Armed with October:
Thawra and Poetry, from Khartoum to Toronto
By Khaldah Salih and Fathima Cader
In November 2024, the Sudan Solidarity Collective partnered with LINE/BREAK, a political poetry group, to host a small event about Sudan’s resistance committees. The discussion was centered around the beloved poem-turned-anthem “October Al Akhdar,” written by Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim in 1964 Sudan.
That is, we (Khaldah Salih, Seema Shafei, and Fathima Cader) had thought the event would be small. Instead, nearly three hundred people registered, a testament to how powerful Green October’s call for collective liberation remains—from Khartoum to Toronto—sixty years later.
Like that event, this essay offers a collective reading of October Al Akhdar. Below, we interweave our translation of the poem with our reflections on the lessons that historic and ongoing struggle in Sudan provide for liberation struggles everywhere.
OCTOBER AL AKHDAR
GREEN OCTOBER
Excerpt from the original Arabic by Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim (Khartoum, 1964)
Translated by Fathima Cader with others** (LINE/BREAK, Toronto, 2024)
But, as Nisrin Elamin points out, “the British basically handed us an economy dependent on the extraction of cash crops like cotton and a political system which was reconfigured to serve the interests of a Nubian- and Arab-identified elite in Sudan’s north and center.”
She continues that “both of these systems developed at the expense of the masses in the south and other marginalized regions, but also of a rural farming population at the center who helped sustain this extractive export-oriented economy.”
The tactic of using race/ethnicity to cover for class is deathly familiar outside Sudan. The rise of the comprador bourgeoisie throughout the global south is partly a result, as Muzan Alneel explains, of how newly-independent states often “prioritised abstract concepts like national pride and state sovereignty over people-centred goals such as self-governance and equitable resource distribution. These concepts were often used to mask the failure of post-colonial governments to improve the lives of the majority.”
In Sudan, independence was quickly followed by military dictatorship, which inevitably provoked resistance: El-Mekki wrote October Al Akhdar about the thawra—uprising—that broke out against the regime in October 1964. Mohamad Wardi—outspoken communist and superstar musician—turned those stanzas into song. Soon, the poem’s heartbeat lived off the page: amid the general strike, the call for a Green October echoed through the streets as protest anthem.
Eventually, that thawra forced the regime to step down. Here was the triumph Green October had promised, blossoming from poetry into reality. Here was faith rewarded and good tidings made manifest through collective struggle.
Coup after coup followed, as did waves of resistance. During this period, the Sudanese state began arresting and executing communists, including Khaldah’s maternal grandfather, El Tigani El Tayyib Babikir, who was arrested in 1980 and held solitary confinement for two years without trial.
When he was brought before a military court in 1982, in lieu of a defense, he delivered a speech excoriating the regime. “I realize myself,” he declared, “only through identification with the values and aspirations of my people’s struggle. I identify myself with the heroic history of our people, and I am a product of that history. That is why this trial is not intended for me alone. It is a desperate attempt on the part of the regime to uproot the movement and history which I represent. This will prove an intractable mirage.”
He was sentenced to ten years of further imprisonment, but revolutionaries broke him and other prisoners out of jail three years later, during the April 1985 intifada.
From shackles to bracelets: the next year, Wardi sang at his daughter’s wedding—that is, Khaldah’s parents, Azza El Tigani and Mohamed Khaled.
“I’ve heard the first speech of every coup,” Warda said, decades later. “Imagine how many first speeches I’ve heard, each one the death of democracy.” By the time he died in 2012, the singer had spent years in prison and intermittent exile.
But that day, at that wedding, the celebration of romantic love was also a celebration of resistance. Azza and Mohamed describe their guests singing along to the anthems they had earlier roared on the streets. In their odes to Sudan’s forests and deserts, the land was part of their love. The wedding glowed with October Al Akhdar’s afterlife: collectively, their dream and their labor was a Sudan free from military rule.
