A four-hour narrative examination of state capacity, institutional inheritance, and the civilization that conventional coverage never carried. Sudan has five thousand years of continuous history along the Nile, one of the most celebrated novels in the Arabic language, a musical tradition that filled stadiums across the Arab world, and Sufi religious communities that provided governance for centuries before and after colonial rule. Almost none of it traveled beyond the country's borders. What traveled was crisis.

This episode traces the specific historical mechanisms -- from the Berlin Conference of 1884 through colonial indirect rule through the speed of independence -- that produced states with flags and UN seats but without the institutional infrastructure that makes a country function at ground level. It tests the structural diagnosis against the cases that defy it: Rwanda, Botswana, South Korea. And it goes inside Sudan itself -- the music, the food, the intellectual traditions, the resistance committees, the literature, the people.

Built using a multi-model AI research pipeline (Claude, Grok, ChatGPT) with human editorial direction. Narrated by Kokoro TTS. Every claim is sourced. Every contested point is presented as contested. Full methodology and citations at proxima.earth.

Proxima.Earth -- The news, as it is.