 Welcome to this event today, my name is Angelica Baskera, I'm representing here the Center of African Studies of the Source of Source University of London. And we are very pleased today to host in our weekly seminar series to incredible author from Sudan, Ruba El-Malik and Reem Abbas. Welcome. And we are very pleased to have you here today with us, Blonchin, your very interesting book entitled Undoing Resistance, Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan, 30 Years of Islamic Rule. And the book has been published by Andrea, very innovative digital platform. And today we also have here the editor of the platform, Omnia Chokat. Welcome, Omnia. We are very pleased to then hear from you as well as the publisher, as well as about the digital platform that seems extremely, extremely innovative. Finally, I also want to thank the chair of the event today, Mr. Paul Askwit, who is a research associate of the Center of African Studies, but he's also co-founder, co-director of Shabaka, who is, as many of you know, a very very interesting organization working on diaspora engagement in Sudan. And Paul is here, a chair in day band and also representing Shabaka as one of the organization involved in today's book launch. And so as I said, you know, we are very, very honored to have you here. We are all looking forward to this very interesting discussion about your book. We have quite a lot of people registered online. We are very pleased to see people coming from different parts of the world. And then the format will be, I will pass it on to the chair now. The audience will have a chance to ask the question by putting them in the Q&A box. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to open the mics, but if you can kindly write your question in the Q&A chat and then Paul will aim to pick as many questions as possible within the time frame we have tonight. Just to say also that the event is recorded, therefore, and it's going to be available on the Source YouTube channel a few days after today. Therefore, if any of your friends or colleagues missed the event, please share the link afterwards. It will be on the Source YouTube channel and we will share it with the attendees. I am not going to take too much time because there is a pack agenda here. The book has so many different aspects that we would like to talk about today. So I just want to say thank you again so much from SOAS, from the Central African Studies at SOAS for coming here today in one of our seminars. We are very, very delighted. I'll pass it now on to Paul Askwit, the chair who is going to talk a little bit more about the authors before and then managing the discussion. Many thanks and I pass it on to Paul. Thank you Paul. Thank you Angelica and welcome ladies and gentlemen wherever you are joining us from in whatever time zone you're in. It's a great honour and a pleasure to be with you here today and with our very special guests for this discussion about a new book that's being launched called Undoing Resistance Authoritarianism Attacks on the Arts 30 Years of Islamist Rule and thanks to Angelica for a very kind introduction. I think she's actually promoted me without realising it. I'm director of research at Shabaka. I'm not one of the co-founders but thank you in any case. In terms of the format for the event today we're going to have a panel discussion with the authors. So I'm going to ask questions of esteemed authors that we've got here. We'll introduce in just a second and then there will be an opportunity as Angelica has said for audience members to post their own questions into the chat box which I will then ask of the authors. So with no further ado, let me start by introducing our authors for today and really excited about the discussion and really about the book. I wanted to say when I was in Khartoum in November and I was able to meet with Andrea colleagues who told me about the book. I was incredibly excited and I thought well we have to try and do a launch event around this in partnership with the centre of African studies at Saas and their kind of weekly seminar series. So with no further ado, please let me introduce our two esteemed authors. The first is the writer Malik, who is an independent researcher with a social cultural anthropology degree from UCLA. And she's interested in progressing solutions to social issues through research, ethnography and collaborations with local community organisers. Her research interests include arts, education, indigenous languages and paradigms of gender and race that shaped the lived experiences of women. Non-academic work has included production and editorial work for the Literary Journal, Mizna, Swinalitz plus art, as well as literary programming, musical festival curation and grassroots open access initiatives. She's invested in shaping futures for cultural expression by creating possibilities for African scholarship on the continent that exists outside of institutions. And our second esteemed author today is Reem Abbas, who's a freelance Sudanese journalist, writer, researcher and communications expert. She's been working in the field of communications and advocacy for Sudanese civil society groups and international organisations for more than a decade. Her writings on press freedom have appeared on the index on censorship and the Doher Centre for Medi-Freedom, and her socio-political commentary was published in the Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Nation, Here in News, amongst other publications. She's also spent years working with Sudanese refugees in Egypt and published a profile on young refugee musicians in the book Voices in Refuge published by the American University of Cairo Press. She's writing an essay titled Smuggling Books into Sudan, a brief history from 2012 to 2016 was published in Art and Sociology Reader, Radical Actions, Politics and Friendships, a reader published by Valets and supported by the Office of Contemporary Art in Norway. And so thank you once again for being with us today. I also need to introduce Omnia Shaukat from Andreea, he's a very good partner of us at Shavaka. It's a pleasure to have you here with us today. And before I start asking questions of our esteemed authors, maybe Omnia you could just say a few words about Andreea's interest in the book and how your journey in publishing it. Thank you Paul. Thank you everyone. Thanks to the attendees as well. It's really a pleasure to be here with you today and thank you for your interest in our book. And in this really incredible publication of stories as well as history and narration. I'm really excited for everyone to read the book and I'm looking forward to all your feedback. It's our first book at Andreea, and it's quite an interesting sort of trajectory because we started as a digital cultural platform in English and Arabic for Sudan and South Sudan. We later expanded into Uganda and now we're in 12 countries in the East and North, sorry in the East and Horn of Africa region. Our focus is really positive stories. So telling positive cultural stories, we later expanded into having culture exchange projects between these different countries that we operate in, as well as research. And how we stumbled across this book is really just so interesting and very Sudanese in a way because, you know, I know Ruba's sister and then somehow I met Ruba and she was just a graduate coming with so many questions about what's going on with Sudan, especially around the Revolution time. And Reem is my sister. A lot of people know that she's also a journalist and she's also someone who's always probing into the narrative and creating stories that are extremely rooted in the context of Sudan, the people of Sudan, their stories, as well as really correcting the narrative about what's going on with media in general or international media, but also local media and blogs and so on. So it was really natural for us to take an interest in this project, connect the two together and embark on this really long journey. It took us three years to go from beginning to end. It started in 2020 and it ended in 2022. It's actually so actually just starting. It feels like it's just starting because we're just talking about the book right now. It's blossoming really right now. But yeah, so they came together and we found an opportunity with the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and Arab Council for the Social Sciences for a grant and we went for it and we got it. So really, really huge thanks for them, not just for this grant because it was an essential turning point for us at Fenderia, but also for their patients because it was a three year project that was supposed to be a year and a half project. I want to say a little bit about why this project is important to us and why this book is important to us. So the premise of the book is that when the revolution started, and I say started between quotations because it didn't really start in 2018 but let's say it gained momentum and it gained international attention in 2018. There was a lot of shock about the arts and how it's fueling it, whether it's diaspora generated digital arts or music or it was local art that was chance and poetry and music and just creativity and how the entire movement was set up to be. And the narrative really quickly turned into something like oh this is something that came out of nowhere, whereas for people who understand the anthropology of the place people who study it like Ruba, people who've been here documenting stories from 2009 like cream. There's been no shocker. There's been so many different, let's say bursts of protests burst of resistance throughout the 30 years of the cause rule, but maybe the momentum that came in 2018 required that we take a minute and really go back and study all of that. And also more importantly, what was the implication of being cause on this momentum, and on this resistance. And how do we now look at it from the perspective of now we're in a transformational point, what do we do next. We mitigate some of the challenges that were prior and make sure that we don't face them in the future because the whole world is changing and this revolution was definitely not televised but it was televised it was Twitterized, that's the word. And there lies the importance of this book, it stops in 2019. So it doesn't really go into this point that we're in right now but has so many lessons that is carrying over from 30 years of work that is compiled into this 250 plus manuscript basically. I'm so excited for people to read