Shahenda Suliman

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‘Sudan Prison Exhibition: Memories of Kober and Beyond’ was a one-day exhibition held in London in September 2022, focusing on prisons and prisoners in Sudanese history. Showcasing work harking back to the late 19th century and Anglo-Egyptian occupation, the exhibition aimed to highlight the role of prisons in colonial and post-colonial Sudanese political history, and how prisoners have historically sought to re-imagine these spaces. It focused predominantly on Sudan’s infamous Kober (Cooper) prison, built in 1902-1903 by the British and was funded by the Joint BME small grants scheme administered by the Social History Society.

The idea of the exhibition came from two different strands: an ongoing project and broader interest in exploring memories of incarceration in 20th century Sudan, and a dissatisfaction with the way Sudan – particularly its anti-colonial revolts – were sometimes invoked in recent discussions on decolonisation in Britain. In the case of the latter, discussions tended to focus on the brutality of Kitchener and Churchill, with Sudanese relegated as bodies – objects of history. Some of the images I came across (but did not display) reproduced this lens, for example harrowing photographs of massacred prisoners during the Battle of Omdurman.

Whilst I drew on photographs in colonial archives and museums to illustrate the relationship between prisons and colonialism in Sudan, I was keen to balance this by displaying works produced by prisoners, in order to highlight their cultural and intellectual productions. The exhibition was organised in chronological order. It began with 19th century photographs showing the forced labour of imprisoned anti-colonial fighters, before moving on to photographs illustrating how the colonial government deployed prisoners as a source of unpaid labour in areas such as construction and domestic work. As a trade unionist by trade, I was instinctively drawn to those which provided a visual snapshot of the interplay between colonialism, race, prisons, and labour discipline.

The section on the 1960s and 1970s in particular focused on the works of prisoners – selections of poems and songs smuggled out of prisons, leaflets, booklets, artworks, memoirs – as well as solidarity posters and internationalism. Here, communist archives – both personal and party archives – were an invaluable source of oral and visual history. Communist cadres had spent long spells in prison under both colonial and post-colonial governments, and their intellectual productions were heavily shaped by these experiences. This section also aimed to highlight how many of the revolutionary songs and poems that featured in Sudan’s 2018-19 uprising were formulated behind bars, and encourage us to look at hidden spaces not only as sites of subaltern history and imaginaries, but also spaces that tell us much about colonialism and its afterlives.

Although there were logistical setbacks – for example some of the prints ordered pertaining to nationalist prisoners in the early 20th century failed to arrive in time – I was extremely grateful for the way so many people offered their time and expertise. Former prisoners who heard about the event kindly reached out to loan their own personal materials for the exhibition, whilst others such as Tricontinental and Ibrahim El-Salahi’s studio generously gave permission for use of their artworks. Research for the exhibition also informed a talk I gave the week before as part of a panel at SOAS titled ‘Prisons as colonial relics across Africa’.

A panel discussion and poetry readings (Arabic and English) were also organised as part of the event. The panel featured formerly incarcerated Sudanese speaking about their prison experiences and was extremely positively received, particularly by attendees unaware of these oral histories. It also led to extensive (and at times heated) discussion surrounding prisons under different historical periods and the continuities and ruptures between them. On a personal level, I had long struggled with how to capture the type of discussions I had grown up around – discussions that were explicitly about experiences of incarceration, but implicitly about social relations, solidarity, and attempts to theorise alternative worlds from the margins of society. To find myself in such a space in a community centre in East London with countless strangers sharing deeply personal stories was welcome and unexpected in equal measure.

One illuminating moment involved an attendee calling for greater scholarship on prisons during the Mahdist period. When I relayed my experiences with official archives, another attendee in his late sixties urged me to speak to his generation, emphasising that “all of us have stories our grandmothers told us about the Mahdiyya and its prisons.” Despite much of my research focusing on oral histories, I had so far focused on the direct carceral experiences and recollections of those I spoke to. I hadn’t even fathomed that many older Sudanese would have heard stories about Ottoman and Mahdist rule directly from their elders who lived through these periods, let alone be willing to share them. The colossal temporal distance I had imagined between 1885 and 2022 collapsed, bridged by memories shared between two generations.

Although my intention was to organise a small one-off event, I was blown away by the interest in the theme and requests for similar events. I am currently working (slowly) to digitise some of the materials donated and secured for the exhibition, and hope to set up an educational website on political mobilisation and intellectual productions across Sudanese prisons. I’m grateful for the joint BME grants scheme for funding this exhibition, and for giving me the intellectual and creative freedom to explore these histories.

About the author: Shahenda Suliman works as a senior policy advisor for a trade union and has a background in organised labour in Sudan and the UK. She is currently researching memories of incarceration amongst Sudanese Marxists and trade unionists between the 1960s-1980s with a focus on social relations and intellectual productions across prisons.