Indexical (re)ordering and commodification of linguistic resources during the December Revolution in Sudan

Abstract

In this essay, we analyze the processes through which the actors of the December Revolution in Sudan—being themselves revolutionary activists or counterrevolutionary promoters—use language for political and economic purposes. Based on an ethnographic analysis of both oral and written language practices, the study describes the metasemiotic changes that occurred during the last Sudanese uprising, against the background of the language-related ideological struggles, and it analyzes them through their embeddedness within local sociocultural patterns. By focusing on the processes of indexical (re)ordering and language commodification, the study eventually shows how a phase of political crisis can generate metasemiotic reconfigurations of the revolutionary linguistic resources in order to render them more suitable for the market economy and/or to produce political consensus.

Full text

Indexical (re)ordering and commodification of
linguistic resources during the December
Revolution in Sudan
Stefano Manfredi
SeDyL—CNRS, INALCO, IRD
Barbara Casciarri
Université Paris 8, Vincennes—Saint-Denis—LAVUE—CEDEJ
ABSTRACT
In this essay, we analyze the processes through which the actors of the December
Revolution in Sudan—being themselves revolutionary activists or counterrevolutionary
promoters—use language for political and economic purposes. Based on an
ethnographic analysis of both oral and written language practices, the study describes
the metasemiotic changes that occurred during the last Sudanese uprising, against the
background of the language-related ideological struggles, and it analyzes them through
their embeddedness within local sociocultural patterns. By focusing on the processes
of indexical (re)ordering and language commodification, the study eventually shows
how a phase of political crisis can generate metasemiotic reconfigurations of the
revolutionary linguistic resources in order to render them more suitable for the market
economy and/or to produce political consensus.
Keywords: Sudan, language and revolution, indexical orders, language
commodification
1. THE DECEMBER REVOLUTION: SOCIOLINGUISTIC BACKGROUND
AND THEORETICAL POSITIONING
1
In December 2018, popular demonstrations broke out in the Sudanese provinces of
Damazin, Atbara, and Dongola and rapidly spread to Khartoum, marking the beginning
of the December Revolution.
2
Although this popular uprising was primarily a product
of a longstanding economic crisis, the Sudanese protesters soon revealed their political
Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics 1.2 (2023): 206–226
DOI: 10.3366/arabic.2023.0014
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/arabic

objectives by demanding the ouster of the Islamist regime led by Omar Al-Bashir (see
Deshayes et al. 2019; Bach et al. 2020; Casciarri & Saeed 2020 for different overviews).
Since its beginning, the mobilization maintained a nonviolent and anti-racist dimension,
coupled with a bottom-up approach that rejected any political leadership from the
various political parties. This strategy succeeded in achieving the removal of the regime
on 11 April 2019 and, a few months later, produced the installation of a transitional
government headed by the civilian Abdallah Hamdok, in an uncomfortable cooperation
with military elements of the Sovereign Council. This situation eventually came to an
end on 25 October 2021, when General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan led a coup d’état that
dissolved the transitional government. While the first draft of this paper was being
written, a new agreement was signed on 21 November 2021, claiming as its objective
the restoration of a shared civilian–military government. However, this political
agreement ended with a stalemate, as Abdallah Hamdok resigned from the second
transitional government on 3 January 2022. Despite fierce repression and dozens of
killed and detained activists, this unstable political situation ended up revitalizing
the revolutionary movement, with the Resistance Committees as a core actor (Thomas
& El Gizouli 2021).
From a linguistic point of view, the repertoire of the December Revolution
3
is
extremely heterogeneous. On the one side, most of its linguistic resources are derived
from some form of Arabic (i.e., Sudanese Arabic, Standard Arabic, or other local
non-standard varieties of Arabic). On the other side, international languages such as
English also played an important role during the December Revolution, mainly due to
its large use by the Sudanese diaspora on the social media. In this context, the so-called
“indigenous”
4
languages of Sudan are relatively rare (but see §3; cf. Casciarri &
Manfredi 2020a: 8), as they have been perceived as a potentially harmful means of
ethnic fragmentation for the revolutionary movement. The above-depicted linguistic
repertoire includes heterogeneous linguistic resources variably associated with different
functional and prestige values. Consider the following image of a graffito drawn in
Khartoum in 2019 showing an instance of register variation in written Arabic (Figure 1).
The graffito starts in Latin script with the hashtagged English-derived neologism
#sudaxit, which evidently refers to the Brexit episode, and which has been widely
used on social networks during the revolution for demanding the withdrawal of Sudan
from the Arab League. It then continues in Standard Arabic: Nuṭālib bi-xurūj as-sūdān
min jāmi‘at ad-duwal al-‘arabiyya, naḥnu zunūjawlād al-kūšīn
5
“We demand Sudan
to leave the Arab League, we are black (and) descendants of the people of Kush.”In
this first part of the graffito, Standard Arabic features are clearly identifiable in the
verb phrase nuṭālib bi- ‘we demand’and in the form of the first person plural pronoun
naḥnu ‘we’. The adoption of a formal register for “officially”demanding Sudan to
withdrawal from the Arab League is not surprising (cf. Suleiman 2006; 2008); more
atypical is the use of the same register for expressing an ethnocultural claim that stresses
an African (i.e., non-Arab) identity for the Sudanese people (“we are blacks (and)
descendants of the people of Kush”). In fact, this expression makes sense of an alleged
and thus contested Arab and Muslim Sudanese identity that has been directly
challenged by the revolutionary process (Casciarri et al. 2020). The graffiti then ends
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 207

