Sudan is truly a unique country, definitely off the beaten track, and not for your average traveler. Tourism in itself is in it's infant shoes, with a maximum of approximately 10,000 visitors a year. However for the hardened traveler, able to adapt to the rich multi-culture of Sudan, the rewards will be high. Sudan boasts different climatic regions, spanning from jungles, to desert and 750 Km of the most pristine, undeveloped shores of the Red Sea.
Besides the amazing people, culture and traditions, the land, and natural resources; Sudan also boasts the largest collection of Antiquities, the black pharaonic dynasties; which certainly surpass the few (but larger) pyramids and temples of it's northern neighbor Egypt.
The OC3ANCLUB TEAM has compiled the latest information, for your enjoyment and benefit. We try to keep the information on the following pages up to date, which is not easy with the Sudan. Don't hesitate to reach out to us anytime, for the latest updates via Whatsapp: +249902909260
General Information
Sudan gateway to Africa
The name Sudan derives from the Arabic expression bilād al-sūdān (“land of the blacks”), by which medieval Arab geographers referred to the settled African countries that began at the southern edge of the Sahara. Since ancient times the Sudan region has been an arena for interaction between the cultural traditions of Africa and those of the Mediterranean world. Islam and the Arabic language achieved ascendancy in many northern parts of the region, while older African languages and cultures predominated in the south.
For more than a century, Sudan—first as a colonial holding, then as an independent country—included its neighbor South Sudan, home to many sub-Saharan African ethnic groups. Prior to the secession of the south in 2011, Sudan was the largest African country, with an area that represented more than 8 percent of the African continent and almost 2 percent of the world’s total land area.
Land
Sudan is bounded on the north by Egypt, on the east by the Red Sea, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, on the south by South Sudan, on the west by the Central African Republic and Chad, and on the northwest by Libya.
Relief
Sudan is mainly composed of vast plains and plateaus that are drained by the Nile River and its tributaries. This river system runs from south to north across the entire length of the east-central part of the country. The immense plain of which Sudan is composed is bounded on the west by the Nile-Congo watershed and the highlands of Darfur and on the east by the Ethiopian Plateau and the Red Sea Hills (ʿAtbāy). This plain can be divided into a northern area of rock desert that is part of the Sahara; the western Qawz, an area of undulating sand dunes that merges northward into the rock desert; and a central-southern clay plain.
Most of northern Sudan is a sand- or gravel-covered desert, diversified by flat-topped mesas of Nubian sandstone and islandlike steep-sided granite hills. In south-central Sudan the clay plain is marked by inselbergs (isolated hills rising abruptly from the plains), the largest group of which forms the Nuba Mountains (Jibāl Al-Nūbah). The western plain is composed primarily of Nubian sandstones, which form a dissected plateau region with flat-topped mesas and buttes. The volcanic highlands of the Marrah Mountains rise out of the Darfur Plateau farther west to elevations between approximately 900 and 3,000 metres above sea level. These mountains form the Nile-Congo watershed and the western boundary of the clay plain.
In northeastern Sudan the Red Sea Hills region is an uplifted escarpment. The scarp slope facing the Red Sea forms rugged hills that are deeply incised by streams. The escarpment overlooks a narrow coastal plain that is 16 to 40 km wide and festooned with dunes and coral reefs. Farther south the eastern uplands constitute the foothills of the Ethiopian highland massif.
The country became independent in 1956 and has had numerous changes in government since then. Successive regimes found it difficult to win general acceptance from the diverse political constituencies. An early conflict arose between those northern leaders who hoped to impose unity upon the nation through the vigorous extension of Islamic law and culture to all parts of the country and those who opposed this policy; the latter included the majority of southerners and those northerners who favoured a secular government.
From 1955 until 1972 there prevailed a costly and divisive civil war, fought largely in the south but punctuated by violent incidents in the north. The Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 ended the conflict only temporarily, and in 1983 the civil war resumed. By this time the comparative lack of economic development in the south had become a new source of regional grievance, and northern leaders’ continuing attempts to Islamize the Sudanese legal system proved an even more potent source of discord. Attempts to end the civil war included numerous discussions, cease-fires, and agreements but yielded very little success until 2005, when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended the warfare. It also granted southern Sudan semiautonomous status and stipulated that a referendum on independence for the south would be held in six years. The results of the vote, held in January 2011, were overwhelmingly in favour of independence, and South Sudan was declared an independent country on July 9, 2011.
Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, is located roughly in the centre of the country, at the junction of the Blue Nile and White Nile rivers. It is part of the largest urban area in Sudan and is a centre of commerce as well as of government.
