Why You Haven’t Heard About Sudan—and What the Diaspora Is Building

A reflection on Sudan, diaspora, and the communities taking shape in the wake of war.

May 13, 2026

Have you heard about the genocide in Sudan?

If the answer is no, or barely, you are not alone. Today’s piece comes from my friend Marwa Eltahir, a Sudanese American writer and cultural producer born in Omdurman, Sudan. I met Marwa through an organization called RIVET, which supports young changemakers through grants and developmental support. She is the founder of Our Political Home, a portal that incubates and amplifies Black art created by, with, and for trans and queer practitioners across the African diasporas. She is one of the most thoughtful writers I know, and what follows is her reflection on what the war in her home country has taken and what the Sudanese diaspora is building in its wake.

Before you read it, some context.

Since April 2023, a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced more than 12 million. It is the largest displacement crisis in the world. Famine has been declared in multiple regions. The RSF, the paramilitary group at the center of the violence, traces its lineage directly to the Janjaweed, the militia responsible for the Darfur genocide that began in 2003. Two decades later, the international community is once again watching, or more accurately, looking away.

As Marwa points out in her piece, Sudan has been in crisis for the last three years, but really for much longer. Modern Sudanese history has been shaped by interruption. British colonial rule drew arbitrary borders that fused regions with little in common and exploited the divisions for control. After independence in 1956, the country lurched through coups, civil wars, and military regimes, including the thirty-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who took power in 1989 and was eventually indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur. In 2019, a youth-led revolution forced him out. Sudanese women, students, and labor organizers filled the streets demanding civilian rule, invoking what Marwa describes as the legacy of the Kandakas, the revolutionary matriarchs of Nubian history. For a moment, it looked like the country might finally turn a corner. Then in 2021, the generals staged another coup. Two years after that, those same generals turned their weapons on each other, and the country has been at war ever since.

What gets lost in the headlines, when there are headlines, is everything else: the music, the poetry, the food. There’s the fact that Sudan is home to more pyramids than Egypt. And the fact that Khartoum and Omdurman were, until recently, vibrant cities where Marwa’s family gathered each summer.

A Chance Encounter in Brooklyn

It’s one of those rare, balmy mid-April afternoons in Brooklyn—the kind that feels like a collective exhale. Sidewalks swell with people who have waited all winter for this exact softness in the air: dog walkers lingering longer than usual, couples leaning into each other on park benches, friends rediscovering the simple pleasure of being outside.

I duck into my favorite neighborhood spot for a quick bite and order the hamachi crudo. The restaurant hums with that low, steady rhythm of early evening—glasses clinking, quiet laughter, a playlist just loud enough to blur the edges of conversation. I’ve barely taken a few bites when someone taps me on the shoulder. When I turn, to my surprise, it’s one of my closest Sudani friends, Hind.

A screech escapes me before I can catch it. “My babe!” I shout, pulling her into a tight hug. It’s the kind of run-in that makes New York feel like a small town masquerading as a big city, where the right person always seems to appear at the right time. We squeeze into a booth in the back, giggling over small cups of sake. Two more friends join. A quick bite stretches into dinner, then into a nightcap, and before we know it, it’s that glowing hour when the restaurant begins to empty and no one is in a hurry to leave. We talk in loops, catching each other up on the small and large shifts of our lives.

Eventually, the conversation turns—as it often does—to Sudan. Someone asks how our families are doing, now scattered across Egypt, Qatar, and beyond.

A familiar feeling rises in me, layered and contradictory. Gratitude, because someone is asking, because someone cares. And grief, because to answer honestly is to reopen a wound that never quite closes. Sudan has been in crisis for the last three years, but really, for the last thirty years.

This time, I decide not to dwell on the obvious—the famine, the staggering loss of life, the forced displacement of millions. Instead, Hind and I find ourselves reflecting on something else: the unexpected expansion of the Sudanese diaspora in this moment of upheaval.

In April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, seized large parts of northern Sudan, including the capital, Khartoum, and my hometown of Omdurman. As a child, I spent every summer there in my grandmother’s home—running through the courtyard with my cousins, eating mangoes in the heat, playing cards long after the sun had gone down.

When the war began, families fled overnight. Those who could afford to leave scattered across neighboring countries like Egypt, Kenya, and Uganda, or farther to diasporic hubs in Qatar and the UAE. Others had no choice but to stay. The ability to escape became its own kind of privilege, shaped by access to visas, money, and networks.

Three years later, that forced exodus has reshaped the reach and influence of the Sudanese diaspora.

