In November 2024, the Sudan Solidarity Collective and LINE/BREAK hosted an event in Toronto about Sudan’s resistance committees. The centerpiece of our gathering was Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim’s 1964 poem “October Al Akhdar” (“Green October”).

Like that event, this essay—a longer version of which first appeared in ArabLit—offers a collective reading of “Green October.” Below, we interweave LINE/BREAK’s translation of the poem with lessons from liberation struggles in Sudan.

*

October Al Akhdar

Green October

By Mohamed El-Mekki Ibrahim (Khartoum, 1964)

Trans. from the Arabic by Fathima Cader (Toronto, LINE/BREAK, 2024)**

Two months before we gathered to study “October Al Akhdar,” El-Mekki died. Transnationalism was matter-of-course for 1960s revolutionaries, so perhaps he would have not been surprised that his call for a Green October had reached across six decades, from Khartoum to Toronto. Perhaps his ghost, still new to the afterlife, enjoyed hearing comrades translate his Arabic into Kutchi, Tamil, and Urdu.

We read El-Mekki’s poem together as a reverberation through time and place, across the interconnections of our oppressions and our resistances. From Tkaronto to Gaza, from Khartoum to the Dahieh, from the belly of the beast here on these borderlands to colonial outposts the world over, his verses reminded us that it is the duty of the artist to join the ranks of struggle.

“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 at home to the collective voice roaring it in protest on the street, these stanzas are firm: The prisons must be crushed, and from shackles we will carve love.

In your green name, يا أكتوبر, the people will be victorious.

Victory: In 1956, Sudan achieved independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule, but freedom remained out of reach for most people, because the British had left behind a political system that favored the Nubian and Arab elite in Sudan’s north and center. The economy was reliant on cash crops.

This tactic of using race/ethnicity to cover for class exploitation is widely familiar. Muzan Alneel explains how the postcolonial rise of the comprador bourgeoisie class throughout the Global South is partly a result of how often newly independent states “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.”

Independence in Sudan was quickly followed by recurring waves of popular resistance and military coups.  Eventually, in 1989, Omar al-Bashir commenced what would become the country’s longest dictatorship. Under the guise of Islamic rule, his regime followed instructions from the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, and liberalized the economy and privatized the public sector. Unemployment mounted. Drinking water, health care, and education became inaccessible.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) created the Janjaweed militia, recruiting especially from nomadic groups. This tactic was part of a general approach by successive Sudanese governments to inflame conflicts over resources between farmers and nomadic communities.

State violence against non-Arab communities intensified. Western media coverage of the subsequent 2003 genocide in Darfur was pronounced, but selective: It described the violence only in terms of race hatred. This approach concealed the genocide’s root causes, including the fact that international mining companies were benefitting from the genocide.

As farmer and union organizer Abdelraouf Omer observes, “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.”

This is just one example of how genocides anywhere in the world—whether in Palestine or by Canada—are often framed in purely identitarian terms, even though their causes and purposes are typically material. This includes land theft, water restrictions, and manufactured famine. Mining, as we note below, remains a key vector of mass death in Sudan.

*

Eventually, the al-Bashir regime shifted Sudan’s economy to crude oil. But Sudan lost its oil revenues when South Sudan (where most of the oil was produced) achieved independence in 2011 (following resistance and a war over its co-optation as a “quasi internal colony” of Sudan).

Sudan then turned to gold. It is now one of Africa’s biggest exporters of gold. About 90 percent of Sudanese gold is smuggled into the UAE, who sells it internationally. This gold rush benefited only the elite. For everyone else, hunger worsened. Protests erupted in 2012.

The SAF responded by formalizing the Janjaweed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The SAF brought the RSF to the urban core, where the RSF massacred protesters in Khartoum in September 2013. Most of the martyrs were high school students, who had been instrumental in starting the protests.

Soon afterwards, the al-Bashir regime appointed the RSF as Sudan’s primary border control force. The Sudanese state then played a key role in coordinating the infamous “Khartoum Process,” an agreement whereby the European Union has paid African states €4.5 billion to block African immigration to Europe. Sudan is a key transit point for people traveling across Africa to Europe. Despite 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 state violence, resistance committees rose to prominence in 2013, leading to Bashir’s ousting in 2019. However, the path forward was rocky: Labor strikes by the public were met with massacres by the state. By force, the SAF instituted a Transitional Military Council, which included the RSF. International powers, like the UN, supported the military junta, but on the streets, the “Three Nos” slogan resounded: no negotiations, no partnership, no legitimization with the military.

Eventually, the council came to a power-sharing agreement with some civilian elite. But the SAF and RSF reneged on that agreement and launched a joint coup in 2021.

Meanwhile, the resistance committees remained so popular in their opposition to the military that for over a year, the military struggled to form a government.

In February 2023, 8,000 resistance committees across Sudan issued a Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Powers. It denounced the local elite and 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.”

*

Weeks later, the SAF and RSF turned on each other, bringing about war in April 2023.

The SAF, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is reportedly supported by Egypt, Ukraine, Iran, and others. The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a.k.a. Hemedti, is supported by the UAE and its provision of French arms.

Estimates from last year placed the war’s death toll as high as 150,000. This is likely an undercount, given the targeted destruction of hospitals and morgues. Outbreaks of preventable and treatable illnesses like dengue, malaria, and cholera exacerbate this death toll. Additionally, this is the world’s largest displacement crisis today, with over 14 million people displaced. Sudan was once renowned as the breadbasket of the Middle East, but its people are now suffering the worst famine the country has seen in 40 years.

Amid this ruination, Sudan announced record levels of gold production last year. It is because the war has been so lucrative that it has remained so protracted.

*

The people of Sudan have remained armed with October: The resistance committees run emergency response rooms that 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 these rooms are “filling the void of an absent international aid community and a civilian state.” This demonstrates how elite bodies like the state, military, and international NGOs 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.

Indeed, despite the scale of their work, and the dangers they face, revolutionaries in Sudan have refused international co-optation. For example, in 2021, the UN mission in Sudan tried to persuade the resistance committees to join negotiations with the military council. Finally, the resistance committees agreed, on one condition: The meeting had to be live-streamed to the public.

The UN not only rejected this proposal, it canceled the meeting altogether. Alneel notes that the resistance committees’ “success in exposing the nature of the UN mission and the process it promoted was … based on an understanding of the impact of public participation in the balance of power against the elite.”

*

For those of us in the Global North—including here in Toronto—our responsibilities and complicities are not abstract, they are material. Canada is currently 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 altogether banned its residents from applying to resettle relatives from Sudan, unless those relatives go to a different province.

In March 2025, hundreds of protestors gathered in the bitter cold outside the annual convention for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) in Toronto. 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 multimillion-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.”

In heeding that call, we arm ourselves with October, knowing that the struggle is long, but victory is ours. لن نرجع شبرا—we shall not retreat.