A complementary reading of Dr. Wajdi Kamil’s article “Sudan’s War and the Epistemic Shock: Towards

02:05 AM October, 08 2026

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From Epistemic Shock to an Institution of Knowledge

Complementing, Not Confronting series

A complementary reading of Dr. Wajdi Kamil’s article “Sudan’s War and the Epistemic Shock: Towards Rebuilding the Sudanese Questions after the War”

By: Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha


Introduction

Few articles write about the war without being consumed by the war alone. Dr. Wajdi Kamil’s article, published in Alrakoba newspaper on 5 October 2026, is one of those few. It asks not only what the war has done to cities and people, but what it has done to the way we used to think in, and about, Sudan. This is a question of rare courage, because it places the intellectual himself, and not the politician alone, under scrutiny.

In reading this article from the standpoint of the Charter of Salvation and State-Building, I am not looking for disagreement but for a bridge. The article raises, from the side of knowledge, the very questions the Charter has tried to answer from the side of institutions. What I offer here is not a rebuttal in the sense of refutation, but a completion of what the author began: an attempt to carry the epistemic question he has posed so well to its institutional conclusion.

First: Where the Article Meets the Charter

The article converges with the Charter on four essential points, and fairness requires that I begin with them.

The first is moving the question from politics to knowledge. The author suggests that the problem may have lain “in the questions we did not ask, more than in the answers we gave.” This is precisely the Charter’s point of departure: restoring the institutions that collapsed, exactly as they were, would merely reproduce the crisis with new tools; the real beginning lies in diagnosing the structure that produced the collapse.

The second is giving the document precedence over the settled narrative. Here the author writes a sentence I consider among the most mature in the article:

“But to assume the connection and then build upon it — that is not research.”

A researcher’s willingness to let the document overturn his own hypothesis is the first condition of any honest knowledge. It is the same discipline we try to uphold in the Charter when we verify every reference before building upon it.

The third is that history accumulates rather than succeeds itself in stages. The author rejects reading Sudan as a series of consecutive phases, like chapters in a school textbook, and holds that “old things do not necessarily disappear when new things arrive.” This is the Charter’s own logic in reading the persistence of the colonial structure within the independent state.

The fourth is that the South is not a file separate from the history of the state, but part of the history of its formation. This vision is consistent with the Charter’s adoption of place-based representation, which makes the whole of the country’s geography a partner in defining the state, rather than peripheries administered from a centre.

Second: Who Carries the Epistemic Shock؟

The author defines the task precisely: reordering the questions, returning to the archive, and revisiting settled assumptions without wholesale demolition. Yet in his conclusion he assigns this task to “the Sudanese intellectual” and to “intellectuals and researchers.” A question arises here that I see as a natural extension of his own: who turns what the archive reveals into public awareness, and then into policy؟

Sudanese scholars have produced, as the author himself acknowledges, a wide body of knowledge about their history. But much of it has remained confined to university shelves and specialist journals, and never became shared memory. The problem was not only an absence of knowledge, but also the absence of an institution that carries it from the circle of the elite into the public sphere.

This is why the Charter proposes that three-tier transitional justice, in its component concerned with truth and memory, become the institutional vehicle for the project of “reordering the questions.” In the Charter’s conception, transitional justice is not merely trials; it is also a collective process of writing a national narrative in which the communities that were absent from the writing of their own history take part. In this way, the review the author calls for does not remain a scattered elite effort, but becomes part of building the state itself.

Third: Slavery and 1924 — One File, Not Two

The author addresses the question of slavery in one place and the 1924 Revolution in another, as if they were two neighbouring matters. I would like to propose a reading that brings them together. The moment of 1924 was, in one of its aspects, the moment when the legacy of slavery met modern politics face to face.

Ali Abdel Latif, and a number of the officers who joined the movement, came from social backgrounds that bore the marks of that era, and from groups that the prevailing social hierarchy continued to treat as inferior. When the author asks, “Who is Sudanese؟ And who has the right to speak in the name of Sudan؟”, this was not a theoretical question in 1924. It was a living question, answered by the positions people took towards the movement’s leadership itself, and the criterion of lineage was present in some of those answers to a degree that cannot be ignored.

If this is so, then the modern national movement was born carrying an unresolved question within it: is belonging to Sudan a citizenship in which people are equal, or a status determined by origin؟ That question remained unresolved until it erupted in various forms, the latest of which is this war.

The Charter offers this question its explicit institutional answer: the distinction between the citizenship-state and the identity-state; representation based on place rather than lineage; and the establishment of the Fourth Pillar of regional representation. These tools are not merely administrative arrangements. They are an attempt to close the question that 1924 left open, with an answer that makes a Sudanese person whoever lives on this land and takes part in building it, not whoever descends from a particular origin.

Fourth: 1922 Is Wider than the Closed Districts Law

The author rightly says that “1924 does not begin in 1924,” and draws attention to the closed-districts measures the British administration took towards the South in that period. He poses a precise research question: did the national movement in the North know of this policy and discuss it؟

I would add a neighbouring question. The year 1922 saw not only the closing of the South, but also the issuing of the Powers of Nomad Sheikhs Ordinance, regarded as one of the legislative beginnings of Native Administration and the policy of indirect rule in the North. Read together, against the background of the 1919 Revolution in Egypt and the British anxiety it aroused about the spread of Egyptian influence and national consciousness among the educated, the two measures may reveal a fuller picture: a single policy seeking to isolate the urban, educated national movement — through the tribe in the North, and through closure in the South.