it. I really want people to know the stories of the people. I was touched so much by the stories of things lost. There's a chapter, there's a theme called memory of religion being misconstrued to so that it's influencing people in all the negative ways and killing their spirits killing the expression. We are in an African continent in the African continent we are part of this continent this continent is known for rich culture for expression. And the project of the former regime really did its best to change that. And this is where we are right now and we need to take our lesson but we also need to acknowledge that the revolution and the artistic expression that happened during the revolution came from somewhere. And I'll leave you here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much on the and maybe you've part answered one of my first question questions for our esteemed guests, which is, how did you choose the time period for the book, you know it covers a 30 year period but up to the end of 2018. But maybe I can ask our esteemed authors to maybe remove how you'd like to to answer this from your perspective. Yes, hello everyone, and I would like to thank all the participants for coming I hope you can hear me well. Yeah, so before I start I just answering your question I just wanted to tell a little story. So when I started out as a journalist, I was an arts and culture reporter and editor. So, and I remember my first few weeks reporting for this local newspaper. I convinced the owner to pay for a ticket for me to go to this fashion show and I told him was the first fashion show on our tomb in a very long time I have to be there have to cover it and so on. So I went and I, my friend went with me and we did the interviews and so on and then, just as we left the police raided the location and then they arrested a bunch of people. And then it was a basically there was like a court that was happening for a very long time and some of the people were prosecuted and we were kind of following the case. And I, I was I just found it very difficult to write about it you know what do I write in this situation. And the first time was I was when I wanted to interview this writer and when I called him because I wanted to buy his books before I do the interview. And he told me to that his books are now all banned and that but I can buy them from this lady. So I remember I went to this to this place and I, there was a lady selling his books from the trunk of her car. And I think this really made me realize that. Oh, you know the spaces, the civic space is very limited and the civic space for art and culture and Sudan is very, very limited and there's a lot of intimidation happening, and, and there's a lot of prosecution happening to the writers, artists and so on. And I think this turned me more I would say into sometimes I think of myself as an activist because I became I became very passionate about just working for civic spaces for freedom of expression and so on. So I think this is how kind of, you know, like, years later I came to write this book with robot. So to answer your question, Paul. I think for us in the beginning we wanted to focus on the rule of al-bashir the Islamist rule in Sudan 1989 to 2019. So this was because we really wanted to to write about a period that was not necessarily under reported but but but we wanted to write on a period that was very interesting because this government is unlike any other dictatorship in Sudan, it's very volatile. We've always had kind of a military dictatorship happening, and we've had more than 55 years of military rule actually counted it today. So, but this but the last government the Islamist government was very different because they're, they didn't have a cultural project per se, but their project, their political project was to kind of basically get rid of the cultural problem because their theory was that the cultural scene in Sudan is fueled by the left, you know, and for them, the left is a bunch of communists. So for them, if they managed to kind of, you know, really crush this cultural scene and and prosecute artists and writers and make sure that they're not producing artwork anymore, then they kind of then it's going to really impact the opposition and the political position and so on. This is one of their, their premises. So yeah, so we wanted to write about this period because we wanted to see what happened. So what did this government do when they came to power how did they crush the cultural scene, because we because we always used to hear about how Sudan had theaters and Sudan had cinemas and Sudan had this and that. But then when we were growing up, it was like, everything was shut down, you know, I mean, we came of age and you know Sudan where everything was the past you know they and we knew that when they came to power they shut down theaters, cinemas, they shut down many magazines they shut down the Sudanese Writers Union in their first month in power, they prosecuted a lot of artists and they confiscated books they even confiscated private collections that people had in their houses. So we wanted to understand what happened. But not only that we wanted to understand how the artists and the cultural movement reacted to it. But what did they do how did they fight back you know, and where did they find a fight back and this is why we traveled to a few states because we wanted to know how people in different states were mobilizing. And at the same time we also wanted to understand, did they really succeed in crushing the cultural scene and what we really saw is. There was a lot of devastation but there was also an organic, you know, decentralized cultural movement that was in that was happening in Sudan. There was amazing and it was in so many different states and a lot of people were so invested in just kind of continuing to be part of this resistance. So what we saw was something very, very beautiful because we saw that there were so many associations and groups that are spread across the country. And this is really the result of people coming together and mobilizing when a lot of the institutions that they used to rely on and that they were part of, were no longer there because the government, you know, shut them down or close them. Yeah, so I'll give you a chance to respond. No, thank you so much. Is there anything you'd like to add to that robot in terms of particularly this decision, why did you choose to end the book when you did. I think it's always a great proponent of looking back in order to look forward. I think it's important to understand where you've come from in order to understand where you can go in the future, but over to you anything you'd like to add around this. Yeah, of course, and I think it's exactly what you said Paul and also what they have touched on. It's that this is just the natural path of looking into the revolution so that was ultimately our entry points into this entire thing and like where our curiosity like initially or not initially ended up sort of situating us at that moment in time which was you know 2019 2020 and in asking just like the very first the most shallow questions about it. You're immediately led to the to the past right and you're immediately led to all these questions that take us to the 30 year period of okay what exactly has happened. And now to get us here. And I think a huge answer to that question is is kind of these different pockets of life and cultural existence that were happening that Dean was describing, and how those people really kept something alive in Sudan and in a time where it was not only dead but very publicly and loudly declared as dead by the government and ultimately over a 30 year period by the people themselves which is, you know, the, not only self expression but the interest in self expression and the interest in art and like the commitment to culture. And so, not only were there people fighting this but it's like, oh, okay, this actually happened extremely systematically. And things can be traced very clearly. And not only do we have like stories from multiple people that sort of reflect exactly what was going on during that time but it just when you put it all together creates a very clear picture that just looked over because if we want to move forward. Like I think everyone here has mentioned and believes you just you have to look at the past to understand where you are in a moment in time and for us that was okay we need to look from 1989 to 2019 that 30 year period is absolutely the story. Thank you. And also just to add, it doesn't just cover the past 30 years it also covers a bit beyond that I think that's important to stress, but really fascinating to read sections of it. And maybe just as a quick follow up. I see you've organized the book around five themes. Gender, memory, religion, conflicting governance and finally institutions. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about your choice of these things. So I can talk a little bit about about our choice of themes and a few of the themes and then you can sort of take over but we initially approached this idea of themes as maybe, you know, we were looking for theoretical frameworks to really ground this. And ultimately what they ended up being were very important lenses through which to understand and study what happened to the art and cultural scene and what happened to the Sudanese population, and their relationship to the art and cultural not only over the past 30 years like you mentioned but honestly like since colonialism and even before that. And so we, you know, had some very long and interesting discussions that led us to, to these five, you know, central themes that also just kept coming up throughout our research and we realize that's that's where all the stories lived and where all the stories really lived. And memory is one that only already mentioned some way be I'll lead with that. And the memory theme is just meant to explore like this concept of collective memory as a people and as a Sudanese people and to really explore what we've lost through that and be able to start to grasp how important this concept is to Sudanese population and then also grasp what the government or the previous regime was able to do throughout their understanding of collective memory and what it was like. And so when you have a population that in the 70s and the 80s was really displaying a commitment to art or was displaying there it was the scene was flourishing or it was beginning to flourish or there was