Commentary and analysis to persuade people to become socialist and to act for themselves, organizing democratically and without leaders, to bring about a world of common ownership and free access. We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. We are not reformists with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism.
Sudan has always been dominated by a light-skinned, Arabic-speaking elite, while black Africans in the south and west of the country have faced discrimination and marginalisation. Racism is insidious in Sudan, historically and since independence when most senior positions have been filled by people from the north - the Arab and Nubian ethnic groups.
Almost all senior military officers are from these communities, which has also allowed them to use their influence to dominate the business sector. If you go into any government department or bank in Khartoum, you will rarely see a black person in an important role. After independence, entrenched notions of Arab superiority in the new state reserved almost all jobs for Arabs while failing to develop areas inhabited by black people. The superiority complex of many members of the Arab elite lies at the heart of some of the worst conflicts to hit Sudan since independence, as black people either demand equality or their own homeland.
Many Sudanese who see themselves as Arabs, rather than Africans, routinely use the word "slave", and other derogatory words, to describe black people. It is common for newspapers to publish racial slurs, including the word "slave". Almost all media outlets describe petty criminals in the capital, Khartoum, as "negros" as they are perceived to be poor and not ethnically Arab.
As anti-racism protests swept through various parts of the world following African-American George Floyd's death in police custody in the US, there was little take-up in Sudan of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Sudanese social media users hurled racial abuse at a famous black Sudanese footballer, Issam Abdulraheem, and a light-skinned Arab make-up artist, Reem Khougli, following their marriage.
The head of a women's rights group, No To Women Oppression, commented on a photo showing a young black man with his white European wife by saying that the woman, in choosing her husband, may have been looking for the creature missing on the evolutionary ladder between humans and monkeys. Following an outcry, Ihsan Fagiri announced her resignation, but No To Women Oppression refused to accept it, saying she did not mean it.
The racism goes back to the founding of Khartoum in 1821 as a marketplace for slaves. By the second half of the century about two-thirds of the city's population was enslaved. Sudan became one of the most active slave-raiding zones in Africa, with slaves transported from the south to the north, and to Egypt, the Middle East and the Mediterranean regions. The practice was only officially abolished in 1924, but the decision faced strong resistance from the main Arab and Islamic leaders of that era, among them Abdelrahman al-Mahdi and Ali al-Mirghani, who many believe had slaves working on the vast tracts of land they owned along the Nile River.
Slave traders are still glorified - a street in the heart of the capital is named after al-Zubair Pasha Rahma, whose 19th Century trading empire stretched to parts of what is now the Central African Republic and Chad. Another street is named after Osman Digna - a slave trader and military commander.
Two Sudanese academics, Sulimen Baldo and Ushari Mahoumd, publicly alleged in 1987 that they had uncovered evidence of some northern-based Arab groups enslaving black people from the south. They say these groups were armed by Sadiq al-Mahdi's military - and were the genesis of the Janjaweed militias, which were later accused of ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
The southern slave raids were widely reported to have continued until the end of the civil war in 2005, which led to the mainly black African South Sudan seceding from Arabic-speaking Sudan five years later.
The women and children abducted by Arab groups to work for a "master" for free often never saw their families again, though in some cases their freedom was controversially bought by aid groups such as Christian Solidarity International. And since the Darfur conflict started in the early 2000s, the pro-government Arab Janjaweed militias have repeatedly been accused of arriving on horseback in black African villages, killing the men and raping the women.
Little has changed there in the last year, with reports of rapes and village burnings continuing despite the peace talks organised by the power-sharing government, which is leading the three-year transition to civilian rule.
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