In 2024, Black Rose/Rosa Negra's International Relations Committee began
working closely with anarchist revolutionaries in Sudan. Thisrelationship has involved the exchange of ideas, practical advice, and
support. ---- Earlier in 2025, Black Rose/Rosa Negra organized a
campaign to raise $20,000 USD on behalf of our Sudanese comrades, which
they have since used to purchase a printing press. ---- In this article,
developed in consultation with our Sudanese comrades, we provide a
written account of how the organization now known as the Anarchist Group
in Sudan (AGS) came into being.
The Sudanese Revolution was one of the great revolutionary upsurges of
the 21st century. Like all too many of our great revolutions it has for
the moment at least been throttled in blood and dictatorship. But also
like all great revolutions, it was a crucible that forged significant
new political ideologies and tendencies.
While anarchism is not new to Africa, like in many other parts of the
world it has struggled recently to go beyond being an intellectual
tradition or a lifestyle and toward becoming a living movement with
substantial strategic recommendations. Through fully throwing themselves
into the social movements that drove the Sudanese Revolution while
simultaneously growing their own formal political organization,
anarchists in Sudan have been able to develop a revolutionary practice
that has real meaning for class struggle in their country. Despite their
conditions being far different from ours here in the US, we can still
learn valuable lessons from their experiences both in the process of
revolutionary struggle, and in the current state of surviving under
civil war and intense repression.
Before the outbreak of mass street protest in December 2018, Sudan had
already been experiencing simmering opposition to the dictatorship of
Omar al-Bashir and the crushing economic conditions that the people
faced under his rule. And this atmosphere of successive outbursts of
student and worker protests encouraged young student activists to study
and look for ideologies that would help them overcome the many obstacles
they faced. It was in this period that some of the founding members of
the Anarchist Group in Sudan (AGS) first found anarchism, and that they
founded the organization as a small group of five comrades in April 2017.
The AGS was initially a small student organization, and they began by
focusing their efforts on establishing a foundation in Sudanese
colleges. They organized secretly, and concentrated on the smaller, more
peripheral campuses where the eye of the state would not be so intense.
Within the context of the Sudanese opposition, clandestinity was common
practice. AGS itself strategically avoided direct confrontation with
power, with its members instead attempting to immerse themselves in
spaces of broad popular struggle, particularly student unions. The reach
of the group grew as they came into contact with more young activists
seeking alternatives to the failed and stale political ideologies of
yesterday.
As the organization grew, it attracted professionals such as lawyers and
engineers which was, through the Sudanese Professionals Association, a
prominent organization representing a specific class layer driving the
Revolution. The AGS began emphasizing recruitment more, and spread
across many universities, and achieved influence within the coalition of
student unions. As they grew, they used the name "Anarchist Federation
of Sudan", which a number of their statements appear online under, but
ended up using the term "group" rather than "federation" as they
operated as a single unitary organization.
The founding and initial growth of the AGS was well-timed to match the
explosion of the Sudanese Revolution in December 2018. The Revolution
was led by grassroots social movements such as workers unions, student
unions, women's organizations, and the neighborhood-based resistance
committees.
Protesters celebrate the collapse of president Omar al-Bashir's
government in 2019.
The resistance committees are of particular note. Similar to the local
coordination committees of the 2011 Syrian Revolution, the Sudanese
resistance committees are essentially small groups of neighbors
self-organized to participate in protest and the revolutionary process.
Networking together as hundreds of local committees, they formed the
fabric of the movement to overthrow al-Bashir. We see them as a classic
example of popular power in practice, as neighbors confront state power
and simultaneously begin taking control over their own neighborhood and
creating the organizational structures of self-management that could
replace the state.
The AGS actively worked in the resistance committees and student
organizations during the first months of the Revolution while still
staying underground. Militants were able to advocate for anarchist
positions and influence the direction of groups without publicly
announcing themselves as anarchists. Through participating in this mass
upsurge in self-organization coupled with mass street confrontation,
anarchism moved from an idea into a lived strategic practice. They saw
anarchism as a pragmatic way to involve themselves in social struggle
while contesting all of the authoritarian forces that oppress the
Sudanese people, whether it be tribal, cultural, military, religious a
comprehensive struggle against all this and for freedom and individual
rights.
The strategies proposed by anarchists in Sudan are unprecedented in
addressing the complex social crisis. The principle of rejecting even
small, grassroots authorities such as tribal domination and racism based
on ethnicity forms the core of dismantling power structures in Sudanese
society. This has psychological effects on the individual and social
consequences that may bring them into direct confrontation with
entrenched authority. However, we believe that freedom is indivisible,
and every individual deserves to be free even outside institutional
power, including power within one's own behavior. Authority is a social
behavior rooted in the individual's desire to monopolize violence and
deprive others of freedom.
Member of AGS during dialogue with members of BRRN, September 2025
Within the resistance committees, the AGS coordinated anarchist activity
to push the committees in a more anti-authoritarian direction. The
resistance committees were in many ways an organic expression of
existing Sudanese society the basic elements of solidarity and mutual
aid that have been necessary to survive in a country where the
government provides nothing for the survival of the people. While this
gave them strength, it also meant that a lot of work needed to be done
to give them the organized power and vision to challenge the state. The
AGS worked, for example, to expand the nature of many committees from
being more limited groups with a selected membership and president,
vice-president, etc., into being open to everyone in the neighborhood to
join and participate.
Protesters clash with security forces after the military coup initiated
by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in 2021.
Alongside the practical organizing work, the AGS initiated the
organization of "thinking circles" to discuss anarchist ideas and worked
on making anarchists texts available in Arabic. They put their modest
membership dues to use printing anarchist pamphlets and organizing
university events.
