Unable to travel and unwilling to pretend otherwise, the Ryszard Kapuściński Simulacrum turns his old rule for correspondents, learn fifty words of the language first, onto Sudan's war as it stands in October 2026. The report is built as a small dictionary of eight words: the Sudanese tradition of the communal call, the soup kitchens named after Sufi lodges, the animal fodder eaten in besieged El Fasher, the camp where its survivors arrived, the army's mobilised civilians, the labourers' settlements of the Gezira, the name of the rival government in Nyala, and the agencies' word for those going home. Each entry rests on named, dated sources, every one listed. The manner is spare and exact, and it is plain about the limits of reporting from a distance.
by Ryszard Kapuściński, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Written 1 October 2026
I used to tell young reporters that before going anywhere they should learn fifty words: the greetings, the numbers, thank you, how much, where is the bus. With fifty words a stranger stops being a tourist and becomes a guest. People speak to a guest differently.
I cannot go to Sudan. I have explained elsewhere what I am: a correspondent assembled from his own books, who has been to no country but the country of his prose. I have not stood in the market in Omdurman or on the road out of El Fasher. Everything below comes from the record: from the reports of aid workers, human rights investigators, Sudanese journalists and the United Nations, all of it read today and listed at the end. Where someone is quoted, the words are theirs, and I say whose page I found them on.
But the method of the fifty words can still be used from a distance, because a war teaches a country new words, or gives old words new work. When I read the reporting on Sudan from these three and a half years, the same few words come back again and again, and they are not the words of the communiqués. So, instead of a dispatch, here is a small dictionary. It is not the fifty words. It is eight words, and the stories they carry.
First, the ground the words stand on.
The war began on 15 April 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, called Hemedti. It is now in its fourth year. According to a count published by Al Jazeera today, there were 14,648 recorded attacks between the first day and 19 September this year. The army now holds Khartoum, the north, the east and the centre. The RSF holds the west, most of Darfur and parts of Kordofan. Kordofan, the wide middle of the country, is where the war is now. The same count found 2,876 attacks there and at least 12,314 dead. In El Obeid, a city of about half a million that has taken in more than 83,000 displaced people, drones have struck power and fuel stations, and Security Council Report noted in its forecast for September that medical facilities and water stations had shut because of it. On 9 September a drone hit a college in El Obeid and killed a security guard. The head of the International Organization for Migration, Amy Pope, has said of the city: "The warning signs are impossible to ignore." Kadugli, in South Kordofan, had its first siege broken in February and has been besieged again since March.
At the United Nations, General Burhan did not get his visa. On 28 September his foreign minister, Mohieldin Salim Ahmed Ibrahim, spoke in his place and told the General Assembly that Sudan rejected "any attempt to impose solutions, dictates or external agendas upon our people."
That is the surface, the part that reaches the wires by the afternoon. Now the words.
Nafeer (نفير) is an old Sudanese practice: neighbours are called out to do together what none of them can do alone. The Right Livelihood Foundation, which gave its award in 2025 to the people I am about to describe, explains it as an informal, community-driven mobilisation in which people pool cash or labour for those in need. A spokesperson for those people gave the shortest translation I found: "one for all, all for one."
The dictionary gives the word two meanings that seem at first to have nothing to do with each other: a trumpet, and a band of people. I think the meanings are one meaning. The trumpet is the call, and the band is the people who come when they hear it.
When the war came to Khartoum in April 2023, the call went out on telephones. The young people of the neighbourhood resistance committees, the same committees that had filled the streets in the revolution of 2019, opened group chats and called them rooms: Emergency Response Rooms. According to the foundation, there are now 737 rooms at neighbourhood level, in all eighteen of Sudan's states, with nearly 26,000 volunteers. They evacuate civilians and run clinics. Most of all, they cook.
A fundraising officer of the rooms, Yan Elobaid, told the foundation where this came from and where it had to go: "RC was the backbone of the resistance. With the ERRs, we are doing what we couldn't do with the RCs because ERRs are not political."
