Sudan

Land of Kush and the confluence of the Niles, from the Black Pharaohs to a republic at war.

Sudan straddles the middle Nile, where one of Africa's oldest civilisations took shape. From the Bronze-Age city of Kerma grew the Kingdom of Kush, whose rulers conquered Egypt as the 25th Dynasty of "Black Pharaohs" and later raised the pyramids of Meroe. Christian Nubian kingdoms held the river for centuries before Islamisation and the rise of the Funj Sultanate of Sennar and the Sultanate of Darfur. A Turco-Egyptian conquest from 1820 founded Khartoum and provoked the Mahdist revolt, crushed by Kitchener at Omdurman in 1898. Under Anglo-Egyptian rule until independence on 1 January 1956, the new state was riven almost at once by north-south civil war. Two long wars, the Darfur conflict, the secession of South Sudan in 2011, a revolution in 2019 and a devastating war between rival generals from 2023 have shaped a nation still searching for stable peace.