How long will we keep letting our Sudanese heritage be erased and forgotten?

After the liberation of Khartoum, images of shattered glass and looted display cases from Sudan’s National Museum spread across social media. For many Sudanese, it was the first time they had ever seen the museum’s interior. There was no national outcry – not beyond the tight circles of those in the cultural field who had spent their lives trying to protect what the country never truly embraced: its own memory.

Sudan has more pyramids than any other country in the world – over 200 still standing – but it is Egypt’s pharaohs who fill museums, schoolbooks, and movie screens. Even when those rulers were Nubian kings like Taharqa or Shabaka, their names were folded into Egypt’s narrative. Sudan’s history became someone else’s legacy.

Over 100,000 artifacts, spanning from prehistory to the Islamic period, have been destroyed, stolen, or disappeared. One of the few surviving objects was a towering granite statue of Pharaoh Taharqa – the Nubian king who ruled from Kush to the Levant. He still stands, thousands of years later, watching it all happen again.

But the looting of Sudan’s history didn’t begin with the RSF.

In the 1830s, an Italian treasure hunter named Giuseppe Ferlini arrived in Sudan. He blasted open more than 40 pyramids in Meroë with dynamite, looking for gold. What he found were intricate treasures – earrings, crowns, sculptures – which he smuggled back to Europe. But even European museums refused to believe they had come from a Black African civilization. They assumed he was lying. The evidence was too refined for their expectations of us.

And it wasn’t just racism. It was politics.

The Sudan National Museum was never just a building. It was a fragile attempt to gather what had been scattered. It was built by colonists, and often seen by locals as meant for them, not us. And yet, it still stood. In that broken museum, the only thing left standing was a statue of Taharqa – alone at the entrance, watching as his memory was erased for the second time.

In the late 1800s, the Mahdist revolution disrupted archaeological work, not just logistically but ideologically. Ancient history was dismissed as un-Islamic, a pagan distraction from the present. That belief never really left. Ferlini’s workers were likely Sudanese – men who hauled stolen artifacts across the desert, unaware they were carrying the crowns of their own ancestors.

But the theft of our identity began even earlier.

In 1820, the Blue Sultanate of Sudan fell to Muhammad Ali Pasha – the Albanian ruler of Ottoman Egypt. He came looking for gold and soldiers to build an empire, and he found both in Sudan. From that conquest until Sudan’s formal independence in 1956, we were not a nation of our own. Every Sudanese was legally Egyptian. Even today, our names and monuments are often claimed across the border. Sudan has more pyramids than any other country in the world – over 200 still standing – but it is Egypt’s pharaohs who fill museums, schoolbooks, and movie screens. Even when those rulers were Nubian kings like Taharqa or Shabaka, their names were folded into Egypt’s narrative. Sudan’s history became someone else’s legacy.

In 1931, Emperor Haile Selassie renamed Abyssinia “Ethiopia” – a name that, for centuries, had referred not to the highlands but to the Black African kingdoms south of Egypt: Kush, Napata, Meroë. In biblical and classical texts, the “Ethiopians” were Sudanese. But with one political decision, even that symbolic inheritance was shifted east.

The erasure continued in the name of development. In the 1960s, Egypt built the Aswan High Dam, submerging vast areas of Nubian land in both countries. Dozens of archaeological sites were drowned. A global campaign saved Abu Simbel – near the Sudanese border – but Sudan’s Nubian heritage was left to disappear beneath the water.

At the other end of the supply chain are the collectors and dealers in the West. Some of them claim to be preserving African heritage – saving it from destruction. And in some cases, maybe they are. But more often, this is just colonial logic dressed in new language: the idea that Africa doesn’t deserve its past. That same logic informed eugenic “research” which used Sudanese skulls to justify racial hierarchies.

In recent years, Chinese-funded dam projects inside Sudan repeated this pattern. The Merowe Dam displaced tens of thousands and submerged entire cultural landscapes. At a conference, I once watched Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet – who had spent decades excavating Kerma – cry while warning that Sudanese heritage was being lost again. Even he remembered. Why didn’t we?

This forgetting hasn’t only come from outsiders.

Sudan’s 30-year Islamist regime treated history, art, and culture with suspicion. In the 2000s, the country’s Minister of Culture publicly admitted he had never visited the National Museum – because it “contained idols.” That wasn’t a fringe opinion. It was policy.

By the 2010s, financial desperation pushed the state to open historical lands to unregulated mining. Foreign companies were given contracts in archaeological zones. Gold excavation was left to anyone with a shovel. Reports emerged of statues and relics being melted down for scrap – destroyed not out of malice, but because no one told the diggers what they were holding.

And now, during this war, the RSF looted the museum. Some fighters didn’t even know what they were destroying. In a widely shared video, soldiers mistook ancient mummies for massacre victims. They weren’t desecrating history because they hated it. They simply didn’t know it was theirs.

Earlier this year, in the second year of the war, Sudanese artifacts began appearing for sale online – on platforms like eBay. A few months before Khartoum was liberated, trucks were reportedly seen leaving the museum and heading south. Not rebels. Not protectors. Just more men hauling away what they didn’t recognize.

At the other end of the supply chain are the collectors and dealers in the West. Some of them claim to be preserving African heritage – saving it from destruction. And in some cases, maybe they are. But more often, this is just colonial logic dressed in new language: the idea that Africa doesn’t deserve its past. That same logic informed eugenic “research” which used Sudanese skulls to justify racial hierarchies.

And so, the story continues: soldiers loot, desperate people help, dealers buy, collectors profit, museums display. Their biases are confirmed. Ours are too. The circle repeats.

In the name of racism at times, politics at others, and often in the name of development – or simply out of ignorance of the value of history – Sudanese heritage has been continuously erased. How much longer will this be allowed to continue?

But the Sudan National Museum was never just a building. It was a fragile attempt to gather what had been scattered. It was built by colonists, and often seen by locals as meant for them, not us. And yet, it still stood. In that broken museum, the only thing left standing was a statue of Taharqa – alone at the entrance, watching as his memory was erased for the second time.

Whatever comes next – whether for Sudan or for the Sudans – let it begin with truth. Let us look at what we’ve done and what we’ve let be done. Let us remember.

So next time we stand before those glass cases, we see ourselves. And we don’t dare break them.