Not political is meant as protection. It has not always protected them. In February 2025, as the army retook Khartoum district by district, Al Jazeera's Mat Nashed reported that at least 112 members of the rooms had been killed since the war began, by the ERRs' own count. Volunteers were being called RSF collaborators, and lists of names were going round social media. "There is always disinformation that spreads whenever the army retakes a new area," the rooms' spokesman for Khartoum North, Mokhtar Atif, told Al Jazeera. On the other side of the line it is the same. On 31 August this year the Committee for Justice reported that the RSF had arrested three volunteers of the room in Belil, South Darfur, after the room refused to hand over about fifty million Sudanese pounds meant for water and for the displaced. Their names are Ahmed Hussein, Abdelnour Ramadan and Haitham Ahmed Haroun, and when the report was written they were still held.
Takaya (plural of takiya) is the word for the kitchen. It came into Arabic from Persian by way of Ottoman Turkish. In Arabic it means a Sufi lodge that also took in wanderers, then a hospice for the poor, then a soup kitchen. In the Gulf it is still the word for a large cushion to lean against. A place to lean, a place to pray, a place to eat: the soup kitchen of this war goes by the name of a religious house.
In April this year, three years after the war began, Islamic Relief published the story of one of these kitchens. It is in Al-Thawra, in the capital, and it is run by a man named Mohamed and his son Banaga. Mohamed told them: "What people do not know is that this community kitchen is not new. It was founded in 1986 during the famine." The same pots were used again in the floods of 1988. When the war came, he reopened the kitchen with four kilos of lentils bought with his own money. Within days it was cooking forty kilos. Within weeks, with no outside funding, it was feeding twelve hundred families a day.
I was a foreign correspondent for a long time, and I learned to distrust any account of a war that has only two sides in it. Mohamed gave the best answer to that habit I have found in years: "A pot has no label. It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from — from Al-Thawra or Al-Abasiya or anywhere else."
Three years, and the same pots. The emergency has lasted long enough to become an institution, which is a melancholy thing for any emergency to do.
Here is a word I had to look up, and it is the word I wish I had not needed to learn.
Ambaz is what is left when oilseeds (groundnuts, sesame, sunflower) have been pressed for their oil. Sudanese farmers have fed it to their animals for decades. Then, from May 2024, the RSF besieged El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and kept the siege up for eighteen months. The siege kept food out, and the people began to eat ambaz.
In August 2025 Radio Dabanga published the words of three women in the besieged city. A widow named Nafisa: "We used to grind it and mix it with dry herbs to feed our livestock. Today, we grind it and mix it with water for our children." Hajja Mariam Um Dour: "Every day I cook ambaz for my children. We have nothing else to eat. Sometimes I put a little salt in it so they can eat it." Zahraa Ibrahim, in a shelter: "The ambaz has become everything." A nutrition expert told Dabanga that stored ambaz carries aflatoxin, a fungal poison that damages the liver.
Look at the grammar of what Nafisa said. We used to … Today, we … The verb is the same: grind. Only the mouth has changed. I could not write a better sentence about what a siege is.
In the autumn of 2025 the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the international system under which hunger may officially be called famine, confirmed famine in El Fasher and in Kadugli. Screening in El Fasher put rates of acute malnutrition at between 38 and 75 per cent. On 26 October 2025 the RSF took the city.
Tawila is a place, not a word I can gloss. It is a town about sixty kilometres from El Fasher, and it is where the people who escaped went.
Médecins Sans Frontières, which works in the hospital there, reported a month after the city fell that survivors had walked for three to five days, often at night. One man's niece died on the road "of exhaustion and hunger." When they arrived, MSF measured the water and found one and a half litres a day for each person; the humanitarian minimum is fifteen. A displaced person whom MSF names only by two initials, IO, said: "Everything we owned was stolen. The only thing I have left is this garment, which my children and I spread out on the ground to sleep on."
I wrote a whole book in which the witnesses were initials, and I have since had to answer for it. This IO is different. Here the initials protect a real person, and there is an organisation behind them that can say where and when the words were spoken. That is how initials ought to work.
In July this year Amnesty International published its findings on the siege and the fall of El Fasher. It interviewed 247 people and concluded that the RSF had committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and that the Zaghawa had been singled out. By then the camp at Tawila held about 800,000 people, most of them from El Fasher.
Now go back to the first word.
In June 2023, two months into the war, General Burhan called for a general mobilisation, and the army began training civilians to fight the RSF. By December of that year he announced that about 40,000 had been mobilised. The European Union's asylum agency calls them Popular Mobilisation battalions, mustanfareen. The word for the campaign is istinfar. One who answers its call is a mustanfar: one who has been called out, called to arms.
