This Saturday, December 19, marks the second year of the outbreak of the Sudanese People’s Revolution, which overthrew the regime of former President Omar al-Bashir. It all started on December 19, 2018 in the working class Atbara, 300 km north of Khartoum. That day began the first manifestations of discontent that would lead four months later to a thirty-year dictatorship.
It is said in Sudan that it was a handful of high school students from Atbara who started it all. At the beginning of December 2018, the bowl of lentils that served them for lunch had become affordable for them. Inflation was out of control and there was no more cash in the banks. Some demonstrations had already taken place in the city since September, where mainly poor fathers gathered.
Anger on sheets of paper
So on December 13, some children also wrote their anger on sheets of paper and took positions at an intersection. Persecuted by the almighty intelligence services spread quickly, but their action was repeated elsewhere. The following days, modest gatherings called for cautious processions, in Damazine, in the south, in Port Sudan, in the east – popular and middle class – in turn upset.
But on December 19, the price of bread suddenly tripled. So in Atbara, the fortress of the left-wing unions and Sudanese railway workers, many were dissatisfied at last on the streets. Armed with sticks, they set fire to the headquarters of al-Bashir’s party, shouting “peace, justice and freedom”, a slogan that would become the revolution.
Unpublished photos
These unsurpassed images then toured in Sudan, from mobile phone to mobile phone. “When we saw that the people of Atbara had the nerve to do so,” said Ahmed, a revolutionary student from Khartoum last spring, “we understood that the dictatorship was over.”
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