Sudan’s diaspora uses WhatsApp voice notes as a war archive

When Safaa Bashir didn’t hear from her father in Sudan for two months, she expected the worst.

While Safaa lives in Canada and studies medicine there, her parents and siblings were evacuated from Sudan to Egypt a few months after the war began.

Her father returned to his home state of Al Gezira in October 2023 to care for his sick mother, whom he was unable to leave due to health reasons.

During this time, connectivity in Al Gezira was completely interrupted for two months, according to Safaa.

“It was a nightmare. For two months we didn’t know whether my father was alive or dead,” said Safaa, deeply dismayed.

Months later, Safaa finally received a voice message from her father reassuring them that he was OK, a message that gave her some comfort in the face of the ongoing displacement her family was facing.

Their father told them that he would not be able to send voice messages until he moved to a neighboring town outside Al Gezira where the connection would be better.

“We relied on a two-week cycle of voice messages as many people from different villages came together to do the same with their families abroad,” she explained.

As phone calls became increasingly difficult for Safaa’s family, voice messages became their primary method of communication.

Voice messages have become a vital resource for Sudanese families like Safaa’s.

Nisrin Elamin, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, puts it this way: “The Sudanese have become experts in WhatsApp voice messages. Whole books, diaries and confessions are created through voice messages. They have a certain permanence.”

Evacuation efforts

This also led to evacuation planning among the Sudanese diaspora and their families.

Murtada El Fadl, a Sudanese writer living in New York City, has relied on voice messages to coordinate his family’s evacuation from Sudan in April 2023.

He and his close family members living abroad mobilized their international networks to strategically and safely bring family members in Sudan to Egypt.

Faced with connectivity problems across Sudan and fears of cellphone confiscation at RSF-run checkpoints, Murtada’s family abroad used voice messages to meticulously plan every detail of the evacuation.

Before the Sudan War, Murtada was never interested in using voice messages. However, during the war, voice messages were one of the few ways he could coordinate on-site transportation of his family out of Sudan.

“WhatsApp voice notes have become very important for coordinating all these networks,” Murtada explained.

This meant that Murtada and his family had to contact people directly to coordinate buses and pick-up locations. They used pinned Google Maps links to communicate their whereabouts and pick-up points. Thanks to these efforts, they were safely evacuated to Egypt a few weeks later, in May 2023.

Reflecting on his family’s harrowing journey a year later, Murtada explains that his role in documenting that war comes from his perspective as an indirect observer who experienced the events through his family’s accounts.

“As a journalist and film curator, I have public forums where I am in control and can say what I want. There I talk about Sudan and Sudanese culture,” he says.

“I think I can use my network to inform the world about Sudan and what is happening there,” Murtada adds.

Mutual support

Voice messages also served to strengthen the close ties between the diaspora and the indigenous population in Sudan during the war.

Iman Abarro, a Sudanese creative living in Toronto, Canada, uses voice messages to stay in touch with her grandmother in Sudan. While most of her family was evacuated at the beginning of the war, her grandmother fled in December 2023.

Although Iman could not speak directly on the phone, she regularly sent voice messages to check on her grandmother.

Even though she didn’t always receive an answer, her father, who was able to call directly from the region, assured her that her grandmother appreciated hearing her voice.

“We only talked about trivial things,” says Iman. “When I cooked a Sudanese dish, I told her about it and said I was thinking of her, and she would answer me and ask me how I prepared it,” she adds.

The exchange of voice messages created space for normality and family care.

In our interview, Iman searched through her chats with her grandmother and found that they had been deleted for security reasons when crossing borders.

This highlights the deletion of personal archives due to wartime precautions and underscores the dual role of voice memos as a means of communication and potential historical evidence.

Still, for Iman, the archiving process does not begin with the war, but with Sudanese culture in general. “It’s about presenting our culture, humanizing us and showing who we are,” she says.

“Considering how little coverage there is on Sudan, people don’t really know anything about Sudan, our culture and history, apart from the unrest.”

Safaa described similar feelings about how, despite connectivity issues in Sudan, voice messages allowed her to communicate with all members of her family during joyful moments.

“I celebrated birthdays with voice messages and sent congratulations and news to my aunts and grandmother,” Safaa recalls. “It calmed me down and allowed me to share in their lives.”

The Sudanese diaspora faces the difficult task of raising awareness and educating communities abroad about the urgency of the war in Sudan and its impact on Sudanese culture.

Archiving these experiences is becoming increasingly complex, and voice messages offer a way to share Sudanese stories and narratives with the world.

Janine AlHadidi is a freelance Jordanian journalist based in Ottawa, Canada. Her work focuses on Arab film, gender and art.