How ‘Khartoon Magazine’ is Sustaining the Revolutionary Work of Sudanese Artists

Albaih’s cartoons were picked up by activists and graffiti artists across the region who printed them on banners and sprayed them on walls in Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon. The Sudanese people were protesting too, but their uprisings in 2011 and 2013 were brutally suppressed by Omar al-Bashir’s regime.

In 2018, the December revolution succeeded in deposing al-Bashir. “In my opinion, the revolution in Sudan was led by the three actors al-Bashir was trying to destroy: women, artists and unions,” Albaih explains. “And these three came back and bit him in the arse. Art was at the forefront of it all, from poets to rappers to street artists and so on. My job was to push their work.”

By then, Albaih had garnered international recognition for his political commentary. “I was already in a place where I could understand what comes next in terms of the revolutions in the Arab world,” he says, referring to the backlashes against protesters that undermined democratic transitions and re-established autocratic dictatorships across the region. “I understood the counter-revolutions and how they worked, and the importance of highlighting other artists.”

The counter-revolution was launched on June 3, 2019, when the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Janjaweed, or Rapid Support Forces (RSF), violently dispersed Al Qeyada, the peaceful sit-in camp in front of the SAF headquarters in Khartoum. This “Khartoum massacre” laid the foundation for the military coup in October 2021 and, ultimately, the outbreak of war in April 2023.

One of the ideas he had during that time was to write a book about Sudanese history. However, Albaih did not want to tell Sudanese history from only his perspective, so he organized a workshop in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut and invited 31 artists to create a collective history of Sudan, advised by professors of Khartoum University. The book, Sudan Retold, focused on the interrelations of history, rather than merely stating historical details.

“But the examples were missing,” says Albaih. “I couldn’t show them any books on how to tell history in a creative way. So I had the idea to get my collection of comic books and house it at the Goethe-Institut. And with that, we started the first comic book library in Africa.”

Next, he met with the minister of culture at the time, hoping to get a space for a library. The minister agreed, but the process was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Albaih describes a spiral of obtaining and losing funding amidst worsening political conditions and a changing government. “What was also sad was that whenever I told people that I wanted to start a library, they understood ‘book shop,’” he says.

When it became clear that the government would not help, Albaih assembled a team with the vision of creating a mobile library in a rickshaw. Despite the coup happening in 2021, he hired 12 people to build four rickshaws. Two days before the project was scheduled to begin, war broke out between the SAF and the Janjaweed. Albaih’s books and the four rickshaws were lost.

In parallel, he started the Sudan Artist Fund. “It started with one of my favorite artists, a video artist who posted daily videos during the revolution, but had stopped,” shares Albaih. He spent two to three weeks trying to contact the artist and when they connected, he told Albaih that the Janjaweed were looking for him, because they wanted him to work with them. In addition, his computer was not working.

“So, I sent him some money to get a computer and he started working again,” says Albaih. “And that’s the thing: if artists don’t work, we lose them and their freedom of speech, which is what the revolution is about. This is what happened in Sudan: we lost a lot of people to Hemedti (the leader of the Janjaweed), because he’s the only one who pays a lot of money.”

The Sudan Artist Fund is a crowdfunding project that has supported an artist with $500 a month for the past two years. “It’s nothing really, but it helped people to keep their heads above water,” says Albaih.

In April 2023, the SAF and the RSF entered into a full-blown war which has so far killed an estimated 16,650 people, displaced over 8.8 million people and put 2.5 million people at risk of death by starvation by September 2024.

“After the war, most of my friends and artists I admire, political cartoonists in particular, were displaced internally and internationally with no way to work,” shares Albaih. “Starting a magazine to help people work sounded like the best solution. So we made Khartoon Magazine.”

Khartoon Magazine is an online publication for political cartoons and detailed reports that give unique insight into the situation in Sudan. Spread across the globe by the ongoing war, the team of resident artists and contributors bravely covers everything from the political landscape to personal stories. It offers residencies to three Sudanese artists every two months, one working from inside Sudan, another from outside of Sudan, and the third working on converting reports to graphic formats.

Albaih envisions for Khartoon Magazine to become a local platform that fights disinformation and the lack of information on Sudan generally. “This is from the horse’s mouth, it’s the situation that these political cartoonists are living in,” he says.

Through collaborations with other international platforms, artists are given a platform nationally and internationally, and get to shape the image of Sudan. Albaih thinks that taking control over the stories and images we tell about Sudan is crucial for the country’s nation-building.

“At the end of the day, Sudan is a project that was kind of made by the British. We ended up with this project and we have to make it work — or not,” he says. “We need to find ways other than war to think about the future of this area. We’re part of the region and whatever happens to us happens to the region, and whatever happens to the region happens to us.”