Under the guise of Islamic rule, the Al-Bashir regime ushered in widespread neoliberalism, which, as farmer and union organizer Abdelraouf Omer points out, was “driven and recommended by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO.” Resistance committee member Ra-ad Sahaba describes how drinking water, health care, and education became inaccessible to regular people. Razaz H. Basheir and Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman show how inequitable electricity access has been driven by the fact that “energy was one of the most important central services provided by the state, and was thus inherently political: it served to perpetuate the power of the country’s military rulers.”
Thus, to the extent that resistance has continued to flourish, it has had to do so under cover of darkness (as of 2022, sixty percent of people in Sudan have been living without consistent access to electricity), as with the concealed hands evoked by the poem.
Against this backdrop of mounting inequality, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) set up the Janjaweed militia. Like other militias, the Janjaweed’s members largely came from pastoralist groups, since, as Alneel explains, “Sudanese governments have repeatedly enflamed existing conflicts over resources between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralist groups. [….] pastoralist groups are more susceptible to forming militias because their livelihood and economic activities are restricted and endangered by the system of the modern state far more than those of farmers.”
Relatedly, Hassan ET argues that the Janjaweed’s growth benefited from the fact that “pastoralists had already been at odds with the landed communities of Darfur over the use of land and resources, with the former hoping that an alliance with the state would serve as a shortcut to political domination in the region. The result was catastrophic.”
Indeed, Rabab Elnaiem, Elamin, and Sara Abbas describe how this period “saw an intensification of state violence against non-Arab communities in South Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile region, and, starting in 2003, Darfur […] With quelling the rebellion as a rationale, the regime unleashed the Janjaweed militias from pastoralist Arab groups in the region in a genocidal campaign against non-Arab communities.”
This is a reminder that, though genocides are often framed in purely identitarian terms, their root causes actually are typically material—such as land theft, water restrictions, manufactured famine, and education barriers. These add fuel to the fire of racial and ethnic divides.
Thus, Green October’s call to unite the peoples of the forest and the desert is a lesson that resounds across the global south. Our history is pitted with the remains of liberation struggles that failed to fight ethnic majoritarianism and class exploitation together. They are mutually constitutive. A focus on one vector to the exclusion of the other has doomed our movements to failure, time and again.
The genocide in Darfur is one example. Western media covered it extensively for years, but described it only in terms of race hatred. Omer observes that this selective coverage hypocritically concealed the fact that the genocide was propelled by international mining: “The state displaced millions of non-Arab Darfurian farmers in order to exploit the region’s gold and uranium. The international community intervened primarily to provide shelter and aid to displaced Darfurians, which ultimately cost less than the mineral wealth extracted by companies working with regime leaders.” Mining remains a key vector of mass death in Sudan.
Eventually, the Al-Bashir regime shifted Sudan’s economy from cash crops to crude oil. Then, after South Sudan (where most of the oil was produced) achieved independence in 2011 (following resistance and a civil war over how it had been subsumed as a “quasi internal colony” of Sudan), Sudan lost its oil revenues.
So Sudan turned to gold. It is now one of Africa’s biggest exporters of gold, about 90% which is smuggled out of the country.
But the land’s real treasure is its green: the gold rush benefited only the elite. Elsewhere, hunger worsened.
Resistance resurged. As part of the broader Arab Spring revolution that erupted in 2011, protests broke out in Sudan in 2012. Through that June and July, people would emerge from the mosques after Friday prayers, chanting slogans against the regime. Each Friday protest was given a name and a theme.
The demonstration of Friday, June 13, 2012 was named “Kandake Friday,” which means “queen” in the Cushitic language. Ironically, as they were leaving the Kandake protest, Khaldah, Azza, and several other women comrades were arrested. State forces singled out Azza and the older women, due to their decades of feminist activism against the state. All of them were held that day in the National Intelligence Security Service’s station, threatened with beatings and forced to watch as young men who had also been arrested were tortured.