in Sudanese Arabic: Awwal ḥāja gaffil al-ma‘bar al-maṣri wa ḥalāib ḥaggatina “First
of all, close the Egyptian bridge and Hala’ib is ours.”Here, Sudanese Arabic features
can be identified in the adverbial phrase awwal ḥāja ‘first of all’and in the possessive
particle ḥaggit-na ‘ours’. The choice to adopt colloquial Sudanese Arabic rather than
formal Standard Arabic is clearly linked to the expression of a nationalist statement
against Egypt’s interference in Sudan during the December Revolution.
6
Since Ferguson (1959; see also Bassiouney 2020), the register variation exemplified
by Figure 1 is traditionally analyzed in terms of “diglossia”or “multiglossia”—that is,
the coexistence of two or more functionally distinguished codes that are tidily
organized along a continuum of linguistic forms.
7
In contrast with this structuralist
view (cf. Léglise & Sanchez Moreano 2017), in this study, we will instead focus on the
use of heterogeneous linguistic resources whose meanings depend on their indexical
(re)ordering in the context of the December Revolution. This means that, rather than
correlating a series of linguistic forms to a pre-established list of social categories,
we will analyze the contextually bound meanings through which the actors of the
December Revolution take stance, create solidarity, build their own identities, and
spread their ideologies (cf. Bucholtz & Hall 2005). According to Silverstein (2006: 14),
“indexicality is simply the principle of contextualization of (linguistic) signs-in-use,
seen as a component of the meaning of the occurring sign forms.”The notion of
indexicality, however, it is not explanatory in itself as it is contingent on “indexical
orders”that are necessary for showing “how to relate the micro-social to the macro-
social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenon”(Silverstein 2003: 193).
In a similar way, Blommaert (2007a) argues that “indexicality”refers to “registers”or
“recognizable semiotic emblems for groups and individuals,”whereas “orders of
indexicality”explain how the former categories are ordered in hierarchies of value.
Figure 1. A graffito drawn in the sit-in area during the December Revolution.
22
208 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

For the aims of this study, it is worth reminding that indexical orders come in
integral and ordinal degrees of “presupposition”(i.e., the indexical “appropriateness-to”
context, what is already established between sign users, at least implicitly as “context”)
and “entailment”(i.e., indexical “effectiveness-in”context, how contextual parameters
seem to be brought into being by the usage of indexical signs; Silverstein 2003: 193).
As a further matter, it is also important to remark that even basic lexical choices may be
indexical (Silverstein 1976: 35).
8
In this respect, Blommaert (2007b: 8) introduces the
notion of “intertextual asymmetry”(corresponding to Silverstein’s“interdiscursivity,”
2005) for stressing that single words are sensitive to indexical processes, and the values
of such words are often emblematic of particular social positions. In the light of that, the
first part of this paper (§2) analyzes the metasemiotic reconfigurations linked to the
use of the terms rāṣta ‘Rasta’and madaniyya ‘civil (government)’in different phases
of the December Revolution.
Of course, the outcomes of indexical (re)ordering are not restricted to the contextual
construction of social meanings, as metasemiotic reconfigurations may also have a
direct impact on the way language influences, and is influenced by, larger social and
political structures. In this regard, the process of commodification that affects the
linguistic resources of the December Revolution is particularly meaningful. According
to Heller et al. (2014), “commodification”describes how a specific object or process is
rendered available for conventional exchange in the market. Similarly, Block (2018)
argues that “commodification”is a process by and through which objects that were
previously unsalable become sellable. In sociolinguistics, the notion of “commodifica-
tion”has been primarily used with reference either to the value of workers’multilingual
skills in the globalized labor market or to the folkorization of minority languages
for touristic purposes (Heller 2010; Duchêne & Heller 2013; Heller et al. 2014). By
focusing on how language is seen as a tradeable commodity, this perspective of analysis
sees commodification as a discursive event, in which a commodity status is attributed
to languages. In this study, we are instead interested in “commodification”as a process
through which single linguistic resources (i.e., linguistic forms such as words or
slogans) acquire a value for the market economy. Seen in the context of the December
Revolution, the problem of how a given revolutionary linguistic form gains the potential
for commodification has evidently to do with the question of how social transformation
(enacted through revolution) can become social reproduction (shaped by market
economy) (cf. Bourdieu 2001). In order to tackle this issue, the second part of this study
(§3) analyzes the metasemiotic reconfigurations that led to the commodification of
the term kandāka “revolutionary woman”and of the slogan Ḥanabnīhu “we will build
it [i.e., the New Sudan]!”after the installation of the first transitional government in
September 2019.
As a general remark, we stick to the view that language is endowed with performance
and agency and, therefore, it contributes to the way in which human actions dialectically
relate to social structure in a mutually constitutive manner (Ahearn 2001: 113). This is
especially true during phases in which a stable order is being challenged, when changes
in traditional linguistic resources may directly participate in the creation of a revol-
utionary change and/or in the subsequent reactionary response (cf. Yuan et al. 1990: 67;
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 209

