Africans of the Year: Sara Elhassan
Making sure Sudan is seen
Khalid Elwalid
Writer and editor Sara Elhassan has been documenting Sudan’s political situation since 2013. Through uprisings, revolutions, coups, and now full-scale war, her work has evolved from analysis and commentary into an act of sustained national witnessing. Over more than 900 days of conflict, she has provided coverage, insight, and interpretation of a war that has devastated communities and fractured the country.
Beyond daily reporting, Elhassan has become deeply involved in direct support efforts. She fundraises for emergency-response rooms, grassroots organisations, and families trapped in the conflict. In a country in which institutions have collapsed and humanitarian access is limited, these networks represent the final thread keeping many communities alive. Elhassan has helped to redirect global attention and resources to people working under fire to provide food, medical care, and shelter.
What Elhassan values most, she says, is her role in amplifying a narrative often overshadowed by power and violence – the story of Sudanese people saving themselves. Across the ruins of cities and the collapse of formal systems, she has documented how ordinary people have organised kitchens, clinics, evacuation routes, and emergency shelters with little more than willpower and solidarity.
These activists, medics, and volunteers continue to function in conditions that defy survival. For Elhassan, they are not supporting characters in the story of war: they are the story itself.
Her call to Africa and the world is to support what still lives in Sudan. Support emergency response rooms. Support local organisers. Support families by any means possible. Beyond financial aid, she emphasises the necessity of solidarity and moral recognition. Sudanese people, she says, have long felt invisible. War has only deepened that invisibility. Naming the injustice matters. Saying this suffering is not normal, not acceptable, and not forgotten, matters.
Ultimately, Elhassan has a simple vision: she hopes for the day when this work will no longer be necessary.
My main and go to source for what's happening in Sudan-- clear, accurate, articulate. A lifeline for the beleaguered innocents.
I follow her thank you!