Khartoum

Khartoum was founded in 1821 as an Ottoman-Egyptian military camp at the tip of land where the Blue and White Niles meet, and grew into the capital of Egyptian Sudan, a river port for the ivory and slave trades with a name commonly explained as coming from the Arabic for an elephant's trunk, the shape of the spit between the rivers. By the 1880s it was a town of government offices and merchants' houses along the Blue Nile.

In 1884 the forces of the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, besieged the city; it fell in January 1885 and the governor-general, Charles Gordon, was killed. The Mahdist state abandoned Khartoum for Omdurman across the White Nile, which grew within a few years into a walled capital of hundreds of thousands. Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army defeated the Mahdists at Omdurman in 1898, and the condominium rebuilt Khartoum as a colonial capital, with a grid of avenues, the Republican Palace, Gordon Memorial College and a garrison, while Omdurman remained the Sudanese city and Khartoum North became the industrial one.

Independence was declared at the palace on 1 January 1956, and the capital then lived through decades of coups, expansion and waves of arrivals displaced by war and drought from the south, Darfur and Kordofan, who settled in vast districts on the outskirts. In 2019 a months-long sit-in outside the army headquarters helped bring down Omar al-Bashir. On 15 April 2023 fighting between the army and the Rapid Support Forces broke out in the capital itself, emptying much of it; the army declared Khartoum recaptured in March 2025, and the government returned from Port Sudan in January 2026.

The capital drew people from every corner of Sudan, and its culture is a meeting of them: riverine Arabic-speaking families from the north, Nubians, westerners from Darfur and Kordofan, Beja from the east and southerners who stayed after the 2011 partition. Arabic in its Sudanese dialect is the common language, and English is widely used in universities and business.

Religious life is shaped by Sufism. The great orders and religious families — the Ansar, followers of the Mahdi's descendants, and the Khatmiyya of the Mirghani family — built political parties as well as congregations, and in peacetime the Friday dhikr at a Sufi tomb in Omdurman, with drumming, chanting and whirling dervishes in patched robes, was among the capital's best-known public rituals.

Omdurman is the home of modern Sudanese song. The haqiba style of the early twentieth century, sung to clapping and tambourine, shaped everything that followed, and the capital's radio carried singers such as the Nubian star Mohammed Wardi, whose career began in the late 1950s, across the country. Poetry, calligraphy and painting have long been strong, and the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum trained many of the modernist painters who emerged from the 1960s. Hospitality is a point of honour: a stranger is given water and tea before any question. Weddings run for days, with the jirtig ceremony of red silk, gold and perfume and a henna night, and football, played and argued over everywhere, is dominated by the Omdurman clubs Al-Hilal and Al-Merrikh.

Before the war, greater Khartoum held an estimated seven million people across its three cities and dominated the country's government, trade, universities, hospitals and industry. Millions fled after April 2023, and although people have returned to damaged homes since the army retook the city in 2025, the population now is impossible to state with any confidence.

The pre-war rhythm began early, with work before the midday heat, a long break in the worst of it, and evenings outdoors on the Nile banks or in courtyards. Tea sellers set up under the neem trees, government offices and shops closed in the afternoon, and Friday was the day of prayer, family visits and picnics on Tuti Island. Neighbourhoods ran on a strong sense of the hayy, the quarter, where neighbours share food and attend each other's weddings and funerals.

Work was in ministries and offices, the souks, the workshops and food factories of Bahri, and the informal trades of the outer districts, where families displaced by earlier wars had built whole towns of brick and sheet metal. The war overturned all of it: markets, banks, the airport and the National Museum were looted or damaged, universities closed, and power, water and health care largely failed. Volunteer-run neighbourhood emergency rooms became a lifeline, and the city's recovery is now measured in restored water pipes and reopened bakeries.

Khartoum eats the Sudanese staples in their fullest form. The day starts with ful, broad beans stewed overnight and mashed with oil, cumin, white cheese and chopped onion, served in a shared metal bowl with bread and often with ta'amiya, fried chickpea patties. Kisra, a thin fermented sorghum flatbread, and asida, a stiff porridge, are eaten with mullah, the family of stews built on okra, dried meat, peanut butter or spinach-like greens; gurasa, a thicker pancake bread, is eaten the same way.

Meat matters. Grilled lamb and beef, agashe skewers rubbed with peanut and chilli spice, and kammouniya, a cumin-scented stew of liver and other offal, are sold in market grill houses, and shayyah, meat fried with its own fat, is a favourite of the souks. Fish from the Nile is fried whole by the river. Salads of tomato and cucumber, salata aswad made from smoked aubergine and peanut butter, and dakwa, peanut paste stirred into many dishes, round out a meal.

Drinks are central to social life. Street tea sellers, usually women, pour sweet tea with mint or cinnamon, and jebena coffee is roasted, pounded with ginger and cardamom and poured from a clay pot through a grass filter. Karkade, cold hibiscus infusion, and aradaib, made from tamarind, are drunk against the heat, and during Ramadan families break the fast with hilu-mur, a dark spiced drink made from fermented sorghum flakes. Alcohol has been illegal for Muslims since 1983, when Islamic law was introduced, though a change in 2020 allowed non-Muslims to drink.