It is difficult to imagine that the political violence and civil war now tearing Sudan apart is the very outcome Sudanese artists and writers, particularly those involved in the early comics magazines, labored to forestall, since these publications articulated a cultural project grounded in ethnic plurality, regional recognition, and the cultivation of shared civic imagination across Sudan’s heterogeneous populations. In the years that followed World War II, when the Anglo-Egyptian condominium still administered, managed, and shaped the educational bureaucracy of Sudan, a policy of childhood national and cultural literacy emerged as a critical field through which state officials, teachers, and artists were involved. This state policy, led by Sudan’s institutes and Ministry of Education, attempted to articulate the configurations of a broader national agenda that centers children’s comics in curriculum and textbook programs. At the center of this comics literature, educational policymakers underscored Sudan’s African and Arabic linguistic and cultural identity. It is in this context that the first comics magazine in the Arab world, Majallat al-Subyan, designed for children, emerged. Issued by a governmental educational institution concerned with pedagogy and learning, Al-Subyan (which preceded Egypt’s Sindibad Magazine by six years) was primarily intended to parallel Sudan’s curriculum and underscore its complex binary African and Arab identity.
Established in 1946 through the teacher-training institute at Bakht Alruda in White Nile State, Majallat al-Subyan captured this experiment in its earliest stage. The magazine first circulated in modest numbers, yet its reach widened quickly as the Ministry of Education recognized that children’s publications could function as a pedagogical tool and a cultural platform for a society negotiating multiple racial, linguistic, and regional histories, especially during its early independence era. Through a blend of pages filles with comics characters, poetry, regional cultural diversity, children’s drawings, readers’ pages, and serialized moral tales, the comics magazine introduced Sudanese and other Arabic-speaking children to an Afro-Arab world that they already inhabited but had not yet encountered in textual and visual forms. The magazine’s importance lies in the way it naturalized this ethnic and cultural regional hybridity, turning it into a baseline of childhood learning and friendship building throughout Sudan rather than a contested ideological frame. It should be noted that this comics tradition of underscoring Sudan Afro-Arab identity would continue in other comics magazines such as Maryud and Sabah until the 1990s.
Figure 1 Selected cover page from al-Subyan Comics Magazine issues illustrating visual representations of Afro-Arab Sudanese belonging.Figure 2 Cover page of Maryud Comics Magazine situatingAfro-Arab Sudan within children’s print culture. Bakht Alruda, one of the first teacher-training institutes in Sudan, shaped the ethos of al-Subyan Comics Magazine and other comics projects after independence. Established in 1934 near the city of Ed Dueim along the White Nile south of Khartoum, the institute served as a pedagogical laboratory for the entire country, especially during the 1940s and 1950s. Under the leadership of Vincent L. Griffiths, its curriculum blended British instructional methods with local norms and traditions.[1] Its graduates and trainees later settled and taught across Sudan’s provinces, carrying with them a training that emphasized observation of village life, attention to vernacular languages, and the cultivation of learning materials that addressed children as active participants in their Afro-Arab environment. When the ministry authorized a children’s magazine from this location rather than from Khartoum, it tied the project not to a capital-centered vision of Sudanese nationalism but to a rural teacher-training institution that had long acted as a bridge between Sudan’s regional diversity and its emerging bureaucracy.
Emergence of Children’s comics Magazine in Sudan: al-Subyan
Awad Sati, al-Subyan Magazine’s first editor, embodied this bridging role of the institute. Educated at Gordon Memorial College (renamed the University of Khartoum in 1956) and later at the American University of Beirut, Sati brought to the project a command of classical Arabic, a familiarity with modern pedagogical theory, and a sensitivity to the socially complex textures of Sudanese Afro-Arab life, culture, and history. Under his direction, al-Subyan developed an eclectically diverse editorial program. Al-Subyan’s issues combined short poems written in simple, rhythmic Arabic with folktales that drew from Nilotic, Nubian, and Darfuri traditions. Its pages included stories of Nuer pastoral traditions and ordinary Sudanese teaching embroidery patterns, cooking techniques, and household organization. Puzzle sections and competitions invited children to send handwritten submissions from distant towns such as Wadi Halfa, Geneina, and Kosti. These varied elements created a textual environment in which Arabic literacy and heritage and African vernacular knowledge reinforced one another rather than appearing as separate spheres.
