Introduction. Greater Khartoum through the Prism of In-Betweenness

“Life is a Gamble”

“…Yet the legacy of British colonial land policy in Sudan has racialized terms of land tenure and tribal identification, and antagonized intertribal relations of trade and co‐dependence in south Kordofan, as elsewhere in Sudan (see Franck, Casciarri, and El‐Hassan 2021; Elamin 2018; Ille 2011; Mamdani 2020). The British colonial administration reformed customary land law by interpreting land rights differently according to tribal designation and area, in a strategy to cultivate cheap crops on mechanized farming in eastern Sudan, while maintaining rain‐fed farming in the west (Babiker 2009).…”

“…Although the protests first erupted among frustrated workers in Atbara in December 2018, the revolution became centered in Khartoum and associated with young middle‐class urban professionals (Tubiana 2022). Many of the urban poor in Khartoum are pastoralists or sedentary farmers indigenous to western Sudan, including Bashir's home of south Kordofan, who have been displaced or lured away from their land through a history of colonial and postcolonial state‐induced economic warfare (Babiker 2009; Franck, Casciarri, and El‐Hassan 2021). The Sudanese anthropologist Mohamed Bakhit (2020, 919) has argued that the economic hardships hit the middle class the hardest, since “the population of peripheral areas and shantytowns has faced economic hardships for a long time, and most of them work in the informal economy with the ability to get cash money and negotiate their income on a daily basis.”…”

“…In Sudan, where the wind is hot and dry, the harvest often does fail, despite speculations to the contrary. Through the “neoliberal urbanization” and expansion of Khartoum, pastoralists now produce “for the city” (Franck, Casciarri, and El‐Hassan 2021). The Sudanese state has promoted this “pastoral entrepreneurialism” as a form of self‐investment (Casciarri 2009).…”