promise. And obviously, now we can't really say anything for sure right and that's part of the tragedy of it all. But there were like there were promising moments there there was already success there were already incredible, or was incredible artistry coming out of that time. Certainly being led into the 90s and after that and having people stop being interested in art it's like what happened and stop being interested in self expression, what happened and as you move forward throughout the years so as those generations that went through the coup in 89, you know birth newer and newer generations like maybe two generations down now. It's like the question becomes, why has there been a lot of self deletion of people's own memories so you have people becoming more conservative over time and then passing on those values to their new generations and what happens is that then the past is disregarded entirely. And people choose not to remember anymore. And so when that happens it's at least the question of how much agency was exercised and people's moral values, changing time then if they're not even able to confront their own personal past in a way that is honest and open, and not judged or seen as wrong. And so this idea of collective memory, which is a combination of, of really what holds all of our like it's a, you can you think of it as an intangible thing that holds all of our cultural values and that obviously a huge part of that is our relationship to art and a part of that is also our relationship to morality. And what happened there is that the regime really played on the slink between culture and morality and used memory or abused folks's memory over time by closing down institutions by burning books which even can can talk about for days. By stealing people's personal archives by going into people's home and destroying their different music things by like censoring paintings or destroying them or and so on and so forth. So it's like by doing that, they slowly started to erase the presence of art from Sudan as an entirety and a huge part of that, like a lot of that is extremely visual like now our visual culture has suffered greatly because of this. You're not really down the street you're not really seeing, you know, these beautiful artistic institutions or you're not seeing murals on the street like 30 years worth of murals you're seeing two or three or four or five years worth of murals. You're not seeing music concert halls and venues and and flyers and things that just exist in countries where self expression is a lot easier. And that tells people this doesn't matter and this has never mattered because you also cannot see evidence of it existing in the past anymore either. So yeah that's that's a part of exploring, you know, the memory theme. And then we have the theme of religion which is, you know, it took the took the path of not like this discussion of art and culture. And then we have the theme of religion which is, you know, it took the took the path of not like this discussing okay is art. Okay within the context of religion or within the context of Islam or specifically it's like no that's actually that question in and of itself is a trap right it leads us to this idea of like morality, what is okay because I want to be a good person. And this is important to me, and I've chosen these values to be my own. No, so it takes us the religion theme really explores the use of religion as a political tool, and the use of morality as entirely a political tool, and really goes back into Sudan's look at how Islamism kind of gained the stronghold in Sudan and how during times of colonialism it just sort of helped shape some quick pseudo national identity that could be used to sort of, you know, to create an identity of ourselves and fight off our colonizers and and sort of become a country and how in the process of that we obviously alienated the south and that's a whole different, or the same topic right but a different part, and how that ultimately led to Islamism adopted as like a very central or being forced as being a very central part of our national and political identity, and then having that be shuffled into these different memory channels, like I mentioned before as okay this is who we are. It's really important. And we are in the business of, and you mentioned something called a civilization project or I think maybe that was omnia, they were in the business of creating or engineering, like the ideal Sudanese person, and a huge part of that was that this person was Arab, this person was Muslim. This person spoke Arabic and not indigenous languages. And so you can imagine the kind of mold that they were vying for. And so religion really helped with that erasure of literally everything else outside of that mold of that one person. And that's why I think it was really important like he mentioned to go to different states. And there we're able to see how much people, which the further you move from the capital the further you're moving from this mold of like what the right Sudanese person should be. You're not at like you're not going into Arab people who are ethnically you're not going into like the cultures or states of people who are ethnically or sorry culturally Arab right you're going into people who are into the cultures and communities of people who are marginalized by the government and there's a lot of conflict there. And seeing like, okay, this is a very limited idea of who this person is and then religion is also used to, to help bolster this idea that that the Arab, you know, almost almost non black Sudanese person, which, which obviously is not sensible right because this is a black and African country, but this Arab sort of Arabic speaking Muslim person is this is this makes sense racially and politically and culturally and linguistically and everything right. And so, yeah, so we really, you know, look deeper into that and I think I mentioned conflict and governance which is another theme. And that really discusses like I said how when you move further from the capital you see that art and culture were oppressed or were suppressed in different ways into different levels of brutality by the regime. It's all systematic but whereas in Khartoum you could have neglect, they're neglecting to fund institutions they're neglecting to offer spaces for art and artists they're neglecting to, you know, do things like that. You have in, for example, Blue Nile, which is a bit further down south from the capital, you have people like police officers being stationed at cultural centers permanently and been given the right to run the administration of different cultural centers and having them every day as like a display of prowess to be like we are watching you. And then having artists go through the honest humiliation of applying for different permits and and grants and funding to do a play or have an exhibition or a gallery or make a movie and just constantly being arrested, being put through like ridiculous amounts of red tape that ultimately lead nowhere, having that backfire and have them being arrested for trying to do something. So yeah conflict and governance ultimately really played a huge part in how, how the regime went about suppressing art in different places and I'll let you maybe touch on the other the last two themes. Thank you so much. If you'd like to add to that and actually I think you've anticipated perhaps my next question, which is for particularly for those who are not familiar with Sudan or the Sudanese context. What is it that motivates why is it so important, these links between arts activism and revolution in Sudan. I mean this is what struck me from kind of reading sections of the book what made it so powerful and topical to my mind, but why would why do you think this is. Yes. You know, we've it's interesting but in a way art in Sudan. Music different forms of it were always kind of resisting. I mean we've we've seen. We read some of some literature that talks about how for example, women singers were not allowed to sing during the Mahdi a period and like towards the end of the 19th century and after the, the Mahdi rule collapsed. British colonialism then the women singers were back kind of performing. So in a way art was always kind of suppressed and oppressed depending on the political ideology in power. So the political and religious ideology in power so Sudan, like I said, it is a very, you know, volatile country and in a way artists were always resisting because artists are always longing for freedom. Because, because they want to perform and they want to produce artwork and so on it's also freedom because when you're living under dictatorship, you can't really, you can't really be like a complete artist you know and this is one of this is the sentiment that was shared with us that you cannot have, you cannot think clearly you cannot think freely when you're living under oppression. And this is why for artists it was always a fight for them to to long for a state where they feel respected, where they feel that they're not prosecuted where they can move freely they can perform freely. So, so I just don't want to go really way back but we've had different military dictatorship dictatorships in Sudan and some of them in a way, I wouldn't say supported the art but they co-opted the art so in the 20s we had the memory dictatorship it was more left leaning most of its time in power, it did not support the art but it kind of tried to swallow it so it would hire artists and poets and writers into state institutions in a way to kind of, you know, make sure that they are abiding by its, you know, its values. But then when we came to the Islamist regime, like I said they didn't treat, they had a social, they had a social project so their social project was called the civilizational project. Okay, and some people we could argue that it's a social and also cultural project, but it's a social project in the sense that they describe it, I mean their godfather, the godfather of the Islamist movement in Sudan he describes it as a process to re-engineer the Sudanese person or the individual. So by re-engineer I mean that they want to, they want this person, they want the Sudanese man or woman to have their values, to share their values, or to share certain values. And this is why they, and of course the civilizational project was kind of implemented through the school curriculum, through the media, through the state institutions, through so many different channels so people were bombarded. And this