Identity

Cover: Original editorial illustration commissioned by Kandaka, 2026. It is symbolic, not a proposed flag, emblem, map or official design. Sudan, Kush, Nubia and the Problem of Naming a Diverse Republic After South Sudan became independent in 2011, the world was left with two countries whose names differ by one direction. Search for Sudan and results often include South Sudan. News reports, maps and conversations confuse the two. Some Sudanese also question whether a name derived from a broad medieval term—Bilad al-Sudan, usually translated as “the lands of the Black people”—is sufficiently distinctive for a country with its own ancient civilizations and complex modern identity. ...

Cover: Original editorial illustration commissioned by Kandaka, 2026. It is symbolic, not a documentary image. The Case for Blue, Yellow and Green—and Why the People Must Decide On 1 January 1956, Ismail al-Azhari and opposition leader Muhammad Ahmad Mahjoub lowered the flags of Britain and Egypt at the Republican Palace and raised the flag of an independent Sudan. It had three horizontal bands: blue, yellow and green. Blue represented the Nile and water. Yellow represented Sudan’s deserts. Green represented its agriculture and vegetation. The design did not borrow the colours of the departing colonial powers or place Sudan inside a wider ideological family. It described the country through its own land. ...

The word Kandaka appears in the New Testament. A treasury official travelling from the court of the “Kandake, queen of the Ethiopians” – the Greek word for any land south of Egypt – is described returning from Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles. The Roman geographer Strabo wrote about the one-eyed Kandake who led her armies against the legions of Augustus Caesar. Pliny the Elder mentioned the Kandakai in his encyclopaedia. These women were not legendary figures or mythological queens. They were heads of state, military commanders, and economic administrators of one of the most sophisticated civilisations in the ancient world – a civilisation located, for most of its history, in what is now Sudan. ...