Muzan Alneel and people’s power in Sudan 

Leo Zeilig writes about the inspirational work of the late Sudanese revolutionary Muzan Alneel and an initiative to foreground revolution, struggle and resistance in Africa.

Sudanese revolutionary Muzan Alneel was one of the most brilliant voices for socialist transformation in the country’s struggles against dictatorship and for a new anti-capitalist Sudan. Tragically, she died in April 2026; she had recently completed a small book for Editor House Facility, which stands as her last account of the Sudanese revolution. In this booklet, she describes the revolution’s experience of people’s power and genuine revolutionary democracy in the most extraordinary – and extreme – circumstances. What emerges is a vision of popular power in the hands of Sudan’s insurgent popular classes, and an inspiring account of revolution in a world on the edge.

I was put in touch with Muzan Alneel by the UK based socialist Anne Alexander last year. Prior to this, I had read about her, her activism during the Sudanese revolution and her writing, including a pamphlet Sudan’s Revolutionary and Popular Movements, written with others for the MENA Solidarity Network (available here). 

The contact was established because of my work in East Africa. EHF (Editor House Facility) is a Ugandan publishing project founded by Yusuf Serunkuma in 2014. Serunkuma is a journalist and public intellectual and is well known as an outspoken and radical commentator on Ugandan (and global) politics from his base in Kampala. But more than anything, he is a publisher – this is his original love.

Together we are developing EHF into a pan-African publishing house, with titles that reflect on the continent’s radical modern history, and its recent revolutionary struggles. One initiative has been our pamphlet series, Censored Histories. Muzan’s booklet is part of this series.

Setting up this series in 2025, we decided that we needed to cover events and politics on the continent in bite-sized pamphlets that captured popular events, social movements, uprisings, history, and politics ignored or ‘censored’ by mainstream writing and publishing on Africa. Our objective was a broad and popular readership, and short-format, pocket-foldable extended ‘essays’ that could be read in one sitting (or rather, standing in a queue or on the bus).

Another of our objectives was to draw attention to sub-Saharan African revolutions, popular struggles, and resistance movements. The great wave of revolutionary struggles in North Africa and the Middle East received copious and justified attention – but, once again, the continent further south, its revolutionary struggles over a similar period were almost completely ignored.

Who, for example, outside specialist journals, academic debates, and conference proceedings, ever seriously considered the extraordinary events in Burkina Faso from 2011–2014? These years involved a range of popular and working-class struggles, strikes, and uprisings that left anyone interested breathless – more often fascinated and inspired.

As we know, 2011 was the year of the Egyptian revolution, but it was also a time of rippling, ever-expanding economic and political strikes, occupations, and protests across Burkina Faso- captured brilliantly by the independent researcher Lila Chouli in her short book on the movement.

Other popular struggles, near-insurrections, uprisings, and strikes shook Nigeria (2012), Senegal (2012), Ethiopia (2015–2018), and South Africa (2012–2014). Many other examples could be provided. Once more – true to old and racist habits – the world paid little attention. More scandalously, neither did the international radical left – weak, divided, and hopelessly Eurocentric as it is. There were few efforts to explore the complexities and possibilities of the uprisings and mass movements which were typically dismissed as peripheral to where the action was really taking place.

Real struggle, and real revolutions existed elsewhere, we were told. 

Sudan’s revolutionary struggles received more attention, but not enough. First triggered by bread price hikes and massive inflation, huge street demonstrations exploded into a national revolution in December 2018. The movement managed to create a situation where the military removed dictator Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.

Among a generation who emerged from the furnace of the popular uprising across Sudan from 2018 was the outstanding organiser and revolutionary Muzan Alneel.

Alneel brought the Sudanese revolution, its enormous hopes, frustrations, and failures, to the attention of the global left. In meetings and solidarity campaigns, her voice – radiant, clear and decisive – could be heard speaking about the challenges of the revolution. 