Casciarri and Manfredi 2020a: 6). Bearing this in mind, this study aims to show how a
phase of political crisis can generate metasemiotic reconfigurations of revolutionary
linguistic resources in order to render them more suitable for the market economy
and/or to produce political consensus. Based on an ethnographic approach
9
, the
study draws on first-hand data (i.e., semi-structured interviews and participant
observation) gathered on fieldwork between 2019 and 2021 as well as on secondary
oral and written material coming from different sources (social media, press
conferences, songs, etc.).
2 INDEXICAL (RE)ORDERING IN TIMES OF PROTESTING
In this section, we analyze the contextually bounded meanings of two terms that were
widely used during the December Revolution. The analysis shows how those terms can
function at multiple levels of indexicality and how they participate in the processes of
identity construction and consensus building during the revolution. The first term to be
discussed here is rāsṭa‘Rasta’(also rāsta) (pl. rasṭ-āt‘Rastas’). This term is not a
lexical innovation of the revolution, since it represents an English loanword already
attested in Sudanese Arabic before the 2018–2019 mobilization. Rāsṭa, however, gives
evidence of a full range of indexical shifts redefining the scope of its semantic reference
during different phases of the December Revolution. In Sudanese Arabic, rāsṭais
generally used as a referential term for describing young and fashion-conscious people
wearing dreadlocks. The same term can also have a derogatory meaning raging from
“beatnik”to “drug dealer”that reflects a stereotypical image contrasting with the local
Islamic morality.
10
A first indexical shift linked to rāsṭaoccurred during the early
phases of the revolution, when the term started to be used for referring to the young
militants organizing the barricades in the streets (Casciarri & Manfredi 2020a: 24). M.,
a twenty-two-year-old militant student at the University of Khartoum interviewed in
October 2021, describes this metasemiotic change as follows:
Ma‘nāta / filāndarāsṭa// filāndadrug dealer // aw gangster bi-šakl ‘āmm
keda // ma‘as-sawra filāndarāsṭabigat šifit / he knows how to do his stuff //
rāsṭahuwa zātu šifit / lakín mujrim / ya‘ni //
It means, (for example). This guy is a rāsṭa(means): this guy is a drug dealer;
or a gangster, more generally. With the revolution, rāsṭabecame like šifit.
Someone who knows how to do their stuff. Rāsṭais just like šifit, but smart (lit.
‘criminal’) I mean.
In this excerpt from an interview, M. first associates rāsṭawith the derogatory
meaning of ‘drug dealer’/‘gangster’. Then, in a rather tautological way, he observes that
during the revolution rāsṭabecame a synonym for šifit. Indeed, during the revolution,
the term šifit has been typically used to refer to young “rascals”who demonstrated in the
streets without fearing clashes with the police (Casciarri and Manfredi 2020a: 27).
Thus, in M.’s view, rāsṭaadds a “smart”(i.e., mujrim, lit. ‘criminal’) connotation to the
210 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

more neutral šifit. This account describes how the December Revolution produced a
metasemiotic switch of rāsṭathat passed from an indexical order that stigmatizes a
given sociocultural group from the outside (i.e., young people with dreadlocks, drug
dealer) to an indexical order that positively marks out a second sociodemographic group
from the inside (i.e., young people who lead the protests in the streets). This indexical
shift is also confirmed by the fact that the term rāsṭabecame a means of
self-identification for many young protesters, while being used in several initiatives
during the initial phases of the Revolution as well as after the 2021 military coup. By
way of example, Figure 2 shows a flyer that circulated on social media calling for a
march (milyūniyya; see Casciarri and Manfredi 2020a: 39) on 10 January 2022 in honor
of the Rastas who had been killed during the demonstrations.
A second indexical shift linked to the term rāsṭaoccurred on the occasion of the
international press conference held on 6 July 2019 by General Al-Burhan in anticipation
of the political negotiations between the Transitional Military Council and the Forces of
Freedom and Change.
11
Not surprisingly, the whole speech was delivered in Standard
Arabic, except for the following excerpt of the text read by Al-Burhan:
Taḥīya xāṣṣalēnās ar-raṣṣa/lēr-rasṭātwa as-sanāt//taḥīya xāṣṣalēnāsal
wagfīn ganah //
A special greeting to the yobs, the Rastas, and the girls. A special greeting to
the respectful people (who participated in the revolution).
Figure 2. The flyer calling for the Milyūniyyat ar-rastāt“The march of the Rastas”.
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 211