This, as the author says of his own hypothesis, is a hypothesis we should not build upon before the document. But it widens the circle of the archival research he calls for, so that the question is not limited to the South’s connection with the national movement, but extends to the connection of the whole national movement with the project of social reorganisation that the British administration was carrying out at the very same time.

At this point the Charter proposes the concept of ascending functional legitimacy, as an alternative to two legitimacies we inherited from that era: the legitimacy of notability that Native Administration conferred on traditional leaderships, and the legitimacy of tutelage monopolised by the centre. In the Charter’s conception, legitimacy is earned by performing a function and serving people, and it rises from the base to the top, not the reverse.

Fifth: The Army after 1924 and the Institutional Firewall

The author asks: “Was the army part of the national movement, or were the soldiers moving within a wider political movement؟” This is an essential question, and I believe its answer is completed when we look at what happened after the defeat, not before it.

The suppression of the revolution was followed by the withdrawal of the Egyptian units from Sudan and the creation of the Sudan Defence Force in 1925. In other words, the colonial administration rebuilt the army as an instrument of the state separated from society, after 1924 had shown it the danger of the soldier and the politician meeting in a single movement. From that moment, a duality took root in Sudanese political consciousness that has stayed with it ever since: either a soldier who sees himself as the bearer of the national will, or an army isolated from society, which intervenes in politics when it pleases and returns to its barracks when it pleases.

Perhaps the successive coups since independence, and then the present war between two military institutions, are the latest harvest of this legacy. Hence the Institutional Firewall in the Charter: a clear structural separation between the political sphere and executive and military authority, resting not on good intentions but on rules and institutions that prevent the soldier from acting as guardian over politics, and prevent the politician from using the army as a tool in his own struggles.

Sixth: What Did We Inherit at Independence؟

One of the deepest moments in the article is its question: “It inherited a state. But which state؟” The Charter proposes a specific answer: we inherited the gateway economy.

The colonial state was built to extract resources and move them out, and it was administered through crossing points at which rent was collected: the Gezira Scheme, the port, the railway, import and export licences, and public employment itself. Independence did not change this structure; it changed who stood at the gates. Ever since, competition for control of these gateways has been the core of Sudanese politics, instead of competition to serve people and produce wealth.

This is why the Activation Protocol counts the gateway economy as the sixth of the structural gaps without whose treatment the building of the state cannot be complete. The author’s question about “what remained of the colonial state within the independent state” finds here an answer that does not stop at diagnosis but extends to treatment: dismantling the gateways, distributing access to resources, and capping external funding so that the gateways do not simply move from the centre to outside the country.

Seventh: Understanding and Building Together

The author closes his article with a question:

“If the Sudan we knew before the war led to this war, is it enough to rebuild it؟ Or must we first understand why it was the way it was؟”

I agree with the author that rebuilding without understanding will reproduce what was. But I fear that “understanding first” may turn into an endless postponement. The archive is inexhaustible and historical review is never complete; if we make understanding a precondition of building, history itself may become a pretext for delaying the future. The author himself is aware of this when he says that rereading history is “part of the work that must begin now.”

The Charter therefore proposes that understanding and building proceed together, on a single track with a time ceiling. The Transitional Bridge Initiative sets a transitional period of no more than five years, during which institution-building and epistemic review run side by side, each nourishing the other: the institution protects the freedom of research and disseminates its findings, and research corrects the course of the institution and reveals what it has missed.

All of this rests on the principle of al-iftiqar (mutual interdependence), on which the Charter is philosophically grounded: no one is self-sufficient, and Sudan’s communities depend on one another in their existence and their meaning. Al-iftiqar also has an epistemic face: we do not understand ourselves except through the other, and the history of Sudan is not complete if one community writes it about the others. That is why the reordering of questions the author calls for cannot be complete unless the communities that have been the objects of history, rather than its makers, take part in asking them.

A Note on Sources

In support of the author’s call to return to the document, it is worth noting that some of this archival work has already begun. The Japanese scholar Yoshiko Kurita produced an early study of Ali Abdel Latif and the 1924 Revolution based on primary sources, and the Italian scholar Elena Vezzadini published Lost Nationalism: Revolution, Memory and Anti-Colonial Resistance in Sudan (James Currey, 2015), as well as a study titled “Nationalism by Telegrams: Political Writings and Anti-Colonial Resistance in Sudan, 1920–1924.” Vezzadini drew on the British archives and the Sudan Archive at Durham University, both of which the author mentions, and addressed questions close to his own, including the organisational nature of the White Flag League. Building on these works, critically and complementarily, can shorten part of the road for Sudanese researchers.

Conclusion

Dr. Wajdi Kamil says that what is required is not only to change what we see, but to change “the way we look.” I would add, in the spirit of complementing rather than confronting: and the institution through which we look.

The epistemic shock the author has described so well is a precious moment, but if it remains a shock it will pass, as many moments have passed before it. If, however, it becomes an institution — transitional justice that writes memory, place-based representation that answers the question of belonging, an institutional firewall that separates arms from politics, and the dismantling of the gateway economy — then it becomes the beginning of what the author calls “the Sudan that could be.”

This is what the Charter seeks to offer: not a substitute for the epistemic question, but the bridge on which that question crosses from the book to the state.