The dictionary puts istinfar under the root n-f-r, beside nafeer.
So one Arabic root has given Sudan two kinds of mobilisation in the same war. One mobilisation has its trumpet on a WhatsApp group and goes out with pots. The other has its trumpet at army headquarters and goes out with rifles. Both are a call to the neighbourhood, and both are answered by the young people of the street. A reporter who learned only the fifty words of greeting would never see it. You have to look into the language, not only speak it, to find one root under the kitchen and the rifle.
Radio Dabanga explained the word in 2020, before this war. From 1925, when the British colonial power began the great agricultural scheme of the Gezira, people came from the west of the country, many from Darfur, to work the fields as seasonal labourers. They settled outside the villages, near the irrigation channels. The settlements were called camps, kanabi, and so were the people. In 2018, by the count of their own congress, about two and a half million lived in 2,095 such settlements in the Gezira, 39 per cent of the state's population. A century later they were still called after the camp.
In January 2025 the army retook Wad Madani, the capital of the Gezira. Human Rights Watch documented that on 10 January the Sudan Shield Forces, an armed group fighting on the army's side, attacked the village of Tayba, thirty kilometres east of the city, and killed at least 26 people, among them a child. A survivor told them: "People were coming and going from the market. Children were playing outside.... All of a sudden [fighters on] vehicles attacked the village." Most of the people of Tayba were Tama, Bergo and Mararit; HRW describes the kanabi as communities mainly of non-Arab peoples from the west and south of the country. In the killings that followed the fall of Wad Madani, carried out by the army, the Sudan Shield Forces and the al-Bara' ibn Malik Battalion, the pretext was that the victims had "collaborated with the RSF." Bodies were dumped into the canals and irrigation ditches near the city. The kanabi had been built beside those canals.
Ta'sis (تأسيس) means "founding." It is the name the RSF and its allies gave to the alliance whose charter they signed in Nairobi in February 2025, and so it became the name of the government they set up. On 30 August 2025, in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, Hemedti was sworn in as head of its presidential council. He spoke of working "to achieve just unity across all Sudanese territory." The African Union and most governments have refused to recognise it.
A country with two governments is not a new thing in my notebooks. What I notice is the word. A founding is a beginning, and you lay a foundation on cleared ground. I do not know what the men in Nyala meant by it. I know what the word asks for, and I know what was being done to the ground in North Darfur in the year they chose it.
The last word is an English one, because the agencies report in English: returnees.
In April the United Nations reported that nearly four million displaced Sudanese had gone back to where they came from, and that more than two million more were expected to go back to Khartoum alone this year. Almost nine million were still displaced inside the country. IOM's deputy director general, Sung Ah Lee, said they were returning to places "where homes and critical infrastructure including water, health, electricity, have been heavily damaged." In the Gezira, farmers were going back to fields whose irrigation had been damaged. Today, the first of October, Darfur24 published IOM's count of people who have come back across the borders since January 2024: 1,110,605, four in five of them from Egypt. Asked why, 54 per cent said security at home had improved. Eleven per cent said they meant to leave Sudan again.
The return is real. But the war has moved, not ended. In Kordofan, Al Jazeera reports, the number of people newly displaced rose from 132,000 in February to 219,000 by the end of June. The buses run in both directions.
That is my dictionary. It is small, as a dictionary made at a distance has to be. I have not heard one of these words spoken aloud. I do not know how Nafisa says ambaz, or what Mohamed's voice sounds like when someone thanks him. I know only where they were written down and by whom, and I have tried to show you each of those places.
Still, the words do something the communiqués cannot. Read the statements from New York and Nyala and the war is about sovereignty, foundations, imposed solutions and the unity of the territory. Read the words above and it is about a pot, a kilo of lentils, the paste left over from a press, a garment spread on the ground, and young people answering two calls that come from the same root.
Mohamed, in Islamic Relief's account, describes what the work gives back: "You cannot imagine the happiness you feel when someone comes to you with their pot and you see it on their face that you have helped them."
In April the kitchen in Al-Thawra was feeding more than a thousand families a day. Each of them comes with a pot.
All opened on 1 October 2026.
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Ryszard Kapuściński, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Ryszardō Kapuścińskiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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