I had emailed her briefly in October 2021, when, as editor of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) website, I asked her for an update on the situation in Sudan. Looking back at 2018-19, she then wrote, ‘One chant which has been heard during the ongoing protests in Sudan, and which has become a prevalent part of daily life, is the call ‘It hasn’t fallen yet’: a phrase that follows the call of the December 2018 uprising ‘Just fall’ – referring to the dictatorial regime. The phrase ‘It hasn’t fallen yet’ is a clear expression of the protesters’ rejection of the current situation in the country, and of their will to continue protesting. Other chants include ‘Whether it’s fallen or not, we’re staying here’ and ‘It hasn’t fallen yet, the rule is military still’.

A theme in her writing on the revolution was the weakness of socialist politics; by 2021, this had become central to the inability of the popular movements to break through. The slogan above, ‘the rule is military still’, expresses this impasse. Muzan now looked explicitly to the failure of organisations or, more accurately, the absence of a socialist politics from below strong enough to counter the NGOs, professional associations, and the ‘military’, which had captured the revolution.

But if Muzan had stopped here, we would have had only one side of the picture. The failure of organisation spoke to real political and popular sentiments in Sudan. New political forms emerged, including the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA), favoured over other existing forces on the left. As she wrote at the end of 2021 in the blog for ROAPE, ‘these parties have repeatedly compromised and allied themselves with the autocratic regimes they claimed to oppose, and they have repeatedly failed to realise any of their goals, despite justifying their compromises as the road to achieving them.’

So naturally, Muzan explains, protesters favoured other forms of organisation, from neighbourhood resistance committees to professional organisations. In her words, ‘the popularity of such organisations is the result of alienation from ideological organisation, in favour of geographic or professional organisation.’ Though, once more, she did not stop at a simple acceptance of this reality – it was understandable, entirely logical, she argued but there was a central weakness which the left had to confront one way or another. 

Muzan, with subtlety and empirical clarity, delivered an unapologetic slam-dunk: ‘The lack of a revolutionary vision among the protesters was the result of the absence of any revolutionary party capable of revolutionary theorisation and of introducing a counter discourse.’

She didn’t care if this formulation seemed hackneyed, a repeat of the formulation long favoured by the revolutionary left, frequently tiny and sectarian, in the Global North – that revolutionary party-building was the sole activity and solution for any meaningful socialist project. These were not her debates – instead Muzan was speaking of the urgency of Sudan’s revolutionary situation. In this situation, she showed, if you cared sufficiently to take a look, there was a ‘lack of revolutionary vision’ connected to an ‘absence of any revolutionary party.’ 

These were not simple explanations. 

What was striking to me about her commentary was how relentlessly she sought to interpret and make sense of what was happening for the revolution itself, herself, her comrades and the rest of us. Asking hard questions, interrogating the revolution’s weaknesses, and insisting on using Marxism as a tool for analysis – not a labour-saving device. 

There are many examples of Muzan’s capacity for such hard analysis, but I like her statement about Marxism in an endorsement I asked her to write for the republication of John Molyneux’s excellent short book, What is the Real Marxist Tradition? 

In December 2025, I sent the book to her and asked for a quote we could use in the publicity for the new edition – her response was swift, reading the book in the blink of an eye. She wrote, ‘for us in the Global South, where reality differs greatly from that of Europe, thereby demanding a Marxism of contextualised design, not rigid imitation. The method offered is therefore a vital tool in enabling Marxist projects capable of fulfilling its role in “guiding revolutions to victory.”’ 

Never a quick fix, always an insistence on critically using Marxism as a method, to guide ‘revolutions to victory’. Beautifully put. However, her endorsement, if read without context or global understanding, can seem exaggerated – extreme even. Are revolutions really the order of the day? Yet the reality of Marxism in the Global South, as Muzan writes, does not have the ‘luxury’ of seeing revolutions as an abstraction – a choice for the left. 

In 2021, the Sudanese struggle took a decisive turn. The revolutionary momentum was largely derailed by a military coup in 2021, followed by the subsequent implosion of the country as the coup leaders launched a civil war in 2023. Regional – or more accurately, sub-imperialist – interests have been deeply involved in Sudan’s war, dividing the UAE, Egypt, and Iran.

Though shattered on the rocks of war, remarkably revolutionary organising and popular power was maintained. This was what Muzan wanted to write about in her EHF booklet. 

To start with, in 2025, I had wanted to commission Muzan to write a general introduction on the Sudanese revolution for our pamphlet series – something fundamental, basic, and clear.

