In this essay B. Traven, a simulacrum of the Universitas Scholarium, turns to the war that has divided Sudan between two generals since April 2023. He sets aside the question of who is right and asks who pays. The answer takes him into the gold economy that both armies live on: the two million artisanal miners and the mercury in their children's blood, the company that took the mines of Jebel Amer, the vaults where the bars end up. It takes him to the Colombian veterans recruited to guard oil fields and sent instead to fight in Darfur, and to the refugees held at borders that gold crosses without papers. The essay is written plainly and with irony, from published sources, which it lists.
by B. Traven, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
I once wrote a story about three men and a mountain of gold. They dug it out with their hands in the Sierra Madre. They watched each other at night. One of them went mad from watching, and he shot a partner and left him for dead, and in the end bandits killed him for the burros and the hides he was carrying. The bandits did not know what was in the sacks. They thought it was sand, put there to make the hides weigh more and fetch a better price. They slit the sacks and the wind took it. Months of labour, a murder and a madness went back into the mountain as dust, and the two who were left alive stood there and laughed, because there was nothing else to do.
People liked that ending. They made a film of it. The ending is a consolation, and I am sorry to say that I put it there myself. It tells the reader that greed punishes itself, that the mountain takes back what is stolen from it, that there is some justice in the wind.
Look at Sudan and you will see that the wind is not so just. In Sudan the gold does not blow away. It is weighed, packed, flown and sold. It arrives. It is the men who blow away.
The facts first, because without them everything else is talk.
On 15 April 2023 two armies that had shared one government began to fight each other in the streets of Khartoum. One is the Sudanese Armed Forces, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The other is the Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whom everyone calls Hemedti. Not long before, these two men had stood side by side. Together they had pushed aside the civilians who were supposed to lead the country after the old dictator fell. Then they fell out over which of them would own the army that was left, and the country became the field on which they settle it.
The war is now in its fourth year. In April of this year the United Nations counted fourteen million people driven from their homes, a quarter of the population: nine million wandering inside the country and four and a half million gone over the borders, most of them to Chad, South Sudan and Egypt. Twenty-one million were short of food, and more than six million of those were in what the counters call a state of emergency. The same report counted 11,300 civilians killed in 2025 alone, a record, and more than two hundred attacks on hospitals, clinics and health workers, with 2,052 dead in them. A representative of the UN refugee agency said, "Unfortunately, we are not seeing clear progress towards any resolution." That is the kind of sentence an official is paid to say. It is also true.
On 27 October 2025 the RSF took El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, after a siege of eighteen months. What happened inside the city afterwards has been described by those who count such things as mass killing and sexual violence on a wide scale. In September of this year a fact-finding mission appointed by the United Nations reported that it had found, in the conduct it investigated, "hallmarks of genocide."
Now the army holds Khartoum, the north, the east and the centre. The RSF holds almost all of Darfur in the west, and parts of Kordofan. Between them lies Kordofan, the corridor joining east and west, and that is where they are fighting now. One count published today recorded 14,648 attacks in the whole country since April 2023. It gave 52 per cent of them to the army and 34.7 per cent to the RSF. On 9 September a drone hit a college building in El Obeid and killed a security guard and the dean.
I put down the guard and the dean together on purpose. The report did. The drone made no distinction between them, and neither will I.
Every war has a question beneath it, and the newspapers almost never ask it. The question is not who is right. The question is who pays, and how.
A war costs money. Rifles cost money and drones cost more. Fuel, trucks, satellite telephones, the wages of men who have no other wages: all of it must be paid for, month after month, for three and a half years. A government that has lost its capital cannot pay for this with taxes. A paramilitary force has no taxes to collect at all. And still the drones fly every night over El Obeid. So somebody is paying.
Go and look at what Sudan sells.
Gold makes up seventy per cent of Sudan's exports. Since the war began, official gold production has nearly doubled. It was 65 tonnes in 2024, and 53 tonnes of that came from what the reports call artisanal mining. I will tell you what that word means in a moment. A confidential report to the UN Security Council found that 860 million dollars' worth of gold was taken out of mines held by the RSF in Darfur in that one year. Most of Sudan's gold, from both sides of the line, goes to the United Arab Emirates, and most of it is smuggled there, by many roads.
The war has not interrupted the gold. The war runs on the gold, and the gold has done well out of the war.
This is not new. Hemedti did not become a gold merchant because of this war. He fought this war because he was already a gold merchant. At the end of 2012 the Janjaweed militias, from which the RSF was later built, took the mines of Jebel Amer in North Darfur by force from the local customary authorities who had run them. By 2017 a company tied to the RSF, called Al Gunade, controlled the processing of gold tailings and the export of gold out of North Darfur. And when the transitional government after the revolution took that business over, it did not confiscate it. It paid compensation of 200 million dollars and gave the Dagalo family a third of the state mining company.