Here, rasṭāt‘Rastas’is used in association with other terms typical of an informal
register of Sudanese Arabic (nās ar-raṣṣafor “yobs,”sanātfor “girls,”and nāsal
wagfīn ganah for “respectful people”; see Manfredi 2008) in the pursuit to build
political consensus among different components of the revolutionary movement.
However, this intertextual asymmetry in Al-Burhan’s speech was instead interpreted as
a clumsy attempt to create solidarity with the young revolutionary leaders and soon
became a subject of humor on social media. More interestingly, the stereotypical
use of rasṭātin the sense of “young leaders of the revolts”by the most prominent
counterrevolutionary actor introduces a new indexical order in which the term is
perceived as emblematic and then used with stylization aims.
Figure 3 displays the range of indexical shifts redefining the semantic reference
of rāsṭaduring the December Revolution as ordered along the two axes of “pre-
supposition”and “entailment”(cf. §1).
The term madaniyya has a similar “biography”(see Kopytoff 1986) showing
the weight of indexical (re)ordering through different phases of the December
Revolution. Stemming from the adjective madani ‘civil’, the term was used from the
beginning of the mobilization to demand the installation of a (fully) “civilian
government”(Casciarri and Manfredi 2020a: 36). After the fall of ‘Omar Al-Bashir,
the term replaced other keywords of the revolution in two widely known slogans:
ḥurriyya,Salāmwa‘adāla—madaniyya (rather than sawra ‘revolution’), Xiyāraš-ša‘b,
“Freedom, peace, and justice/the civil government is the people’s choice,”and
Madaniyya bess,“Civilian government, that’s all!”in place of Tasguṭbess “Fall
down, that’s all!”In this phase of the mobilization, most of our respondents used the
term madaniyya ‘civilian government/authority’in a dichotomist opposition with
PRESUPPOSITION
ENTAILEMENT
1st order indexicality
rāsta stigmatizes a specific sociodemographic group (i.e., young
people with dreadlocks, drug dealers) from the outside.
2nd order indexicality
rāsta marks out a specific sociocultural group (i.e., young
protester leaders) from the inside.
3rd order indexicality
rāsta is perceived as being “emblematic” for a specific
sociodemographic group (i.e., protest leaders) and it is used with
stylization aims by outsiders.
Figure 3. The indexical shifts of rāsṭain times of protest.
212 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

‘askariyya ‘military government/authority’. An exception was raised by a respondent—
A., a 65-year-old man, close to the Sudanese Communist Party and with a high degree of
formal education—who explained to us that medaniyya corresponds to the French
“laïcité”(Eng. ‘secularism’), in opposition to islamiyya ‘Islamic government’. The same
respondent affirms that there is actually no contradiction with the most common
meaning of “civilian rule,”as civilian governments are typically secular, whereas
Islamist regimes are usually supported by the army. Even more interesting is the
indexical shift that occurred between 2020 and 2021. During that period, consensus on
the prime minister and his civilian cabinet started to weaken, while the economic crisis
deepened. At the same time, the revolutionary movement began to lose the unity of
intent that characterized the first period of the mobilization. As a consequence, a part of
the Sudanese population that is more sensitive to the Islamist rhetoric started to use
the term madaniyya in a derogative way for indicating the “loose morals”and the
“licentiousness”produced by the December Revolution in Sudan. In this respect, M.
(see above) observes:
Binisbat lēy / kalāmdawādiḥ// madaniyya ma‘nāta faṣlaṣ-ṣultāt // lakín fi nās
biḥawwilu yistaġallūha innu / ya‘ani / al-madaniyya di / bittak bitagdar tamši
‘aryāna fi š-šāri‘//
As far as I’m concerned, this point is clear. Madaniyya is the separation of
powers. But there are people who try to exploit it (i.e., the word) like, I mean,
madaniyya means that your daughter can go around unveiled (lit. “naked”)in
the street.
In M.’s activist perspective (“as far as I’m concerned”), the term madaniyya simply
makes reference to the “separation of powers”between civilians and military forces.
However, he remarks that there is also an outsider indexical order (“there are people who
try to exploit the word”) in which madaniyya is used derogatively to refer to the alleged
crisis of the local Islamic morality (“it means that your daughter can go around unveiled
in the street”) after the installation of the transitional government. This shift of the
semantic reference of madaniyya has also been confirmed byother interviewees, such F.,
a primary-school teacher and member of the recently formed Resistance Committee in a
settled nomads’village northeast of Khartoum,
12
who in July 2021 told us:
Madaniyya bigat madaniyya ‘āmma // ya‘ni / talbas ‘alākēfak / bitkūnmārig fi
š-šari‘/ayyḥāja fi rāsak dāyir ta‘amal // al-madaniyya di / ayy ḥāja
muḥarrama / al mafi l-islam / inti bit‘amilha //
Madaniyya became a general term. I mean, [it meansthat] you dress as youwant
(when) you go out in the street; you are free to do everything you want to do.
This Madaniyya [means] that everything [that is] illicit for Islam, you can do it”
In the same interview, F. takes further distance from the secular values promoted by
the December Revolution (and, according to her, stemming from the spread of the
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 213

madaniyya), by criticizing the alleged changes made to school curricula by the
transitional government in 2019–2020:
Yaḷḷaḥassi al-madaniyya /niḥna ka-muslimīn/fiḥajāt fi t-tadrīs / ma dāyrīn
na‘amalha // masalan / al-qur’ān al-karīm // yashilūhu / yijību ḥāja ġērhu / fi
t-tarīx daxxalu ḥajātmaḥaggitna // ma ḥagg al-islām//ḥajātmuḥarrama //
So, now (with the) madaniyya, we as Muslims, there are topics in the
curriculum that we don’t want to teach. For example, the Holy Qur’an, they
replaced it with another topic. In the history course, they introduced concepts
that are not ours, that are not Islamic, that are illicit.
As a further matter, ourattention was directed to the occurrence of the term madaniyya
in an electronic flyerannouncing the cancellation of an event called “Taboo Beach Party,”
organized by “actors of the private sector,”and supposed to be held on 16 July 2021 “on
the Nile river banks, from dusk to dawn.”The flyer, written in English (Figure 4), was
joined to a message diffused on WhatsApp on 16 July 2021 in which the organizers
complained about the forced cancellation of the event, following threats by ill-defined
conservative pressures (and reassured the participants that they wouldbe refunded).
As explicitly stated in the flyer,
13
one of the aims of the event was to “push the
boundaries of freedom (madaniya [sic!]) in the New Sudan and making it a true reality.”
Furthermore, by affirming “we are aware of our responsibilities to promote the New
Sudan,”the authors of the text insert themselves into the field of revolutionary change.
In this context, the Arabic translation of “freedom”with the word madaniyya rather than
with the more common ḥurriyya (as found in many slogans of the December
Figure 4. The flyer announcing the cancellation of the “Taboo Beach Party”.
214 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

Revolution) gives further evidence of the metasemiotic shift that occurred after the
installation of the transitional government. Indeed, despite the contrast between F. (who
complains about madaniyya as a decline of Islamic moral values) and the authors of the
flyer (who denounce the persistent limitations on new forms of madaniyya), what
emerges is that between 2020 and 2021 the semantic reference of madaniyya shifted
from its etymological meaning of ‘civilian (government)’to that of ‘civil liberties’. The
metasemiotic changes of the word medaniyya over a three-year span (i.e., between
the beginning of the December Revolution and the crisis of the first transitional
government) show how indexical (re)ordering is highly contingent with broader social
and political changes. As a final remark, the use of the term medaniyya in a
commercial-driven initiative intended “to help propel and position Sudan on the global
tourism map as an attractive tourist destination”opens the question of the progressive
commodification of the linguistic resources of the revolution, which will be analyzed in
more details in the following section.
3. THE COMMODIFICATION OF REVOLUTIONARY LINGUISTIC
RESOURCES
As already stated (§1), the metasemiotic reconfigurations produced by indexical
(re)ordering may also have a direct impact on the way linguistic resources are used and
perceived in a given context. In this section, we analyze how the indexical (re)ordering
enacted by the December Revolution can generate reconfigurations of the revolutionary
linguistic resources that drive them into a process of commodification. The first term to
be analyzed is kandāka ‘Kandaka’(also “Candace”in the Western tradition). This term
is not of Arabic origin, as it can be traced back to Meroitic (a Nilo-Saharan language
spoken in Nubia between 2000 BCE and 600 CE), in which it was used to refer to the
“sister of the king (of Kush).”The term emerged in a Sudanese political context with the
meaning of “revolutionary woman”(mara sawrawiyya in Arabic) during the 2012
protests,
14
in which there was significant participation of young and old women alike,
even if it remained limited to the vocabulary of political elites. It was reintroduced and
spread during the December Revolution to express the increased importance of
women’s activism in Sudan (Casciarri & Manfredi 2020b). Indeed, during the first
phases of the December Revolution, expressions such as anākandāka “I’m a Kandaka”
and ḥabōbti kandāka “my grandmother is a Kandaka”
15
were widely used in banners
and chants, as we can see in Figure 5.
In this overall context, it should be remarked that some of our interviewees have also
stressed the underlying exclusivism of the term kandāka, which supposedly evokes the
image of a woman from the ruling class of northern riverain (i.e., Arab and Muslim)
groups (see also Ahmed Abdel Aziz 2019).
16
Notwithstanding, kandāka became iconic
for all Sudanese women involved in the December Revolution, and came into everyday
use, going beyond the local cultured elites. At the same time, the term kandāka also
started to be widely diffused by international media, mainly in relation with the figure of
Alaa Salah, a young student who gained worldwide attention from a video of her that
went viral in April 2019.
17
In this context, following the gradual economic liberalization
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 215