In 2013, millions took to the street, organizing themselves into sit-ins, barricades, strikes, and boycotts. These tactics, Omer reminds us, were an “accelerati[on] of a movement that had begun in rural areas and spread to Sudan’s cities.”
In response, the SAF formalized the Janjaweed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and brought them to the urban core, where the RSF killed protesters en masse in Khartoum in September 2013. Reem Abbas notes that “it was high school students that sparked the protest movement, and this is why they are over-represented in the over 200 deaths of protestors that were recorded over just four days of protests.”
Shortly thereafter, the Al-Bashir regime appointed the RSF as Sudan’s primary border control force. Sudan is a key transit hub for people travelling across Africa to Europe.
The Sudanese regime then played a key role in coordinating the infamous “Khartoum Process,” an agreement through which the European Union has paid African states 4.5 billion euro to block African immigration to Europe. This arrangement offloads the policing of Europe’s borders onto African forces. Despite more recent attempts by the EU to publicly distance itself from the RSF, the RSF continues to congratulate itself on its “advanced role […] in protecting the European Union by preventing the flow of illegal migrants.”
Amid this repression, resistance committees rose to prominence in 2013, because they were central in helping organize sit-ins throughout Sudan. Sahaba defines resistance committees as having a “a horizontally structured body with a fraternal and revolutionary nature, characterized by democracy and grassroots revolutionary discourse. It is distinguished by the spirit of collective work, with collective leadership.” Abdulrahman Ali, a mechanic and resistance committee member, describes how the committees drew strength from blue-collar workers’ organizing.
In the years since, the resistance committees have stayed the course of glory. In 2018, people again organized against the military, in an intifada popularly known as the Glorious December Revolution. The call for حرية سلام وعدالة—freedom, peace, and justice—reverberated through the streets.
Poetry remained inextricably intertwined with resistance. Our title for this essay comes from those demonstrations. One especially viral clip shows a young women leading crowds through a call-and-response chant, each line interwoven with the crowd’s demand for uprising:
Our land protects us—thawra!
And if a martyr falls—thawra!
Our youth will build anew—thawra!
And if we only have one hand left—thawra!
We will continue the struggle—thawra!
Faith is with us—thawra!
ثورة. Bashir was ousted the next year.
The path forward was rocky. There were labor strikes by the public and massacres by state forces.
Briefly, the country was ruled by the Transitional Military Council, which was established by the SAF and included the RSF. The military council was supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and other foreign powers.
But on the streets, the resistance committees popularized the “Three Nos” slogan against the military council: no negotiations, no partnership, no legitimization.
Eventually, the military council came to a power-sharing agreement with some civilian elite.
But in 2021, the SAF and RSF reneged on that agreement and coordinated a joint coup. However, for over a year, they struggled to form government, constrained by mass opposition by the resistance committees.
In February 2023, eight thousand resistance committees across Sudan issued a Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Powers. It declared that “the totalitarian state model has proven time and time again that it has no alternatives for the rural communities other than famines, violence, and slow death.” It continues: “With resources and power having been concentrated, since independence, in the hands of very few elite groups, achieving social justice will necessitate dismantling the model of the modern national state, which has been built on monopolizing resources and revenues.”
The land must sing. As Omer observes, “land is at the center of this struggle. By land I mean soil but also water, livestock, forests, minerals, oil, and other resources that local, regional, and international elites have sought to control and exploit since ancient times. […] We cannot afford to hand it over to the capitalists who are waging and profiting from this war.” For example, Saudi and Emirati investors now own more land in Sudan than all of Sudan’s largest domestic investors combined.
In April 2023, the SAF and RSF turned on each other. Alneel remarks that this rift was “reasonable and predictable,” given the massacres they had earlier coordinated together. That turf war is ongoing.
Reports indicate that the SAF, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is supported financially, militarily, and otherwise by Egypt, Ukraine, Iran, and others.
