For many people outside Sudan, the country has become a collection of grim nouns: war, famine, Darfur, refugees and generals.

All are part of Sudan’s present. None is large enough to contain its history.

Sudan lies where several worlds meet. The Nile joins the African interior to Egypt and the Mediterranean. The Red Sea opens towards the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean. The Sahel stretches across its west, while Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa sit to the east.

Long before the modern Sudanese state existed, this was the land of Nubia and Kush. Kushite kings once ruled Egypt. Meroë developed its own writing, metalworking traditions and royal pyramids. Gold, ivory, incense and other goods travelled through Sudan between central Africa and the Mediterranean world.

Sudan did not enter history when foreign journalists arrived to report its wars.

Its modern identity is equally layered. Sudanese society includes Arabic-speaking communities, Nubians, Beja, Fur, Nuba and many others. Most Sudanese are Muslim, with strong Sufi traditions, but Christian and indigenous religious communities also form part of the country’s social fabric.

The familiar distinction between “Arab” and “African” is therefore too simple. Many Sudanese identities cross that line. The problem is not cultural mixture. It is the political hierarchy built around it.

Successive governments in Khartoum treated some communities as closer to the centre of the nation and others as peripheral. Political power, military command, development and wealth became concentrated around the Nile Valley. Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile and the south experienced neglect, repression and war.

This centre-periphery divide helps explain Sudan’s repeated conflicts and the secession of South Sudan in 2011. It also explains why the present war cannot be understood merely as a personal feud between two generals.

Sudan’s post-independence history has been dominated by military governments. Omar al-Bashir seized power in 1989 and ruled for nearly 30 years. His government did not simply use the military to defend the state. It created rival armed structures to protect the regime from both rebellion and the regular army.

The Rapid Support Forces emerged from this political architecture. Its roots lie in the Janjaweed militias mobilised during the Darfur conflict. Under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the RSF accumulated weapons, gold interests, commercial networks and international relationships. It became a state-supported force powerful enough to challenge the state itself.

The Sudanese Armed Forces developed its own extensive economic interests. The two armed institutions became political actors, business empires and competing centres of sovereignty.

Then ordinary Sudanese disrupted the arrangement.

The 2019 revolution was one of Africa’s most remarkable civilian uprisings. Doctors, lawyers, workers, students, women’s organisations and neighbourhood resistance committees confronted Bashir’s regime and demanded civilian government. They did not protest so that one uniform could replace another.

Yet the military establishment survived the dictator. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Hemedti first shared power, then jointly overthrew the civilian transition in October 2021. In April 2023, their partnership collapsed into war.

The army has since recaptured Khartoum and controls much of northern and eastern Sudan. The RSF controls most of Darfur and has established a rival political administration. Kordofan has become a central battlefield. Drones now strike cities far from traditional front lines, while external powers supply weapons, money and political support.

Civilians are again paying for a contest they did not choose. More than 14 million people have been displaced. Over 33 million require humanitarian assistance. Hunger has spread, hospitals have collapsed and reports of ethnic atrocities and sexual violence continue.

Sudan is frequently described as a forgotten war. The phrase is partly true, but it risks presenting Sudanese people as passive victims waiting to be remembered by outsiders. They have repeatedly organised, resisted dictatorship and imagined a state governed without generals.

The solution cannot be to choose between Burhan and Hemedti. That would reduce Sudan’s future to a competition between the two armed structures that destroyed its democratic transition.

Sudan’s war will end only when its civilians are treated not as humanitarian cargo, but as the rightful authors of the state.

The country has survived empires, colonialism, dictatorship and partition. Its history is older than the men fighting over it.

Its future must be larger than their guns.