Among the magazine’s most influential contributions to this Afro Arab identity was the creation of ‘Ammak Tangu/Tango, “Uncle Tangu/Tango,” a comic character based on the life of a real Darfuri teacher, ‘Uthman Muhammad Ahmad. The background of the creator as a teacher lent the comic figure and hero of ‘Ammak Tangu an organic social and cultural familiarity that readers recognized intuitively. The comic series of Uncle Tango was used as a pedagogical visual and textual medium to teach diverse Sudanese cultural traditions and norms through humor. His transformation to a national children’s hero in a printed comic strip reveals how the magazine understood the relationship between regional biography of Tango’s creator and the collective imagination of Sudan. The editors did not import a foreign protagonist. They elevated a teacher from the western borderlands to the status of an uncle familiar to children across the country. His presence rebalanced representational geographies by placing Darfur -- often stereotyped as backward, underdeveloped and distant from the political and cultural center of Khartoum -- at the heart of the nation’s pedagogical project.
Figure 3 Tango, principal comic character in al-Sibyan MagazineThe strip combined short, rhymed verses with illustrations that blended African caricature traditions and Egyptian print techniques. Early issues featured drawings by Isma‘il al-Shaykh; later, the artist and musician Sharhabil Ahmad refined the visual language, adding expressive bodily gestures, exaggerated facial movements, and a kinetic line that made each episode unfold like a miniature performance. Sharhabil’s training at the College of Fine Arts in Khartoum and his later career in Sudanese jazz gave the drawings a musical quality, as if the rhythm of the verse shaped the arc of a figure’s body movements. The synergy between image and text invited children to recite the poems aloud and reenact them in playgrounds, creating a link between the printed page and embodied play.
Figure 4 Sharhabil Ahmad, Sudanese illustrator of textbooks and comics magazines, and musician.The civic morality embedded in these stories relied on humor rather than admonition. Episodes typically began with Tango making a small mistake, such as neglecting to share a tool or forgetting a responsibility assigned by the school principal. The verse narrated his misstep in a tone that remained gentle and modest. The illustrations amplified the comic effect by presenting Tango’s body in exaggerated poses, often with a group of children reacting in the background. The resolution came when Tango corrected the error, apologized, or helped others resolve a situation. This narrative form taught values of fairness, mutual aid, and responsibility without invoking the abstractions that usually accompany authoritative figures’ moralizing approach. It allowed children to recognize themselves in an Afro-Arab subject whose authority came from the humility and humor of everyday life.
Beyond the comic sequences, al-Subyan cultivated a participatory reading culture that shaped children’s relationship to the broader nation. Competitions required children to send answers by post, and the magazine published names and towns of those who participated. These columns created a form of imagined community in which children encountered peers from remote regions that they were unlikely to visit. The experience of seeing their own names in print encouraged a sense of belonging to a textual nation that used Arabic script but carried African vernacular memories, cultural practices and social traditions. In a multilingual country where many children spoke local languages at home and learned Arabic formally at school, the magazine provided a transitional zone where both identities could coexist.