Meanwhile, the RSF, led by Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo aka Hemedti, is supported by the UAE, which has been providing it with weapons, including French arms.
Now entering its third year, the war has been devastating. Estimates place the death toll as high as 150,000, though this may be an undercount, given the targeted destruction of hospitals and morgues. With over 14 million people displaced, this is the world’s largest displacement crisis today. Once renowned as the breadbasket of the Middle East, people are suffering the worst famine Sudan has seen in 40 years. Outbreaks of preventable and treatable illnesses like dengue, malaria, and cholera worsen the staggering death toll. Tahani Ajak describes how, on top of everything else, the violence of life in the refugee camps runs the gamut of arrest, torture, forced deportations, and fatal attempts at getting smuggled out.
Yet in 2024, amid this ruination, Sudan announced record levels of gold production. The vast majority of Sudan’s gold flows into the UAE, which then sells it on the international market. This is why this war has been so protracted: it is lucrative.
As Omer puts it, this war is a “counterrevolutionary political and class struggle for authority and resources driven by the interests of global capital. These forces don’t mind replacing a totalitarian system, already rejected by the people, with a fake civil and democratic government adopting a neoliberal system controlled by elites, who will continue to rob and exploit Sudan’s human and natural resources.”
The people of Sudan have had to remain armed with October: in the face of domestic and international abandonment and complicity, the resistance committees have set up emergency response rooms. These rooms provide direct aid war-relief efforts across Sudan, including distributing food and medicine, coordinating burials, assisting evacuations, and more. Yusra Khogali, a Sudan Solidarity Collective member, explains that the emergency rooms are powerful and effective because they are “filling the void of an absent international aid community and a civilian state. They’re organizing with deep and nuanced knowledge of the local geographic, political, and social landscape of Sudan, and have extensive social networks.”
In response, the Sudanese regime banned resistance committees and other grassroots efforts. The SAF and RSF have also killed members of resistance committees and emergency rooms while they were providing vital services, like running community kitchens. These are our shuhada—martyrs—and we heed Green October’s command that we preserve their names and their memory.
So it is misleading, as Sarah Abbas and many others have pointed out, to describe this as a war between the SAF and the RSF, when it is in fact a war “between the militarized state in all its forms and the revolution.”
The Sudan Solidarity Collective provides financial and other support to emergency response rooms across Sudan. We urge you to donate to this life-saving work. So far, the SSC has raised over $600,000 for the rooms. Much of this money has come from small monthly donations from working class people—once again a reminder that transformative change does not come from the elite, but from the care and courage of people who are themselves struggling.
Revolutionaries in Sudan have a clarity of analysis and force of action that should be transformative for us all. They are effectively running the country amid the SAF’s and RSF’s death drives. Crucially, despite the dangers they face, they have refused cooptation by international powers. Part of this defiance is because international bodies have repeatedly shown themselves to be complicit in the ravages of war.
For example, some international human rights organizations continue to argue that post-war Sudan “would almost surely need to encompass both belligerents and non-belligerents.” In contrast, the resistance committees have long decried partnerships with the junta as “undoubtedly a mere ‘zero-sum game’ as it only took us back to square one by imposing a de facto military coup against which we protested in the first place.”
As another example, Alneel recounts how, in 2021, the UN mission in Sudan tried to persuade the resistance committees to join negotiations with the military council and civilian elite, because of their popular appeal.
At first, the committees refused. Finally, they agreed, but on one condition: the meeting had to be live-streamed to the public. The UN rejected the proposal and cancelled the meeting altogether. Alneel notes that the committees’ “success in exposing the nature of the UN mission and the process it promoted was the result of a principled commitment to the rights of people to information and political participation, being based on an understanding of the impact of public participation in the balance of power against the elite.”
The steadfastness and the successes of resistance committees remind us that elite bodies like the state, the military, and international organizations are incapable of creating real change—and are in fact aligned against it. True power is instead manifested through organized mass movements of regular people.
