Mr. President: Our war against forgetting – The face of truth – ✍️ Ibrahim Shaqlawi
In the midst of wars, a sound is not above the sound of the battle, but history is not written with the value of man, showers of ammunition and its noise. Each war, no matter how much its capacity and the greatness of its affliction will end one day, to begin the battle of confined memory, because the events are united, the stories are written and the conflict is decided of the truth. Consequently, the documentation in wartime is not considered a cognitive luxury, but rather an act of resistance and a parallel struggle against attempts to erase and counterfeit began with the accounts of war which began with a greedy coup in power and the State, some try to blur its truth, ending with those who have with the fact of preserving the country and restoring security and Sudane.
What increases the danger of lack of documentation is that Sudanese society – by its nature – has an oral tendency, tends to circulate the novel orally, and not in writing and to preserve history in the breasts, not in the lines. This cultural characteristic in time of stability was a manifestation of oral wealth and narrative transmission, but at the time of disasters and wars, it becomes a dangerous obstacle to a documented narrative building on which one can rely on the path of transitional justice and the restoration of rights. The absence of a culture of written documentation has made many fateful events in the history of Sudan told with different languages, therefore the conflict of stories, and the effect of truth in congestion is lost.
Since the outbreak of war in Sudan on April 15, 2023, the country faces an unprecedented wave of systematic destruction. The rapid support militia was not satisfied to commit atrocities in the field, but rather sought a destructive conscience to erase everything that could constitute a collective memory: educational establishments and the media were burned, the role of culture, libraries and museums was burned and the headquarters of ministries and documents was destroyed, practicing a complex crime. Indeed, what is erased from memory today, will not be restored tomorrow, and what neglects its documentation will turn into a void that is exploited by false accounts.
The documentation is not limited to the collection of images or to the narration of events, but rather goes beyond the construction of an integrated narration which expresses the essence of what happened, preserves the sense of discoloration and contributes to justice after the war. It is a moral and political commitment, in which state institutions, media and civil society, creators and living certificates of victims and survivors participate. Just as the armies advance on the field, cameras and pens should progress on their other front, awareness and documentation.
What is happening in Sudan is not an ordinary struggle for power as some claim, but rather an attempt to disturb the structure of the national state, and to destroy its pillars, the army and the institutions, and to reach memory. This is why the battle is not only on the ground, but also on paper, in the image, in the sound, in the text and the drama, in everything that immortalizes truth and saves it from annihilation. We are not only fighting for victory, but to prove that we were here where the consistency, the redemption and the protection of the State and the entity, and they were where the conspiracy, the refraction and the failure and that we resisted, with our sumptuous army, a renewed colonial project and did not stay before ruin.
In times of major affliction, new responsibilities are born. The teacher who studies in a destroyed school, a journalist who documents in danger, the writer who transforms tragedy into legal testimony, and the historian who preserves the memory of history, all are soldiers in the battle of documentation and dignity. The state must kiss these efforts later and transform it into a complete national record, restore the Sudanese their confidence in their history, preserves their right to justice and prevents the recurrence of disaster and war.
Unless we document it today, he will transform tomorrow into an adversary novel, and the world catches him as reality. Whoever does not have his memory will not have his future. Consequently, documentation is not only a reaction to pain, but rather a conscious voluntary act in which we draw the image of our injured homeland as it is, with all its cruelty and its nobility, with all that has been lost and what remains. It is not enough to win, but we should rather tell how we won, for future generations and why we endured, and which was with us and which was against us and who was gray and who wants to uproot our roots of our land.
Consequently, according to what we see in the face of truth, strategic documentation is not only a mission to record events, but rather a serious step towards the construction of a collective national memory capable of dealing with future challenges. In the Sudanese context, where dependence on oral memory is dominated, the State, civil society and the private sector must work with a concert to document the battle to recover Mawia and the management of the army and the republican palace as one of the most important chapters of the national resistance. This important documentation constitutes a bridge between the past and the present, and improves historical justice, at a time when there are many stories and contradictions. Consequently, we send a message to the authorities concerned, starting with the president of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council and the government, to the need to accelerate the “launch of a complete documentary project”, supported by the media, art, academic and research institutions, so that this decisive chapter remains part of the history of the generations of Sudan.
You are fine and well.
Monday April 7, 2025 AD (Protected by e-mail)
