Sudan
Capital: Khartoum · North Africa
Land of the Nubian pharaohs of Kush, whose pyramids at Meroë outnumber Egypt's, and a meeting point of Arab, Nubian and Beja worlds.
Ethnic communities
- Sudanese ArabsJa'alin, Shaigiya and other Nile Valley groups
- NubiansHeirs of Kush and Christian Nubia; ancient languages still spoken
- BejaRed Sea Hills pastoralists with millennia of recorded history
- FurPeople of the Darfur sultanate and Jebel Marra
More communities of Sudan
- Ja'alin · Nile-bend Arab farmers claiming Abbasid descent
- Shaigiya · Warrior-scholar riverain tribe of the great bend
- Danagla Nubians · Dongola-reach farmers, heirs of Christian Makuria
- Mahas Nubians · Cataract-country Nubian speakers with palm-grove villages
- Beja (Hadendowa) · Red Sea Hills herders — Kipling's 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy' resisters
- Beja (Amarar & Bisharin) · Camel nomads of the hills' northern reaches
- Masalit · Dar Masalit farmers of the western marches
- Zaghawa · Sahel herder-traders spanning the Chad border
- Nuba peoples · Fifty hill communities — wrestling, terraces and rich rituals
- Baggara (Rizeigat, Misseriya) · Cattle-Arab nomads of the savanna belt
- Rashaida · Red Sea coast camel breeders in black-and-silver dress
- Ingessana · Blue Nile hills people with distinct language and iron craft
- Berta & Funj · Blue Nile borderland heirs of the Sennar sultanate
- Halfawi & Kababish · Northern desert-edge farmers and great camel herders
Languages
Major languages: Arabic, Nubian languages, Beja, Fur, Zaghawa
Language families: Afro-Asiatic; Nilo-Saharan
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of Kush (Kerma, Napata, Meroë)
- • Christian Nubia (Makuria, Alodia)
- • Funj Sultanate of Sennar
- • Sultanate of Darfur
Heritage sites
- • Meroë pyramids
- • Gebel Barkal
- • Kerma
- • Suakin
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Sudan
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Sportb. 1984
Ismail Ahmed Ismail
800m
Took Sudan's first Olympic medal, silver in the 800m in Beijing in 2008.
- Science, business & activismb. 1946
Mo Ibrahim
Telecoms and governance
Engineer who built Celtel into a pan-African mobile network without paying bribes, then created the index and prize that measure and reward African governance.
- Music & the arts1932–2012
Mohammed Wardi
Music
Nubian singer whose songs of love and of resistance were banned by successive governments and sung again in the streets during Sudan's uprisings.
- Politics & liberation1844–1885
Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi
Revolt and state building
Declared himself the Mahdi in 1881 and led the revolt that expelled Turco-Egyptian rule and founded a Sudanese state that lasted until 1898.
- Music & the arts1929–2009
Tayeb Salih
Literature
Author of Season of Migration to the North, voted by Arab writers among the finest Arabic novels of the twentieth century.
Deep-dive community profiles
Ababda
Camel herders of Egypt's Eastern Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, the northernmost of the Beja peoples, who guided caravans to the emerald mines and the Nubian gold roads, and who lost their language to Arabic while keeping everything else.
Open deep profile →Beja
The camel lords of the Red Sea Hills — Africa's ancient 'Blemmyes', sword-bearing clans of the Hadendowa, Bisharin and Ababda whose crossed-swords dances, coffee ceremonies and desert codes have held the corridor between Nile and sea for four thousand years.
Open deep profile →Berta
Muslim gold-washers and sorghum farmers of the Ethiopia-Sudan borderland whose sheikhdoms were tributary to Sennar and then to Ethiopia, and whose waza trumpet ensembles are inscribed by UNESCO.
