The most recommended books on Sudan

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has the best Nubian collection in the United States and one of the very best in the world. This publication of Nubian jewelry held by the MFA is exceptional in its breadth: ceramics, stelae, figurines, faience and ivory inlays, and jewels of gold, silver, precious stones, and beadwork. The artifacts span 3000 years of Nubian history produced during the three Kushite kingdoms: Kerma (2650-1550 BCE), Napata (750-332 BCE), and Meroe (332 BCE - 300 CE).

This is a collection of short stories by well-known writers—Irvine Welsh and Alex Garland among others—whom The Daily Telegraph newspaper assembled and flew to Africa in 2000, with an open brief to write one short story each; the book’s proceeds went to famine relief. One story in particular, by Telegraph editor W.F. Deedes, resonated in particular with me. The British government, responding to concerns that a UK-based oil company—Phoenix—is contributing to human rights abuses committed in the context of the Sudanese civil war, establishes “A Small Mission of Inquiry” (the title of the story). For most of my diplomatic posting in Sudan (2000-2003), I found myself dealing with strikingly similar allegations against a Canadian company, addressed equivocally by the Canadian government with just such a commission. 

The Sudanese music scene of the 1970s is legendary. With stars like jazz king Sharhabil Ahmed and the girl group al-Balabil, the Nile was really swinging. Jamal Mahjoub, a British-Sudanese author who also writes crime fiction under the name Parker Bilal, has fun with this golden age in his new novel, The Fugitives. An English teacher in Sudan receives a surprise invitation to perform in America and has to re-form his father’s old band, The Kamanga Kings, who rocked Sudan in the years before Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship and take them to Trump’s America.

A beautifully painted account of the author’s journey through Africa, as much about his conflicting emotions as about cycling. Mainly eating jam sandwiches, and sleeping in dangerous places and filthy hostels, he pedals his way towards South Africa across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and war-torn Sudan. He finds friendship in unexpected places, and disappointment in others.

It appealed to me as both a cycling adventure, and having lived in Kenya I was keen to read about his experiences in Africa.

Like most readers, I’m scared these days about the future of our democracy. As a reporter I’ve covered trouble spots; like Somalia – where no law existed - and Sudan, where I was in a crowd fleeing at the mere sight of an airplane, fearing bombs. One of my friends lost his wife in a Washington car bombing. Others escaped danger during a Chilean coup. Seven Days in May imagined an attempted coup in the US, and although the setting was decades ago, some forces at play are the same, since human motivation never changes. This book sobered up the nation back then by reminding readers what happens when some of us....any of us...think they know better than everyone else and believe force is the way to go. We could use that reminder now.

By a considerable distance, the most gripping novel I have devoured on gender roles in the long shadow of the loss of home. Several of the book’s characters and defining scenes in the refugee camp remain haunting years after I first encountered them.

Suleiman Addonia’s dissection of the entangled shocks wrought by cultural change, war, and displacement drips with emotional contrasts. This book feels, at times, unbearably intrusive, as the reader is exposed to the most privately held fears and embarrassments of its protagonists.

Simultaneously, the book beautifully underscores how valuable (at least some) intimacy remains for those who feel that the future has already bypassed them.

A beautiful coffee table book, complete with stunning photographs by Chester Higgins, this publication includes maps, general articles about Nubia, and a gazetteer of stunning sites from Gebel Qeili and Naqa in the south to Philae, Elephantine, and Aswan in the North. The general articles range from art and architecture, kings and kingship, religion, texts, and women in ancient Nubia. This book is a beautiful and welcoming introduction to the vibrant land of ancient Nubia.

Emma McCune was a beautiful young British aid worker who fell for—and married—Riek Machar, a rival of John Garang for most of the long years of Sudan’s second civil war (1983-2005), reluctant leader of a bloody post-independence revolt, and now one of the country’s five (sic) Vice-Presidents. Emma died in 1993 in a traffic accident in Kenya, but wherever I have been in both Sudan and South Sudan, hosted by aid workers, I have found echoes of her. Emma wanted to make the world a better place—who can knock that?—but her naivete allowed her to be easily manipulated and impressed by raw power, increasingly blind to the corruption and violence within the cause she had adopted. She is buried at Leer, South Sudan, the hometown of Riek Machar.

Who would have imagined that a fake diving resort on the Red Sea would become the focus of a clandestine operation by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad? Raffi Berg’s book tells the epic story of a mission behind enemy lines by Israeli spies to secretly rescue thousands of Ethiopian Jews and bring them to Israel. It was a clandestine operation sparked by a single cryptic message pleading for help from the Ethiopian Jewish community. During his research, Raffi Berg was given rare permission to interview the Mossad agents involved in the mission, including the commander Dani. He also gathered testimonies from those who were brought out of Ethiopia and narrates this human story with honesty and openness.

Rare video footage of the operation has now been released. It uses night vision technology and provides deeply moving footage of the exodus of these people in the middle of the night to… show more.

Carol Berger is a Canadian journalist and anthropologist with decades of experience in Sudan/South Sudan. This book is a meticulously-documented dissection of one of the founding myths of South Sudan: the supposedly glorious deeds of the rebel SPLA’s Red Army (made up of child soldiers) and the associated romance of the phenomenon known as the Lost Boys, as featured by Hollywood (The Good Lie). The truth is that during the second Sudanese civil war (1985-2003) thousands of young boys were ruthlessly exploited and/or abandoned by warlords, many of whom now hold positions of power in South Sudan. A fascinating sidebar is the story of the Cuban Jubans: the young boys who made their way from displacement camps in Ethiopia, via a long sojourn in Cuba, eventually settling in Alberta, Canada. Some two dozen returned to South Sudan in 2011/12 to work as doctors, and I had the pleasure… show more.