Who ruled Khartoum?

Khartoum stands where the White Nile, flowing slowly from the lakes of East Africa, meets the Blue Nile, which rushes down from the Ethiopian highlands. The name is usually explained as "elephant's trunk", after the narrow spit of land between the two rivers. Together with Omdurman across the White Nile and Khartoum North (Bahri) across the Blue, it forms the largest urban area in Sudan. Unlike many African capitals it is young: it was founded in the 1820s as a military camp of Egypt's conquering army, and its story is one of conquest, siege, imperial rebuilding and, most recently, war.

People were living at the confluence long before any town. Archaeologists use the name "Khartoum Mesolithic" for a culture of fishers and hunters who made some of the earliest pottery in Africa there more than 8,000 years ago. Later the area lay on the southern fringe of the Kingdom of Kush, whose capital at Meroë stood some 200 kilometres downstream. From about the 6th century CE the Christian Nubian kingdom of Alodia had its capital at Soba, on the Blue Nile just upstream of modern Khartoum. Alodia collapsed around 1500, and the region came under the Funj Sultanate of Sennar, a Muslim state that ruled much of central Sudan for three centuries.

In 1820 and 1821 Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, sent armies south to seize Sudan's gold and recruits for his army. A camp was set up at the confluence in 1821, and around 1823 Khartoum became the seat of the Egyptian administration. It grew into a trading town of mud-brick houses and the base for expeditions up the White Nile in search of ivory and enslaved people. The public slave market was closed under European pressure in 1854, but the trade carried on for decades.

In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad, a religious leader who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, rose against Egyptian rule and won control of most of Sudan. Charles Gordon, a British general in Egyptian service, was sent to Khartoum to evacuate it but stayed to defend the city. The Mahdist siege began in March 1884, and on 26 January 1885 Mahdist forces broke in and killed Gordon and most of the garrison. A British relief force arrived two days too late. The Mahdi made Omdurman his capital, and Khartoum was largely abandoned.

An Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener defeated the Mahdist state at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898. Khartoum was rebuilt as the capital of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, a joint arrangement in which Britain held real power within the British Empire. The new city was laid out with broad avenues, a governor's palace on the Blue Nile and Gordon Memorial College, founded in 1902, which became the University of Khartoum. Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956 with Khartoum as its capital.

Independent Sudan alternated between short civilian governments and military rule. The capital swelled with migrants and with people fleeing wars in the south, Darfur and neighbouring countries. Mass protests in Khartoum helped bring down governments in 1964, 1985 and 2019, when Omar al-Bashir was removed after three decades in power. A military coup followed in October 2021. On 15 April 2023 fighting broke out in the city between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Much of the centre was destroyed and millions of residents fled before the army retook the capital in March 2025.

Before the war the three cities had an estimated six to seven million people. Khartoum remains Sudan's official capital, though recovery from the war is only beginning.