is why for a long time, the artists were not only kind of fighting the government, but they were also fighting the society because they would be performing, for example, and then people would see them as, you know, communist, you know, bad people, you know, drunk people, they would kind of stigmatize them because it was so embedded into people's minds that, oh artists are just not good people, you know, they're just a bunch of people who want to kind of, who have a grudge against society, you know, and because there was a lot of propaganda against artists, there was a lot of propaganda against just anyone who kind of looks, even looks different, you know, and this is why there's so many, you know, there's a lot of propaganda against people who wear, who dress a certain way, who have a certain lifestyle, who have a certain, you know, look basically if you have dreadlocks, if you do this, if you do that, then it just really means that you're stereotyped and stigmatized and this is because of the mass government propaganda for a very long time. So it was a situation where for artists they were really struggling to kind of find this acceptance in the society but also, you know, struggle against the regime. So yeah, so the, you know, during the Islamist regime it was a full on dictatorship and I think from the get go, the regime made sure that they targeted the cultural movement. I mean, in the first month basically, when they shut down, when they dissolve the parliament and they shut down or sorry they banned all the political parties, they also banned the Sudanese Writers Union. So this is a statement, right, that they're making from the get go. And then after that, so they set up like torture, you know, chambers for, or like they're called ghost houses like torture, you know, detention facilities for politicians and opposition leaders and so on. And they also imprisoned artists, poets and so on. So in the first few years you see that poets have been tortured, arrested, disappeared and subjected to so many different things, you know, so they made very sure that from the beginning they were targeting this kind of community. So they had no other basically alternative but to resist but also because they were resisting because they really believed in kind of the different democratic values, they really believed that they wanted to see a free Sudan free from this dictatorship. So it was always a movement that is very much, you know, that was always kind of resisting because also, like I said, the different governments looked at artists the same way they look at the opposition political parties, you know, that they're their enemies, enemies of the states, you know, that they're there to get them, that they are spreading awareness and they don't want this kind of awareness because the awareness is kind of against the civilizational project, you know, that they are advocating and trying to impose. No, thank you so much. I very much agree I mean to just initial thoughts from what you've said is one, just how important control about some culture is for many political movements and revolutionary movements for precisely the reasons you've outlined. There's a way in which that artists and kind of cultural activists often can find themselves in a position of challenging or subverting norms within society, which can expose them to kind of backlash both at a popular level but also at a kind of a different level from the government. And maybe this kind of leads quite neatly into my next question to you, which is, why do you think or what do you think is the value and importance of arts and culture in terms of crisis. Yes. So let me start that and then Rover can. Yeah, she has a lot of addition. I mean, you know, in Sudan. I mean, I think it's, it's, it's very, I mean people look at it as a very kind of interesting thing that Sudan that this is kind of the third 2019 was the third revolution in Sudan. So our first revolution was 1964 and then 1985 you know, so it's really, it's really inspiring that we that's all the different generations whether it's my grandparents my parents and now my generation, we are trying to break loose we're trying to break free from this, you know status quo basically, but it's also quite sad that we're kind of all the different revolutions somehow have very similar demands. But, but in a way, this revolution, I would, you know, we would say is different because of all the, all the research that we have done it really showed that there was kind of a revolutionary infrastructure in Sudan. So the revolutionary infrastructure whether it's like different groups organizations associations, independent trade unions, and different groups basically. And it's and we're, we still say we're still seeing that even you know in the form of the Sudanese professionals association association, the different political parties and so on. So they're revolutionary sorry the resistance committees not the political parties, but then also you have a cultural infrastructure okay. And in and other and in many different countries, this cultural infrastructure is kind of governmental, or it's tied to the state, you have, whether it's libraries whether it's different, you know, institutions that are kind of tied to the state in Sudan. In most cases, this is not the case because we're talking about 30 years of, you know, really just total destruction of you know, the government literally burning books. And basically raiding and shutting down so many things so this cultural infrastructure in Sudan is very interesting because it is organic in a way. It's organic in the sense that people have to organize and they have to organize in different states in Sudan, and they had to organize in a way to kind of to to have some kind of solidarity. So the artist groups or the different cultural groups in different parts of Sudan, whether for example, a true cultural association I dedicate actually this look to them. I mean, yeah, because I feel that they're very important a true cultural association for example, they completely depend on on just donations, you know, the people support them they pay their rent they pay their, you know, for their activities and so on. And this is how the infrastructure is is sustained, and this is how the infrastructure is able to operate independently, and it's able to kind of really rely on the community to come together, you know, and this takes a lot of work. I'll tell you an example to show that how this was kind of done. So for example, in a jazeera, the artist they insist to use the at some point they used to insist to use the state institutions to hold their events because they felt that this is a state institution it does not belong to the, to the ruling party it's our right to use it. So they would go to the, you know, arts and cultural palace there. They would book, you know, the venue to kind of hold their events. And then when they come in the evening. The guard would disappear with the key, somehow. And of course this was all, you know, it was on purpose, it was not you know that the guard got sick or something it was on purpose because they wanted to, to make sure that the event does not take place. So of course, you know, at, you know, they're there in sending in front of the venue and a bunch of people are there and they had to find a way right so someone would kind of donate their house to have their events, you know, so they would walk or drive to someone's house and they would sit there in their, you know, in their, you know, like the hosh or the yard in, you know, like we call it in Sudan. And then they would just have the event right so this was people coming together and people finding different kind of venues to hold events and people finding solidarity right the community had to come together and support. The cultural infrastructure in Sudan is strong because people support it and people get like people continue to give resources to make sure that it continues to be available. So, it's very important basically because right now you see this so much in the different platforms that have basically that have appeared in Sudan in the past few years right now you have cultural cafes in so many states across Sudan. And I think this is what we found that we found like like I said, the cultural movement is not centralized anymore. Okay, it's not just in cartoon right now it's everywhere so you have a cultural cafe in Costa you have a cultural cafe in Madani in like so many different places. You have book shops opening in different areas you have art galleries opening up in different areas. So this really shows that people want to continue kind of having this, you know, like organic kind of cultural movement and they want to continue making sure that art has a place in Sudan, it has a place in society, it has a place in the civic space, and so on. So in on one hand you have the authorities erasing the graffiti from the wall to kind of erase the revolution to kind of erase, erase resistance not even the revolution erase that people were there, and the people drew this and the people were resisting. But on the other hand you have people who are saying no we're still here, we're going to continue doing this, we're going to continue holding events we're going to continue to fundraise, and we're going to continue to kind of use our own spaces, houses or whatever to have events to kind of support this movement. Thank you so much. Is there anything you'd like to add to that? Yeah I'll just quickly add to that I mean I think that's such a perfect and beautiful answer honestly. And I just think you know, arts and culture they bring communities together like they bring the community together kind of like something and it decides, they help people decide their values collectively and more importantly and something that we're just really trying to stress in this book and by doing this is that it's a thing that is very much alive and needs to be like kept alive and it's a collective responsibility and that's exactly what Reem was talking about and artists in a way are the vanguards of this right there are the people creating and the people reflecting and the people who are almost being fully honest because it's impossible for them not to be right, because they're constantly reflecting their realities, but the guarding of arts and cultures is a collective effort you know and when I visualise this I don't want it to be like they're like sound militants you know that each of us as a people like has a you know individual