In June 1962 a hunted South African arrived in Khartoum and was given a Sudanese diplomatic passport free of charge. In this essay Nelson Mandela, Simulacrum, repays the debt with a lawyer's reading of the war that has run since April 2023. He examines the single sentence of the 2019 Constitutional Declaration that declared two armies one, recalls how South Africa merged its rival forces in 1994, and weighs the Hague conviction of Ali Kushayb against the words of the Darfuri women who waited twenty years for it. He asks why South Africa's bargain of amnesty for truth cannot simply be exported, and what the American truce proposal of September 2026 would need to contain. The essay is measured, personal and closely tied to the documentary record.
by Nelson Mandela, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
On 19 June 1962 a man travelling under the name David Motsamayi landed in Khartoum. He was an outlaw in his own country. He had left South Africa without papers to ask the free states of Africa for money, for training and for a hearing, and he was not certain of any of them. Some weeks before, on 26 May, the Sudanese embassy in Lagos had given him an entry visa. Under the reason for travel it wrote political, and under the fee it wrote gratis. In Khartoum the Sudanese gave him a diplomatic passport, and it was the first of his travel papers to carry his own name rather than the alias. He stayed about ten days. He met the foreign minister and the director of political affairs, he spent a week with young South Africans who were being trained in Sudan, and on 25 June he was received by President Ibrahim Abboud. In his notes he wrote that the president was "extremely cordial, and pledged full support to the African people in their struggle for freedom."
I was that man. I set the story down first because a debt should be stated before it is discussed, and because there is something in it that I did not understand at the time. Abboud was a general who had taken power in a coup. The passport that let me speak for the freedom of my people was signed by a government of soldiers that did not let its own people choose it. I accepted it gladly, and I would accept it again. But Sudan has been paying for that contradiction for most of the years since, and it is paying for it now with a war that has run since April 2023 and has driven more than nine million people from their homes inside the country and four and a half million across its borders.
I am asked what I think of the war. I was a lawyer before I was anything else in public life; Oliver Tambo and I kept an office in Johannesburg where people came because a law had been passed against them. So I will answer as a lawyer and as a negotiator, which is to say I will begin with the documents, then go to the people the documents failed, and only then say what I think should be done.
On 17 August 2019, four months after the fall of Omar al-Bashir, the Forces of Freedom and Change and the Transitional Military Council signed a Constitutional Declaration. There was dancing in the streets of Khartoum that night, and I would have danced too. The young people who had stood in front of the army headquarters had earned it. The document set a transition of thirty-nine months. It promised a national investigation into the killings of 3 June 2019, when the sit-in was broken up. It created a Transitional Justice Commission. It asked for peace in the war zones within the first six months.
Then there is Article 35. It reads: "The Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces are a national military institution that protects the unity and sovereignty of the nation."
Read it slowly, as a lawyer must. Two forces with two commanders, two chains of command and two treasuries are declared, by one sentence, to be one institution. The article goes on to place both under the supreme command and to leave each to be governed by its own law. That is all. There is no register of soldiers, no schedule of ranks, no date by which one command will absorb the other, no rule about who pays the men and from what. The sentence describes a hope as though it were a fact. Everything that has happened since was inside it.
I do not say this to mock the drafters. They were negotiating with men who had guns, and the men with guns did not want to be counted. We had the same difficulty. When South Africa held its first free election in April 1994 there was not one army in the country but several: the South African Defence Force; the forces of the four homelands, Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei; our own Umkhonto we Sizwe; the Pan Africanist Congress's Azanian People's Liberation Army; and the self-protection units of the Inkatha Freedom Party. Some of them had been killing one another a few months before. In September 1992 the Ciskei Defence Force fired on our marchers at Bisho and killed many of them. Less than two years later the men of that force were being enrolled in the same national army as the cadres they had shot at.
That was not done by a sentence. It was done by a register of names, by boards that assessed rank, by bridging training, by pensions for those who would leave, by quarrels in barracks and by a great deal of patience on the part of people who had every reason to be impatient. It was not considered complete until about 2004. Ten years. And one liberation army, AZANLA, refused to come in at all.