Figure 5 Selected illustrations from al-Subyan Magazine.Figure 6 Sample folklore story with children’s illustrations.Al-Subyan’s early relationship to Sudanese national institutional publishing networks was critical to its broader and conscious debates about colonial education and postcolonial nation-building. Sharkey and other scholars of Sudan have demonstrated that British policy in the condominium maintained segregated educational pathways, with missionary schools in the south and government Arabic schools in the north, thereby reinforcing regional and religious divisions including ethnic and linguistic divides.[2] Al-Subyan is a indigenous Sudanese intervention in this colonial landscape by presenting a repertoire of stories and images that drew from multiple Sudanese regions, refusing to treat the country as a divided cultural entity. The folklore pages regularly featured tales from Nubia, Darfur, the Blue Nile, and Kordofan, showing children that the nation contained a mosaic of cultural histories and cultural funds of knowledge necessary for civic education (FIG. 6). Instead of erasing difference, the magazine normalized it by placing African and Arab heritage stories in the same narrative space.
Sabah Magazine: A New Era of Sudanese Comics with a Female Face
By the 1950s, the volume of Children’s Magazines and comics publication increased in the larger Arab world. In Sudan, the expansion of children’s magazines in subsequent decades underscored the evolving relationship between visual texts, pedagogy and national belonging. Majallat Sabah (Morning), which also appeared within the Ministry of Education’s system, maintained the link between schooling and print but adopted a more utilitarian tone. Muhammad Mustafa Muhammad al-Jayli, one of the leading figures of children’s literature in Sudan who played a key role in the foundation of al-Subyan, al-Bahith al-Saghir, al-Jil, al-Kibar and others, noted in one of his interviews that Sabah emphasized lessons, civics, and short didactic stories that echoed the school curriculum. Although its visual style remained close to that of al-Subyan, its frame was more straightforward, and its ambition was to reach out to an audience of young and old readers. It provided continuity in years when economic contraction and administrative pressures strained the capacities of state publishing.
Figure 7 Selected cover pages from Sabah Magazine.
Like al-Subyan which built its reputation and reach among young readers through a series of comic characters such as Tango, Hamkanji, Saad and Sa‘id mainly by artists Sharhabil Ahmad and Muhammad Mustafa Muhammad al-Jayli, Sabah Magazine became famous for a rich ensemble of recurring comic characters, among them Sabah herself who features regularly on the cover of every issue, Ghalbawi, Hasan al-Shatir, the tiger Abu Shanab and the monkey Abu Danab, all drawn by the artist Omar Abdelrazek, who was at times joined by Ammar Abdelwahab. The magazine also featured the historical serial The Scent of the Earth, written by Muhammad Mustafa Muhammad al-Jayli and illustrated by Sharhabil Ahmad. Another significant comic character was the frog family Fangat which was created by Ismail Abbas Hamoudi. The frog Fangat, his wife and mother-in-law represented different aspects of social life in Sudan across regions and ethnicities. Nizar Awad Abdelmajid, Sabah Magazine’s editor-in-chief, published a regular column introducing its readers to different themes and questions, at the same time and unlike the al-Subyan which centered around Sudanese voices during its formative years, Sabah magazine’s contributions were supported by a wide network of correspondents and connections across the Arab world. Taken together, these features gave Majallat Sabah a distinctive tone and established it as a new and influential magazine within Sudanese children’s literature and around the Arab world.
Figure 8 Ghalbawi, a comic-strip character featured regularly in Sabah Magazine.
Figure 9 Fangat Frog, a comic-strip character, Sabah Magazine.Maryud: Defining Afro Arab Identity through a New Adventurous Generation
By the early 1980s, the publication of Majallat Maryud signaled a new shift in Sudan comics history toward new era of visual and thematic experimentation during a new Sudanese cultural and political moment. The expansion of television, the pressures on state publishing, and the growth of Sudanese artistic ambition combined to create a magazine that leaned on fantasy, local folklore, and external adventure while insisting on local protagonists and local landscapes. The use Maryud as a title of the magazine reflect this new thematic experimentation from al-Subyan to Sabah. Maryud is a child comic figure different from Tango who represents the older generation of Sudanese during the colonial era. Maryud stands for young Sudanese children with the permission to explore new worlds outside Sudan but the vigilance and constraints to stay faithful to their Afro and Arab history and identity. Within the magazine, the comic character Maryud functions as a proxy for the child reader, but not in a neutral sense, since he is imagined as the child whom Sudanese society allowed to step outside the protective family and communal constraints and rules, and whose curiosity about the world is not only treated as legitimate but also encouraged.
