Asked about motivations, one used the term nafeer, which refers to “communal labor” or “communal work.” Another mentioned takiya, when “people collect their food together and to eat together, to share it, if somebody doesn’t have food for supper or dinner.” While traveling in Sudan during Ramadan, I saw many instances of men far from home—drivers, workers, or indeed our translators—joining the communal prayers and meals served on the street when the fast is broken at sundown.
It’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.
On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.
But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.