For those of us in the global north—including here in Toronto—our responsibilities and complicities are not abstract, they are material. For example, in 2019, on the heels of massacres by the SAF and RSF, an infamous Canadian public relations firm, Dickens & Madsen Inc, signed a $6 million USD deal to clean up the military council’s image and to secure US investment in oil projects in Sudan. The firm is headed by a former Israeli intelligence operative.
In March 2025, hundreds of protestors gathered in Toronto’s bitter cold outside the annual convention for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC). This is the largest mining convention in the world, and it attracted protestors from Treaty 6, the DRC Congo, Chile, and more.
At that protest, Elamin told the crowd about how, after the SAF and RSF staged their joint coup in 2021, the Canadian mining company Orca Gold signed a multi-million dollar deal with the Sudanese regime to construct a large gold mine in northern Sudan. “It is therefore our duty,” she reminded us, “as people living in proximity to the headquarters where this consortium of corporate murderers sit, comfortably plotting how to up their profits through war, to disrupt their business as usual.”
Another example of business as usual—namely, racism—is the fact that Canada is accepting only 4,000 people from Sudan as government-assisted refugees, in contrast to the approximately 300,000 Ukrainians Canada has accepted. Quebec, meanwhile, has banned its residents from applying to resettle relatives from Sudan, unless those relatives go to a different province.
In late March 2025, the SAF resumed control of Khartoum, taking it back from the RSF. While a turning point in the war, it remains to be seen what this means for true peace and justice in Sudan, especially as, in the meantime, the RSF has escalated attacks in Darfur.
In September 2024, El Mekki died, just two months before we gathered to read his poem, exactly sixty years after he wrote it. Trans-nationalism was matter-of-course for Third World revolutionaries in the 1960s, so we think that perhaps El-Mekki would have not been surprised that his call for a Green October reverberated from Khartoum to Toronto. We imagine that his ghost, still new to the afterlife, would have been charmed to hear comrades from across the world translate his Arabic into Kutchi, Tamil, and Urdu.
We read October Al Akhdar together as a reverberation through time and place, through the interconnections of our oppressions and our resistances. We brought this poem to Toronto as a reminder of the responsibility of the artist in an era of transnational revolution. From Tkaronto to Gaza, from Khartoum to the Dahieh, from the belly of the beast here on these borderlands to every colonial outpost the world over, Green October reminds us that it is the duty of the artist to join the ranks of struggle.
Moreover, Green October insists on victory. Fa satallahna bi oktober—the word is small, but the poem is clear: we are armed with October. The struggle is itself our weapon.
From the individual reading it alone to the collective voice roaring it at protest, these stanzas are a reminder and a demand from our revolutionary forebears—the prisons must be crushed, and from shackles we will carve love. In your green name, ya oktober, the people will be victorious.
** Every translation is an act of migration—this one especially so. Rather than a literal translation of El-Mekki’s work, this is LINE/BREAK’s composite of and variation on pre-existing translations by Taghreed Elsanhouri, Adil Babikir, and Oswa Shafei. To all these writers, as to all this poem’s countless readers and singers, and to everyone who has recited it in crowds in the streets and everyone who has enacted it in ways both preserved and forgotten by time, we are indebted.
Khaldah Salih is a Sudanese-Canadian organizer based in Toronto and a member of the Sudan Solidarity Collective.
Fathima Cader is a writer and educator based in Toronto and a member of LINE/BREAK.
The Sudan Solidarity Collective is a volunteer collective that was formed in response to the outbreak of war in Sudan in April 2023. Since then, the Collective has been supporting civilian-led groups and grassroots relief efforts in the country’s hardest-hit regions, where people are facing militarized violence, catastrophic famine, and the most extreme displacement crisis in the world: https://www.sudansolidarity.com
LINE/BREAK is a political art project that showcases grassroots organizing in Toronto: https://www.instagram.com/linebreakto