49 Fun Facts About Sudan

The river that joins the White Nile at Sudan's capital is named after which colour?

The Blue Nile meets the White Nile at Khartoum, a name often said to mean 'elephant's trunk', after the spit of land between the two rivers.

Which country borders Sudan to the west, along the edge of Darfur?

Chad shares a long desert border with Darfur, and hundreds of thousands of people fled across it to refugee camps after war broke out there in 2003.

Sudan's coastline lies on which body of water?

The Red Sea coast holds Port Sudan, the main harbour, built between 1905 and 1909 to replace the old coral-choked port of Suakin.

Ful medames, widely eaten in Sudan, is a stew made from which ingredient?

Fava beans are stewed and dressed with oil in a dish that came south from Egypt and became a standard Sudanese breakfast.

Sudan won independence a year before which West African country?

Ghana's independence in March 1957 is usually called the first south of the Sahara, yet Sudan raised its own flag on 1 January 1956, months after an army mutiny began its first civil war.

What was the joint British-Egyptian rule of Sudan from 1899 to 1956 formally called?

A condominium meant shared authority on paper, but in practice a British governor-general ran Sudan from Khartoum and Egypt was edged out almost completely.

The name Sudan comes from the Arabic bilad as-sudan, meaning what?

Land of the Blacks once meant the whole belt of Africa south of the Sahara, which is why colonial Mali was called French Sudan; only later did the name narrow to one country.

The Kingdom of Kush was centred first at Napata and later at which city farther up the Nile?

Meroë is thought to have become the capital after an Egyptian army sacked Napata around 590 BC, pushing the Kushite court to a safer seat farther south.

Kushite kings from Sudan ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty for about a century until which empire drove them out?

The Assyrians invaded in the seventh century BC and the last Kushite pharaohs withdrew to Napata, where their line went on ruling Kush for centuries.

In the 1830s the Italian treasure-hunter Giuseppe Ferlini smashed open which ancient Sudanese monuments while hunting for treasure?

Pyramids were levelled from the top down in his hunt; in Queen Amanishakheto's he found a hoard of jewellery, later sold to museums in Berlin and Munich.

Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, often cited as the earliest evidence of warfare, is what kind of site?

A cemetery here held dozens of skeletons, some with stone points still lodged in the bones; a 2021 restudy found healed wounds too, pointing to repeated raids, not one battle.

What did Nubia's Christian kingdom of Makuria manage twice in the seventh century that few states could?

It repelled the Arab armies at Dongola, where Muslim chroniclers praised the Nubian archers, and the treaty that followed kept the frontier largely at peace for 600 years.

From the 12th century, Christian Nubia's throne usually passed to which relative?

The son of the king's sister inherited, so as Nubian and Arab noble families intermarried, Muslim nephews gained a claim, and a Muslim king took the throne in the 1310s.

Which Islamic sultanate, founded in 1504, dominated central Sudan from Sennar until the 19th century?

The Funj adopted Islam as they took power, then ruled a patchwork of vassal chiefs from Sennar until an Egyptian army took the city in 1821.

Which ruler of Egypt sent his son to conquer northern Sudan in 1821?

Muhammad Ali, nominally the Ottoman sultan's governor, wanted Sudanese slave recruits for the new army he was building; the regime he installed is remembered as the Turkiyah.

British soldiers called the Mahdi's fighters in 1880s Sudan by which name?

Dervishes was the name the British used, but the Mahdi had banned it: he called his followers the Ansar, after the Prophet's own early supporters.

Which British general was killed when the Mahdi's forces stormed Khartoum in January 1885?

Charles Gordon had been sent to evacuate the city but stayed to defend it through a siege of nearly a year; the relief force arrived two days after it fell.

Kitchener's reconquest of Sudan culminated in which battle on 2 September 1898?

Omdurman pitted machine guns against spears: more than 10,000 Mahdists died for fewer than 50 of Kitchener's men, and a young Winston Churchill rode in the cavalry charge.

According to Churchill, what did Kitchener take as a trophy from the Mahdi's tomb?

His head, in a kerosene can, is Churchill's own phrase; Kitchener had ordered the tomb wrecked and the body dug up, and the desecration troubled even Queen Victoria.

During Sudan's 2019 protests, women demonstrators were nicknamed 'Kandaka', an ancient Nubian title for what?

A queen or queen mother of Kush bore the title; it stuck in 2019 after a photo of student Alaa Salah, in a white robe on a car roof, leading chants went around the world.

Which militant leader lived in Khartoum from 1991 until Sudan expelled him in 1996, when he returned to Afghanistan?

Osama bin Laden arrived after falling out with Saudi Arabia over US troops in the Gulf War, and built up his network there until international pressure forced Sudan to expel him.

The Darfur war led the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for whom?

Omar al-Bashir became the first sitting head of state the court had charged, in 2009, yet he held on to power for another ten years until his own army removed him.

What was the name of the horse-riding Arab militias accused of atrocities in Darfur?

Janjaweed, a name often rendered 'devils on horseback' though its origin is unclear, were Arab nomad fighters the government used against Darfur's rebels from 2003.

Sudan's ruler fell in April 2019 after months of protests sparked by what?

A tripling of bread prices, as bread and fuel subsidies were cut, brought crowds out first in the town of Atbara, not the capital, and the marches grew into a sit-in at army headquarters.

Which economist led Sudan's 2019 transitional government as prime minister until an October 2021 coup?

Abdalla Hamdok, a former UN economist, was detained in the coup, reinstated a month later under a deal with the generals, and resigned in January 2022.

