Khartoum – the sprawling capital of Sudan with a population of six and a half million people. On the Nile (the city where the two Niles – the white and the blue – meet), by Lake Victoria. Famously a British colony, though always restive and always seeking independence. More fighting during the Sudanese Revolution led to destruction, many people fleeing the country and a significant Sudanese diaspora. Khartoum is arguably where the Arab world meets Africa.
Parker Bilal (aka Jamal Mahjoub) has created perhaps the best-known Khartoum refugee turned Private Eye in Egypt: Makana. Bilal was born in London and raised in Khartoum and has written the Makana book set in the decade leading up to the Egyptian revolution of 2011. There are six books so far in the Makana series and Bilal has four more books planned to complete Makana’s story. The series starts with The Golden Scales (2012) where we first encounter Makana, a former police inspector who fled from Sudan to Cairo, lives on a rickety Nile houseboat. His first investigation involves Muslim extremists, Russian gangsters, and a desperate mother hunting for her missing daughter. Dog Star Rising (2013) sees Makana trying to solve the unsolved murders of young homeless boys. The Ghost Runner (2014) takes Makana to the Egyptian town of Siwa. Book five in the series, City of Jackals (2016), takes Makana back to his Sudanese past and Khartoum after a severed head washes up on the banks of the Nile leading Makana to feel the pull of his Sudanese past and is impelled to seek justice for murdered emigrants. With four more books to come one hopes Makana will once again return to Sudan.
Wholly set within Sudan is Luke Dixon’s novel Khartoum (2010), contemporary take on the John Buchan-style adventure story. The story is set against the backdrop of the current political unrest and warfare in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. As an NGO worker Dixon devised and led participatory theatre workshops in refugee camps in Sudan.
Hammour Ziada is an award-winning Sudanese writer and journalist. His previous literary novel The Longing of the Derwish won the 2014 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was shortlisted for the International Prize of Arabic Fiction. His 2022 novel The Drowning is more genre. It’s Sudan in 1968, the military coup taking place in Khartoum echoes all the way to the small rural town of Hajer Narti, where the body of a young girl has just been found in the Nile. Like every time a body is washed up on the shore, Fatima shows up, according to popular belief, when the Nile brings a new body back, it also brings back an old one. Fatima is still looking for her daughter Souad, believed to have drowned many years ago.
Born in the north of Sudan in 1960, author Amir Tag Elsir divides his time between his prolific literary career and being a doctor. He has published ten novels, two biographies and several collections of poetry, and was short-listed for the 2011 Arab Booker Prize for his novel Hunter of the Chrysalises (2011), the story of a former secret service agent who, having been forced to retire due to an accident, decides to write a novel about his experiences. He starts to visit a café frequented by intellectuals, only to find himself the subject of police scrutiny. His 2015 novel, Ebola ’76, follows the story of Louis, a simple worker who unwittingly transports a deadly disease back to his home country, with disastrous consequences for his family, friends and colleagues alike.
A host of other Sudanese writers are included in The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction (2016). Incidentally, Khartoum, according to one theory, takes its name from the Beja word ‘hartooma’, meaning meeting place. Geographically, culturally and historically, the Sudanese capital is certainly that: a meeting place of the Blue and White Niles. Several stories in the anthology feature crimes and less than savoury characters. The fact is that little Sudanese writing is translated into English and so this is a rare opportunity to read the political satire of Ahmed al-Malik; the surrealist tales of Bushra al-Fadil; and, reflecting the harshness of the streets and coirruption, the social realism and the lyrical abstraction of the new ‘Iksir’ generation in Sudan.
A few more novels set in the Sudan….
Australian author Martina Nicholls’s The Sudan Curse (2009) starts with an explosion in Cairo propels professional aid worker, Jorja Himmermann, into an adventure involving an ancient Egyptian ring that mysteriously finds its way into her purse. To discover its origin and how it came to her Jorja travels into Sudan with a refugee boy and discovers a country just emerging from civil war. Nicolls writes from experience of Sudan as she was as an aid worker there, and in Darfur, for a time.
Nigel Seed takes us back to colonial Khartoum (remember Gordon of Khartoum with Charlton Heston!) in the first of his historical Michael Macguire trilogy – No Road to Khartoum (2021). Found guilty of stealing bread to feed his starving family, Irishman Michael McGuire is offered the “Queen’s Hard Bargain”, go to prison or join the Army. He chooses the Army and, after training in Dublin Castle, his life is changed forever as he is selected to join the ‘Gordon Relief Expedition’ that is being sent south of Egypt to Khartoum (1884). In the series McGuire moves on from Sudan to South Africa and the Boer War and then finally the First World War.
Gabriel Timar’s The Khartoum Project (2015) is set within the world of the intelligence community and agent Monica Brett who is sent on a mission to Khartoum.
And finally, something a little different as ever, a a novel set in Khartoum called Fatima’s Room (2017) by Charlotte S Gray, who worked for a time as a teacher with Sudanese female students and absorbed their stories and everyday lives of patriarchal suppression. Fatima is a young woman accused of an unimaginable crime. She is confined to her room while her uncles decide her fate. Fatima fills the hot and worrisome days of waiting, by writing in her journal. She remembers the time before her imprisonment and imagines what the future might be. All the while family members come and go, interrupting her reflection with various schemes: to reconcile – or escape. A powerful story that allows us a glimpse in the lives of Sudanese youth today.