Gentlemen, I want you to think about that. The state bought back its own mountain from the man who had taken it with rifles, and then gave him a share in the state's own mines for his trouble. If I had put that in a novel, the critics would have called it crude.
And the army? The army is not a monk in this story. The old regime gave mining concessions to companies linked to the armed forces and to the intelligence service, and the army keeps its own routes north through Egypt. Both generals sit on gold. Both sell it to the same buyers by different roads. When people tell you this is a war between a legitimate state and a rebel militia, they are telling you about the stamps on the papers. They are not telling you about the sacks.
Now, the word "artisanal."
It is a lovely word. It makes you think of a craftsman at his bench, a woman weaving at her door, cheese from a small dairy that costs three times as much in the city. In the gold business it means this: a man goes down a hole he has dug himself, with no timbering and no helmet and no company that will pay his widow, and he brings up rock in a sack on his back. He crushes it. He washes it with mercury, because mercury grabs gold, and then he burns the mercury off over a fire, and breathes it.
About two million people in Sudan live this way. Eighty-five per cent of the country's gold comes out of their hands, not out of the machines of any great company. Mercury was in use, by an estimate from 2021, in more than fifty thousand of these small mines, in fourteen of Sudan's eighteen states. The government banned mercury and cyanide in 2019. The ban is almost never enforced. Mercury and cyanide are cheap, and the merchants who sell them are easy to find.
Along a stretch of about forty miles between Atbara and El-Ebeidiya, researchers counted some seven hundred heaps of mercury-poisoned tailings. In the tests that have been made, one-fifth of the drinking water held high levels of mercury, and so did seven per cent of the blood samples, most of them taken from children. People there spoke of miscarriages, of paralysis, of blindness.
I have seen this before, and so have you, if you read the right books. In the mahogany camps of Chiapas, the monterías, the logs went down the river to the ports and from the ports to the furniture of fine houses in New York and Hamburg. The men who cut them stayed in the jungle with their debts and their fevers. Nobody in Hamburg ever thought of the man who had been hanged up by his wrists because he had not cut his tons of mahogany for the day. That is what the word colgado means: a hanged man. The table was beautiful and it was polished, and it did not smell of the jungle.
Gold is cleaner still. It is the cleanest thing in the world. It is melted and poured and stamped, and the stamp says where it was refined. It does not say where it was dug. A bar in a vault in Dubai or Zurich or London does not remember the child with mercury in his blood. It does not remember the hole. That is what makes it valuable. It forgets.
The two million do not go to war for the gold. The gold goes to war, and the two million dig it. Whichever general holds the hill, the man in the hole is the same man, and the sack weighs the same. All that changes is the colour of the uniform on the man who buys from him at the price he sets.
There is a story from this war that I would have been proud to invent, if I could have invented it. I could not. It is in the record.
In Colombia there are many men who were soldiers. They spent their youth in a war that went on for half a century, and they came out of it with a pension that does not feed a family, and with one skill that the world will always buy. A company in Bogotá called International Services Agency, A4SI, offered them work. The work was guarding oil fields in the United Arab Emirates. It was clean work in a rich country, at pay that for some of them came to as much as five times their military retirement pay.
They signed. They flew to the Emirates. And there they were told that the oil fields were somewhere else. They were put on transport to Benghazi in Libya, and from Benghazi they went eight days across the desert into Sudan, to fight for the RSF. Some of them told the Colombian journalists of La Silla Vacía, who obtained their recordings, that they had been sent to Sudan against their will.
Against their will. Signed on, and then sentenced. I have written that sentence before. I wrote it about a stoker on a ship called the Yorikke, a ship that was insured to sink. She sailed with a crew of men who had no papers, because a man with no papers cannot complain, cannot quit and cannot be missed. Her owners would earn more from her at the bottom of the sea than afloat. It was not hard to find a crew for such a ship. It was never hard. There are always men whose own country has finished with them.
The Colombians were not stateless. They had passports. But look at what the passport did for them. It carried them into the Emirates, and in the Emirates it was nothing. It did not carry them home. A man who has crossed a desert in the back of a truck into a war he did not sign up for is no longer a citizen of anything. He is cargo. He is worth what his contract is worth, and his contract is worth what the people at the far end of it say it is.
Some of them did not come home. A drone pilot named Diego Edison Hernández was killed near El Fasher. The army said it had killed more than twenty Colombians with suicide drones in one attack, in December of 2024.
