With Sudan’s street-fighting women

ON APRIL 23rd I stood amid throngs of Sudanese as a train carrying hundreds of people arrived in the heart of Khartoum. The carriages were crammed with passengers from Atbara, the town where anti-government demonstrations had begun five months earlier. They had come to join the swelling ranks of protesters against military rule. As we watched these reinforcements arrive, a fellow journalist remarked that the scene reminded him of Russia in 1917. (He’s an old hand but I don’t think he was there.) More than a century ago Vladimir Ilyich Lenin arrived in Russia on a train from Switzerland, intent on seizing power for the Bolsheviks. Yet, train aside, it is an inapt parallel. For unlike Lenin’s coup d’etat, what I saw in Sudan was peaceful, joyous and leaderless.

Less than a fortnight earlier, on April 11th, civilians had forced Sudan’s army into ending the 30-year reign of the dictator, Omar al-Bashir, who is indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide. That was not enough, however, to end the sit-in. In the weeks after Mr Bashir’s ouster ordinary Sudanese kept up pressure on the junta to cede power. More than a month after my visit, the protestors remain dug in.