TRIALS:  Across generations of displacement, struggle, and war in Sudan, ordinary acts of care become a form of inheritance that no violence can erase…

By  Ahmed Ismat Ahmed

We are sitting at Gallal. It’s in Madinaty, on the edge of Cairo where the buildings are all new and the streets are too wide.

The tea is too sweet the way Sudanese tea is supposed to be too sweet when someone else makes it for you. Mahmoud is across from me.

I don’t remember either of us standing up. Only the hug itself, which went on long enough that an Egyptian girl at the next table put down her phone and started crying. She didn’t know us. She cried because whatever passed between two men holding on to each other in the middle of that cafe was apparently visible even to a stranger who had no context at all.

Mahmoud went red immediately—a Sudanese man has no idea what to do with a stranger’s tears—so he pulled out his phone, opened Facebook, and muttered that she was probably crying over some relationship, while the screen in his hand played footage of Khartoum burning.

We’re good at that silence now. The silence of being physically tethered to one place while completely living inside another. I kept thinking: Does everyone I love do the same? Carry so much that they stop feeling it, until a stranger has to cry for them?

The screen lights up. The wallpaper is a photo of my grandfather’s class in Wadi Halfa, built after the water took Halfa Dagheim. The first time my grandmother told me about it, she didn’t say “displacement.” She said, “We left the house, and the water took it.”

Halfa Dagheim was going to drown for the High Dam—a decision made far away by people who would never bear its cost. When they moved to Wadi Halfa, there was only dust. The first shared project families built was a school.

The teacher was my grandfather Ahmed, an English teacher. He gathered children under a tree and started. I inherited that before I understood it. Not money. Not land. The habit of starting under a tree when the official map says your town should no longer exist.

The waitress calls me ya walad even though I am 29. That word makes me think of my mother. Her father died during her certificate exams. She carried grief silently and kept studying until she earned admission to veterinary school at the University of Khartoum. She graduated while pregnant with me. I came from that lineage of exhausted people who kept choosing endurance.

When I entered the University of Khartoum in 2015, I thought I was entering a sanctuary. The conversations that shaped us happened beside roads, under trees, around tea stalls that surrounded campus from every direction.

The women who ran them knew who was always late, who never had money, who argued too much, who quietly listened. They knew us better than the administration.

For a long time I thought we had to be hard to win. I thought we had to stop feeling to keep going. I was wrong. The only thing that ever saved us was the opposite. The tea. The sitting together after. The hand that was out before you asked. They can turn violence into money. They can turn gold into weapons. They cannot turn care into money. Care refuses to be bought. That is why they fear it.

In the republic of the unimportant—at the tea stalls, in the resistance committees, in the unions that kept meeting in borrowed rooms after being banned—we kept a different ledger.

Not gold.

Who was missing, who needed medicine, who hadn’t eaten. That ledger didn’t make anyone rich. It kept people alive.

At Gallal, Mahmoud orders a second tea without asking me. He knows I will want it. We have this habit from Khartoum—you order for the other person before he finishes, so he doesn’t have to say he wants more but has no money.

He pushes sugar toward me. That small push is the whole essay. You notice who needs sugar and you push it without making a speech.

And finally—to the child walking into a school that hasn’t been built yet, with a notebook slipping against his arm. Inside, a poster on the wall is crooked. Someone taped it in a hurry and left one corner hanging. He will stop, shift the notebook to the other arm, and straighten it without thinking. He learned that from someone who sat next to him when he cried. That is ordinary.

That is how a child inherits care. – Africa is a Country

Comment

Teacher training and inequality

What hope does a black child in a township have when the education system promises liberation, yet risks preparing teachers merely to manage the conditions that imprison that child’s future?

This is the unsettling question raised by a research into the experiences of 24 student teachers. This study is published elsewhere today. Nineteen of the teachers confined their reflections largely to technical concerns: completing lessons, controlling classrooms and covering the syllabus. Only five demonstrated the deeper questioning that connects classroom practice with poverty, language, privilege and fairness.

This small study cannot speak for every teacher or university. But, its findings demand attention because they expose a troubling possibility: that teacher preparation can become an apprenticeship in accepting inequality. There is something profoundly dispiriting about teaching geography without maps, or science without adequate equipment, while measuring success chiefly by whether the lesson was completed.

What has completion achieved if the child remains excluded from meaningful learning?

Teachers face enormous pressures. They cannot supply electricity to every household, rebuild every classroom or eradicate unemployment. Their daily struggle deserves support. Yet, these constraints make critical reflection more necessary. A child’s circumstances must inform teaching, rather than become an explanation for diminished expectations.

QUESTIONS?

When an assignment requires internet access, who asks whether every learner can connect? When language obstructs understanding, who questions whose knowledge counts? When hunger silences a child, who recognises that discipline alone cannot restore concentration? These are questions about the substance of education and the dignity of those it serves.

The responsibility reaches beyond individual teachers. Universities must examine what their programmes reward. Schools must give mentors time and support to guide meaningful reflection. Education authorities must confront the material deprivation that no amount of teacher commitment can overcome alone. The study offers a crucial opening: supportive mentors helped student teachers ask difficult questions. That suggests this bleak pattern can change. For the township child, hope cannot remain a ceremonial promise repeated at school openings and examination celebrations. It must become visible in classrooms where teachers recognise exclusion, question practices that deepen it and help learners imagine possibilities beyond their immediate circumstances.

We should lament a system that risks teaching resignation. We should demand the resolve to change it. Our children deserve that commitment now. The researcher’s counsel deserves to guide that effort: “South Africa cannot achieve quality education for all while ignoring the conditions that prevent many learners from succeeding. Developing reflective teachers is essential if schools are to contribute to a more equitable and just society.

Indeed.