enacted by the transitional government in 2019–2022, the term kandāka became subject
to a process of commodification. On the one hand, due to its association with the
Meroitic civilization, kandāka became a means of folkloric branding of Sudan. On the
other hand, owing to its association with the revolutionary change (and in particular
with its feminist component), kandāka also started to be adopted in the context of the
market economy for promoting the sale of new “sustainable”products and services.
This twofold market value of the term kandāka can be exemplified by its adoption
as the name of a local touristic agency (“Kandaka Tourism,”Figure 6) organizing
archeological tours in north Sudan, and for branding a line of handmade cosmetics
(“Kandaka Naturals,”Figure 7).
Although the commodification of the term kandāka seems to occur in many
and different commercial initiatives—like a “Kandaka sandal perfume”advertised on a
local radio station—in both cases mentioned above the promotors are members of
cultured diasporic elites. The Kandaka Tourism agency was founded by a Sudanese
anthropologist who got his master’s degree in Europe. In a similar manner, the Kandaka
Naturals line was launched by a Sudanese activist who studied and spent a long period in
Europe. Both actors, though trulyengaged activists, have thus been exposed to a Western
market culture enhancing ethnocultural heritage and gender equality as commodities
for a public of “responsible”customers. While the Kandaka Naturals line proclaims
aims of “sustainability”and “equitable trade”intended to match the New Sudan vision
(especially with in its feminist-oriented shape) promoted by the December Revolution,
18
the Kandaka Tourism agency promotes a vision for “developing Sudan tourist sector and
helping local communities basically in education and water projects.”
19
This fact shows
how the process by which the term kandāka became a means for selling commodities is
contingent upon the exploitation of different metasemiotic nuances (i.e., “African
heritage”;“gender equality”;“liberal and sustainable change”) linked to its use in the
context of revolution.
Figure 5. Anākandāka “I’m a Kandaka”in a banner displayed during a demonstration in
2019 (Casciarri and Manfredi 2020a: 32).
216 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

The process of commodification of revolutionary linguistic resources also involves
fixed expressions, such as the slogan Ḥanabnīhu, which literally means “we will
build it!”This slogan finds its origin in the title of a poem written by Mahjoub Sharif
(1948–2014), a famous Sudanese poet and activist, just before the 1985 revolution. The
poem was then set to music by Mohammed Wardi
20
with the title “al-Badīl”(‘the
alternative’). Although the poem was already part of the shared repertoire of Sudanese
democratic militants—notably the ones linked to the Sudanese Communist Party—it
was only during the 2018–2019 uprising that ḥanabnīhu became a revolutionary
slogan.
21
In this context, the original reference to the struggle for the construction of a
Sudan free from oppression and inequality took on a renewed meaning after the fall of
Figure 6. The Kandaka Tourism logo.
Figure 7. The Kandaka Naturals website.
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 217

Omar al-Bashir’s regime, with the third person singular (masculine) pronoun hu ‘it’
denoting the “New Sudan”to be built according to the principles promoted by the
December Revolution. The slogan Ḥanabnīhu has been represented in many graffiti
(Figure 8), and it lent its name to various initiatives organized by the Resistance
Committees in Greater Khartoum.
Following the broad diffusion of the term, in 2019 the African Paints enterprise, a
well-known company producing painting materials in Khartoum, launched a massive
advertising campaign exploiting the slogan Ḥanabnīhu (Figure 9).
In this advertisement, we find the phrase Ḥanabnīhu wa ḥanalawwinu, which
literally means “We will build it and we will color it.”The reference of the advertising
campaign to the December Revolution is made even more explicit by the picture on the
right side of the billboard showing the face of a young “protestor”painted with the
colors of the Sudanese flag. Actually, ḥanabnīhu is not simply one among the many
linguistic resources (both single words and slogans) that had become widespread and
emotionally active during the December Revolution and thus gained the potential for
commodification in the local market. Actually, this slogan is particularly meaningful for
our analysis because of its complex social “biography.”In the seminal book edited by
Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, I. Kopytoff
(1986) writes about the cultural biography of things (a term that we could replace here
with “(linguistic) resources”). Similar to Heller (2010) and Block (2018) (cf. §1), he
invites us to consider commoditization as a process, rather than a status quo, through
which one could trace the social life of commodities along a complex and non-linear
Figure 8. Graffiti in Khartoum: Raġm ad-damm ḥanabnīhu “Despite the blood, we will
build it”(Photo: B. Casciarri, February 2020).
218 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

path. According to him, ethnography (and biographical methods extended to
non-human actors, thus endowed with agency) can be useful to seize not only the
situated successions of commodification, decommodification, and recommodification
(Kopytoff 1986: 65), but also to perceive the embeddedness between the sociocultural
and the material spheres. The biography of ḥanabnīhu witnesses this type of complex
and dynamic vision of commodification. First emerging in 1985 as the title of a militant
poem, it soon became a protest song widely spread during Omar al-Bashir’s regime. In
2015 it was paradoxically adopted by the electoral campaign of the National Congress
Party (Omar al-Bashir’s party, which jailed as opponents both the poet Mahjoub Sharif
and the singer Mohammed Wardi; see Ille 2015, until being used again during the
December Revolution, between 2018 and 2020. This last “renaissance”of ḥanabnīhu
ended up with its commodification in correspondence with the liberalization process
enacted by the first transitional government. This new commodity status attributed to
ḥanabnīhu is also confirmed by its wide occurrence for branding gadgets (tee-shirts,
hats, sacks, etc.) related to the revolution and sold on the internet for commercial
purposes (Figure 10).
Although some anthropologists (Appadurai 1986) have suggested that commodifica-
tion is a complex process that should be understood beyond the unique aspect of the
entry of a given entity into the logics of the market exchange, fieldwork supports us
in suggesting that such dynamics have been equally raised by Sudanese activists. In
February 2020, a young militant from Shambat (Khartoum Bahri) condemned the
presence of what he called tujjār as-sawra ‘the merchants of the revolution’since the
Figure 9. Advertising panel of the African Paints company: Ḥanabnīhu wa ḥanalawwanu,
“We will build it and we will color it”( photo: B. Casciarri, February 2020).
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 219