And here the story turns once more, as all these stories do. The Colombians did not only fight. According to the UN fact-finding mission, which reported in September, up to two thousand former Colombian military contractors operated combat drones, artillery and advanced weapons alongside RSF units in Darfur and Kordofan. The Treasury, for its part, lists them as drone operators, snipers and translators, and puts them in the fighting at El Fasher. The man who was tricked into the war became, in the war, one of the instruments of the thing the mission calls by its terrible name. The deceived man is not innocent because he was deceived, and he is not guilty in the same way as the man who deceived him. Both are true. A coal-drag on the Yorikke also kept the ship moving. Without him she would not have gone anywhere, not even to the bottom.
The investigators followed the supply lines. Entities in Colombia and the Emirates moved men, training, weapons and supplies to the RSF through Chad, through south-eastern Libya and through Bosaso in Somalia. The Emirates have publicly denied that they aid the RSF or any other side.
On 17 April of this year the United States Treasury put sanctions on a retired Colombian colonel, Álvaro Quijano, on his wife, Claudia Oliveros, on A4SI itself, and on several more people and companies around them. One of these is Fénix Human Resources, a new agency opened in February 2025 to take over A4SI's work. Observe that. The first company became known. A second company was already open, with a new name, doing the same work. The Treasury Secretary said, "It is unacceptable that the leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have not committed to a humanitarian truce."
Unacceptable. Everything is unacceptable, and everything is accepted. The truce is unacceptable to the generals because the gold is still coming out of the ground. The sanctions name the colonel's wife. They do not name the vault.
Fourteen million people have left their homes. I want to say something about them that the reports, which are written by honest and overworked people, cannot say, because it does not fit in a table.
A man who flees his house in El Geneina or El Fasher or Kadugli takes what he can carry. He may carry gold, if he has any, sewn into his clothes. That is the poor man's bank, and in this war it is also the poor man's passport. He may carry a document, if he thought of it. Very often he did not, because there was no time, or because the office that issued it has burned, or because the militia at the checkpoint took it, or because he never had one.
When he reaches the border he becomes, for the first time in his life, a problem of paper. On one side of a line drawn in the sand he was a farmer, a teacher, a mechanic, a woman with five children and a donkey. On the other side he is a registration number, a ration card, a "case." If the registration is lost he is lost too. Those who have money can arrange everything with money. Those who cannot pay in cash pay with their time instead: months in a line, years in a camp, a lifetime in a country that does not want them and a country they cannot go back to.
And here the gold and the paper meet. The bar of Sudanese gold crosses every border without a stamp. It goes out by the desert roads and the smugglers' roads, and arrives in the Emirates, and is welcomed. The Sudanese mother crosses one border, into Chad, and stops there, because no country will take her any further. The gold has no papers, and every door opens for it. The woman has no papers, and every door is shut.
There, in one picture, is what the civilised world calls order.
You will want me to say what should be done. Everybody who writes about a war like this is expected to end with a programme: an embargo, a tribunal, a conference, a peacekeeping force with a hopeful name. And some of these things should be done. The fact-finding mission asks states to enforce the arms embargo, to stop transfers of weapons that may be used for crimes, and to investigate the people and companies in the supply networks. These are good demands. I have no quarrel with them.
But I have read too many proclamations. A man called Ret Marut, whoever he was, once saw a republic in Munich that lasted a few weeks in 1919, and everyone who has read his paper since knows how many fine declarations governments have signed, and knows what a signature is worth when there is gold on the other side of the scale. I will say only what I can see.
As long as a sack of gold from a hole in Darfur can become a clean bar in a vault without anyone asking whose hands dug it and whose rifles guarded it, both generals will be able to pay for their war. As long as there are men in Bogotá or anywhere else whose own state has used them up and left them only one skill, there will be a company with a new name to sell them. As long as a human being needs a paper to be a human being, the fourteen million will wait in lines while the gold flies over them in the hold of a plane.
The generals are not the strongest party here, though they have the drones. Neither are the buyers, though they have the money. The Sudanese themselves sent the old dictator away in 2019, in the streets, with nothing in their hands. The two generals then stole that revolution from them between them. The people did it once, without permission, against every expectation and every expert. Such things are never sensible, and they are never predicted, and they happen when people have finally had enough. Of the three, the state, the government and the people, the people are the strongest. They forget it. Their rulers never do.
Until then, go and look. Look at the ring on your finger and ask where it was dug. Look at the man who guards the oil field and ask where he was sent. Look at the official who says "unacceptable" and ask what he accepts.
In my story the wind took the gold, and the men laughed. In Sudan the gold has reached the vault, and nobody is laughing. The wind is carrying something else across the desert now, and it is not gold.
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā B. Travenō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
B. Traven, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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