Drainage and soils
The Nile River system is the dominant physical feature, and all streams and rivers of Sudan drain either into or toward the Nile. It enters the country as the White Nile (Baḥr Al-Abyaḍ) in the southeast, about 100 km south of Kūstī, and maintains an extremely low gradient until it is joined by the Blue Nile (Baḥr Al-Azraq) at Khartoum. The Blue Nile, which rises in the Ethiopian Plateau, contributes much of the floodwaters of the White Nile. After the confluence of the White and Blue Niles at Khartoum, the river flows in a great northward-curving course and is known simply as the Nile (Nahr Al-Nīl). Throughout much of the country, however, drainage does not reach the Nile; the rivers of the southwest infrequently reach the Baḥr Al-Ghazāl system, and to the north most hill groups initiate seasonal watercourses that are lost in the surrounding plains.
The surface of the deserts in the north and northeast are either bare rock, a mantle of bare waste, or sandy expanses of mobile dunes known as ergs. In the semiarid zone of north-central Sudan, the layer of rock waste is slightly modified to form immature soils; in the Qawz region, soils are brownish red and of low fertility. Alluvial soils occur at the desert deltas of Al-Qāsh (the Gash) and Barakah rivers, along the White and Blue Niles, and in the alluvial plains of the many small rivers radiating from the Marrah Mountains. The alkaline soils of the south-central plain are heavy cracking clays. The soil of the Gezira (Al-Jazīrah) plain south of Khartoum is deep-cracking uniform clay that has been deposited during the annual inundations of the Blue Nile.
Climate
In northernmost Sudan, northerly winds prevail for most of the year, and rainfall is rare. To the south of this the seasons are characterized by the north-south oscillation of the boundary between moist southerly air and dry northerly air. In winter the north winds of the tropical air mass blow across Sudan. These winds are relatively cool and dry and usually bring no rain. Sometime around May, the moist southerly air of the southern maritime air mass moves northward across the country. Because of this, central and southern Sudan have rainy seasons, the total lengths of which vary according to their latitude.
Sudan is a hot country. The central and eastern areas have the highest mean annual temperatures, typically ranging from the mid-90s to mid-100s F (mid-30s to low 40s C). In the west and northwest of the country, the highest mean temperatures generally range from the mid-80s to mid-90s F (low to mid-30s C). The highest temperatures normally occur just before the rainy season. The mean minimum temperatures in most of the country range from the high 60s to high 70s F (low to mid-20s C); in the west and northwest, mean minimum temperatures are a little lower, ranging from the high 50s to high 60s F (mid-10s to low 20s C).
Precipitation varies from almost nothing in the north and centre to 20–30 inches (500–750 mm) annually in the south. Along the Red Sea the climate is alleviated by sea breezes, and most of the rain falls during winter. In southern Sudan, precipitation usually occurs during the summer months. Dust storms are common in the north and centre, often occurring before rainstorms in the late spring and early summer.
Plant and animal life
Sudan has five main vegetational belts in succession from north to south, more or less in coincidence with rainfall patterns. The desert region in the north is followed southeastward by semidesert, low-rainfall and high-rainfall savanna (grassland) with inland floodplains, and mountain vegetation regions. The desert region, with hardly any rainfall, supports permanent vegetation only near watercourses. The semidesert, with minimal rainfall, supports a mixture of grasses and acacia scrub. Farther south appear low-rainfall savannas that consist of grasses, thorny trees, and baobab trees. Acacia trees dominate these savannas, with one species, Acacia senegal, yielding the gum arabic which was long one of Sudan’s principal exports. The high-rainfall savannas of southern Sudan are more lush, with rich grasses along the Nile that support a large number of cattle. There are intermittent woodlands that dot this belt.
Large areas of Sudan’s natural vegetation have disappeared because of the effects of centuries of cultivation and because of grass fires that annually may sweep across more than half the country. Further dangers to plant life are the effects of overstocking, soil erosion, the lowering of the water table, and the advance of the desert from the north.
The country’s wildlife includes lions, leopards, and cheetahs, as well as elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and numerous varieties of antelope. Several species of monkeys are found in the forests. Resident birds include bustards, guinea fowl, and storks. Reptiles include crocodiles and various lizards. Insect life is abundant, and the tsetse fly is found south of latitude 12° N whenever suitable conditions occur.
Sudan has several protected nature areas, including game reserves and national parks. Dinder National Park, located in the southeast, and Radom National Park, in the southwest, have been designated as UNESCO biosphere reserves.
People
Even after the secession of the south in 2011, Sudan’s population still exhibited a diverse profile. The Sudanese people boast several major ethnic groups and hundreds of subgroups, and they speak numerous languages and dialects.
