Battle To Save The Crumbling Palace Of General Gordon's Last Stand

(MENAFN- Sudanow Magazine) Khartoum, (Sudanow)- This is a story of how Sudanese cultural heritage, devastated by war and aggression, is working to once again come out of the ashes and how culture, no matter what material damage inflicted, has the capacity to revive braving all oddities. The story is related by a renowned British art and culture reporter who visited the country, upon coordination with the Sudanese minister of culture and information, Khalid Alasir, wrote a masterpiece of a sort.

(Sudan) publishes excerpts from the article prepared by Craig Simpson, the Arts Correspondent of the British the Telegraph, a rich and detailed reports about the arts, culture and heritage that have been devastated by the war since 2023, when the RSF militias attacked, not only material but cultural and civilizational symbols in Khartoum, the national capital and others.

The British journalist focused his report on the Presidential Palace for its symbolism and its historic and cultural but equally sovereign value. He started his well-argued report with this portrayal image:
“Entering a bullet-riddled ruin in Khartoum, Abdelnaser Hassan picks his way through splayed girders, rubble and blackened metal towards a plaque cracked by shellfire that displays only fragments of a name: Charles George Gordon.
This shattered palace on the banks of the Nile was once the center of British colonial rule in Sudan. It was also where, on Jan 26, 1885, the besieged General Gordon was cut down by jihadist warriors, after what became known as General Gordon's Last Stand.”

In 2023, blood was again spilt on the white steps of the Old Republican Palace, as the first shots were fired in a civil war that has left more than 150,000 dead, millions displaced, and rebels facing accusations of genocide.
Mr Hassan, a museum director and custodian of the palace, is now assisting reconstruction efforts.
Khalid Ali Aleisir, the Sudanese minister for information, said:“It is a priority. The palace forms a very important part of Sudan's history. It is symbolic of the close relationship between Sudan and the UK, and our shared history. It would be a perfect opportunity for British partners to help protect that.”

That historical relationship could help secure funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which supports the Cultural Protection Fund operated by the British Council.
The fund could contribute to a £200,000 temporary roof for the fragile structure, preventing heavy rains in June from causing further damage, and to a broader restoration estimated at around £4m.
The writer stated that restoration costs could rise to £20m, and Sudan is also seeking support from another former coloniser, Turkey, whose Ottoman pashas ruled the region before and alongside the British.

He dug into the historical background of the Palace he rightly put it, was built in the 1830s during the earlier period of colonial rule. Charles George Gordon was sent to Sudan some time later, in the service of imperial expansion, and charged with governing the volatile region from 1873 to 1880.
In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad Mahdi launched a revolt against foreign rule, proclaiming himself the Mahdi – an Islamic messiah. Gordon was sent to help evacuate Khartoum in the face of the Mahdi's army, but when he reached the city in 1884, he decided to stay and fight.
On Jan 26, 1885, the Mahdi's army entered Khartoum. Gordon walked on to the palace steps armed either with a rattan cane or a revolver, depending on whose account you believe, as warriors rushed towards him and cut him down with swords. He was beheaded and his body was thrown down a well.

But in 1898, Lord Kitchener destroyed the Mahdi army at Omdurman, with help from a young Winston Churchill, and rebuilt the palace where his friend had fallen, erecting a plaque to mark the staircase where Gordon was killed.
The whitewashed sandstone building, three storeys high, with large porticos supported by classical columns, served as the governor's residence and then a seat of power in independent Sudan until 2015.
Another milestone in the history of the palace was related by the writer was the visit of late Queen Elizabeth II who stayed at the palace in 1965. He described the status of the palace after the militia invasion 2023 as having lost its grandeur, as fire and shelling have destroyed the historic furniture and walls and roofs.
But he pinpointed to the fact that the palace forms part of a complex at the heart of modern Sudanese government, including the new Chinese-built Republican Palace, where RSF rebels under Muhammad Dagalo launched an attempt to depose Sudan's de facto leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. When the coup failed and Gen al-Burhan moved to Port Sudan, RSF fighters dug in and began months of looting and vandalism across the cultural sites of central Khartoum, now dotted with machine-gunned minarets and the blackened shells of skyscrapers and luxury hotels.
Restoring these sites carries symbolic weight for the Sudanese government, controlled as it seeks to project international legitimacy, unify the multi-ethnic population and distinguish itself from the RSF“militia” it portrays as“barbarians”.
.The RSF has destroyed museums, including in Nyala and the Darfur city of El Fasher, where the group was accused of massacring thousands of civilians in 2025 after a prolonged siege.
A senior figure in the civilian cabinet under Gen al-Burhan stressed the need to resist what he described as a“cultural genocide” carried out by the RSF, alongside a campaign that the US has determined amounted to genocide and ethnic cleansing

Millions return to a city scarred by war
Three million displaced people have returned to Khartoum in recent months, to bullet-scarred apartment blocks and restaurants serving fried Nile fish. They can be seen sipping hibiscus tea between burnt-out cars and makeshift cemeteries.
Herds of goats and camels have once again been driven down the smoggy boulevards of Omdurman and Khartoum North, which together form the tripartite capital. Yet the streets remain largely empty in the tightly controlled city center.
Within this military zone stands the Palace Museum, once an Anglican cathedral whose cornerstone was laid in 1906 by Princess Beatrice, daughter of Queen Victoria. It is now a hollowed-out shell.
Museum director Mr Hassan, crunching through shards of fallen stained glass, said he would press for British funding for this site of colonial heritage, which could require a further £4m to restore.
The report pinpointed that the UK database could trace looted Sudanese artifacts' which have been looted from Sudan National Museum.
Staff believe rebels first ransacked the building for metal before turning to antiquities, looting more selectively for sale on the international black market.
Records appear to have been deliberately burned in the ransacked offices, where desks and chairs lie strewn among open sarcophagi, seemingly to erase any paper trail for stolen artifact's.
The Telegraph writer quoted the ministry of information as saying that the British Museum experts had been invited to Khartoum to help trace missing items using a UK database of Sudanese antiquities.
More than 4,000 artifact's are believed to have been taken, including statues and golden jewellery from the Kushite civilisation, deep within Sudan's national story.
Ikhlas Abdel Latif Ahmed, director of museums at Sudan's National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), said:“We have a very important history. They wanted to destroy it – they attacked the heritage as well as the people.”
Museum fire 'burned our identity'
The Ethnographic Museum, a stone's throw from army headquarters where Gen al-Burhan was besieged in the early months of the war, was ravaged by fire.
Rihab Khider, an antiquities inspector, gesturing to the ashes of clothing and baskets, said:“They burned our identity, attacked our identity.”
The paper described the contents, or rather the remains of the contents of the museum, saying that almost all that remains inside are charred plaster models of camels, part of a diorama depicting the ethnic group most closely associated with the RSF. The destruction has undone renovation work funded in 2022 by the British Council, which is expected to be approached again to help restore the museum as a community space. Another piece of art and dear history reported by the Telegraph reporter was Sudan's historic 'first car' which he said was stripped by looters
Outside the city center in Omdurman, where life is cautiously returning despite the front line lying only hours away, work has begun to restore the house of the Khalifa, Abdullah ibn Muhammad (Altaayshi).
This 19th-century leader succeeded the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, who led the 1881 revolt against joint Egyptian and British condominium rule.
Lord Kitchener brought the Mahdist state to an end in 1898, then rebuilt the palace and installed the plaque to Gordon.

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