Sudan's Revolution: Urban/Rural and Wheat/Sorghum Divide

The Rift Valley Institute published in February 2020 a study titled "Sudan's Grain Divide: A Revolution of Bread and Sorghum" by Edward Thomas and Magdi el Gizouli.

Street protests played an important part in bringing Omar al-Bashir's thirty-year rule to an end. This study argues that it was urban wheat-based bread-eaters, both the better off and poorer beneficiaries of National Congress Party rule, who took to the streets. Their grievances were also shared by the wider urban-based elite, but were distant from those of the rural peripheries, who mostly eat sorghum, and had arguably suffered and resisted the Bashir regime for much longer.