The civil war that erupted in Khartoum on 15 April 2023 set the army against which paramilitary force?

The Rapid Support Forces' commander, known as Hemedti, had joined the army chief in the 2021 coup before the two fell out and turned their guns on each other.

Which offence, once punishable by death in Sudan, was struck from the law in the reforms of 2020?

Apostasy, renouncing Islam, had carried a death sentence; the same reforms after three decades of Islamist rule ended public flogging and let non-Muslims drink alcohol.

What did Sudan's first flag look like, before the red, white and black design of 1970?

Blue, yellow and green stripes were raised at independence on 1 January 1956 and flew until the government that came out of the 1969 coup switched to pan-Arab colours.

Lake Nubia, on Sudan's northern border, is the southern end of a reservoir held back by which dam?

The Aswan High Dam's reservoir drowned the old Sudanese town of Wadi Halfa in 1964, and tens of thousands of Nubians were resettled far from the river.

What is the Arabic name for the violent dust storms that can black out the sun over Sudan?

Haboob comes from the Arabic for a strong wind; first described in Sudan, the word is now used by forecasters as far away as the American Southwest.

In October 2020 Sudan agreed to normalise relations with which country, as it came off the US terrorism list?

Israel was the country that Arab leaders, meeting in Khartoum in 1967, had answered with the 'three noes': no peace, no recognition and no negotiations.

Sudan's currency, the pound, is divided into 100 what?

Piastres, qirsh in Arabic, came with the Egyptian pound Sudan once used; from 1992 to 2007 the country dropped the pound altogether for a dinar, then brought it back.

Which metal, mined in Sudan since the pharaohs, did the country turn to after losing most of its oil in 2011?

Gold output took off after South Sudan left with most of the oil wells; by 2022 Sudan was Africa's third-largest producer, and control of the mines became a prize in its civil war.

Which country's state oil firm took the largest stake in Sudan's main oil consortium in 1997?

China stepped in years after America's Chevron had abandoned its Sudanese oilfields when rebels attacked its base, and the new consortium built the pipeline to the coast.

Sudan hosted the first edition of which football tournament in 1957?

Africa Cup of Nations play began in Khartoum with only three teams, because South Africa was thrown out for refusing to field a multi-racial side; Sudan won the title at home in 1970.

Which two clubs from the city across the Nile from Khartoum are the giants of Sudanese football?

Al-Hilal and Al-Merrikh lost their home league to the 2023 war; Al-Hilal joined Mauritania's championship for a season and won it, and both clubs then moved on to Rwanda's league.

Which poet's 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy' saluted Sudan's Beja warriors?

Rudyard Kipling's barrack-room ballad praised an enemy: Beja fighters for the Mahdi had broken into a British square at Tamai in 1884.

Sudan's 2005 constitution named two official languages, Arabic and which other?

English had been the working language of the south under earlier peace terms, so the constitution that followed the 2005 peace deal put it beside Arabic, until then the only official language.

The traditional loose ankle-length garment worn by Sudanese men, usually with a turban, is called what?

Jalabiya, usually white in Sudan, is the men's robe; the word thobe, a man's robe in Arabia, names in Sudan the long cloth that women wrap around themselves.

In 2009 a Sudanese woman was prosecuted under the public-order law for wearing what in public?

Trousers counted as indecent dress, punishable by up to 40 lashes; journalist Lubna Hussein quit her UN job to give up immunity, stood trial and was fined instead.

Which American style gave its name to Sudan's horn-and-guitar dance bands of the 1970s?

Jazz, in Sudan, meant modern dance music more than the American sound: soldiers trained in army brass bands carried their horns into pop, and the guitar style came up from the south.

Gum arabic and which crop dominated Sudan's exports under British rule?

Cotton grew on the Gezira plain between the two Niles, watered from 1925 by a dam near Sennar, in a scheme launched to supply Britain's textile mills.

The Ansar movement, heirs of the Mahdi's followers, backs which Sudanese political party?

Umma was founded in 1945 as the political arm of the Ansar and has been led by the Mahdi's family; his great-grandson Sadiq al-Mahdi was twice prime minister.

What did Khartoum's Al-Shifa plant, hit by US missiles in 1998 as a suspected chemical weapons site, actually make?

Pharmaceuticals, mainly antibiotics, antimalarial drugs and veterinary medicines, were what the plant turned out; US officials later conceded their evidence was weaker than first claimed.

Sudan is Africa's third-largest country by area, behind which two?

Algeria and DR Congo moved ahead in 2011, when South Sudan's independence took about a quarter of Sudan's land; until then it had been the largest country in Africa.

The 2005 agreement that ended the Second Sudanese Civil War was signed in which city?

Nairobi staged the signing after years of talks hosted by Kenya, most of them at a resort in nearby Naivasha, which is why the deal is also called the Naivasha Agreement.

What tied Egypt's first president, Mohamed Naguib, to Sudan?

He was born and raised there, the son of an Egyptian army officer posted to Khartoum, and as leader after 1952 he accepted Sudan's right to decide its own future.

In the late 1880s a Mahdist army invaded which neighbouring country, reaching its old capital, Gondar?

Ethiopia struck back in 1889, when Emperor Yohannes IV attacked the Mahdists at Gallabat and was killed in the fighting, after which his army withdrew.

Karkadeh, a deep-red drink served hot or iced across Sudan, is brewed from which flower?

Hibiscus gives karkadeh its tart taste and crimson colour; Sudanese weddings are traditionally toasted with it, and on hot days it is made at home and served cold.