RSF Militia Is Erasing Sudan's Culture, Artists Are Paying the Price

Awad Haroun left Khartoum North with two shirts, two pairs of trousers, two books and a handful of torn drawing papers. He expected to be home within weeks. He is 45 years old, a visual artist and theatre director, and he has not been able to go back to the life he built. The war took his house, his workspace and every tool he needed to make a living. Ask yourself what a man carries when he has to decide, in one morning, what his entire life is worth enough to keep.

This is the reality behind the statistics coming out of Sudan. Since fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces on April 15, 2023, the country has become a place where paintings are ash, where theatres are rubble, and where the people who make culture are scattered across the map. We are told the war is about generals and power. We should ask who pays for it. The answer is the nurse, the musician, the schoolteacher and the child who never gets to finish a drawing.

Consider what UNESCO has documented. In June 2026, the agency estimated that Sudan's cultural sector faces a funding gap of $30 million. That figure is cold. Behind it are artists killed in the fighting, galleries reduced to shells, archives and artworks lost forever, and entire communities losing the places where they gathered, mourned and celebrated. Heritage sites have been damaged across the country. Once a sculpture is broken or a manuscript is burned, no donor conference can bring it back.

The numbers of displaced cultural workers tell the same story from another angle. In April 2024, UNESCO reported that the Artists and Writers Union in Port Sudan had sheltered more than 112 displaced artists and cultural professionals. By April 2026, UNESCO said its programmes in Port Sudan had reached more than 350 artists, women, girls and internally displaced cultural workers. Those are not abstract beneficiaries. They are people who lost their homes, their income and their place in the world, and who are now trying to rebuild from a school classroom.

Asim Abdelaziz is 31, a musician and filmmaker from El Obeid in North Kordofan. He left his city as fighting intensified and drones began striking the streets. He reached Port Sudan in November 2023, separated from family members now scattered between Omdurman and El Obeid. He lives in a shelter for displaced artists, making music about unity while his own family is divided by the war. He has spoken about how hate speech spreads through his communities, poisoning neighbours against neighbours. Asim is not only documenting Sudan's music. He is fighting the lie that Sudanese people are enemies of one another. That lie was not born in the villages. It is manufactured, amplified and weaponised by the men who profit from division.

We must say clearly who is responsible for the scale of this destruction. The RSF, under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has been documented by UN investigators and human rights organisations in mass killings, sexual violence and systematic looting, including the horrific violence in El Geneina and across Darfur. Investigators have also documented RSF involvement in the seizure of homes, hospitals and public institutions. The SAF has also been accused of indiscriminate strikes that have killed civilians, and every such abuse demands accountability. But let us be honest about the pattern. Two generals who seized power together in 2021, who crushed a civilian uprising that had brought down Omar al-Bashir, have turned the country into a battlefield.

The most troubling question is who keeps the war fed. UN Panel of Experts reports have raised concerns about weapons, funding and logistical support flowing to the RSF through foreign channels, including the United Arab Emirates, which has denied the allegations. Independent investigations have also linked Russia's Wagner network to gold extraction in Sudan, the proceeds of which help finance the fighting. Reports have described Sudan's gold as a currency for war. Think about that. Sudanese earth is being dug up to pay for the weapons that are destroying Sudanese lives, while foreign powers that preach democracy and human rights sign contracts with those who hold the guns.

This is the new scramble for Africa. The actors have changed. The Gulf states, Russia, China, Turkey and Western powers all compete for influence, minerals, ports and political loyalty. The method has not changed: extraction first, governance second, and the people last. Those who lecture us about civilian protection in Geneva must be asked why the same capitals keep doing business with militias whose record is written in mass graves. Democracy cannot be a slogan we apply to African countries only when it suits foreign interests. It is either the standard for everyone, or it is hypocrisy.

What should happen next is not complicated, though it demands courage. The African Union must maintain and enforce its suspension of Sudan's participation and must convene a serious, funded initiative to protect cultural workers and documented heritage, not just issue statements. The UN Security Council must enforce the existing arms embargo on Darfur and expand scrutiny to every supply chain financing the RSF, including gold, fuel and foreign-sourced weapons. Accountability must go to the International Criminal Court and to domestic courts. Impunity is the oxygen of this war.

African success stories show us that a better path exists. Botswana built its prosperity on diamonds, but it did so through transparent institutions, sustained democratic practice and an independent judiciary that held its own leaders accountable. Mauritius has shown that rule of law, open markets and multi-party competition can turn a small island into a respected economy. Senegal has demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power are possible when citizens and institutions insist on them. Sudan's civilian movement once showed the same courage in the streets of Khartoum. It deserves a state that protects property rights, pays its civil servants, opens its courts and lets artists work without fear.

So here is our demand. Sudan's artists must be funded through transparent, accountable channels that reach them directly, not through intermediaries that disappear into corruption. Sudanese civil society, including the unions, cultural groups and independent media, must be protected and given a seat at any peace negotiation. Private donors and diaspora investors should back restoration of studios, theatres and archives with clear public reporting. And ordinary Africans, from Nairobi to Lagos to Johannesburg, should refuse to let this war fade into the background noise of our news feeds.

Awad Haroun still says it plainly: losing his tools does not mean losing his skill. We must make sure the militias, their sponsors and the generals who enabled them learn the same lesson. Sudan's culture has survived colonial occupation, dictatorship and war. It will survive this too, if we refuse to look away. The question is whether we will stand with the artists who keep making something out of ashes, or whether we will let the guns have the last word.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA