From June 2023 until March 2025, the RSF used Sudan's National Museum as a military base and mine; by mid-September 2025, looters had taken more than 60 per cent of its goods. The museum held more than 100,000 artefacts. In response to that destruction, archivists and community organizers are finding ways to preserve history outside the institutions traditionally expected to hold it.
“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 Cynthia Nahhas, co-founder of the Garod Collective, a New York-based community group that hosts Armenian cultural events.
What War Targets
As war spread block by block, the RSF ransacked and pillaged homes, forcing families from houses filled with generations of memories. At times, RSF fighters defecated on children's beds. After seizing Khartoum, they turned to more deliberate and extensive cultural destruction.
The museum served, in essence, as a national living room. Using it as a base and mine gave the RSF protection and a steady financial stream through the black market. The Los Angeles Times reported that attackers had ransacked at least 76 heritage sites and 20 museums across Sudan. RSF forces also affected the Armenian Church in Khartoum.
Vahe Boghosian, a diasporan Armenian and historian from London, launched Sudanahye just after the war began in April 2023. The multimedia heritage project preserves Sudanese-Armenian history, honours historical events, tracks change and aims to help hold war criminals accountable. It also pushes back against the erasure of Boghosian's ancestry amid war and the gap between news portrayals of Sudan and the stories he heard from relatives.
“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.”'
A Living Archive, Not a Frozen One
Sudanahye dates the first known Armenian settlement in Sudan to the 1840s. More Armenians came to Egypt and Sudan after the Hamidian Massacres in the late 1890s, following the British conquest in 1899 and the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, and after the 1915 genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. By the 1930s, Armenian families lived across Sudan, with Khartoum at the centre; at its peak, the population reached about 1,000.
The project draws on historical documents from archives in Cairo, Arabkir and Durham, alongside oral histories and photographs. Boghosian said documents largely show business and some political records, rather than children's or women's perspectives. Photographs reveal more of community life and interactions with other communities; oral histories carry emotion. Through its social media work, the project gives particular attention to personal narratives and encourages its predominantly Armenian audience to recognize the suffering of Sudanese 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 Christopher Tounsel, University of Washington's Director of African Studies. Cultural artefacts, he said, let communities claim a contribution and place in the world. Preserving this history also preserves Sudan's and the Nile's centrality to world history.
Building Outside the Big Three
Boghosian and the Garod Collective held a workshop on building a diaspora from scratch and honouring culture beyond the traditional “big three” institutions: church, school and social club. Since founding the collective last April, Nahhas and Nanor Vosgueritchian have held an Armenian Mapping Workshop, a writing workshop, afternoons of backgammon, musical performances and a barbecue.
“I want to be connected to [my culture] in my own, modern, for lack of a better term, way,” Nahhas said, describing workshops that translate queer songs into Armenian and other ways of connecting with culture outside traditional spaces. Tounsel said investment in diaspora means an evolving identity, not dilution. Cultural preservation, he cautioned, can freeze something in time instead of recognizing it as living.
Boghosian has held events in Cairo, London, Berlin and Amsterdam, and held his first event in Armenia last month. In March, a separate U.S. tour took him to Boston and New York, where he collaborated with Project Save, the oldest archive focused solely on preserving photography of the global Armenian experience. Its Archive Alive venture uses multimedia exhibits to spotlight grassroots initiatives, connect groups and bring archival materials under a common institution. Sudanahye was one of the first projects it featured.
Project Save Director Arto Vaun said human rights attorneys had recently requested photographs dating as far back as 100 years for cases at the Hague concerning the 2020-2023 ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Tounsel said people able to claim a history could assert they were “at the bare minimum your social equals” and “fully human.” Accountability can uphold agreements including the UNESCO World Heritage List and the 1954 Hague Convention, he said, but those agreements' authority is nullified if violations bring no repercussions.