massive demonstrations in 2019. As the economic crisis deepened in 2021, it was also
possible to observe a growing stigmatization of the tujjār(‘merchants’), as an implicit
category of “counterrevolutionary”agents. This also shows how the social transform-
ation advocated by the December Revolution can be manipulated to produce a form of
social reproduction shaped by the market economy, which emerged soon after the 2019
installation of the transitional government and its liberalization measures (Casciarri
2022).
4. CONCLUSIONS
The debate on agency in social sciences, now almost 30 years old, helped to reverse
epistemologies based on dichotomies between subject and object, “human”and
“non-human,”symbols and realities. In this overall context, language as a social
phenomenon is by definition endowed with agency and, as such, it can be a means of
social action and change (Ahearn 2001: 111). This is particularly true in contexts such
as revolutions that trigger a radical social change, while enabling the participants to
understand the intertwining of language and power (Ahearn 2001: 111; Casciarri &
Manfredi 2020a: 5). In the particular context of the December Revolution, the refusal of
political hierarchies and leaderships (see §1) rendered agency even more important
in the process of indexical (re)ordering of linguistic resources. This is because
revolutionary words and slogans emerge and spread quickly, with their faculty of
commoning and participating in the process of identity construction in a phase of
political crisis. In view of that, ethnography stands as the most fruitful tool for making
sense of the metasemiotic shifts produced by a pluralityof agents during different phases
of the revolution.
Yet agency is neither unequivocally nor predictably linked to social change and
emancipation, as it may act in directions that are contradictory to the political intentions
of militant groups. This is particularly evident in the case of the commodification
Figure 10. Gadgets displaying the slogan Ḥanabnīhu “We will build it!”.
220 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

process of linguistic resources during the December Revolution. By following the
“biographies”of revolutionary linguistic resources across a timespan that runs from the
first uprisings in 2018–2019 until the failure of the second transitional government in
2022, we can analyze the different phases and outputs of their complex process of
commodification. On the one side, commodification is induced by the conversion of
revolutionary linguistic resources into sellable items within a capitalist system, by
hegemonic actors who are far from the fundamental claims of the political movement
itself. On the other side, it also induces a reshaping of the claims promulgated by
the revolution (yet without denying them) that flow into an ethnocultural branding of
Sudan and the commercialization of sustainable products. Despite this, at the core of
the commodification, there is the idea of detaching these linguistic resources from
their original embeddedness within the ideology and practices of political activists.
Beyond, the process of commodification of the linguistic resources of the December
Revolution provides evidence of one of the many “contradictions”that characterize
every revolutionary movement.
The metasemiotic changes analyzed in this paper also show that, in spite of the
circulation of revolutionary words and slogans across the Arabic-speaking world, the
actors of the December Revolution developed an innovative and genuinely local
repertoire, which is rooted in Sudanese political history and affected in only a limited
way by the so-called “Arab Spring(s)”(Manfredi & Casciarri 2021).
In conclusion, the December Revolution must be viewed as an ongoing process.
Accordingly, the parallel “biographies”of these linguistic resources are still undergoing
metasemiotic changes: the words and slogans that have been reported in this paper may
be dropped, take on new social meanings, be replaced by other items, or show variations
and semantic nuances according to their users. All things considered, indexical
(re)ordering and agency represent two important theoretical means through which the
complex sociolinguistic dynamics in times of protest should be viewed.
NOTES
1
This study is part of the ANR project (CE41) THAWRA-SuR (“THinking Alternative WoRlds
Across Sudanese Revolution”), https://anr.fr/Projet-ANR-20-CE41-0008.
2
The term “revolution”(sawra in Sudanese Arabic) has been used by the local actors since the
beginning of the uprising in December 2018, and has continued to be used after the fall of the
regime and the formation of a civilian government up to the present day (Casciarri & Manfredi
2020a: 4; Abdelhay et al. 2021). As for “December,”in local memories of prominent
uprisings, Sudanese people commonly use the Western calendar name of the month: thus,
“October”stands for the 1964 revolution, “April”for the 1985 revolution, and “September”
for the violently repressed revolts of 2013. In line with this practice, they name the third
Sudanese revolution the “December”revolution (Casciarri & Deshayes 2019; Casciarri &
Manfredi 2020a: 18).
3
In its conventional definition (Gumperz 1964), the notion of “repertoire”refers to a set of
semiotic resources as shaped by individuals, and not by historical events (see also Léglise
2021). In this paper, the term “repertoire”is instead used in relation to the linguistic forms that
Linguistic resources during revolution in Sudan 221

