Elshafe Mukhtar

“Every border implies the violence of its maintenance,” writer Ayesha A. Siddiqi has observed. This statement neatly encapsulates a key truth about political borders: they exist only in their enforcement. Rivers change course, waters recede, jungles dry into deserts, and deserts bloom into jungles. Through these cycles, a community’s claim to land can never truly be fixed but must be constantly performed as shared history.

In his new series of drawings, Elshafe Mukhtar bears witness to the first days of the war that has raged in Sudan since April 15, 2023, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) clashed with the country’s army. Some of the RSF’s first targets included museums and archives, reservoirs of cultural memory not only for Sudan, but for the entire region. Khartoum’s renowned National Museum—formerly home to one of the most important collections in Africa, with extensive artifacts from Nubian culture—was reportedly heavily looted, with historical records disappearing overnight.

Mukhtar draws a line between this targeted cultural erasure and the destruction of Wadi Halfa, an ancient Nubian settlement whose ruins were flooded in 1964 as part of the construction of the Aswan Dam. In this sense, the violence aims to eradicate the shared history that tethers a particular culture to the land. Mukhtar’s drawings convey the general confusion of those early days: bombs rain down onto rooftops, women and children clutch at empty bowls, and fighters from both sides have no heads, but instead wear boots on their necks—alluding to the army and the RSF—or metal cups (“koz”), in a nod to popular slang for the Muslim Brotherhood. The displacement thus not only extends to the population and its cultural heritage, but also to the political promise of the 2018 December Revolution, which sought to put the country back in the hands of its people.

Text: Kate Sutton