responsibility to like stand and guard our arts and cultures I mean sure, but it should just be something that people refuse to have contained like we as a collective people can make the decision to say we refuse to be contained in this way you know and so you have then examples like Reem was mentioning of people selling books from their trunks, opening up their houses, even you know we've had very famous poets in prison smuggle out their poetry like through prison guards you know who are like up holders of the system, but ultimately have their own personal leaning or their own personal investment and arts and culture so no matter how nuanced that example is or no matter how complicated that example is it's this is what it looks like for a community to come together and say we refuse to be contained that's a value self expression is important that's a value for us. The most important thing that needs to be mentioned and all of this is you, you also have like the this insane amount of heartbreak and bravery and commitment coming from the artists who held on to their own work, even when it's been disregarded and disrespected. You know we were going and interviewing people who had seven books on a USB or in their laptop or something that's been gathering dust for 25 years or trying to give us copies of their books when they have like two or three copies that they could just print because it was their own budget and just stories of rejection and stories and and still they hold on to the idea that their work is important because it literally is. And that in and of itself is is resistance right and and that's like kind of why that became so important the title of the book is revolution can be a moment in time and it's a paradigm shift and it's so important. But resistance is is really what holds everything together. And so that's you know that really is the role of of arts and culture I would say especially in a time of crisis. Now thank you. That was very beautifully put from both of you, maybe just to ask a sort of follow on from that. So Sudan has a very rich cultural heritage that its people and its artists draw on. And I get the impression that Sydney's artistic creation is fizzing with creativity and dynamism and activity. But while Sydney's arts have rightly developed reputation around the world for for excellence. And they, I would argue still deserve to be far better known. How do you think the Sudanese people and the Sudanese diaspora leverage their countries rich artistic heritage, both to raise awareness of Sudan and Sudanese art, and also to build up the arts and cultural sectors within Sudan itself. Who would like to go first please you go, you go first. And we actually had a discussion on this exact same question last week at the gallery in her to. So I think it's also a conversation that people are having and we're glad that we're a part of this conversation right now. I think the first thing I would say is people need to learn to pay for art, you know, and I think it's done because you have so many different kind of, you know, donor or like funded institutions that have for years kind of, you know, different events that were free. So now I think, in a way, you have to make it you we have to kind of work on changing the not changing the culture, but ensuring that people understand that you know, you have to compensate artists for their work so you pay for a gallery, you know, you pay money for a book, you know, or like it could be sometimes you know different prices depending on the situation but you have to kind of make sure that the artists are compensated. So right now also I think the culture is changing in a way that you have artists who are, you know, really selling their artwork for more like higher prices right now and this was not the case before. They feel more confident to do that after this international recognition of Sudanese art and also because right now the culture in Sudan is changing that people are more than willing to kind of pay more for art. And this is good, we have to make sure that artists are able to support themselves through their artwork, this is very important because we want to make sure that they continue support and they're producing it. The second thing is investing in building people and also I wouldn't say institutions because I feel that in the context of Sudan institutions are not really sustainable because you have a government that just comes to power and they shut down everything and they destroy all the institutions. So we have to kind of invest in building people, you know, building their capacity, making sure that, you know, we invest in like the different art institutions that are not the art institutions but like the art facilities basically that are popping in different places in Sudan, making sure that they're able to educate, spread awareness and build the capacity of the movement. There are some people who are doing amazing things right now like for example Khaled el-Bay and artist, he has a small grant for Sudanese artists and makers and shakers so this is good, you know, I mean like there are people who are already doing some creative things and they're supporting the movement somehow, we need more initiatives like that. The third thing is people should not be suspicious of the private sector because I mean there is, there's some private entities that are for example, you know, supportive publication of books, holding events and then there's some kind of suspicion that what do they get out of it. You know, they're part of, they're trying to commercialize the arts, you know, and so on. So I feel that also we have to kind of work on, on really just, you know, making sure that artists can kind of benefit from different institutions, you know, whether it's private institutions and so on. I'm not going to say kind of reclaim back the state institutions that are already there because I feel that right now it's a very vague situation, we don't know what's happening. And we've had a very difficult time with the previous government where, you know, people work very hard to make sure that the quote unquote right people are in power and then they didn't do anything for the for the artists and so on they did nothing actually, unfortunately. We have to stand up for art so right now I mean unfortunately just a few weeks ago, this exhibition was confiscated, like an entire exhibition as in paintings were confiscated so we have to stand up for art we have to make sure that prosecution does not not happen. And when it does, we have to show solidarity artwork is as important because this is our heritage, this is our, our story, right, they are, they're just again trying to erase our memories and they're trying to again, you know, take back stories from us. So yeah, so the last thing it's kind of it's interesting but basically, when we were working on this book, we really struggled with finding information because there's a lot of very little writing but also all the archive, the artistic archive is actually with people. So, we really want people who have managed to kind of hold on to books, you know, you know, different writings and things and documents over the years and who have, you know, fled the country with them or I don't know what really we like they just have to find a way to digitize it and make it available because we need this to be out there for us to benefit from it. As researchers but also to kind of for us to put the pieces together. So, this is a special request that I'm making. Thank you. Thank you. I very much echo that special request but also I like the fact that you started your answer with your reference to the fact that artists need to get paid for their work. You know, in Shabaka, we're big believers in everyone needs to eat. Yeah. So people should be recompensed for their for their labor and their effort. And I'd also extend that to yourselves and under your colleagues and I strongly encourage everyone who's joined us here today to buy a copy of the book. And I'll ask some questions of yourselves and omnia about that right at the very end, but I just wanted to open the discussion out to our audience, and just to say if you've got any questions for our esteemed authors, please put them in the Q&A box we've already had a question come through, which if it's okay, I will ask a panel in just a second. But yeah please, please ask your questions it's kind of your space now. And maybe actually we can move on to the first question we've received, which is from Hoda, which is asking about the role of archaeology in both supporting authoritarian regimes or supporting underground resistance artistic movements. And the questions around the use of ancient culture in constructing current struggles. What are your immediate reflections on this I'll start with you if that's okay. Yeah, that's a question I just have to say that I think that's so so very interesting. So there's, I touched on this a little bit in the book but yeah I think it's like an extremely interesting question I think that archaeology at least in Sudan right now is currently so like it's definitely more on the side of support supporting authoritarian regimes. And the way that happens is because it sort of helps the current population detach themselves from their ethnic and racial and cultural histories and feel like they're part of a lineage that makes sense and there's a part in the in the book where we talk about how like if you're trying to construct them a timeline of Sudanese history you'll have like and media and delay 1880s and then you have colonialism and then the you know the fight against colonialism and then you have independence. And then you have a few dictatorships and, and now you're here and when you look at that you're just kind of astounded because it feels like a very short history. And in a way it really is like this sort of artist like post modern or post colonial history is extremely short and that's something that we're also not thinking about enough at all. And just a quick digression from there is a dream thing is she always says please buy art and my thing is I always say please read more, because we do have a lot of like learning to catch up on and I think both of things are very important just consumption in but that is all to say that I think archaeology and I hope this is not a hot take is helping or help the regime keep things very a historical and keep things very revisionist for an extremely long period of time and help to make people feel detached so they'll have, you