Sunday 30 August 2015

Abd al-Khalig Mahjoub's speech in the University of Khartoum 1970

Apart from his speech to the roundtable conference on southern Sudan in 1965, this is as far as I know the only surviving recording of Abd al-Khalig Mahjoub, leader of the Communist Party of Sudan, speaking in public. He made the address to students of the University of Khartoum in 1970, at a time when the contradiction between his mass revolutionary line and the agenda of the 1969 coup was sharpening. The dispute eventually resulted in the fracture of the Communist Party with almost half of its central committee siding with Nimayri against Abd al-Khalig's policy line. Within a year or so from his speech, Abd al-Khalig's life came to an end on order of Jaafar Nimayri on the gallows of Cooper Prison in the aftermath of the 1971 Communist coup attempt.

https://soundcloud.com/cps-sudan/wiisy7qvh9xw




Sunday 16 August 2015

Sixty nine years of the Communist Party of Sudan

According to its official history, today marks the 69th anniversary of the Communist Party of Sudan. During a large chunk of its history, the party was a workshop of creative dissent, sufficiently threatening to the Sudanese establishment as to earn its wrath time and again. Today, it is a reservoir of an idiom and certain skills of underground struggle but not the vanguard it once perceived itself as. Whether the creole Marxism of the Sudanese communists and their skills are of any relevance to Sudan's struggles today is a matter of debate. I believe some are and will attempt in articles to follow to demonstrate to what use these resources of emancipation could be employed today. 
 
Creative Commons Licence
This work by Magdi El Gizouli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.