Note: this program is from 2019! We leave it here for context of the current situation. In a Washington Post article titled, Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots, Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly, writes “On Dec. 19 2018, the town of Atbara in northeastern Sudan erupted in protest against the military dictatorship that has ruled the country for almost three decades. People took to the streets following a tripling of bread prices to demand “freedom, peace, justice and the downfall of the regime.” But international coverage framing the protests as bread riots obscures the larger political context, misrepresents protesters’ demands and supports the regime’s insistence that the crisis can be resolved by simply reintroducing targeted subsidies and stabilizing the Sudanese pound.” Let’s contextualize this important moment in the African world that is directly related to the long tradition of protest and resistance in the region referred to as Sudan further. According to Nisrin and Zachariah, “It is no coincidence that the protests began in Atbara, a town known for its powerful railroad workers union. Sudan has a history of successful revolutions against military regimes, most notably in 1964 and in 1985, in which trade unions and student movements played a pivotal role. But the absence of formal trade unions and independent local governing structures did not prevent people from forming alternative grass-roots structures for mobilizing against political repression. Youth movements and independent farmer and worker formations multiplied over the last decade as people lost faith in established opposition parties and politics. Most notably, from 2012 to 2014, students and the urban poor held a variety of creative protests before being repressed by the regime. With the oil-export economy emerging in the 1990s, other sectors that produced food and cash crops were left to wither away or were privatized and handed off to foreign investors or regime loyalists. All in all, the conditions that spurred the current Sudan uprisings, were proliferated and promoted by austerity measures recommended by the IMF in 2017 (known as structural adjustment programs). Today, Africa World Now Project’s Mwiza Munthali discusses the uprisings in Sudan with Nisrin Elamin. Nisrin Elamin is a Sudanese writer, activist and PhD candidate in Anthropology, based in the New York City area. She has over 15 years of experience working with community-based organizations as an educator, organizer and advocate. Most recently, she served as a Director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project’s summer leadership and social justice program for young women and non-binary folks at City College. She also works part-time with the group African Communities Together, which organizes around immigrant, civil and workers’ rights in New York and in Washington DC. Her research examines the ways Saudi and Emirati ‘land grabs’ are reconfiguring social relations between landholding and landless communities in central Sudan. In January of 2017, she was one of the first people to be detained under the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, causing her work to be interrupted. But since then, she has been able to return to Sudan to complete her research. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! For more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/12/28/recent-protests-in-sudan-are-much-more-than-bread-riots/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fce161deb4fd https://www.thenation.com/article/sudan-protests-revolution-bashir/ Image: Alaa Salah, 22, stands on a vehicle as she sings to the crowd. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images