Holidays in Sudan

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Sudan

Twelve Hundred Years of Building Pyramids

Sudan holds more pyramids than any other country on Earth, roughly 255 of them scattered across the desert north of Khartoum, more than double the number Egypt built next door. They are the legacy of the Kingdom of Kush, a Nubian civilisation that ruled the middle Nile Valley through three successive capitals: Kerma from around 2500 to 1500 BCE, Napata from roughly 1000 to 300 BCE, and finally Meroë, home to the largest concentration of pyramids, from about 300 BCE into the fourth century CE. At its height in the eighth century BCE, Kush conquered Egypt outright and ruled it for three-quarters of a century as its twenty-fifth dynasty, with the Kushite king Piye becoming the first pharaoh in five centuries to be buried in pyramid style.

What sets the Meroë pyramids apart from their more famous Egyptian counterparts is not their size, since most stand under thirty metres tall against Giza's much larger monuments, but their steepness and their duration. Built at angles of sixty to seventy degrees compared to Egypt's shallower fifty-one, and constructed in an unbroken tradition spanning roughly twelve hundred years, the Kushite pyramid-building program outlasted the Egyptian one it originally borrowed from by a considerable margin. Kushite script, used to record the names of the kings and queens buried inside these tombs, including the warrior queen Amanirenas, who fought the Romans, remains only partly deciphered today, leaving much of this millennium-long dynasty's own account of itself still effectively unread.

A Homeland Given a Flooding Deadline

In November 1959, Sudan and Egypt signed the Nile Waters Agreement, setting in motion the construction of the Aswan High Dam and, with it, a four-year countdown for the communities living in its future flood zone. The agreement meant that roughly 50,000 Sudanese Nubians, whose ancestors had lived along that stretch of the Nile for millennia, would have to leave their homes on a fixed schedule dictated entirely by engineering rather than by their own choice or history.

The town of Wadi Halfa, then home to around 11,000 people and surrounded by ancient Nubian archaeological sites, became the focal point of resistance: residents demonstrated against the resettlement plan in October 1960, protests spread to Khartoum and were dispersed with tear gas, and the government responded by placing Wadi Halfa under martial law and cutting its communications with the rest of the country. None of it stopped the schedule. As the reservoir began rising in 1964, the old town was destroyed by flooding entirely, and by 1965 its relocated population, resettled at a new site called New Halfa near Kassala, had fallen to just 3,200, a fraction of what the town had held less than a decade earlier. Archaeologists spent the intervening years racing the rising water to remove what temples and artefacts they could, relocating some to Khartoum's National Museum, but the great majority of the old Nubian heartland simply disappeared beneath what is now called Lake Nubia on the Sudanese side of the border.

A Civil War That Began Before the Country Did

Sudan formally became independent on 1 January 1956, in a ceremony at the People's Palace in Khartoum where the British and Egyptian flags were lowered together and the new Sudanese flag, in green, blue and yellow, was raised in their place, ending fifty-eight years of joint Anglo-Egyptian rule. The moment came after Sudan's newly elected parliament had unanimously declared the country's independence the previous month, a declaration Britain and Egypt accepted rather than contested.

What makes the date unusual in the history of decolonisation is what had already happened before it arrived. Five months earlier, in August 1955, troops of the Equatorial Corps mutinied in the southern town of Torit, reflecting fears among southern Sudanese that the new northern-led government would not represent them fairly once the British departed. The mutiny was suppressed within days, but survivors withdrew into the countryside and kept fighting, meaning that Sudan's first civil war was already technically underway for months before the country whose future it was contesting had even formally come into existence.

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