By Shrijan Raj Pandey
On April 15, 2023, Azza Abdul-Rehman, a 22-year-old medical student at the University of Medical Science and Technology in Khartoum, Sudan, was sleeping after preparing the whole night for her seventh-semester final examination when a phone call woke her up. The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces had broken out in the capital, and she had to pack and evacuate within hours.
“When the war broke out, they destroyed the airport,” Abdul-Rehman says now, recalling how she weighed the best options for leaving Khartoum. Despite the urgency, she was trapped inside the war-torn country for three months. She was able to catch a bus to Egypt and then took a flight to Qatar, where her family resided. For the next five months, she was stranded without any clue of where her academic journey was headed.
The chaos of the civil war has impacted all aspects of life in Sudan. Its future is imperiled as much as its present due to disruptions in the educational system.
“I was thinking about restarting from Year 1, even though I was in the final year of university,” Abdul-Rehman says.
Luckily, the university helped her and her colleagues to move to a university in Kigali, Rwanda, to continue their education.
However, not every student had the same liberty as Abdul-Rehman did.
Fatima Abd-Elmonem, another final-year medical student at the University of Gezira, shared a similar fate when the RSF blocked civilians from leaving Gezira, a city near Khartoum, as the war spread. Unlike Abdul-Rehman, Abd-Elmonem stayed in Sudan, moving east from Gezira to Kassala State to be with her family. She does not know how or when she will continue with her studies.
“We lost everything. We lost our house, our cars, our businesses and jobs, our studies,” says Abd-Elmonem over WhatsApp texts. She couldn’t call, as there have been frequent widespread internet shutdowns and blackouts since the war began, cutting off communication for millions of people stuck in conflict zones.
“I lost all the basic materials that helped me to study – my books, valuable medical references, my medical tools, and other stuff,” Abd-Elmonem says.
Like Abdul-Rehman and Abd-Elmonem, more than 8 million people have been displaced inside and outside Sudan since mid-April, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, making the country the source of the largest displacement crisis in the world.
Almost a year into the conflict, the country’s educational system is in shambles. Many schools and universities have closed indefinitely, while many others have been destroyed.
The greatest devastation is in Khartoum, where 60% of the population has fled, according to Khalid Mustafa Medani, an expert on Sudanese politics and chair of the African Studies program at McGill University. “They fled to the central part in Gezira province, one of the last safe havens for refugees, which they also had to flee from, of course, a couple of months ago, because that was attacked.”
Around 200,000 people in the Darfur region of western Sudan have been forced to flee across the border with Chad, Medani adds, and multitudes in southern Sudan have fled to South Sudan, where now there is increasing tension because of the refugee flow.
“If given a choice between helping their families survive or going to school”, Medani says further, “there would be no choice. Very few people would make a choice to go to school, even if the family wants them to go to school.”
People displaced internally have moved to smaller towns that have few schools or none at all, as these regions are the safest in the moment.
Osama Mohammed Ali, 22, a third-year medical student, had been studying at Karary University in Omdurman, Khartoum State, but is now displaced in El-Gadarif, another state in Sudan. Ali had high hopes of pursuing a career as a medical doctor. However, the war destroyed his university and with it, his dreams, and perhaps his future as well.
“The war destroyed my life. My home was stolen; my university was destroyed; my future plans disappeared,” Ali says. After the war broke out, he moved with his family to Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira state in Sudan. He did paid volunteering work with the NGO ADD Sudan, helping to distribute food to the displaced population and aiding medical treatment in different villages of Gezira state. This job helped him support his family for a while, until the RSF attacked Wad Madani. He lost his job and was displaced again to El-Gadarif.
“I have spent all my money supporting my family,” says Ali, who is unsure about what his future holds.
Targeting Sudanese students is political
Medani says the conflict is a war against Sudanese civil society and against the legacy and history of Sudanese culture.
Referring to Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan and the Islamist National Congress Party regime, “if you look at history, [their] biggest threat was among the educated students of the University of Khartoum and across the secondary schools in Khartoum and elsewhere,” Medani says.
Sudanese students have a history of resisting government forces. For instance, the revolution in 2019 that toppled the regime of Omar Al-Bashir, who was president of Sudan since 1989, was led by Sudanese university and secondary school students.
“They [the fighting forces] understand that their nemeses are educated students or those seeking an education,” Medani says.
He adds that RSF Commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, has a strong hatred against students as he himself is uneducated and semi-literate, and the strongest disapproval of his legitimacy is from students. Therefore, targeting cultural institutions such as schools, universities and museums is strategic for Hemedti, as these institutions hold archives of Sudanese history and legacy, and the foundations of the Sudanese nation state. Destroying these institutions and the histories they contain would then allow Hemedti to remake Sudan in his own mercenary militia image.
Medani also explains that towns with functioning schools, strong secondary institutions and a long history of higher education in states such as Al Jazirah, have been direct targets of bombing by both parties.
“What makes Sudan what it is are the Sudanese who are in secondary schools and universities. Now the majority of young people have not been to a classroom in Sudan. Approximately 25 million young people have not entered a classroom since the war began,” Medani says.
Sudanese students outside Sudan also struggle in their new residency
Students displaced outside Sudan in Rwanda, Egypt, Qatar, and Malaysia face daunting challenges as wartime migrants.
Estifaa Khoursheid, another 21-year-old medical student in her final year, fled Sudan for Rwanda because of the war.
“I didn’t have any other options,” says Khoursheid, who wouldn’t be able to pay for her education if she didn’t have an existing scholarship from her previous university.
Many of her close friends and family are still in Sudan, and she rarely is able to contact them due to poor internet connectivity. “I’ve been here in Rwanda for almost seven months now, and I’ve talked to them [her family] like four times,” Khoursheid says.
Apart from sporadic contact with their families, students such as Khoursheid and Abdul-Rehman feel isolated in their new homes.
“I didn’t know where to go and how to speak to Rwandan people here since not all of them can speak English,” Abdul-Rehman says.
Sudanese war refugees also face discrimination and racism, according to Medani. “To find employment or to be matriculated into a university or school, oftentimes you face barriers, not only financial but also racial and xenophobic.”
While the Rwandan government has opened its arms as well as its borders to the Sudanese refugees, other countries in the region have not done so.
“My friend who moved to Malaysia dropped out of her university as she couldn’t handle the racism she faced as an African student,” Abdul-Rehman says.
Wherever they have migrated, Sudanese students share a similar plight: Their home country is embroiled in civil war with no sign of peace or stability, and their future is in shambles.
Abdul-Rehman says many of her friends in Rwanda have been struggling financially as their parents are unable to support them because of the war. The students are contemplating dropping out even though they are in their final year of university. Likewise, as many universities have been destroyed, students cannot access their university transcripts, which restricts them from transferring universities or finding a job. Professors and teachers have also been displaced and are struggling to support themselves.
“The biggest change in my life is that I have to live far away from my home and the town that I belong to,” Abd-Elmonem says. “I have to start a new life from the beginning, with new people to know, new places to discover, new stuff and clothes, and even a new me.”
Students are racked with uncertainty over what the future holds – for their country as well as for themselves.
“It’s not only our future, but the future of all the children living in Sudan now,” Abd-Elmonem says. “There will be no education, and thus there will be no country.”
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