This is especially evident in the recurring column “A Tour with Maryud in the Arab Countries,” where Maryud travels imaginatively across the Arab world, asking questions, observing differences, and learning without bias about cultures outside Sudan. This narrative approach explains the political anxiety that Maryud provoked in the early 1980s when he travelled to regions in the Arab world that were political taboos in Sudan. Maryud, unlike Tango, deploys a new approach of learning, for by allowing Maryud to move freely across borders, the magazine implicitly affirmed a conception of childhood as open, inquisitive, and pan-Arab, rather than narrowly national or ideologically constrained. Edited by Bakhita Amin, Maryud was under the patronage of the Sudanese state od Jaafar al-Numeiri since it was launched in 1981. After three years it was suspended over Maryud’s regular column “A Tour with Maryud in the Arab Countries.” This ban underscores that Maryud was understood, especially by Sudanese authorities, as more than a fictional child, functioning instead as a symbolic figure through whom Sudanese politics, history and culture are mediated circulated in and outside Sudan. Therefore, the deviation of Maryud from state policies at the time which was diplomatically at odds with the regime of Muammar Qaddafi and Maryud’s mistake to visit Triploi ended his life and the magazine. In this sense, the meaning of Maryud in Majallat Maryud can be stated precisely: he embodies the beloved child as citizen-in-formation, whose right to curiosity, imagination, and cultural breadth the magazine sought to normalize, but was unsuccessful when it attempted to extend the political boundaries of Arab identity of Sudan.
Like many comic characters and especially Uncle Tango, Maryud was also the artistic creation of Sharhabil Ahmad, and the stories incorporated elements of fantasy, folklore, and adventure. Like Sabah Magazine, animals, witches, and trickster spirits populated the landscapes of Maryud, yet the protagonists remained recognizably Sudanese children. Although Maryud operated within a more fragmented cultural and political field in Sudan and the Arab world, it continued the Afro-Arab aesthetic by combining colloquial Sudanese Arabic with African visual motifs drawn from village life, riverine ecologies, and rural folklore.
Concluding Note
Taken together, al-Subyan, Sabah, and Maryud form a linear continuity that starts with the wisdom and humor of Tango, goes through the diverse representations of Ghalbawi and Fangat Frog and continues with the optimism of Maryud. These comic characters allowed children to imagine themselves as part of a nation that drew from African regional traditions and Arabic textual histories without requiring them to choose between the two. They reveal how Sudanese comics literature was continually reframed through different political conjunctures while maintaining a commitment to a visual and textual language that treated Afro-Arab belonging as an ordinary and organic element of everyday life. Artists such as Sharhabil Ahmed, Muhammad Mustafa Muhammad al-Jayli, and Ammar Abdelwahab moved across these publications with ease, carrying techniques, themes, and pedagogical visions from one venue to another. Their careers demonstrate that Sudanese children’s media developed through the circulation of individuals whose training spanned art schools, teacher-training institutes, and print houses. The Sudanese comics magazines I presented here provide a rich archive of how children’s comics literature mediate the relationship between language, geography, race, and memory. Al-Subyan, Sabah, and Maryud were laboratories of Afro-Arab belonging, offered children a script for inhabiting an Afro-Arab world. They are some of the most durable cultural archives for understanding how Sudan imagined its cultural identity in the decades before and after independence. Al-Subyan, Sabah, and Maryud are a reminder that Afro and Arab identity and social cohesion could be built not only through political struggle but also the work of storytelling, illustration, and childhood pedagogy.
Figure 10 Cover page from an issue of al-Subyan Magazine, presenting multiple Afro-Arab Sudanese figures.