Qualla: University of Khartoum

University of Khartoum: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Elrasheed Diab, CC BY-SA 3.0. In six weeks, Britain raised £100,000. The year was 1898, Kitchener had just won the Battle of Omdurman, and the donations - public and private - came in faster than anyone expected. The purpose was a memorial to Charles Gordon, the British officer killed at Khartoum thirteen years earlier. What Britain built with that money turned out to be something neither the donors nor Kitchener had quite imagined: the institution that would train most of independent Sudan's political, scientific, and literary leaders for the next century. Gordon Memorial College opened in 1902. Today it is the University of Khartoum, and every revolution in modern Sudan has started somewhere near its gates.

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Image: User:Elrasheed Diab | CC BY-SA 3.0

University of Khartoum: Gordon's Name, Sudan's Students

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petr Adam Dohnálek, CC BY-SA 3.0 cz. The college that opened in 1902 was modest - three schools, mostly primary and vocational. A small teachers' training centre. An industrial school. A bacteriological analysis laboratory added in 1905 through donations from Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Through ...

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Image: Petr Adam Dohnálek | CC BY-SA 3.0 cz

University of Khartoum: Independence

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shmyg, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 24 July 1956, seven months after Sudan became independent, the new parliament passed a bill elevating Khartoum University College to full university status. The institution shed its memorial name and became simply the University of Khartoum. The British classicist Michael Gran...

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Image: Shmyg | CC BY-SA 3.0

University of Khartoum: A Tradition of Protest

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leendert Adriaan van Es, CC BY-SA 4.0. The University of Khartoum has been a staging ground for political change from the moment it became a university. Every Sudanese revolution of the postcolonial era has had its roots, at least partly, on these grounds. In October 1964, student protests triggered the uprising that ...

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Image: Leendert Adriaan van Es | CC BY-SA 4.0

University of Khartoum: The Campus in Wartime

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petr Adam Dohnálek, CC BY-SA 3.0 cz. When war broke out in Khartoum in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the University of Khartoum was suddenly in a battlefield. In the first days of fighting, at least one student was killed by gunfire on campus; he was buried on campus days...

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Image: Petr Adam Dohnálek | CC BY-SA 3.0 cz

University of Khartoum: What Continues

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petr Adam Dohnálek, CC BY-SA 3.0 cz. At the time of writing, the University of Khartoum is a ruin and a rallying point. Faculty continue to teach online and from refuge in Cairo, Addis Ababa, and elsewhere. The student body - 16,800 undergraduates in its last normal year, 55 percent female, drawn from across Sudan a...

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Image: Petr Adam Dohnálek | CC BY-SA 3.0 cz