Muzan pushed back and insisted on another project entirely: ‘in terms of topic I was thinking about the survival strategies of civilians in Sudan in the ongoing war, both in terms of mutual aid as well as productive economic activities. I think there are important lessons and potentials of popular organising within those efforts and also some major shortcomings.’

I commented on the same day, as we discussed the topic, ‘perhaps also suggest that the Sudan experience reinforces and confirms a full and proper democratic movement, creating a bottom-up critique of the so-called democratisation pushed on the continent, as part of structural adjustment, hollowed out and meaningless etc.’ 

Within seconds, Muzan sent a heart emoji, and the words, ‘that definitely goes with what I’m thinking about.’

For an activist a writing project always involves delays and missed deadlines, and that is a good thing. Writing needs to be displaced by life and activism – turning up copy on time suggests a little too much willingness to obey the computer and the deadline. I am pleased to say there were delays. I pestered Muzan politely, like a good editor, and in early January 2026, I received a message. ‘I am both embarrassed and glad to share my manuscript. I would also like to apologise for the delays, as a recently displaced person I have to weigh financial issues and jobs very carefully unfortunately, I’m sure you understand.’ 

What was eventually written was far more than I had hoped for, and  more important than a simple hurrah to the 2018–2019 revolution; instead, it was a deep dive into its popular forums and decision-making bodies. The task of revolutionaries – and Muzan’s pamphlet – was powerfully stated in her opening pages: ‘the lived experience shows that the old forms of mass organisations might no longer be suitable for our time. Labour organisations, for example, have a rich history in the past century. However, it is a history of labour organising in an environment of industrial centres and large agricultural projects. The contemporary economy of the African continent and large portions of the Global South are shaped by precarious labour opportunities and the gig economy. This thereby cements the need for reimagining mass organisations to effectively activate the force of the masses for their liberation… An organised public front is, for example, what makes the difference between democratic participation and electoral performism.’

When war broke out, splintering the organisations of the revolution and the Neighbourhood and Resistance committees, new forms of organising almost instantly developed. Muzan writes, ‘The Sudanese resistance front faced the war in the same manner it did the years before: as an organisational giant, with the lack of a revolutionary theory as its Achilles heel. A new unit of mass organisation emerged in the first hours of the war: the Emergency Rooms (ERs). They shared the core characteristics of the Neighbourhood Resistance Rooms in terms of being organisations of individuals from a specified geographic area sharing a commitment to a task. And while the task of the committees was to organise resistance, the task that the Emergency Rooms took on was that of saving lives during wartime.’

The war created massive suffering, but also revolutionary adaptation. Muzan was clear about the challenges for us in the booklet: ‘The time indeed calls for organising. And the revolutionary task of reimagining our organisations in order to effectively build and protect them can only be done via the serious study of the lessons of our recent and distant past, and via the praxis of experimentation and theorisation.’

Building People’s Power is a startling, brilliant account of Sudan’s popular power, which poses profound questions: how do we grapple with the major changes we have seen across the Global South in our politics and revolutionary projects? What has changed in the real world of popular protest and revolutions that forces us to reappraise our political formulas? What does the ‘task of reimagining our organisations’ look like in the context of the serious study that Muzan has provided?

The short book is now available from the website of Editor House Facility in Uganda and can be downloaded as an eBook or, even better, read in its original pamphlet form – sitting on a train, waiting to start marching on a demonstration, quoted from in a meeting on revolution, and popular democracy and passed, hand-to-hand, from activist to activist, reader to reader. 

There is no balm for loss, no quick fix for the pain of grief – none I have found, at least. When news came of Muzan’s death a few months ago, the reaction from her readers, comrades, and friends was initially stunned silence. A wordless disbelief that such a vital and necessary comrade had died. Then, slowly, as word began to spread and friends began to surface, we whispered the news to each other, invariably with the question: ‘Have you heard?’

Books, blogs, even pamphlets do not really help, but they do keep our history and thinking alive. Muzan’s indelible, passionate writing and analysis in Building People’s Power ensure we keep thinking about how we can sustain revolutionary practice and popular power and build on and create new forms of organising in the life-and-death battles ahead of us for another world. 

Muzan will be alongside us in these struggles.