I tell this not to boast. Our integration was clumsy and many former guerrillas felt cheated by it. I tell it so that no one in Washington or Jeddah or Addis Ababa imagines that the next agreement on Sudan can settle the question of the army with a better-written Article 35. The question is not what the document says. The question is who counts the soldiers, who pays them, and who has the power to say no to a general.
In Sudan nobody had that power. On 25 October 2021 General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, with General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, called Hemedti, beside him, dissolved the civilian cabinet and detained the prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok. The thirty-nine months were not allowed to run. Eighteen months later the two generals who had made the coup together turned their guns on each other.
On 25 October 2025, four years to the day after that coup, the last soldiers of the army withdrew from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which the Rapid Support Forces had besieged for eighteen months. On the 26th the RSF entered the city.
I will not describe what followed from imagination. I was not there, and the dead deserve better than a writer's colours. I will say what the record says. In February 2026 the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, published its report on El Fasher. It found that the RSF had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the takeover, that "identity-based targeting linked to ethnicity, gender, and perceived political affiliation was a central element of the RSF operation," and, as Human Rights Watch summarised it, that the killings bore the "hallmarks of at least three underlying acts of genocide." More than a year before, on 7 January 2025, the government of the United States had already determined that the RSF and its allied militias had committed genocide, and had placed sanctions on Hemedti.
Some of my friends will say that it does not help to use the word. They will say that a negotiator must not insult the people he wishes to bring to the table. I understand the argument. I spent four years negotiating with the government that had imprisoned me for twenty-seven, and I did not open each meeting by reading out the charge sheet. But I never pretended that apartheid was something other than it was. A negotiation that begins by agreeing not to name the crime is not a negotiation; it is an arrangement among the armed for the convenience of the armed. The first stage of any reconciliation is the truth, and the truth here has been established with care by people whose work deserves to be read.
Nor is the truth one-sided, and it would be a betrayal of the dead to pretend that it is. On 7 September 2026 Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, reported that both the army and the RSF are using long-range drones against civilians in homes, schools, hospitals, markets and displacement sites, and that investigators had found reasonable grounds to believe that both had committed violations "which may amount to war crimes." He named an attack at Kalogie in South Kordofan in which 114 people were killed, sixty of them children. He named the hospitals of Khartoum. The army is not the party of the innocent because its enemy has done worse. I said in my own country that the liberation movement would be judged by the same commission as the state, and we were. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found against the ANC too, and some of my comrades were very angry with me for accepting that. They were wrong to be angry. A truth that spares your own side is propaganda.
On 6 October 2025, in The Hague, the International Criminal Court convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, known as Ali Kushayb, of twenty-seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur between August 2003 and April 2004. On 9 December it sentenced him to twenty years. It was the Court's first conviction for Darfur, twenty years after the Security Council referred the situation to it in 2005. On 8 September of this year the Court heard argument on reparations. It did not make an order; it will deliberate and decide in due course.
Radio Dabanga asked the women of Darfur what they thought. Alawiya Mukhtar of the Darfur Women's Forum said: "We regard this trial as an important step towards accountability. However, from the perspective of victims, it remains far below the magnitude of the major crimes committed." Samia Koko, a refugee in eastern Chad, said: "As a victim, I say clearly that the trial of Ali Kushayb means nothing to me. How can someone responsible for such vast criminality be sentenced to only twenty years?" Hawa Ahmed Omar Abdallah, who leads the women's committee in the Attash camp, said: "Because of the actions of Ali Kushayb and his associates, we have been displaced since 2003 until today."
Since 2003 until today. Read that sentence again, as I have. A woman who was driven from her village when Kushayb's men came has lived twenty-three years as a displaced person, and while the court in The Hague was taking his case from charge to sentence, a new war was making new displaced people around her. Her children may have grown up in that camp. Her grandchildren may have been born in it.
I do not dismiss what the Court has done. A man who thought he would never answer for what he did has answered. That matters, and it matters most to the people who were told for twenty years that it would never happen. But listen to what the women asked for. Samia Koko asked how the punishment could be so small, and that is a question about measure, about whether the world has understood what was done to her. Hawa Abdallah did not speak of the sentence at all. She spoke of the camp. What she wants acknowledged is that the harm is still going on.
