The past weeks have been defined by loss for Sudan and for the Sudanese political sphere. April 15th, the third anniversary of the outbreak of war in Sudan, was already set to be a sad day. Muzan al Neel’s passing, announced on the anniversary, underscored all that Sudan had lost, all the possibilities foreclosed. This was followed with the announcement of Hamid Khalafallah’s death less than two weeks later on April 29th.
It is difficult not to connect the loss of these two individuals who died so close in time, both researchers, activists, and intellectuals, both of whose work imagined a different future for Sudan. Moreover, it is difficult to not connect them both with the larger loss—and the others, equally beloved by their families and friends, who are now gone.
Muzan would have understood this of course. Her life and work were not defined by one thing, either in terms of her interests, her political activism, or her writing. It was that variety, that curiosity and wide set of practices and associations that account for the wave of commemorations that have expanded world-wide through in person meetings and online tributes.
Yet that diversity in focus was held together by a singular, hard-crafted set of values that kept focused on creating a better world, one that she believed we all should work towards. Muzan’s politics were global, but the core of her work was always Sudan, and her audience was first and foremost Sudanese.
One of my first encounters with her work was a critique of Sudanese activists, published on her blog before the September protests in 2013. She commented “They are not interested in informing us, not in convincing us, not in winning us, not even in using us.” This was a problem for her, one against which she defined herself.
For Muzan, the Sudanese public was always the point, and winning people over to work towards collective revolutionary action was the primary goal. Her speeches during the revolution, her presence at protests, meetings, and symposiums were a cornerstone of this practice. Even since the outbreak of war, Muzan engaged publicly in her writing, writing against the war through public engagement with a Sudanese public.
Her stance on the war was principled and dismissed the motives of the armed parties. In her discussion of divergent war narratives in Sudan, she explained: “Neither faction’s definition of victory included the efficiency of service provision to the public in their territories, a glaring contradiction that reveals how their priorities clash with those of civilians, particularly Sudan’s most oppressed and exploited communities.”
Her work, as noted widely, was people-centric, but to say that should not imply that this value was devoid of analytics or ideology. Revolution for her involved class consciousness as well as social transformations that would reorient class relations and redirect resources to all communities and people on an equitable basis. “My political stance is that people should not be killed,” as a statement was undergirded by a principled understanding that killing happens in many ways. For her, deaths caused by poverty, neglect, or marginalization were just as intentional and wrong as those caused by direct violence. Structural violence was equally violent and an indictment of the state and legitimacy of a government. And that structural violence was also the major driver of the mass violence of the Sudanese state.
These structural implications took on greater importance as her intellectual focus moved towards industrial policy, which seemed a long-term way to address these issues. Through her work at ISTinaD, as well as her collaborations with other researchers and scholars, she looked for ways forward to direct industry, that is, the production of resources and items for use, in a way that would create greater resources for society, and in the process, create more equitable societies.
In this, she looked for lessons from other radical political projects, such as that of Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania. She then turned to Sudan and made a case for the need for small-scale industry even amidst the war. “Any project for justice will remain constrained by the very resources it depends upon for funding,” she explained, so “prioritizing productive economic activities is essential for developing a political project of justice.”
Feminism was an inextricable part of her politics; however, her feminism rejected the easy respectability politics of the center, challenging the state and reactionaries, but also purported revolutionaries. Since her passing, videos of her speech at the Joda Hospital sit-in have circulated.
There, she pointed to the ways that state failure rebounded to increase the work of women. “When hospitals become extremely expensive, it suddenly becomes their duty to provide care for sick family members — free care. They sit and provide excellent care for the sick without any pay. And when schools become extremely expensive and their standards collapse, they are also the ones who provide care for the children. They keep the children at home and teach them what the school should have taught them — twice over — all without any pay.” [1]
These were powerful words, made all the more powerful because they were a rebuke to those organizers of the sit-in who felt they had the right to police their fellow revolutionaries’ clothing and comportment.
While her focus centered Sudan, her politics and connections were explicitly global. Muzan engaged internationally in networks of global solidarity. There, she positioned Sudan, the December Revolution, and the struggle for civilian government in revolutionary terms and called for global solidarity. Such solidarity was always two-way. She explained the ways that Sudanese revolutionary struggles were tied up in the same global forces of oppression as those of Palestine and Western Sahara.
This intellectual heft was also matched by a commitment to action, as an individual and as part of a collective. Muzan would show up, and she’d encourage others to do the same. On social media, following the coup, Muzan gave detailed tips for how to manage the effects of tear gas while proceeding at a march, and how to manage them later after everyone went home. This sort of practical advice, as well as a central value of showing up and participating, was essential to her work. For her, all were not just welcome at a sit-in or a protest; rather, essential work for organizers was to make it seem manageable for those less comfortable in those settings to join.
This was a type of work that valued collective action. However, it did not prioritize such collectivity or unity over principle. Muzan believed in working together for the right cause. She also believed in calling out those she saw as betraying the people, particularly when they wielded power and held responsibility.
Her public confrontation of Nabil Adib over the unnecessary delays to the investigation into the June 3rd Massacre initially faced criticism, more focused on her manners as well as broader imaginaries of political unity that she disregarded. After the committee’s years of inaction, a coup, and then a war, however, Muzan’s actions were proven correct—accountability, even when uncomfortable and confrontational, brings about more than silence in the name of unity.
At her home, she kept plants. There, she balanced the competing challenges of home gardening in Khartoum: assuring they get enough direct sunlight to flourish, but not so much heat as to burn their leaves. More than just keeping plants though, she appreciated cuttings—to take a stem or leaf and give it the nourishment to take root, become whole. In this moment, I think of metaphor in being able to multiply plants from a single leaf or stem. One can only hope that some aspects of her approach, her fortitude and principle, have taken root in those around her.
When we speak of revolutionaries and thinkers who die too early, we point to the grief we feel at not getting to see them evolve. How would their focus have changed over time? How would they have developed as thinkers? It is a trajectory and a life’s work interrupted.
In addition to that sense of incomplete work, I’m left missing Muzan’s reactions. She has left a world that is profoundly in flux, a Sudan profoundly disrupted, changing, though not for the better. In the midst of all this, I grieve not being able to turn to her to process and demand better from the future as she did for so long of our present.
There is no easy answer to Muzan’s absence, no easy answer to the weight of all others who have also left us. It feels a bit as if there is a Muzan shaped hole in the world, one defined by the knowledge that her vibrancy, her forceful moral courage and acute intellect can no longer be relied upon to inflect the Sudanese and international political spheres. Muzan demanded more of everyone—and with that demand, carved out a political space for herself and her comrades, space in which we could all grow.
Honoring Muzan properly, it feels, comes with an obligation: to think through and take the principled path, to demand better of the world around us, of ourselves, and of our colleagues. This will look different for everyone. Not everyone might come to the same conclusions Muzan did, and not everyone may want to push on the same political boundaries and limitations; not everyone has the same leverage or the same priorities. But Muzan’s ability to create space for new possibilities should not be one that we yield in this terrible moment. By carrying her sensibility with us, we might build that better world, one of which she would be proud.
[1] This excerpt of Muzan’s speech was translated by Shafaq Mokwar
