Sudanese-Armenian archivists fight erasure and keep their history alive for generations to come

Feature by Sara Bass for Radio Dabanga

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Sudanahye is a Sudanese-Armenian archival project launched just after the war’s outset in April 2023 and is building a growing network across diasporas. Each collaboration addresses a different aspect of archival preservation, making it relevant to the past and present and providing direction for the future. It is a means of honouring historical events, lending legitimacy to a people, tracking evolution, and holding war criminals accountable.

In its early stages, the war progressed block-by-block. Families were driven from homes that had amassed memories over generations, and in their absence, the RSF ransacked and pillaged those properties, even defecating on children’s beds. This destruction occurred on the micro-scale. Much of it was collateral. But with the RSF’s total takeover of Khartoum, cultural destruction became more deliberate and grander in proportion.

From June 2023 until March 2025, the RSF was using the National Museum as an ad hoc military base and mine, providing exceptional protection and a steady financial stream by way of the black market. Housing over 100,000 artefacts from the many eras of Sudan’s history, including the Stone Ages, Nubian and Christian times, and the Islamic period, the National Museum acted as a national living room in essence.

The targeting of such prominent cultural heritage sites has been a means of demoralising the Sudanese people collectively by erasing heritage and symbols of the country’s pride. As of mid-September 2025, over 60 per cent of the museum’s goods had been looted.

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier last month that at least 76 heritage sites and 20 museums throughout Sudan have been ransacked.

The Armenian Church was another heritage site that fell victim to RSF-occupied Khartoum.

“ …growing up in the 2000s in London, my perceptions of Sudan were driven by the news cycle…”
— Vahe Boghosian

Around the time of the war’s outset, Vahe Boghosian, a diasporan Armenian and historian from London, launched the first multimedia heritage project on Sudanese-Armenian history. It’s called Sudanahye. In addition to to preventing his ancestry’s erasure in the throes of war, the project provided an outlet for squaring a violent media portrayal of the country with the more convivial, fond anecdotes his relatives imparted throughout Boghosian’s upbringing.

“For me, growing up in the 2000s in London, my perceptions of Sudan were driven by the news cycle, by films … and then you go and look at the Armenian photos, and it looks very different,” Boghosian said. “And then you hear the stories and you’re like ‘oh, it’s even more different.’”

Sudanahye dates the first known Armenian to settle in Sudan to the 1840s. Further Armenians came to Egypt and Sudan after the Hamidian Massacres in the late 1890s. After the British conquest in 1899 established the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, another wave of Armenians immigrated in hopes of gaining wealth and for remittances.

The same thing happened after the genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. By the 1930s, a network of Armenian families was spread across Sudan, with Khartoum at its centre. At its peak, the population reached about 1,000 people.

“One of the reasons why the Sudanese-Armenian community history must be preserved is because it is like a constituent part of the experience of exile that Armenians experienced,” said University of Washington’s Director of African Studies Christopher Tounsel.

Sudanahye consists of historical documents sourced from archives in Cairo, Arabkir, and Durham; a mounting collection of oral histories; and a photo archive.

“Each source represents something a bit different. In the documents, you’re not really going to see children’s views, even women’s views. You’re seeing mostly business documents, some political documents. Whereas in the photographs, you see this broader picture of Armenian community life and how they interacted with different members of different communities.” The oral histories imbue the emotion.

A primary intention of the project is to distinguish between memories shared and the atrocities persisting in Sudan today, Boghosian explained. That’s where Sudanahye’s social media component factors in, acting as one important means of honouring legacy that places particular attention on personal narratives apart from broader trends.

“Cultural artifacts allow communities to claim a particular contribution and place in the world,” said Tounsel. “I also think [maintaining Sudanese-Armenian history] preserves the centrality of Sudan, and by extension the Nile, as a place that is a focal part of the history of the world, that the world has a vested interest in this region, that Sudan has never existed in a virtual black hole insulated or isolated from major world events.”

Boghosian thoughtfully uplifts the Sudanese struggle through his project in addition to the Armenian. He encourages his predominantly Armenian audience to acknowledge the strife the Sudanese people endure now so it is not similarly forgotten.

Many Sudanese people to whom he’s spoken while archiving Sudanahye have told Boghosian they revere the tolerance of diversity their country once had that allowed an Armenian to call themself Sudanese. Many hope for the same to be true again some day soon, and Boghosian aspires for this sentiment to extend to other lands that could embrace Sudanese refugees.

