From libcom.org
February 14, 2025
Al Amal (Hope) is a new bimonthly newsletter produced by the Sudanese Anarchist Gathering, documenting issues and struggles of Sudanese Anarchists and conditions for Sudanese people.
This bimonthly is issued jointly by the Sudan Anarchist Gathering, CNT-AIT France and their friends. If you want to receive the next issues, please contact us : contact@cnt-ait.info
If you want to support financialy the Sudan Anarchist Gathering, you can use our paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/cntait1 (please validate “Sending ‘money to an individual’ to pay less bank charges) Send an email to contact@cnt-ait.info to inform us of the donation and also so that we can keep you informed of its use.
PDF of Issue #1: https://files.libcom.org/files/2025-02/AL%20Amal%20en%20Issue%2001.pdf
Opening article:
Why Would You Become an Anarchist in Sudan?
This question has always haunted me at many moments in a country of ideological, cultural, ethnic, tribal, and political diversity—where countless choices exist, yet none can be freely made. The moment you are born, your identity in Sudan is determined by religion, while your tribe plays a crucial role in shaping your culture and even your fate.
To become an anarchist in Sudan, you must have already escaped all these imposed identities and the suffocating constraints that push us into the furnace of the state. Sudan is a country where war, crises, and disease have never ceased. Its people, saturated with military, religious, and tribal ideologies, serve as perfect fuel to ignite conflicts.
In such a country, I have always looked at my life with amazement. Our struggles often resemble action films— perhaps bizarre or unbelievable to outsiders—where survival means constantly fleeing from warring factions, dodging a hail of bullets fired directly at you. Bullets of the state, religion, tribe, sect, and armed factions.
Choosing to be an anarchist is an expression of true awareness of the failures of these systems. It is a consciousness that pushes you to the limits of both practical struggle and the deeply complex human experience. And this path leads to only two possible outcomes: you either survive as a true revolutionary resister, or you are consumed by the spiral of power.
Just as authority in Sudan takes many forms, so does opposition. There are political resistance movements, parties, mercenary armed groups, so-called revolutionary and liberal militias built on tribal structures, and cultural factions engaged in deep propaganda-driven authoritarianism.
These intertwined hierarchies form the crises of Sudanese peoples. Sudan is, in reality, a collection of small peoples trapped within a state that wields brutal power, recognizing no human rights beyond its own interests. Furthermore, the ideology of extremist Islamists has been another tool for deepening ignorance and backwardness in Sudan.
Striving to confront all of this as a lone anarchist is like fighting as a wolf among packs of hyenas. If they find a single weakness in you, it will mean your inevitable destruction.
The path forward begins with seeking out those who share your ideas, developing them, and offering them knowledge and education. As an anarchist, you carry the feeling that wherever you are, and whatever your capacity, your mission is to spread freedom. The price of that freedom may be high—it may even cost you your life. Yet, all of this is just a small contribution to the scale of liberation that people need to live a dignified human life.
Freedom is the highest state of being, and anarchism shows us how to achieve and practice it.
Freedom is not just a poetic word to express aspirations—it is an effort, a commitment to being free with yourself and others, and a struggle to make freedom a reality. To be an anarchist is a blessing that cannot be monopolized or hidden. To be free is to be an anarchist, and to be an anarchist is to be free.
— Fawaz Murtada