Wad Madani

The Gezira plain belonged in the medieval centuries to the Christian Nubian kingdom of Alodia, and Wad Madani grew on this stretch of the west bank of the Blue Nile as a river crossing and market on the road between the Funj capital at Sennar and the north. It was a modest place of mud-brick houses and riverside landings when the Ottoman-Egyptian administration reached it in the 1820s, and it later fell under Mahdist control before the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest at the end of the 19th century.

Its modern importance dates from irrigation. The condominium government dammed the Blue Nile at Sennar and opened the Gezira Scheme in 1925, laying a grid of canals across the clay plain between the two Niles and settling tens of thousands of tenant farmers on it to grow cotton for British mills. Wad Madani became the administrative capital of the scheme and of Gezira province, with offices, a research station, rail links, ginning mills and a merchant class that grew rich on the cotton trade. Schools followed, among them the Hantoub boarding school across the river, and in 1975 the University of Gezira was founded, the first Sudanese university outside Khartoum.

The cotton economy declined from the 1980s as prices fell, the canals silted and the scheme was repeatedly restructured, but the town remained the market and university centre of the Gezira. When war broke out in the capital in April 2023 it took in very large numbers of people displaced from Khartoum. The Rapid Support Forces attacked the city in December 2023 and held it for more than a year, displacing its population again, until the army retook it on 11 January 2025.

Wad Madani belongs to the Arabic-speaking riverine culture of central Sudan, and the surrounding plain is home to communities including the Rufa'a and other groups long settled between the two Niles. Family and clan ties are strong, weddings run for several days with the jirtig ceremony of red silk, gold and perfume and a henna night, and hospitality to strangers is a matter of honour.

Religious life is shaped by Sufism. The domed tombs of sheikhs stand in villages across the Gezira, drawing visitors at their annual commemorations; the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, the two great religious movements of Sudan, both have deep roots in the region. Friday prayer empties the market for an hour and fills the mosques.

The town has a reputation out of proportion to its size for education and the arts. Hantoub school and the University of Gezira educated a large share of the country's civil servants, doctors and agronomists, and the singers Ibrahim Al Kashif, Abdel Aziz El Mubarak and Mohammed al Amin all came from the town, which had cinemas from the early 1950s and a long tradition of literary and sports clubs. Football is followed closely, and the evening custom is to sit outdoors — in a courtyard, at a tea stall or along the river — and talk politics, farming and prices until late.

Wad Madani had a population of about 345,000 at the 2008 census and had grown well beyond that before the war; the numbers now are impossible to state with any confidence after two mass displacements. The town rises early, works before the midday heat, closes for the worst of the afternoon and comes out again in the evening along the corniche.

The economy is the Gezira Scheme and what depends on it: tenant farming of cotton, sorghum, wheat and groundnuts, ginning and oil-pressing mills, traders in seed, fuel and fertiliser, and the offices and research stations that administer the canals. The university and the hospitals are the other large employers, and the town is the market for hundreds of surrounding villages. Many households combine a salary, a market stall and a plot of land.

Life since 2023 has been dominated by the war. The town first absorbed hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Khartoum, then emptied when the Rapid Support Forces attacked in December 2023, with residents and the displaced moving on again to Sennar, Gedaref and the east. Farming across the Gezira collapsed as fighting reached the villages and canals went unmaintained, worsening hunger across the country. Since the army retook the town in January 2025 people have been returning to damaged homes, with power, water and health care all unreliable.

The Gezira eats the Sudanese staples produced on its own fields. Kisra, the thin fermented sorghum flatbread baked on a hot plate, is the everyday bread, torn and dipped into mullah — stews of okra, whether fresh or dried and powdered as waika, of dried meat called sharmout, or of greens thickened with dakwa, the local peanut paste. Asida, a stiff sorghum porridge eaten with the same stews, is the other mainstay.

Breakfast is ful, broad beans stewed overnight and mashed with oil, cumin, white cheese and chopped onion, eaten from a shared bowl with bread, often with ta'amiya, fried chickpea patties. Grilled and fried mutton and beef, agashe skewers rubbed with peanut and chilli spice, and kammouniya, a cumin-scented offal stew, are the market foods, and fish from the Blue Nile is fried whole and eaten by the water. Groundnuts, grown across the scheme, turn up roasted, pressed for oil and ground into sauces and sweets.

Drinks follow the heat. Tea sellers pour sweet tea with mint or cinnamon, jebena coffee is roasted, pounded with ginger and cardamom and strained through grass from a clay pot, and cold karkade, an infusion of dried hibiscus, and aradaib, made from tamarind, are drunk through the afternoon. In Ramadan the fast is broken 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.