Ethnic groups
In many ways, the concept of ethnicity in Sudan is closely related to language and religion. The country is dominated by Muslims, most of whom speak Arabic and identify themselves as “Arabs.” They are for the most part ethnically mixed, and many of them are physically indistinguishable from those who do not consider themselves Arabs. Despite a common language and religion, the Arabs do not constitute a cohesive group: they are highly differentiated in their mode of livelihood and comprise city dwellers, village farmers, and pastoral nomads. The Arabs historically have been divided into tribes based on presumed descent from a common ancestor. The tribal system has largely disintegrated in urban areas and settled villages, however, and retains its strength only among the nomads of the plains who raise cattle, sheep, and camels. Each Arab tribe or cluster of tribes is in turn assigned to a larger tribal grouping, of which the two largest are the Jalayin and the Juhaynah. The Jalayin encompasses the sedentary agriculturalists along the middle Nile from Dongola south to Khartoum and includes such tribes as the Jalayin tribe proper, the Shāyqiyyah, and the Rubtab. The Juhaynah, by contrast, traditionally consisted of nomadic tribes, although some of them have now become settled. Among the major tribes in the Juhaynah grouping are the Shukriyah, the Kababish, and the Baqqārah. All three of these tribes herd camels or cattle on the semiarid plains of western, central, and eastern Sudan.
Besides Arabs, there are several Muslim but non-Arab groups in the country. The most notable of these are the Nubians, who live along the Nile in the far north and in southern Egypt. Most Nubians speak Arabic as a second language. The same applies to the Beja, who inhabit the Red Sea Hills. Although they adopted Islam, these pastoral nomads have retained their Bedawi language, which belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Another non-Arab Muslim people is the Fur; these sedentary agriculturalists live in or near the Marrah Mountains in the far west. North of the Fur are the Zaghawa, who are scattered in the border region between Sudan and Chad.
The vast majority of non-Muslim peoples in Sudan live in the south. One of the most prominent groups, the Nuba, live in the Nuba Mountains. The Nuba are hill cultivators who have tended to be isolated from adjacent peoples in the Nile valley. They speak various Eastern Sudanic languages, among them Midobi and Birked, that are collectively known as Hill Nubian. Another southern group is the Dinka, who live near the border with South Sudan. The capital, Khartoum, in the centre of Sudan, is also home to non-Muslim populations.
Languages
As alluded to above, there are many languages spoken in Sudan. Arabic is the primary language of much of the population and is the most common medium for the conduct of government, commerce, and urban life throughout the country. Both Arabic and English are official working languages of the country and were designated as such by the 2005 interim constitution.
Most languages spoken in Sudan belong to three families of African languages: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo. The Afro-Asiatic languages, Arabic and the Bedawi language of the Beja, are the most widely spoken. The Nilo-Saharan languages include the many Nubian languages, spoken in various places across the country, the Zaghawa and Fur languages, spoken primarily in the west and southwest respectively, and the Dinka language, spoken in the south. The Niger-Congo family is represented by the numerous Kordofanian languages, spoken in southern Sudan, and other languages spoken by smaller ethnic groups. To surmount these language barriers, the vast majority of Sudanese have become multilingual, with Arabic and, to a lesser extent, English as second languages.
Religion of Sudan
The majority of Sudan’s population is Muslim, belonging overwhelmingly to the Sunni branch. Sunni Islam in Sudan, as in much of the rest of Africa, has been characterized by the formation of tarīqahs, or Muslim religious brotherhoods. The oldest of these tarīqahs is the Qādiriyyah, which was introduced to the Sudan region from the Middle East in the 16th century. Another major tarīqah is the Khatmiyyah, or Mīrghaniyyah, which was founded by Muḥammad ʿUthmān al-Mīrghanī in the early 19th century. Perhaps the most-powerful and best-organized tarīqah is the Mahdiyyah; its followers led a successful revolt against the Turco-Egyptian regime (1821–85) and established an independent state in the Sudan that lasted from 1884 to 1898. The Mahdiyyah and Khatmiyyah tarīqahs formed the basis for the political parties that emerged in the Sudan in the 1940s and have continued to play a dominant role in the nation’s politics in the postindependence period.
A small percentage of Sudan’s population follow traditional animist religions, particularly in the Nuba Mountains. Although these animists share some common elements of religious belief, each ethnic group has its own indigenous religion. Virtually all Sudan’s traditional African religions share the conception of a high spirit or divinity, usually a creator god. Two conceptions of the universe exist: the earthly and the heavenly, or the visible and the invisible. The heavenly world is seen as being populated by spiritual beings whose function is to serve as intermediaries or messengers of God; in the case of the Nilotes, these spirits are identified with their ancestors. The supreme deity is the object of rituals using music and dance.
