In April 2023, civil war broke out in Sudan. As fighting spread across the country, civilians were targeted by rival military factions, with hundreds raped and murdered and entire villages burned to ashes. Three months into the conflict, militia forces entered the British-Sudanese writer Nesrine Malik’s familial home located in the capital city Khartoum. They looted and took over the property. After fleeing nearby towns and villages, members of Malik's family embarked on dangerous journeys of escape to neighboring countries, some dying on the way.
In June, Malik published a wrenching report in the Guardian about the losses Khartoum had suffered in the civil war. Yet, she was quick to point out that families like hers were not historical victims but, on the contrary, beneficiaries of the Sudanese state, which had for decades channeled its violence against minority communities who lived in peripheral areas like the Darfur region of western Sudan. After five decades of near ceaseless political conflict, the violence had finally reached the capital.
“In this new bewildered state, the question—badly timed, but pressing nonetheless—is, are Khartoum’s middle classes finally paying for decades of privilege and protection?” Malik asked.
“In this new bewildered state, the question—badly timed, but pressing nonetheless—is, are Khartoum’s middle classes finally paying for decades of privilege and protection?”
Malik has confronted such thorny questions throughout her journalistic career. Born in Sudan in 1975, she studied at Western schools and universities in North Africa and then moved to the United Kingdom, where she worked for a decade in finance before securing a job at the Guardian.
Across nearly two decades there, she has covered a variety of issues related to social justice around the world, including the MeToo movement, the 2019 revolution in Sudan, and the George Floyd protests.
She is particularly interested in how narratives about the past are deployed—often in fabricated forms—to shape contemporary political struggles. For instance, Malik has noted how the Tory party erases Britain’s history of empire in order to label immigrants from former colonies as “invaders” or “foreigners.” Likewise, she has reported on how the U.S. government strives to persecute the Sudanese state for aiding Al-Qaeda while ignoring how U.S. sanctions have laid waste to Sudan.
“A legacy of the sanctions is that people in Sudan’s medical community have become resigned to the fact that many patients die for trivial reasons. It is common for people to enter public hospitals for relatively mild ailments and then never come home,” she writes.
Malik analyzes six such biased political narratives or “myths” in her debut book, We Need New Stories: The Myths that Subvert Freedom (Norton, 2021). Focusing on the United Kingdom and the United States, she examines how amnesia and denial have been weaponized by various communities, including men who decry the excesses of feminism, Republicans who claim that “woke” liberals are impinging their right to free speech, and, not least, the elite media that has shirked responsibility for creating celebrities like Donald Trump.
“My hope in this book is to tackle the ways in which history, race, gender, and classical liberal values are being leveraged to halt any disruption of a centuries-old hierarchy that is paying dividends for fewer and fewer people,” she writes.
A central argument is that right-wing forces in the United Kingdom and the United States use “culture wars” to distract people from serious structural issues. For instance, she notes how, in the United States, Republicans have co-opted the discourse of victimhood, claiming they are oppressed by feminists and anti-racists.
“Merely saying the left is bossy and controlling isn’t enough to convert people to the anti-PC [political correctness] cause,” she writes. “The right needed victims. More specifically, it needed to take victimhood away from those legitimately suffering. There is a line that runs through conservative resistance to change, and it is the appropriation of victimhood from the weak by the powerful.”
Similarly, she points to how Republicans often cite their right to “free speech” in order to deny climate change, promote war, oppose abortion, and so forth—all the while pretending the media is a level playing field, not one shaped by donations from lobbyists, many of whom are precisely pro-war, anti-abortion, and invested in fossil fuels.
“The problem with the marketplace of ideas theory (as with all “invisible hand” theories) is that it doesn’t account for a world in which the market is skewed and not all ideas receive equal representation, because the market has monopolies and cartels,” she writes.
The myths most widely held today are in the realm of geopolitics. Malik has described how the West’s war on terror has enabled religious conservatives in Sudan and elsewhere to entrench power. “The presence of jihadist groups in the region has historically elicited a classically narrow militarized response from western powers that have deployed troops,” she wrote about the recent spate of coups in West Africa.
“But this provides no solution for, or understanding of, the fact that increased terrorist activity, like the coups themselves, is a symptom of demographic and economic trends across the region rather than a primary trigger for democratic instability.”
Writing with nuance about African as well as Western societies, Malik serves as a bridge for two sets of readers, allowing them to better understand each other. Grounded in principles of democracy and justice, she helps us imagine a new geopolitical order in which all countries participate as equals.
“But this provides no solution for, or understanding of, the fact that increased terrorist activity, like the coups themselves, is a symptom of demographic and economic trends across the region rather than a primary trigger for democratic instability.”
By Ratik Asokan, February 21, 2024