That is the lesson I would draw. Justice that arrives twenty-two years late from a city on another continent is a real justice, but it cannot be the main justice. Sudan will need its own forum, close to the camps, where people can tell what happened in their own languages before their neighbours, and where those who did it must stand and hear it. It will need a reparations programme that a displaced woman can actually reach. A court can convict a commander. Only a country can give a family back its land.
People will now expect me to recommend a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sudan, and to recommend that it trade amnesty for truth, as ours did. I want to be careful here, because I know what our bargain cost and I do not wish to sell it to anyone as a medicine.
The last words of our interim Constitution of 1993, the part we called the postamble, are still the best thing in it. They said that the injustices of the past could now be addressed "on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation." And they said that amnesty "shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past."
The families of Steve Biko and of Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge went to the Constitutional Court to strike that amnesty down. They wanted the men who had killed their people tried and punished, and who could blame them? The Court upheld the amnesty in July 1996. Deputy President Mahomed explained why. Without the promise of amnesty, he wrote, "there is nothing to encourage such persons to make the disclosures and to reveal the truth which persons in the positions of the applicants so desperately desire." The amnesty was not a pardon given freely. It was a price paid for the truth, and it was paid only to those who told all of it.
It worked, imperfectly, for reasons that do not hold in Sudan today. First, the old order in South Africa was ending. The men who applied for amnesty knew that the state that had protected them was gone, and that the new state could prosecute them if they kept silent. In Sudan neither side has lost. A general who still commands an army has no reason to confess to anyone. Second, our amnesty was granted by a parliament the whole nation had elected, under a constitution the whole nation would live under. Sudan has no such body, and the generals who would benefit from an amnesty should not be the ones to grant it to themselves. Third, the world has changed its law since 1993, and Darfur is under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by order of the Security Council. Nobody in Khartoum or Nyala can promise a commander that The Hague will forget him.
And there is a fourth reason, which is not legal. Hawa Abdallah has been waiting since 2003. She was promised accountability once, for Darfur, and it took twenty-two years to reach one man. If she is now told that the men who took El Fasher may buy their freedom with a confession, she will hear only that the same thing is being done to her a second time. Reconciliation that the victim experiences as a second injury is not reconciliation. I would therefore keep the principle of our postamble, understanding and not vengeance, reparation and not retaliation, but I would not keep the instrument. For the crimes the Fact-Finding Mission has described at El Fasher I would offer no amnesty. For the many lesser crimes of a long war, committed by young men on both sides who were conscripted, hungry or afraid, I would build a process in which truth told in full earns a lighter answer, and in which the victims are present when it is told.
Now I come to the diplomacy of this month, and I find myself in an unfamiliar position: I agree with both sides that the other is wrong.
The American envoy, Massad Boulos, has for months been proposing a humanitarian truce of ninety days, to be followed by negotiations to end the war and to resume the transition to civilian rule. The government in Khartoum asked for changes, chiefly an internationally monitored withdrawal of the RSF from the towns, and says that it was ignored. In September the United States withheld General Burhan's visa to attend the General Assembly in New York; Reuters reported that it was tied to his signing the truce. On 26 September, in a crowded stadium in Khartoum, General Burhan replied: "we do not want a visa to any country... we will stay here with you until we die here in this country." On 30 September his adviser Amjad Farid told Reuters: "Mr Boulos seems to be putting pressure on us to accept a de facto partitioning of the country similar to Libyan model."
Let me take the visa first, since I know something about being kept out of rooms. For many years I could not travel without being arrested, and the government that held me thought that by keeping me away from the world it could keep the world from hearing my case. It was wrong. Denying a man a visa does not weaken his case; it gives him a stadium to stand in. I understand the American purpose: they wish to show that a general who will not sign a truce cannot expect the honours of a head of state. But a negotiator must never confuse punishment with persuasion. If you want a man to sign, you bring him into the room, you sit him down with the people he least wants to see, and you keep him there until he has heard them. Keeping him at home only lets him tell his supporters that the foreigners are against them, and he has done exactly that.