Open deep profile →Bisharin
Beja camel nomads of the Red Sea hills and the Nubian desert, whose language has no close relatives, whose hair Roman and British soldiers both wrote about, and whose range the Aswan reservoir and the Egypt-Sudan border between them cut in half.
Open deep profile →Fur
The people who gave Darfur its name — 'the home of the Fur' — whose Keira sultanate ruled a Saharan-Sahelian empire from Jebel Marra for three centuries, and whose homeland became the site of the 21st century's first genocide.
Open deep profile →Gumuz
Nilo-Saharan shifting cultivators of the hot Blue Nile lowlands between the Ethiopian escarpment and the Sudanese border, historically raided for slaves by highlanders and lowlanders alike, and now living on the land the Renaissance Dam's reservoir has flooded.
Open deep profile →Hadendoa
The Beja of the Red Sea hills — camel herders whose hair the British called fuzzy-wuzzy and whose ancestors broke a British infantry square at Tamai, and whose language descends from the speech of the ancient Blemmyes.
Open deep profile →Hedareb (Beni Amer)
Camel and cattle herders of the Eritrean-Sudanese lowlands, speakers of Beja Tigre and Arabic in varying combination, formed from a nineteenth-century confederation of Beja and Tigre-speaking groups under the Diglal, and among the most consistently displaced peoples of the Horn.
Open deep profile →Ja'aliyin
The riverain Arabs of the Nile bend above Khartoum — farmers and traders claiming descent from the Prophet's uncle, heirs to the Christian Nubian kingdoms whose land they occupy, and one of the two groups that have supplied most of independent Sudan's rulers.
Open deep profile →Kababish
Camel nomads of the Kordofan desert whose confederation was assembled in the nineteenth century out of unrelated lineages, held together by a single family the British then made into a paramountcy, and whose range the droughts of the 1980s emptied.
Open deep profile →Maba
The people of Wadai — founders of a sultanate that ran the Darb al-Arba'in caravan trade to Egypt, resisted French conquest until 1912, and whose capital Abéché was once the largest city between Khartoum and Kano.
Open deep profile →Masalit
The sultanate people of West Darfur — farmers of the Chad borderland whose kingdom defeated a French force in 1910, and whose towns were the site of mass killings in 2003 and again, on a larger scale, in 2023.
Open deep profile →Nuba
The many peoples of Sudan's Nuba Mountains — dozens of hill-communities famed for ceremonial wrestling and stick-fighting, dazzling body-art, terraced granite farms, and a fierce resilience through decades of war in the country's borderland heart.
Open deep profile →Nubians
The people of the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum — heirs of Kush, Meroë and Christian Nubia, whose pharaoh-conquering kingdoms, pyramid fields and living languages make theirs one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth.
Open deep profile →Rashaida
The last arrivals — Bedouin who crossed the Red Sea from Arabia in the 1840s, kept their Arabian dialect and their tents on the African shore, and whose women's veils and silverwork are among the most elaborate anywhere.
Open deep profile →Shaigiya
Riverain people of the Nile's fourth cataract country, cavalry lords who fought the Ottoman-Egyptian invasion in 1820 and then served it, and whose date palms and waterwheels the Merowe dam drowned.
Open deep profile →Shukriya
Cattle and camel Arabs of the Butana plain between the Blue Nile and the Atbara, whose paramount Abu Sin family gave Sudan a line of chiefs and a famous poem, and whose grazing has been progressively converted to mechanised sorghum.
Open deep profile →Tigre
The pastoralists of Eritrea's western lowlands — Muslim herders speaking a language descended directly from Ge'ez, who overthrew their own hereditary nobility in the 1940s, and who formed the first generation of the independence movement.
Open deep profile →Zaghawa (Beri)
The camel-and-cattle nomads of the Chad–Sudan Sahara border — an ancient Saharan people named in medieval Arab chronicles, keepers of the Beri script and the Kobe and Wagi confederations, whose homeland straddles the Darfur frontier.
Open deep profile →