know, another day cared about it very much also because we have this this incredibly sort of abusive relationship with our material history and material culture, and where the government truly does not care about preserving any of this and so we have, you know, European or Western archaeologists coming in and like taking artifacts and sometimes that's literally supported by the government and then on top of that those people are then like lauded as heroes almost for helping us discover like our own history. But ultimately when that happens you you just construct something that you feel is ancient, even though we literally have current understandings of how our history ties into different people today and different ethnic groups, and people know this about themselves, and we have all of these indigenous languages that are now dying because while the government is saying, you know, anything archaeological is super in the past that's like almost a different thing that's not us right now, you have them at the same time, very systematically Arabizing the country, erasing indigenous language. And so using all of these indigenous artifacts to help sort of widen the gap between people and literally where they come from, ultimately very much leads to this like national or sort of identity crisis. And this is very much talked about in Sudan of like, what are we, are we African, are we Arab, are we Muslim, are we not like what is it, what does it all mean. And how like, I think, really like within so many Sudanese people there's like, so like all of these internal questions and, and this goes back to the collective memory is like after you run the tape back a little bit you blank. And even while you're running the tape back over like the years that you've lived or the past 30 years are just like very current history, you still have like a lot of a lot of blank moments and that reminds me of something a story that like is in the book of how that also happens in a literal sense and the name is talking about the archive is being destroyed and how there was once an TV show that was that was aired on TV, an older TV show, and they had episodes missing because the reels were destroyed or they didn't work anymore or they were destroyed and so you just had them airing like episodes and then the ones that were missing were just missing and so you have literally an incomplete story and I think that's like very poignant. The archaeology kind of helps or the abuse of, of our material culture. Yeah, definitely helps kind of situate our history in a way where we're very, very detached from it, if that makes sense. I'm meeting myself when I didn't meet you thank you so much. I think this is a really interesting area. I've got another question from Ahmed El-Avendi and it's great to see you on the Ahmed about will we someday see a whole contemporary artistic museum in Sudan in the near future. And maybe before I ask your views on this, I would like to preface it by saying, I very much hope so, not least because so much of Sudan's cultural heritage unfortunately, along with other African states is sitting outside of Sudan, often in museums, libraries, collections in Europe and North America and other places. And it's been very pleasing to see a movement grow in force over the past couple of years in particular and especially since the tragic death of George Floyd in the black lives matter process in 2020 for increasing restitution of stolen cultural artifacts and human remains to origin countries. And I'll give a quick shout out to a sister organization of Shabaka called the African Foundation for Development or afford. You've got a very interesting project around this called return of the icons which is working with policymakers but also institutions within Africa, but also in Europe and North America to return these stolen artifacts and human remains. So, yeah, what are your views, what do you make about this that we see a museum, contemporary artistic museum, and also maybe a historical one as well that you bearing in mind what's the famous quote, the one who controls the past controls the future. So the way in which history is such a contested state for governments but also people. I think my answer is going to be a bit controversial because I mean I understand I think there are so many countries right now that are more stable, but in this in the context of Sudan, because we have interviewed people we have written about that we have heard say how security forces raided and confiscated their private collections so you have people having their entire libraries, you know, confiscated and it's not only books and artwork and so on but it's even like pictures of their children you know. So I think right now in this very like volatile situation and this like political and certainly I think everything needs to stay put. Everything needs to stay put in the sense that I mean I encourage everyone with with an archive to share it digitize it make sure that it's available somehow okay on the internet for for us to look at it and to benefit from it. But I think right now this is not the right time to talk about it. You know going to the like the National Archives, because it's under not only there's this political uncertainty it's underfunded a lot of things unfortunately get lost and and also a lot of it is on purpose I mean on purpose they want to erase a lot of the things that we have. So yeah it is a controversial answer but because but we have seen so much pain, you know, during the interviews so I really believe that right now this is the right answer. I think that's a really interesting answer actually because although I would argue and certainly our partners that afford argue that the moral and ethical case for returns is unanswerable. There are very real practical considerations depending on the complexity of the situation within origin countries where artifacts were taken from. And it may not it's not always just as simple as give it straight back, particularly if the institutions are insufficiently resourced or there's insufficient or too much political interference perhaps so I very much kind of note your point there. So I can see we've got a question from an anonymous attendee was asking for a bit more information about the confiscated arts gallery stroke event. And could you also repeat the name of the local NGO you mentioned. Yeah the local NGO I mentioned I think he's talking he means or she means. Al-Shu-Ruq Al-Shu-Ruq cultural forum. And yeah so it's it's in the dark in the eastern part of Sudan. And it's just it's an amazing basically institution to answer your question so the event I was talking about was just it was end of last year it was in October. And there was an exhibition organized at this place in in her tomb. And the exhibition was actually, it was all the theme was like revolutionary art and there was a lot of paintings on like, you know political detention and so on. And basically, the security, they raided the exhibition, they confiscated the paintings and they arrested a bunch of people. And people were just very there was it was a lot of anger I just feel that the anger was not as much as as as it should be. Because the paintings I mean I there were some pictures that were shared online and they were very beautiful you know very beautiful because they really document the struggle that is happening. So unfortunately yeah they were confiscated and no one know of course you know they will not be you know returned and it was it was quite sad actually I'm going to. I'm going to answer to you and then I'm going to just kind of put the link. Okay, the, I could don't see the question anymore to be honest, but there's a. Yeah, but anyway there's a link you can go to civic civic monitor. It's like a Sudanese organization and then you could find the kind of a link to it over there. I think that's a very kind of it's interesting to learn more about that but also to provide information about it. I can see we've got a question in the chat from Christine, he was asking the panellists to talk about some of the performances music books or other works of art they saw during their research, particularly outside of Khartou, that they were your favorites or something you really enjoyed, and also does it include humor and comedy. Maybe I'll kind of ask you first. Yeah. That's that's such a lovely question thank you for that Christine. I think, especially in states outside of Khartou, I like some of my favorite moments were seeing instruments that I hadn't heard before and like musical skills that I hadn't heard before. So an example of that was in the Masin which is a city in Blue Nile State that I mentioned before, more to the south and they they had this I interviewed the sort of troop leader or band leader of this band called Khartou, and they use this, it's you know the name of the band is named after an instrument that they sort of it's it's it's really. Yeah, I don't know I just never seen it before right and I never heard it before and it Blue Nile is kind of known for that but it was just really interesting to be able to witness it and see it and hear it and really reflect on the fact that it's not wildly widely available even though it's literally a form of like an Sudanese instrument and it's not as easily accessible just even sonically to literally listen to. And then there's the Boor, for example, which comes out of the north. And, and so that was like one moment that was incredibly beautiful. And another was, I think I interviewed a playwright who after our interview sort of launched into just doing a monologue from a play it was just really it was really incredible to you I don't know just see people be so joyful and in their element and. And just, and just, I don't know just kind of see that happen. And then what else I mean that I could go on forever there was like a professor of music and art to like showed me an excerpt from his book and it was it was so lovely. And these things happen outside of research as well like I've literally met, like outside our research project as well right like I literally like have met artists in the airport gate, waiting for flights back to Khartoum who are like oh my God look at my song or my poetry, or my this or my that and it's just. Yeah, I think I any moments where we're able to encounter that was just like very joyful but those are definitely some of the ones that come to mind and. And we're just really amazing about leaving Khartoum and being able to witness artists there and then in