“We all knew that there was tension on the streets... But you never think the situation is actually going to explode.” From 1843 magazine
he night before street warfare broke out in Khartoum, I was at a cultural centre in the north of the city listening to a panel of feminist speakers. It was the kind of event that would have been unthinkable under Omar al-Bashir, the dictator ousted by a popular uprising four years ago. Under Bashir, Sudan was one of the most oppressive places in the world to be a woman, and it was women who led the protests against him.
We didn’t know that we would be stuck there indefinitely. We felt reassured by having six hours’ worth of battery for our phones in my power bank, though the water pumps were out, which meant we couldn’t wash, and had to drink hot, bottled fluids. After about 12 hours we decided to leave the pantry to try to sleep. We thought it was safer to rest in the same bed so that one of us would know if the other got hit by a stray bullet.
We started to chase down leads on streets that might be quiet enough to drive through, so-called “safe passages”. People were texting each other updates on the roads all the time; someone even built an app for it. At 2pm on the fourth day I received a hurried call from a friend living in the east of the city who had heard about a safe passage to a calmer part of the city. “Leave now if you ever will,” he said.
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