Over a million southern Sudanese people fled to Sudan's capital Khartoum during the wars and famines of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This book is an intellectual history of these war-displaced working people's political organising and critical theory during a long conflict. It explores how these men and women thought through their circumstances, tried to build potential political communities, and imagined possible futures. Based on ten years of research in South Sudan, using personal stories, private archives, songs, poetry, photograph albums, self-written histories, jokes and new handmade textbooks, New Sudans follows its idealists' and pragmatists' variously radical, conservative, and creative projects across two decades on the peripheries of a hostile city. Through everyday theories of Blackness, freedom and education in a long civil war, Nicki Kindersley opens up new possibilities in postcolonial intellectual histories of the working class in Africa.

Finalist, 2025 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize, African Studies Association

‘Sudan and South Sudan, about which Kindersley writes so imaginatively and innovatively, no longer exist as outlined here. This book is an intellectual history of the informal relations and internal turmoil among South Sudanese living in Khartoum, Sudan's capital. Despite its title, this book is primarily about South Sudan, mostly during the period before independence in 2011, covering the sacrifices and cultural disconnections African people fighting to secede from Sudan proper had to make within an Arab-dominated country. … Recommended.’

Nicki Kindersley Source: Choice