terms of humor and comedy I think that's a very interesting question. Yeah, I mean I think I think humor, generally like from a personal standpoint is something that keeps us alive literally because it just helps us cope with the times and everything that is happening and I don't think it's a coincidence that maybe there are many as people that I've even met during our field work where like some of the artists that I interviewed outside of Khartoum and like in different states who have been through like such difficult times and would just sit there and make me laugh because the way that they discuss everything, ultimately they have this attitude of well you know it's really not our loss that this is his population is not invested in an art it's it's really theirs you know and that's really not our that like Khartoum for example is regarded as the epicenter of Sudanese art it's Khartoum's loss because our art is better objectively you know and just having that sort of attitude and that sense of humor and that just yeah that I think is something that has exhibited itself as part of artists lives but humor generally and comedy generally I mean I think how that factors instead I don't know I think that's a that is a very interesting different question yeah I don't know I think that's a really interesting answer actually not least because of how integral culture is to identity and identity is the culture and the interplay between the two but Reem what would you like to nominate some kind of favourite forms of artistic or cultural expression that you encountered over the course of writing and producing the book. Yeah I mean to be honest, writing the book, it really introduced me to a lot of books that were written on like songs and you know cultural history in Sudan and some books were very rare and it was very difficult to find but it really showed that a lot of the books that are kind of very specialised on this topic are kind of out of print or it's just very difficult to find to find them but with the support of some publishers I was able to get a few copies and I'm very grateful that I now have copies of them. But also some of the things that I really enjoyed is every time I would kind of interview and I remember I was in a jazeera in with Madani and every time I would kind of I would interview an artist, a musician and so on, they would always before you know they were always kind of willing to kind of you know tell me a poem you know play a song and I remember we had this interview and we went to we the interview location with as what was at this club. It was called the graduates club so we went there and then we were doing the interviews and all of a sudden so many different artists were you know came to the location to the venue. And then we had a you know a celebration outside people were singing and the people were laughing and dancing and we had this famous musician just kind of come in and then he played a few of his songs. So it was really nice to kind of feel that people are just very generous with their, with their hard work they're very generous with their time they were very generous in kind of just letting you into their space you know and I really appreciated that. The funny thing that I remember talking about you know humor and comedy is, I think, like right now when people are telling you stories that at the time of course we're very painful. There's, they can see humor in them like one example is this this group and it was in the 1990s and they were at the time they were just kind of university students who came together and they wanted to form kind of a theater to pay or a theater group. So they were performing this like Shakespearean play in like, you know, downtown Hortum near the University of Hortum, and they were in full, you know, costume basically. And then the police came and they raided the place and and he was telling me that the one of the, you know, actors that it was really funny how they were not they were kind of running down the street like down university street in like full costume like just you know like they're, they are out of this world and the police is chasing them, and then the audience is chasing the police and he said, it just looked crazy you know now when you when you look back it just it's very very funny but but at the time this is just really how they dealt with so he said, you know, it just really made us think that even if you're wearing costume, you always have to wear comfortable shoes because you just know that you have to run all the time you know. Now thank you so much for for sharing that theme, and I very much agree it's really nice to hear the humor from both your anecdotes and both your experiences. It's it's quite touching. The next question just to change topics likely is around gender it's from Lena. And she says, it often feels that for women, when it comes to political activism, the fight takes place from multiple fronts. Particularly of what happens on the streets where we are especially vulnerable to sexual assault from military aggressors and even allies. I wonder if you could please speak about that overwhelming burden and what can what if anything can be done about it. So, I don't know what your reflections are on this. Maybe how you want to start on that. Actually, I'm going to give this one to Dean because she wrote in some incredible chapters under the gender theme and I think maybe didn't have a chance to talk on that a little bit earlier so yeah this is just maybe the perfect time. To be honest, I think, when we when we were discussing the themes, we selected the theme gender because we felt that like women have completely different experiences, you know, I mean the prosecution was kind of at, you know, was affecting everyone, all the artists, but women their experiences were very particular because for example, you know, in the 90s in the early 1990s, you know, women were kind were banned, you know, from the radio station so we know songs by women were banned especially love songs, girl songs like we call them in Sudan. So, so the spaces for women to perform were very limited the spaces for them to kind of move were very limited, you know, and also I mean we've seen artists like Halem Bulbulu for example, who basically she was a performer, and Joahed for example they were performers actually they were not singers, but then they became musicians why because they couldn't perform anymore. So we saw a lot of a lot of different professions actually disappear they had to adapt to the new setup because they were at risk, you know, many left the country, the ones that remained really had to really struggle and fight a system that had laws that had a whole bunch of infrastructure to kind of criminalize the behavior of women in general, and of women, you know, artists in specific. So for for the musicians, for example, it was, they were more likely to get arrested, they were more likely to get prosecuted, and they were of course, women were very limited in like, when it comes to performance because so they had to like dress in a certain way or otherwise they would not be allowed to perform. And also for women writers, okay I mean I do have a little thing about women writers, and for women writers they would kind of, they would face a lot of threats they would face some kind of stigma. And they would be threatened with people who are telling them that or like the security system, a security apparatus would kind of let them know that they would tarnish their reputation, you know, and kind of spread rumors about them if they continue kind of writing and producing work and so on. So it was a very difficult, you know, context for women. And it was, and I think this is why, if you look for example at the like women, especially women writers and so on. So many enter the field and then they just kind of drop out and they disappear because it takes a lot of gut and it takes a lot of social support for you to kind of keep going. So I think the answer is very difficult, but I think realizing that for women, their activism and their presence in the public space is kind of continue to be, continues to be criminalized by the states and by the state apparatus is in itself, you know, an intra point. And then the next thing is to understand that part of the violence against women on the streets, whether it's sexual assault harassment by the state apparatus is to keep the is to is to make sure that they go back to their homes and this is kind of told we're on the streets, go home, what are you doing here, you know, because it's a way they're telling us you don't own the streets, you know, you should be at home so there's only the only way is to keep speaking out absolutely, but also to just document it to talk about it. And everyone should just kind of spread the word and write about this and you know we don't want this we don't want to be silent and we want this to be exposed basically on so many different levels. No thank you so much. Anything you'd like to add to that rubber. I think that's a that's a good that's a great answer. Yeah. Well I'm slightly mindful of time as well so just a final call for any questions from our audience, but also I know at the very start we talked about the need to look back in order to look forward. I suppose I had a question for you both looking forward, which is that the 2019 popular revolution in Sudan, and what were Africa's largest ruling street protests until very late last year have been an inspiration for many, both in the diaspora, but also around the world in other countries. What role do you think art has in popularizing and also maintaining the fight for a return to civilian led democratic rule. So, I mean I think, I think art is generally like a facilitator between, you know, like systems of power and then the people that are trying to shape culture where whereas where, like whether they're artists or people who are trying to do that for their own political agendas. And so just like acknowledging that that is a relationship that exists and has been so far flowing from one side to the other. Like, basically, the previous regime really using arts and culture is almost like an IV drip of like propaganda, right, of like trying to embed people with all these different like values and ideas of who they're supposed to be. And so, so when you I think after the revolution what happened was that once the space for self expression increased it was very hard to push that back in. And you know artists started to find audiences, which is