2 - Building Marginalisation in the Displaced City

Summary

Khartoum’s war-displaced residents had to fight for safe space to live, work, and think, and over the late 1980s and early 1990s this was a battle over bulldozers, deportations, exploitation, and exclusion. This chapter sets out this fight over the city under the al-Ingaz regime’s civilising project from 1989, from the perspective of its new residents. To them, this was a project not of forcible acculturation but of silencing, exclusion, and disciplining of an exploitable labour force. Former residents explain their choices in navigating these forces to make measures of security and neighbourhood safety, including their renaming of space in this new displaced city. The political geography that this period of state violence and popular resistance created by 1994 sets the terrain for the rest of the book.