In addition to Sudanahye’s Instagram page, Boghosian’s tours have played a central role in community outreach, engendering awareness about Sudanese-Armenian heritage and making the past relevant to the present.

Together with the Garod Collective, for example, a New York-based community group that hosts Armenian cultural events, they brainstormed different approaches to building diaspora if they were to undertake the endeavour from scratch today.

The Collective’s founders, Cynthia Nahhas and Nanor Vosgueritchian, explained that diasporas usually foster community through church, school and a social club. These institutions are the “big three”. During the workshop with Boghosian, though, they asked if there could be other ways of honouring culture.

“Is this the only way? What about things like what me and Nanor are doing — we’re not part of the big three, we’re just two people throwing events in Brooklyn, what does that mean? Where is our value in this?” asked Nahhas.

Nahhas explained the origins of the Garod Collective. “I want to be connected to [my culture] in my own, modern, for lack of a better term, way; and I think Garod Collective has allowed me to do that by having workshops that translate queer songs into Armenian or things that you just wouldn’t naturally think of to connect with your culture that doesn’t exist in the more traditional spaces,” she said.

Nahhas and Vosgueritchian have hosted various workshops since the Collective’s founding last April. These include an Armenian Mapping Workshop, a writing workshop, afternoons of backgammon, musical performances, and a barbecue.

“Investing in diaspora is not about dilution, it’s about an identity that’s evolving. It’s not becoming less of what it was. It’s becoming more of something new,” said Tounsel. “A lot of times cultural preservation is about an attempt in freezing something in time as opposed to freezing something that’s always been.”

Boghosian held his first events in Cairo, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Last month, he hosted his first event in Armenia. But back in March, in addition to New York, a separate US tour also brought him to Boston, where he collaborated with Project Save.

Project Save is the oldest archive focused solely on preserving photography of the global Armenian experience. Its recent venture, Archive Alive, spotlights grassroots initiatives through multimedia exhibits in an effort to connect disparate groups, extend their reach, and induct archival materials under a common institution. Sudanahye was one of the first projects to be featured in this capacity.

Project Save’s Director Arto Vaun emphasised the living quality of the archive, something he attributes to their primary objective to “champion photography. Our form of championing photography is [by collecting] the photographs in the world that have anything to do with something Armenian. Absolutely, rooted in the Armenian experience, but it brings people in because they’re already into it because of the photographs,” said Vaun. It’s this openness to material that allows the archive to keep pulsating as widely as it does.

“This is not a genealogy project,” Vaun continued. “It’s a photography project. Let’s say you’re doing a search of a Sudan family photo – it’s like, well they were in Sudan, but then they were in Paris and then they moved to Soviet Armenia and then from there, one half ended up in London. Well, because it’s Project Save, we have the ability to close that loop. It’s like saying, ‘did you know what a powerful universal ripple effect is going on here, from Sudan to 45 years later, to Kensington?’”

“That history never stops.”

Vaun also proudly emphasised the significance of archival material lasting into the present for the sake of holding war criminals accountable. Project Save has been asked recently by human rights attorneys for photos dating as far back as 100 years to argue cases at the Hague related to the 2020-2023 ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Tounsel backed Vaun with commentary on colonialism. “Unfortunately, one of the main justifications – I would say, illegitimate justifications – that have often accompanied the colonial enterprise has been, ‘well these people don’t have a history, these people are a kind of blank slate, they need to be civilized and cultured. And therefore, we have a right to have a certain type of relationship with them. Well, anyone who can claim a history can say, ‘we are at the bare minimum your social equals because just like you have a history, we have one too. Which helps to show that we are fully human.’”

In addition to defending the integrity of a people, accountability sets an international precedent, honouring the continued relevance of historical agreements like the UNESCO World Heritage List and 1954 Hague Convention and the sanctity of agreements to come. Tounsel says their clout is nullified only if there are no repercussions for violating them.

While Sudanahye lends substance to the past and preserves the meaning of archival records into the present, Boghosian’s discussions, predominantly published on social media or blog posts, provide resources for more easily communicating in Armenian, celebrate an Iraqi Jew from Sudan, or digest the World Cup in terms of Sudanese-Armenian heritage. They dissolve some of the divides distinguishing one people from another. He often uplifts intersectionality.

This research, and the relationships it’s kindling between similar endeavours, represents an embrace of one another’s cultures with greater hospitality moving forward.