Scene 1: The Airport
On my Turkish Airlines flight to Port Sudan, a city I have never flown into before, I am surrounded by foreigners and foreign languages. As I try to force myself to sleep, I overhear faint conversations from different directions: what Doctors Without Borders is doing, a new Chinese investment in water purification, and travel permits to Nyala the capital of South Darfur, issued by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). I have not slept properly in weeks, ever since I booked my flight to Sudan to attend my best friend’s wedding. It is January 2026, and it is my first trip back since I fled the war, and the longest time I have spent outside Sudan in my adult life.
We land. I stand at immigration, my heart racing. It feels familiarly chaotic, like Khartoum International Airport, but different. An airport officer shouts, in the same endearingly rude manner of Sudanese officials, that Sudanese passport holders should move to a separate line. A handful of us do.
The girl standing behind me starts complaining about the mess of the airport. I smile politely, trying to distract myself from my shaky hands. She asks which organization I work for. I tell her I do not work for an organization and that I am here to visit friends. She looks visibly shocked and tells me the name of the humanitarian organization she works for. I apologize and say it must be really hard. She shrugs. “Not really. It’s actually fun.” I fail to hide my own shock. I am reminded that war is experienced differently depending on where one stands, how NGO-facilitated privileges, per diems, and hardship allowances can isolate staff from the tragedies around them, repackaging humanitarian crises into “fun” careers. My hands grow shakier.
Outside the airport, I am greeted by my two best friends of 19 years: the groom and the best man. It feels surreal. So much has happened since we last met in April 2023, a few days before the war broke out, at an iftar I hosted at my place. I burst into tears. They resist; they are too worried about what people will say. We joke about toxic masculinity. I laugh, then cry again, grateful that somehow they have not changed.
Scene 2: The Parties
The groom’s henna parties (all four of them) are held in Port Sudan and the wedding in Khartoum. In between these, the house is full of life, music is constantly playing, zaghareet (ululation) and bakhoor (incense) in every corner, fashion advice, makeup tutorials, and gossip are exchanged between women, younger cousins complain about kitchen chores and men’s constant demands, last-minute market visits, and panic over mismatched outfits.
I am constantly being introduced to family, friends, and neighbors, welcomed each time with immense warmth. Aunties and family friends go out of their way to cook my favorite foods. Clothes and jewelry I compliment are instantly removed and pressed into my hands as gifts. My friend, the groom, despite being consumed by his own wedding preparations, calls every few hours to make sure I am being looked after. My other best friend drives me around the city to make sure I eat everything I’ve missed: agashe, jibna mudafara, moukhbaza, basta, fresh mango juice, an amount of food that cannot possibly be finished in one sitting, yet somehow I do. The level of kindness and hospitality, although so inherently Sudanese, so abundantly ordinary here, catches me off guard. I wonder if I stayed too long in London, whether I have grown too accustomed to Western individuality, to its quiet restraint, its stinginess. My heart aches.
But the parties are glorious. Everyone is dancing, young and old. Perhaps dancing a little too hard, with a kind of longing for joy that seems slightly new and urgent. As if they are seizing every opportunity for happiness, fully aware that these moments are fleeting. Or perhaps I am just projecting. I try to remain present. I notice the cameraman zooming in far too closely, as they often do, invading everyone’s personal space. The women tone down their dancing as he approaches, cursing under their breath, then immediately go back to their regular rhythm the moment he leaves. We all laugh.
The conversations seem so familiar, so ordinary, so pre-war-like. It all feels surreal
I am astonished by the number of new friends the groom has made in Port Sudan, a city he had been displaced to after the war. I am touched by the community he has built and the love his work colleagues show. At one point, they lift him onto their shoulders, as the groom’s friends traditionally do during Sudanese wedding celebrations, a gesture of respect and shared joy. Seeing him so happy, surrounded by family, old and new friends, I hold back my tears. My other best friend, unlike at the airport, doesn’t keep his tears in, this time. I catch him tearing up, and I teasingly laugh.
Between parties, I meet old friends. Almost everybody has more grey hair than I remember. Some look more exhausted, anxious, and overworked than others, and it all depends on one’s employment sector and whether the war economy has made it flourish or crushed it. Nobody seems to have remained in the same socioeconomic class. The movement is mostly downward, except for a lucky few. My friends share stories of displacement, family separation, long periods of hunger, anxieties over broken careers, imminent divorce, unimaginable traumas, yet their sense of humor remains exactly the same. Between heartbreaking stories of loss, there is lots of laughter and banter. The conversations seem so familiar, so ordinary, so pre-war-like. It all feels surreal: one minute you are hearing about the RSF’s brutality and the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) oppression, the next you are singing your lungs out at a party.
Scene 3: The Streets
I was fully prepared to see the destruction in Khartoum, the city where I lived most of my life. I had probably watched every video that surfaced during the war and after its recapture by the SAF: buildings riddled with bullets, burned structures, entire houses reduced to rubble. I understood the scale of the damage. What I was not prepared for was how different the city felt: the emptiness of the streets and the memories that flooded from every corner of the city. Here is my mom’s favorite restaurant, here is where I went on a first date, here is where we joined the first protest of the 2018 revolution, here is where we used to hang out during our undergraduate years. All empty, all soulless.
