When I was 21, I learned a family secret: my maternal great-grandmother was enslaved and my great-grandfather was a slave merchant. My mother revealed this in the car one afternoon, when we were parked outside my grandfather’s house in Khartoum.

My great-grandmother had been abducted in southern Sudan or its borderlands, sometime in the 1910s. Though the British had colonised Sudan over a decade earlier on the pretext of ending the slave trade, it was still a catchment zone supplying the trans-Sahara trade.

She was a child at the time. When a raiding party approached her village, her mother – my great-great-grandmother – collected the children and hid with them in a cave. The raiders fired shots, so loud my great-grandmother thought they came from inside their hiding place. She panicked and bolted out before her mother could stop her. The raiders were waiting. She was taken north to Khartoum and eventually ‘married’ to (and likely raped by) the man who owned her, my great-grandfather. She never saw her family again. We don’t know her indigenous name, only the Arabic one given to her by my great-grandfather: Karima, the Generous One.

My great-grandfather came from Upper Egypt to Khartoum at the turn of the 20th century and made a fortune. He had several wives (up to four at a time, in accordance with Islamic law), whom he regularly divorced and replaced, as well as concubines. He had a taste for enslaved women (siriyaat in Sudanese Arabic, from sir, meaning secret). My great-grandmother was one of his longer-lasting, public, ‘secrets’. He married her and they had eight children. Unusually for him, he never divorced her.

Violence of Sudan’s current war

My great-grandmother’s story has been on my mind during the current war. As of October 2024, 14 million people have been displaced, 25 million (half the population) are facing hunger, and at least 150,000 have been killed. Large swathes of the country have no (…)

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