Nyala

The plains around Nyala were ruled long before the city existed. The Daju, whose kings held this part of Darfur from hills near the present town, gave it its name — in their language it means roughly 'the place of chatting' — and archaeological sites in the hills nearby hold pottery and rock engravings of horses, animals and hunting that have never been properly excavated. Later the Tunjur and then the Keira sultans of the Fur ruled Darfur from the highlands to the north-west, with their capital at El Fasher from the late 18th century.

Nyala itself grew in the 20th century, after Anglo-Egyptian forces annexed Darfur to Sudan in 1916, ending the sultanate of Ali Dinar. Its position on the plains east of Jebel Marra, where farming country meets herding country, made it a market, and the railway pushed west from Kordofan to reach the town in 1959, turning it into the terminus of the whole western trade. An airport followed, and Nyala grew into the largest city of South Darfur.

The rebellion of 2003 and the campaign of killing and burning that answered it changed the city permanently: hundreds of thousands of villagers fled to camps around Nyala, and the city filled with aid agencies and, from 2007, an African Union and United Nations peacekeeping force. When war broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the RSF captured the east of the city and the airport, and on 26 October 2023 took control of Nyala, in fighting that displaced more than 670,000 people.

Nyala is the meeting point of Darfur's peoples. The Fur, farmers of Jebel Marra and the plains, the Daju of the hills nearby, the Masalit from the west, the Zaghawa of the northern desert, and Arab herding tribes such as the Rizeigat all have quarters, markets and kin networks in the city, and most families speak a Darfuri language at home alongside Arabic. Trade, marriage and neighbourhood have long mixed them; politics and war have repeatedly set them against one another, and the distinction between 'farmer' and 'herder' communities that once described a way of life has become a line of conflict.

Islam is universal and shapes the week, the two Eids and the rites of birth, marriage and death, and Sufi orders have a following here as across Sudan. Hospitality is a strong obligation even in hard times: coffee roasted with ginger and poured from a clay jebena, or very sweet tea, accompanies every visit and every piece of business.

Weddings are long, public and loud, with drumming, singing and dancing, and horse and camel racing mark celebrations on the plains. Darfuri women are known for elaborate braided hairstyles and for henna, and craftwork in leather, basketry and silver has been traded in the city's markets for generations. Two decades of displacement have also created their own culture in the camps, where much of a generation has grown up.

Estimates put Nyala's population at about 1.1 million in 2024, making it the largest city of South Darfur, though the figure is uncertain in a place reshaped by twenty years of displacement. The city lives by trade: grain, groundnuts, sesame, fruit and vegetables from the farming country, livestock brought in by herders, and manufactured goods carried in from the east. The railway terminus, the lorry yards and the airport were the links that made all of it work.

Daily life is hard and practical. Water is drawn from wells and from the sand of the wadi and carried by donkey cart; power is intermittent; and much of the population lives in camps or in quarters built by people who arrived with nothing. Work and shopping happen early, the middle of the day is spent out of the sun, and the streets fill again in the evening.

Since 2023 the war has cut supply routes, closed and looted markets, damaged hospitals and driven prices beyond most households, while famine has been confirmed in camps elsewhere in Darfur. Traders have reported the main market reopening after a shutdown of nearly two years; the Rapid Support Forces set up a de facto civil administration in the state after the city fell in late 2023, and since July 2025 Nyala has served as the seat of a rival government, the Sudanese Transitional Peace Government. Aid reaches the region only in part.

Darfuri cooking is built on millet and sorghum. The staple is asida, a stiff porridge turned out in a bowl and eaten with mullah, a thick stew — often made with dried okra ground to a powder (waika), with dried meat called sharmout, or with kawal, a pungent fermented leaf paste that gives western Sudanese food its characteristic depth. Kisra, a thin fermented flatbread, is torn and dipped into the same stews, and groundnuts are ground into sauces and into salatat dakwa, a peanut-butter salad.

Meat and milk come from the herds — fresh and soured cow's milk, camel's milk from the north, butter made from both, and goat and mutton grilled over charcoal for guests and at weddings. Dried strips of meat are kept for the season before the harvest, when food runs short. Ful medames, the fava-bean breakfast eaten across Sudan, is sold from stalls in the market.

Fruit and vegetables come down from the cooler, wetter slopes of Jebel Marra and are sold in the souq alongside dried hibiscus for karkade, tamarind and baobab fruit for cold drinks. Coffee roasted with ginger and cloves in a pan and brewed in a jebena is the drink of hospitality. Alcohol was prohibited under the Islamic law introduced in 1983, and the ban was lifted for non-Muslims only in 2020.