El Obeid

El Obeid began as a caravan stop in the sandy country between Darfur and the Nile, prospering under the Musaba'at before Egyptian forces founded the modern town in 1821 as the seat of their government in Kordofan. Its position made it rich: caravans carrying gum arabic, ivory, ostrich feathers and, from the 1840s, enslaved people taken in raids to the south all converged here, and the population rose and fell with the seasons of herding, farming and trade. By the mid-19th century the town held a governor's residence, barracks, a hospital and several mosques.

Its most consequential years were 1883 and 1884. Followers of the Mahdi assaulted the town, were driven off, and then besieged it until it surrendered on 17 January 1883. Later that year, in November, they destroyed an Egyptian army under Hicks Pasha at Shaykan nearby — the defeat that opened the whole country to the Mahdist state. El Obeid was largely destroyed and abandoned during the Mahdiyya, and only rebuilt after Anglo-Egyptian forces took control in 1899.

The 20th century restored it. A railway reached the city between 1909 and 1912, tying Kordofan to Khartoum and to the new harbour at Port Sudan, and El Obeid became the country's great gum-arabic market and an administrative centre. It grew from about 10,000 people in 1905 to about 341,000 in 2008. Since April 2023 it has been repeatedly besieged and attacked in the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces.

El Obeid is a Kordofani city, and the region's mixture is its character: Arabic-speaking traders and townspeople of Arab and Nubian descent, Baggara cattle herders who come in from the plains, and families with roots in Darfur, the Nuba mountains and the Nile valley. Arabic is the common language, but many households speak another at home, and the weekly market is the great social occasion for the country around.

Islam orders the week and the year, with Friday prayers, the two Eids and Sufi orders whose gatherings draw people from the surrounding villages. Alongside this the Catholic cathedral of Our Lady Queen of Africa, one of the oldest and largest churches in the country, has anchored a small Christian community and its schools for generations, and the city is the seat of a Catholic diocese covering an enormous stretch of western Sudan.

Hospitality is close to obligatory. Coffee, roasted and pounded with ginger or cloves and poured from a clay jebena, and glasses of very sweet tea accompany every visit and every negotiation, and business in the crop markets is done face to face. Music, drumming and horse and camel racing mark weddings and the end of the rains in the villages around the city, and wrestling, associated above all with the Nuba further south, has a following here as well. The Mahdist years are part of local memory, and Shaykan is a name every schoolchild in Sudan knows.

About 341,000 people lived in El Obeid in 2008; by July 2026 an estimated 563,000 residents and a further 105,000 displaced people were living in the city, a measure of how far the war has reshaped it. Almost everything here is trade. Gum arabic from the acacia groves of North Kordofan — Sudan supplies about 70% of the world's gum arabic — along with sesame, groundnuts, millet, hibiscus and livestock, is bought, bagged and sent east by road and rail, and manufactured goods come back the other way.

The rhythm of life follows the seasons and the heat: work early, rest through the middle of the day, and the streets busy again in the cool of the evening. Water has always been a constraint in this sandy country, and power cuts are routine.

Since April 2023 the city has been besieged and shelled repeatedly. Supply routes have been cut, markets and hospitals damaged, prices for food, fuel and medicine driven to extremes, and families from across Kordofan and Darfur have crowded into schools, mosques and the homes of relatives. Aid arrives intermittently. Much of the ordinary business of a market city continues between the interruptions, because there is no alternative.

Kordofan's kitchen is built on millet and sorghum. The staple is asida, a stiff porridge shaped in a bowl and eaten with mullah, a thick stew, or kisra, a thin fermented flatbread torn and dipped into the same. The stews are made with dried okra ground into waika, with dried meat called sharmout, or with kawal, a pungent fermented leaf paste that gives western Sudanese cooking its distinctive depth. Groundnuts are ground into sauces and into salatat dakwa, a salad dressed with peanut butter.

Milk and meat come in from the herders: fresh and soured cow's milk among the Baggara, camel's milk from the north, butter made from both, and mutton and goat grilled over charcoal for guests. Ful medames, fava beans stewed with oil and cumin, is the standard breakfast, bought from a stall with bread.

Drinks belong to the region. Karkade, brewed from the dried hibiscus flowers that are one of Kordofan's cash crops, is drunk hot in winter and iced in the heat; tamarind and baobab-fruit drinks are made in the same way; and coffee roasted with ginger and cloves is poured from a jebena at every meeting. Alcohol was prohibited under the Islamic law introduced in 1983, and the ban was lifted for non-Muslims only in 2020.