Christians account for another small portion of the population. Christianity first came to the Sudan about the 6th century CE, and for centuries thereafter Christian churches flourished in the ancient kingdom of Nubia. After the establishment of Muslim rule in Egypt and later Arab migrations into the Sudan, Christianity declined in Nubia and was gradually replaced by Islam; the process was complete by the end of the 15th century. Christianity in Sudan today is a product of European missionary efforts that began in the second half of the 19th century. Most of those efforts were concentrated in the Nuba Mountains rather than among the Muslims of the north.
Settlement patterns
Rural settlements in Sudan are usually clustered along watercourses, because of water supply problems especially during the dry months. In the north, villages are often strung out along the rivers. The types of houses built vary from region to region. In the north and some central and southern areas, houses are made of sun-dried bricks and have flat-topped roofs, while farther south the people build round huts with thatched conical roofs made out of grass, millet stalks, and wooden poles, called tukuls. In central-southern and western Sudan, walls constructed of millet stalks often surround building compounds.
Though towns are few and widely scattered, about one-third of Sudan’s population can be considered urban. Urbanization has been more pronounced in areas of the country where trade is more highly developed. With few exceptions, all major cities and towns in Sudan lie along the Nile or one of its tributaries or along the coast of the Red Sea.
The largest urban area is that of the capital, Khartoum, and nearby Omdurman and Khartoum North, located roughly in the centre of the country. The easily defended site of Khartoum was adopted by the Egyptian-Ottoman government as the colonial capital of the Sudan in the 1830s. Today it is firmly established as the centre of both government and commerce in the country. Omdurman, formerly the capital of the Mahdist state in the Sudan, retains a more traditional atmosphere, while Khartoum North is an industrially oriented city. Other major cities and towns in Sudan include Nyala, in the southwest, Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast in the northeast, and Ubayyid, in the south.
Because of the prevalence of pastoral livelihoods, the Sudanese population is highly mobile. About one-tenth of the population still follows a totally nomadic lifestyle.
Cultural life
Cultural milieu
The key to an understanding of contemporary Sudanese culture is diversity. Each major ethnic group and historical region has its own special forms of cultural expression.
Traditional cultures
Because of Sudan’s great cultural diversity, it is difficult to classify the traditional cultures of the various peoples. Sudan’s traditional societies have diverse linguistic, ethnic, social, cultural, and religious characteristics. And, although improved communications, increased social and economic mobility, and the spread of a money economy have led to a general loosening of the social ties, customs, relationships, and modes of organization in traditional cultures, much from the past still remains intact. The following discussion of three of those cultures merely suggests some rather prominent cultural patterns that are illustrative of the wide range present. These three cultures are those of the Fur, Muslim Africans in the far western part of the country; the Humr tribe of the Baqqārah Arabs, of west-central Sudan; and the Otoro tribe of the Nuba, in east-central Sudan.
The arts
One of the most important forms of cultural expression among nonliterate groups is oral tradition. The linguistic diversity of the country provides the basis for a richly varied written and oral literature. The major language with a written literature in traditional Sudanese society is Arabic. The most widely known Sudanese literary works in this language are associated with Islam and its scholarship and include a large body of literature describing the lives and virtue of holy men. These works are best known through recitations on special anniversaries associated with pious persons. The combination of oral and written literature remains of major importance to both traditional and Westernized segments of Sudanese society. Perhaps the best-known Sudanese novelist is al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, whose books Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-shamāl (1966; Season of Migration to the North) and ʿUrs al-Zayn (1967; The Wedding of Zein & Other Stories) have been translated into various languages.
Poetry is another important form of literary expression. Modern Sudanese poetry reflects the mixed African and Arab cultural heritage of the country, as expressed in the works of Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Majdhūb and many others.
In such arts as painting, weaving, and pottery making, each locality developed unique forms and styles. However, more-unified national styles emerged under the influence of artists in the cities. A number of Sudanese printmakers, calligraphers, and photographers have achieved international recognition—for example, Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalaḥi, who became proficient in all three mediums.
Song plays an important role in all the cultural traditions of Sudan and ranges from the unique cosmopolitan traditions of Qurʾānic recitation in a melodramatic manner to tribal songs. A characteristically national style of music is emerging out of this diversity, as reflected in the music heard in Khartoum.
Cultural institutions
Sudan is one of the richest African countries in terms of archaeological sites. Ruins of the ancient kingdom of Kush are found at Gebel Barkal and associated sites in the Nile valley; they were collectively designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003. The archaeological sites at Meroe, an ancient Kushitic city, were collectively designated a World Heritage site in 2011.
The Sudan National Museum, located in Khartoum, has several associated museums—including the Ethnography Museum, also in Khartoum, and the Sheikan Museum, with archaeological and ethnographical collections, in Al-Ubayyiḍ. The Sudan Natural History Museum is located in Khartoum. Drama flourishes at the National Theatre and elsewhere in Khartoum.