really important and like what she has talked about and spaces and just discover their own sense of autonomy. And I think that is something that trickles into the general population because when you have the people who are the most oppressed, get be able to have more space, or more, more marginalized to be able to have more space to self express and be present and be visible and resist and then be able to actually see results. I mean, I mean, and we know that like in the past few years those sort of results were, you know, things things have become changing again, but still they were able to see something like tangible results and so that connection between the two, and that reversal of oh actually we can use this relationship that has been set in place between systems of power and arts and culture and we can use that for our own good and we can be loud about our resistance and then directly lead it to saying okay I'm an artist I'm producing art I'm flooding the streets with art and music and and just all forms of cultural expression. And the point here is we want civilian led rule, right we or we don't want to dictatorship or we don't want to military government. I think the revolution really helped really cement the, the pipeline, or the link between the two and have both of them constantly come up and conversation with each other, and use that as kind of like a cultural training because a lot of the answers to all of these big questions are just extremely literal things like buy more art, or learn more about history whether through like any form of learning right like reading online talking to people oral histories going to museums and and maybe doing more research on that and listening to resistance and being able to be a part of it and then also contextualize it and absorb the messages that are being put out of. Okay, we actually have the autonomy or we should have the autonomy and the agency to decide on the actual literal political future of this country and structure of this country and the way to do that is to start to form an opinion and to have one that makes sense and and and yeah to become a person who is very invested in shaping the country's future. Thank you so much maybe just a quick follow up around that I can see a question from in the chat about does the government also have its own propaganda machine in the Ministry of Culture. Yes, I can take that question, and we actually. So we have an example in the book and to be honest we were very careful like framing it because we also didn't want to kind of point fingers but after the Arab spring during protests so after the Arab spring in 2010, you know, and 11 and 12 and so on. The government wanted to kind of, they knew that it would kind of stretch to them because Sudan was already kind of seeing some kind of protest movement so they want to absorb the anger. So what they did is they started kind of supporting, you know, plays and different kind of artistic work that would kind of appear that it's like revolutionary and that it's kind of allowing the space to kind of have a dialogue about Sudan and so on. But the reality is it was like very controlled, you know, material, you know, because like I said they want to absorb the anger and they also wanted to kind of to make it appear that there is a very kind of a superior civic space basically. So I think and this we have to be very aware of that we have to be very aware that the, you know, that the security apparatus is very much infiltrating all the different state institutions that are responsible for culture. So we have to be aware of that as part of this movement and we have to deal with it accordingly. And maybe a final question for you both before time unfortunately is against us. Were there any chapters that were particularly hard or challenging to write about in terms of the findings or any other aspects. Maybe you'd like to go first on that. Yeah, I think the conflict, the chapters under the conflict and governance team were difficult to write in terms of the stories that were being the stories that were being reflected because really discussed a lot of betrayal and a lot of like the ways that surveillance was ultimately sort of, how can I say it's interested to the actual population that someone would look at, for example their artist friend and report them to the police or to their family member or their neighbor and how that kind of came about and that included some very heavy stories of artists, you know, being betrayed by people they know or being reported. And, you know, being tortured or taken to warehouses and left there for days and just being saved on the off chance that you know they know someone or their family knows someone or something like that so in terms of that that was I think, you know, I think those were like very difficult stories to sit with when you get to the, the more granular level of, okay, there are very systemic influences happening but then you get to the granular level of okay people really started making personal choices to the culture in this way, and you just really see like the level of brainwash that happened in a very real and direct way. And then I think the memory chapters were just difficult to write in terms of the like dense theoretical work that goes into sort of talking some talking about something like collective memory but ultimately everything was such an honor and such a pleasure to be interested with stories and to be able to do this work at all. So, yeah, just a lot of gratitude as well. Well, thank you so much, how about yourself. Yeah, just to jump in quickly, I think, I mean in general yes, I would say all the chapters were difficult because of resources so we did a lot of interviews and of course, you know, a lot of documentation was kind of missing but also I would say that really difficult is to kind of choose what to write on or choose like to focus the book because when you're telling people are writing a book about this topic. There's so many things that you that that people feel that you should include there's this almost this burden of like wanting to include everything and off telling the whole story and this is something we grappled with that we cannot tell the whole story you tell the whole the whole story, you tell part of it and then you kind of step back and you have this space and and and you become a primary kind of source and you let other people continue telling the story. So I think for us to come to this conclusion and to kind of feel less guilty it took some time. But at the but once we were there we just felt that you know what this is it we did our work. It's out and then we do want to just continue contributing and this is one of the things we want to do is we want to kind of digitize some of the sources we use some of the interviews and so on just to make sure that we kind of continue giving back to the community and to encourage more people to write. Thank you so much. Thank you so much all about. Thank you so much to our audience as well I'm just very mindful of times with at hand, which is against us as always a very quick question my final question for colleagues and I'm thinking on the you've got your hand up in particular so you might be best place to answer. How can we buy the book. Sure. And I have so much to say I feel so much gratitude to really be here today. Let me start with where we can find the book or people can find the book back and I can find the book everywhere. I have. But we've got three ways so if you're in Sudan or people are in Sudan, you can buy directly from us for the time being, but it will be launched in bookstores once the Arabic ones come. Hopefully by next month. And then if you're in the East of Africa part or Eastern Africa part and you can buy through my hearing books. And we're going to be dropping all these links tomorrow on our page just kind of, you know, let this event have this final bang on our social media and the third thing which is a very exciting opportunity that we had through you Paul and Angelica, which is a partnership with the African books collective, which means that the book is pretty much available worldwide, mostly for the audiences in Europe, America, Canada, and pretty much, you know, the Western hemisphere. We're trying to build up more distribution channels so our book can be available everywhere. But yeah, there's definitely a way so if anyone would be interested in buying it and it's not and does not live in Sudan, East Africa or Western hemisphere, please do reach out and we will try to figure something out for you. The last thing I want to say is that, again, because the book took three years, I really want to send a huge thank you to and maybe they're not even in this forum but I know this is recorded on any watch it to everyone who's really been part of this journey editors, writers, people who have for logistics and movement planning project managers, just everyone who's who circled through this project one way or another, or contributed to it one way or another, from our side at Andrea. And of course, everyone who was instrumental in facilitating so many interviews and meetings for Rima and Ruba and their assistants as well and the assistants that you, the gratitude to them as well. And just really like it's an incredible journey to be on going from a digital magazine to having published book. And just, yeah, I can't thank people enough and of course for you as well, the center of African studies and for you, Paul, Angelica and Paul Shevaka, of course, big thank you to Shevaka and Bashair, who I met at the time when Andrea was brewing as an idea so here we are almost, you know, eight years later. Yeah, Bashair is one of the founders of Shevaka and I'll leave you here. Thank you Paul and thank you Angelica so much. Thank you so much everyone and thank you for your time this evening. I'm just going to hand over to Angelica for a final word, before we bid you good evening or good afternoon or possibly good morning somewhere in the world. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Ruba and Rima for a fantastic discussion. I mean, I would definitely buy the book and read, I'm sorry I haven't done it in advance, but I would definitely do it now. It was an incredible discussion. Thank you so much. We will share the link for those who couldn't make it tonight and we will keep sharing it. Thank you for your excellent sharing and thank you for our audience and I look forward to reconnect it very soon. Thank you everybody and excellent. Thank you so much.