While the Sudanese social movements succeeded in overthrowing al-Bashir
by April, the military took control of the government and the struggle
deepened. On June 3rd, 2019, government forces conducted a massacre of a
sit-in protest in Khartoum, martyring more than 100 and raping more than
70. This was just the largest of many massacres during this time, when
many protesters and comrades were murdered by state forces. Workers
responded to the June 3rd Khartoum massacre with a general strike that
shut down the country, and brought the military leadership to the
negotiating table. It was in this context, of a country on the brink,
with the resistance committees taking control of territory, that the AGS
first announced themselves to the public during a massive march in
Khartoum on June 30th.
Predictably, they faced a large backlash after publicly declaring
themselves as an anarchist organization. But because they had embedded
themselves within the student unions and the resistance committees, and
made themselves known to their fellow students and neighbors as
committed comrades with sensible ideas, they were able to gain many new
members. Many youth who were disillusioned in the false choices
presented by the so-called leaders including the "national liberation"
state communists who had propped up the dictatorship were drawn to the
principled stand for freedom of the anarchists.
However, anarchism in Sudan was not able to grow freely for long. The
mass uprising achieved a historic victory in forcing out the military
dictatorship in July 2019, with a compromise civilian-military
transitional government put in place. But this was an inherently
unstable solution, and the military and 'Rapid Support Forces' (RSF)
together led a counter-revolution in October 2021 that brought a renewal
of harsh dictatorship.1 This too was an unstable solution, and the RSF
and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) fell out in a power struggle and
initiated a civil war in April 2023. The tragedies that have spread
across the country since then are too deep and numerous to detail in
this account.
Heavily armed members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)
The civil war, which has deep roots in both the legacies of British
colonialism and in local histories of domination, is also a war for
Black survival against attempted genocide. Ruling powers in Sudan,
particularly the RSF, are Arab supremacists who seek to dominate and
ethnically cleanse dark-skinned Sudanese ethnic groups from their lands.
Our comrades report that slavery is being perpetrated against Black
people in Sudan, and so they see the current struggle as one for
liberation from racial authoritarianism.
As the revolutionary movement continued a bitter struggle against the
return of military power, this period has seen many martyrs, including
anarchist comrades such as Omar Habbash, a doctor in Al Fashir, Sara, a
leading activist in Khartoum, and others. Comrades, wherever they are,
are constantly under threat of prison - which generally means death
within a month. Faced with these losses, the AGS is committed to
continuing their struggle with selflessness and determination. As armed
conflict spread, anarchist comrades had two general approaches - to
fight with independent resistance militias that attempt to defend the
people from the ravages of the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces, or to
focus on avoiding armed confrontation through planting ideas and
organizing at the grassroots to grow the movement. The AGS supports both
strategic approaches currently.
With the country being ripped apart in a proxy war by external powers
like the United Arab Emirates and Egypt intent on exploiting its natural
resources, as some seven different military factions unleash terror on
the Sudanese people, the AGS has nonetheless survived. Members have been
scattered as internal and sometimes external refugees, but have managed
to stay in contact and coordinate. When possible, they help run communal
kitchens, they help refugees reach safety, they provide medical care,
they support resistance militias, and they continue anarchist propaganda
whenever possible.
Black Rose / Rosa Negra has been coordinating solidarity for the AGS
together with our comrade organizations in the International
Coordination for Organized Anarchism (ICOA), in particular Die Plattform
in Germany and Union Communiste Libertaire in France. Along with smaller
initiatives, a public fundraising campaign riased more than $20,000 USD
to support AGS in their purchasing an industrial printing press to use
for both spreading anarchist propaganda and for providing a means of
economic self-support. While the printing press has not yet been put
into full operation due to the always-shifting front lines and waves of
repression behind the lines, it is a symbol of the AGS' determination
that continuing revolutionary anarchist struggle is a practical
necessity, even in the midst of one of the planet's worst humanitarian
catastrophes.
Image of printing press purchased by AGS using funds raised by Black
Rose/Rosa Negra's solidarity campaign.
Anarchists in Sudan believe that international solidarity will be
critical in ending the conflict, particularly focusing on those powers
that are fueling the civil war:
Combating foreign[state]intervention in Sudan's war requires a global
uprising of struggling networks to expose the entities profiting from
the blood of the people not only in Sudan but across the region.
Ideally, their own populations should stand against them to stop the
bloodshed in exchange for wealth accumulation. Everyone can contribute
to exposing this crime of war sponsorship in their own locations and
raise awareness among people that the war in Sudan can stop if the
external support for it ends then peace will follow.
Member of AGS during dialogue with members of BRRN, September 2025
The political goal of the AGS now is, in the most immediate term, the
end of the war and of the massacres committed by both the RSF and army.
In the longer term, they continue struggling to overcome the tribal and
ethnic divisions that have been exacerbated by racist colonialism to win
the social revolution and create a self-managed socialist and feminist
society in Sudan and throughout Africa.
As revolutionaries in the imperialist core, our lives are far removed
from that of our comrades in Sudan. Nonetheless, we have much to learn
from their experiences inserting themselves into the base a mass
movement, transforming anarchism into a lived practice that is
meaningful for the lives of working class people, acting collectively as
a political force to influence the direction of movement struggle, and
their determination to continue anarchist struggle even in the most
challenging conditions. Support for our comrades in Sudan is important
for all of us who want to see anarchism reborn as a true force for
global liberation.
Notes
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was initiated as a paramilitary group
primarily composed of Janjaweed tribesmen. Previously it acted as an
auxiliary force of the Sudanese state and was used by the military Junta
which took power in 2019 to violently suppress popular protests. Since
2023 it has been in armed conflict with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
https://www.blackrosefed.org/intro-anarchist-group-sudan/
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