Women

In rural Sudan, six out of ten people cannot read or write. Among rural women, the figure is closer to seven out of ten. These are not statistics from a century ago. They are from the 2022 Sudan Labor Market Panel Survey, analysed by the Economic Research Forum in 2024 – the most recent serious measurement of a crisis that has been worsening, slowly and largely unnoticed, for decades. The 2023 war accelerated everything. Sudan’s GDP contracted by an estimated 48%. Five million jobs disappeared. School infrastructure across multiple states was damaged or destroyed. The children who were already out of school – and in rural areas, many were – are now further from any educational pathway than they have ever been. ...

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. ...