Carrying Home Abroad

To grow up in the diaspora is to live in an in-between space. My parents immigrated to the United States in 1995, when I was just six months old. My childhood was structured by an effort to preserve what distance threatens to erode—Arabic classes, Quran lessons, the steady insistence of tradition. But as I grew older, the tension between my life as a Black American girl and my identity as a Muslim Sudanese daughter became more pronounced.

As a teenager, I used to dread our yearly trips back to Sudan. I wanted novelty, not repetition. I wanted to travel elsewhere, somewhere novel. Now, hindsight repaints those memories with an ache I can’t ignore. What I wouldn’t give for one more summer, one more week, one more ordinary day in my grandmother’s home.

The last time I was in Sudan was New Year’s Eve, 2019. It was just after the uprising that led to the overthrow of Omar Al-Bashir’s three-decade totalitarian regime—a moment powered by student organizers, by المدنيّة (madaniya) protests, by women invoking the legacy of the Kandakas, the revolutionary matriarchs of Nubian history. For a brief moment, the air felt electric with possibility, a rare respite from a bloody history of civil war.

Though the momentum of that revolution was later crushed by brute military force, something else endured. In the years since, and especially since the outbreak of war in 2023, the Sudanese diaspora has not only expanded—it has become more visible, more connected, and more creatively alive.

The Diaspora’s New Shape

Across cities in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and beyond, Sudanese artists, organizers, and cultural workers are building something that feels both urgent and enduring. Film screenings, exhibitions, mutual aid funds, dance parties, writing collectives—each one an assertion that Sudanese life cannot be reduced to senseless conflict and crude statistics.

I think of crowded rooms where Sudanese music fills the air, where Arabic and English weave together in conversation, where strangers become familiar through shared memory. I think of the quiet labor of archiving—of preserving stories, images, and histories that war attempts to erase. I think of the ways our culture continues to garner wide, diverse audiences that are invested in Sudanese storytellers and their narratives.

Inspired by this wave of cultural expansion, in 2022 I began building Our Political Home (OPH), an art incubator for trans & queer African storytellers. OPH asks: what does it mean to feel politically at home in a world that constantly displaces us? This question has guided my organizing practice and encouraged me to delve into stories that, especially on the African continent, have been erased, condemned, and even criminalized because of their assertion that queer, Black lives matter.

With the support of organizations such as RIVET, I am able to continue building the platform of OPH as a safe space that fills the gap in connecting trans & queer storytellers across the diaspora to explore how identity, migration, and memory shape the way we understand power, home, and politics.

On days when I am overwhelmed by the weight of loss in my ancestral home, I am comforted by the knowledge that being a part of the diaspora has bestowed me with freedoms that I would not have otherwise had access to. Who I am today — a queer organizer, a multi-disciplinary artist, a staunch feminist — is a product of two worlds colliding and creating something entirely different.

There is a particular kind of power in this diasporic generation—one that once felt like a contradiction. To belong to multiple worlds at once, to navigate the West and the East, to translate, reinterpret, and carry forward. What once felt like fragmentation now reveals itself as range.

At the same time, the losses are immeasurable. Homes abandoned in haste. Family heirlooms left behind. Museums looted. Archives buried under rubble. Musicians separated from their instruments. Entire histories interrupted.

And yet, despite all of this, something persists. Beckons to speak. A cultural force that is ancient, formidable, and irretractable. Illuminating the strange ways loss can also create new forms of intimacy.

Looking Forward

Back in the restaurant, our table has long been cleared. Chairs are stacked. The staff moves gently around us, signaling the end of the night. Still, we linger.

I return often to a question I don’t yet know how to answer: What future is the Sudanese diaspora imagining into being?

The Sudan we knew—shaped by decades of military rule, by systemic violence, by cycles of انقلاب (revolution) and المقاومة (resistance) —has been irrevocably altered. In its wake is both devastation and possibility. Something has ended. Something else is waiting to begin.

Perhaps the answer is not yet fully visible. Perhaps it is already here—in living rooms turned into gathering spaces, in art that travels across borders, in relationships that withstand time.

Outside, the Brooklyn air is still warm. The city hums on, full of small collisions and unexpected reunions. For a moment, it feels like everything is suspended between what was and what might be. And somewhere within that in-between, something beautiful is taking root.

Stories like Marwa’s and the work she is doing with OPH are not isolated — they are part of a broader movement of young people organizing in their communities, building solutions to challenges, developing technologies that expand equity and quality of life, and reimagining the future in real time.