I force myself back to the present. Broken cars line the roads. Men in uniform sit by the few remaining sitat shay (women running informal street tea stalls). There are very few women and girls in sight. Bougainvillea trees pushing through broken walls. Lazeez, an iconic restaurant chain and one of our regular hangouts in our early twenties, recently reopened on Siteen Street, giving us a glimpse of what life once looked like on this busy street. Chills run through me.
Khartoum has always been a city of contradictions, but now, within a fifteen-minute drive, signs of destruction sit alongside visible efforts at rebuilding. Electricity workers restore power lines, construction workers fix damaged streets. Some areas are clean and orderly, others are filled with debris. Al-Ghali’s car workshops are busy, while the once-busy Al-Jawda Hospital is closed. The unevenness of reconstruction is hard to miss.
The unevenness of reconstruction is hard to miss
We pass the Grand Holiday Villa, one of Sudan’s oldest hotels, freshly painted, and see workers restoring its green roof. The night before, I had read that the de facto prime minister was calling on diplomatic missions to return to the capital, assuring them that several hotels were ready to receive guests. Restoring appearances appears to come before restoring essential services in the government’s agenda.
Omdurman and Bahri, Khartoum’s twin cities, offer different pictures. In parts of Omdurman, which experienced less damage, life appears almost uninterrupted: markets operate, shops are open, women are everywhere. At moments, it is possible to forget that a war has recently taken place and that it continues in other parts of the country.
Bahri is less forgiving. At eye level you see busy streets and transportation buses. Al-Mahata Al-Wosta, one of Bahri’s main bus stations and markets, is as vibrant as ever: buses loading and unloading, street vendors spreading their goods, tamarind juice stalls crowded, older men drinking tea beneath whatever shade they can find. For a moment, you once again almost forget about the war, then you look up and see bullet marks across building façades and damaged upper floors.
The military presence is not subtle, a reminder of who controls the state and how that control must be projected
Across Khartoum, Omdurman, Bahri, and Port Sudan, militarization consumes public space. Checkpoints are widespread, pro-SAF billboards line all major roads, military uniforms (in their various shapes and colors, signaling different factions) appear on every corner. The military presence is not subtle, a reminder of who controls the state and how that control must be projected.
But even control is not expressed evenly. The car I am in, with friends from certain ethnic backgrounds from northern and central Sudan, historically associated with power and privilege, passes checkpoints with little scrutiny. We are usually waved through, as our appearance, accents, and perceived social status work in our favor. Others, particularly those perceived to belong to communities of western or southern Sudan, report more frequent stops and harsher questioning. Curfews also bend around class. Expensive cars are rarely treated as threats; they are assumed to belong to those close to power.
The patterns are familiar. They resemble life under Omar al-Bashir: the unequal citizenship, the hierarchies of belonging, the subtle (and not so subtle) racism. The war has only intensified these injustices.
Scene 4: Love
On my last day in Khartoum, I went back to my home. Like many others, I found that everything materially valuable had been looted. But a few things of incredible sentimental value remained: paintings, books, cards. Among the books were Getting Away With Genocide?, about the Khmer Rouge, and Darfur: A 21st Century Genocide. The irony was almost absurd. A minute later I found the first painting I ever bought, one I had saved for months to afford. I broke down, crying over what was lost and what remained.
My best friend, who had taken this journey with me, responded the only way he knows how: cracking silly jokes, pulling me out of tears, patting my back one moment, teasing me the next, giving me a hug, then giving me space. As he patiently helped me gather my paintings and books, objects that may have not made much sense to him, I noticed a dust-covered birthday card on the floor. It read: “Mahi, for all our colorful conversations, the sad and the happy ones, and for the trust that is the bridge to everything, Happy Birthday! God, how kind you are to have created friends”. I look up at my friend and feel my heart full of love. Love for my friends. Love for my home. Love for what remained. Love for Sudan despite the anger and pain. Love for the years I lived in that home, which were full of what truly mattered.
Later, on my return flight, this time with Ethiopian Airlines, I sat next to men who appeared to be Tujar Shanta, literally meaning “suitcase traders”, a term referring to informal merchants who travel between countries with goods, often bypassing customs and taxes. They spoke openly about their contacts in customs, who allow them to leave with suitcases full of gold and return with mobile phones and other goods. I thought about the conversations I had overheard on my Turkish Airlines flight to Sudan, which was full of expats, where humanitarian workers discussed aid logistics. Two sides of the same war economy: one market for aid, another for gold.
I feel a heaviness I can’t quite name. Looking for a distraction, I reach for my phone. I scroll through the photos from the trip: parties, dinners, coffee by the Nile, laughter, bougainvilleas, protest graffiti, sunsets, group photos, one-on-one photos, so much joy. A line from Tayeb Salih’s novel Maryoud comes back to me: “Life, Meheimeed, is there anything more to it than two things, friendship and love?”
I think he was right.
Mahitab Mahgoub is a Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on women, economy, and conflict in Sudan.