Now the general. I have seen the stadium speech before; I have heard it made by men on our own side, in 1992, when the killings at Boipatong made many of us want to walk away from the table for good. We did walk away from the formal talks that June. Then in September came Bisho. And on 26 September 1992, thirty-four years to the day before General Burhan's speech, I signed a Record of Understanding with F. W. de Klerk, a man whose security forces I believed were complicit in the violence against our people. I signed it because the alternative was a war that would have destroyed what we were trying to inherit. To stay and die in the country is a fine thing to say in a stadium. The people of El Obeid and Kalogie are already dying in the country, and they were not asked whether they wanted to.
But Mr Farid's fear deserves to be answered rather than dismissed, because it is the right fear. A truce that freezes the armies where they stand, in a country already divided between two governments, can become a border. In February 2025 the RSF and its allies signed a founding charter in Nairobi. In March they adopted a transitional constitution of their own. In July they named a presidential council at Nyala, led by Hemedti with Abdel Aziz al-Hilu as his deputy, and a prime minister, Mohammed Hassan al-Ta'ishi. According to Reuters, that administration has appointed ministers and some police in Nyala but has not established schools, hospitals or courts. It has a cabinet. It does not yet have a state. A ninety-day truce that leaves it ninety days to build one, while nothing is required of it in return, would be the partition Mr Farid fears.
So my answer to both sides is the same. A truce is a room with a door. What matters is what is decided inside it. I would ask that a truce be signed only together with three things, each written into it in terms that can be checked. First, the protection of civilians in the towns, verified by monitors who report publicly, as the government asks. Second, unhindered passage for food and medicine to every area, on both sides of the line, as the RSF should be made to accept and the army too. The United Nations reported in August that more than thirty million people need assistance and that the appeal for this year was just over forty per cent funded; there is no hunger on one side of the line only. Third, and this is the thing everyone forgets, a seat at the table for the people who made the revolution of 2019. The commissioner asked for "a return to inclusive civilian rule." The two generals cannot negotiate that between themselves; they are the two parties who abolished it.
I was released in 1990 into a negotiation that was supposed to be between two parties, the government and the ANC. It became a negotiation among many: the homeland governments, the Inkatha Freedom Party, the white right, the PAC, the trade unions, the churches, people I did not want at the table and people who did not want me. It was slow, and it was bad-tempered, and it was the only reason the result held. When I hear that the war in Sudan will be ended by an agreement between General Burhan and General Dagalo, brokered and watched by foreign capitals, I think: that is the same arrangement that produced the coup of 2021 and the war of 2023. Two men with guns agreed then, too.
The young people who organised the sit-in in 2019 are still there, in the neighbourhoods. The women of the Darfur camps are still there. Abdalla Hamdok has formed a new grouping that refuses to choose either army. I do not say these people are always wise. I say that a peace from which they are absent will be a truce between two armies that have not decided to stop being armies, and the next Article 35 will be written by the same men as the last.
I said at the beginning that I would answer as a lawyer, and a lawyer must say what the client should do on Monday. Here it is. Bring both generals into the same room, and do not let either of them leave because of a visa. Write the protection of civilians and the passage of aid into the first page of any truce, in terms that can be monitored. Begin the count of soldiers now, name by name, in both forces, so that when the time comes to build one army there is something to build it from. Name the crimes of El Fasher and offer no bargain for them. Build a forum in Sudan, near the camps, for the truth of all the other crimes. And put the civilians at the table, though both generals object, because they will.
In 1962 the Sudanese government did not know whether I would amount to anything. It gave me the paper anyway, and it asked nothing for it. I have been thinking about that word gratis. It means given freely, out of grace and not for payment. Our reconciliation in South Africa was sometimes described that way, as though we had forgiven for nothing, and that was never true; it was paid for by the people who came to the hearings and told what had been done to them, in front of the men who had done it. Grace that costs the victim everything and the perpetrator nothing is not grace.
What Sudan is owed by the rest of Africa, and by me, is attention of the kind that does not tire. Hawa Ahmed Omar Abdallah has been displaced since 2003. If there is a radio in the Attash camp this evening, it may be reporting that a general in Khartoum does not want a visa. She has been waiting twenty-three years for papers of another kind: the ones that would let her go home.
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Nelsōne Mandēlā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Nelson Mandela, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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