emerged during different phases of the December Revolution, while being used by both
revolutionary and counterrevolutionary actors.
4
Since 2005, the term “indigenous language”has been officially adopted by the Sudanese
constitution to refer to all the languages present on the national territory of Sudan, other than
Arabic (Abdelhay et al. 2011). Despite its (post)colonial and potentially discriminatory
nature, the notion of “indigenous language”(ruṭāna in Sudanese Arabic) remains prominent
in both the official and informal discourse about language diversity in Sudan and South Sudan
(see also Manfredi 2015).
5
In this study, we adopt the most common etymological conventions for the transcription of
Arabic. The transcription distinguishes between Standard Arabic and Sudanese Arabic
realizations (e.g., qāftranscribed as qin Standard Arabic, and as gin Sudanese Arabic).
Code-switching toward English is also signaled by underlined text.
6
This register dichotomy could be explained in the light of Suleiman’s (2008) overlapping
distinction between “language community”and “speech community”in relation to standard
Arabic and local dialects, respectively. According to Suleiman, the pan-Arab relation is
typically imagined/articulated through the standard, whereas the ethno-national relation is
imagined through the national dialect(s).
7
See Bassiouney (2012; 2013) and Panovic (2017) for different studies adopting the
diglossic/multiglossic framework for the analysis of the Egyptian revolution. See also
Timm (1981) for a critical review of the notion of diglossia.
8
See also Johnstone & Kiesling (2008) for another application of the notion of “indexicality”to
the distribution of social meanings of phonological variants in Pittsburgh.
9
The option of an ethnographic qualitative approach implies two elements. First, respondents
are not chosen through a statistical sample aiming at generalization, but looking at
“representation”(of studied phenomena) rather than “representativeness”(Olivier de Sardan
2015). Second, the data obtained report conceptualizations of linguistic resources which may
be in contrast with the ones of the revolutionary movement (and even with the authors’
positions), but appear important to seize the issue of indexicality at the core of the article.
10
It should be stressed that the forced shaving of young males, a frequent repressive action
enacted by the security forces both before and during the revolution, confirms that wearing
long hair is still stigmatized for men as a rejection of Islamic morals, and thus as a marker of
political opposition to the Islamist regime (see Casciarri & Manfredi 2020a: 24).
11
Established on 1 January 2019 as a means of political representation, the Forces for Freedom
and Change, also known as the Alliance for Freedom and Change, is a coalition of 22 political
groups of various kinds, including the Sudanese Professional Association and the National
Consensus Forces. Throughout the revolution, the Forces of Freedom and Change promoted
civil disobedience and strikes as a means of peaceful resistance. After the removal of ‘Omar
Al-Bashir, the Forces of Freedom and Change became the main political opponent of the
Transitional Military Council (Casciarri & Manfredi 2020a: 30).
12
Without generalizing about the alleged disapproval of madaniyya values by rural groups, we
also mention two other interviewees that show a similar perception. The first one is a
50-year-old man with a peasant background from a Jezira village who affirms that madaniyya,
taken as “individual freedom”(ḥurriyya fardiyya), has become simple disorder ( fōḍa). In the
same manner, M., an 85-year-old farmer from the Jezira, stigmatizes madaniyya because “it
made girls (wearing trousers) and boys (having long hair) indistinguishable.”
13
The particular nature of this source (a flyer circulated on the web and on WhatsApp lists)
makes it different (and more difficult to seize in terms of reliability and production) from other
222 Stefano Manfredi and Barbara Casciarri

ethnographic material collected in the field by the authors of this article. Despite this, we think
that the flyer furnishes an interesting conception of madaniyya that stands out from the one
developed by the revolutionary movement of the same period.
14
Sudan did not experience significant protests in 2011 during the so-called “Arab Spring”
(Deshayes 2019). Youth protest movements emerged in 2010, in the context of presidential
elections, then a stronger mobilization arose in 2012 (when the term “Kandaka”emerged).
Later on, in September 2013, another protest movement against austerity was brutally
repressed in a few days.
15
Interestingly enough, the latter slogan is often associated with its male-oriented version jiddí
tarhākan “my grandfather is a Tarhakan (King of Kush)”for claiming a more inclusive
African (vs. Arab and Muslim, see §1) identity for Sudan.
16
A consequence of this understanding of the term kandāka expressed by marginalized groups
of Sudan is its gradual replacement by other words that traditionally refer to “politically
engaged women.”This is the case of the term mēram, which seems to be the preferred option
of Darfuri groups, and meḥēra, which is instead widespread in northern Sudan.
17
See, for example, the video “‘Nubian queen’becomes Sudan protest symbol”broadcast by
BBC News on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXiSxI0Vj3E.
18
The Kandaka Naturals website (https://kandakanaturals.com/) also furnishes an interesting
translation of the term kandāka:“A strong empowered woman who is an inspiration; a warrior
queen.”
19
https://www.facebook.com/Kandaka-Tourism-Sudan-103601034961939.
20
Mohammed Wardi (1932–2012) was a famous Sudanese singer and activist in the Sudanese
Communist Party. A version of the song he wrote based on the poem of Mahjoub Sharif can be
found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p45Gi9Dw978.
21
The slogan Ḥanabnīhu was also widely used in 2019 as part of several environmental
campaigns intended to rehabilitate Khartoum neighborhoods (namely Hajj Yusuf).
22
Source: Sudanese Translators for Change, Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Sudanese-
Translators-for-Change-STC-410547673013811).
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