Gold, Gum Arabic, and the Resource Curse: Why Sudan's Riches Keep Making It Poorer

Gold mined Gum harvested Processed abroad 80% of world gum arabic — third largest African gold reserves — exported raw, taxed minimally, processed elsewhere In 2011, South Sudan became independent and took with it approximately 75% of Sudan’s oil revenues. The Bashir government, which had built its entire fiscal architecture around oil — funding the military, buying political loyalty, subsidising fuel and bread to suppress urban discontent — suddenly faced a structural collapse. Oil revenues fell from $6 billion annually to under $500 million. The government needed a replacement. ...

May 1, 2025 · 9 min · Kandaka

A History of Modern Sudan — Robert O. Collins

Robert O. Collins · Cambridge University Press · Available in the Kandaka Library Collins’s A History of Modern Sudan is the standard English-language reference for Sudan’s political history from the Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1820 through the late post-independence period. It is the work that contextualises every economic analysis, every development plan failure, and every institutional crisis discussed elsewhere in the Kandaka library. You cannot read the World Bank’s 2015 Country Economic Memorandum, or the Industrial Location Analysis, or any analysis of the Gezira Scheme, without the political and institutional history this book provides. ...

September 1, 2024 · 3 min · Robert O. Collins