From June 2023 through March 2025, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces used the National Museum in Khartoum as an ad hoc military base and a mine. The building held more than 100,000 artefacts from the Stone Ages, Nubian and Christian times, and the Islamic period. By mid-September 2025, looters had taken more than 60 per cent of its goods. The occupation shielded the militia and fed it a steady stream of money through the black market.
That’s the backdrop to Sudanahye, a Sudanese-Armenian archival project launched by a small group of private citizens just after the war began in April 2023. It’s now in its third anniversary year. No government agency or international body commissioned it. A London historian and a loose network of diaspora volunteers built it.
A Museum Turned Into a Mine
Destruction in Khartoum wasn’t random. As the war spread block by block, families fled homes filled with generations of memories. The RSF ransacked and pillaged properties, at times defecating on children’s beds. Once the RSF seized Khartoum, cultural destruction grew more deliberate and extensive. The Los Angeles Times reported that looters had ransacked at least 76 heritage sites and 20 museums across Sudan. The Armenian Church was among the heritage sites affected in RSF-occupied Khartoum.
The museum had served, in essence, as a national living room. Armed men made it a revenue stream.
The Private Archive
Vahe Boghosian, a diasporan Armenian and historian from London, launched Sudanahye as the first multimedia heritage project on Sudanese-Armenian history. He wanted to prevent the erasure of his ancestry amid the war. He also wanted to reconcile the violent media portrayals of Sudan with the warmer anecdotes 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.'”
The project traces its roots far back. Sudanahye dates the first known Armenian settlement in Sudan to the 1840s. More Armenians arrived after the Hamidian Massacres in the late 1890s. Following the British conquest in 1899 and the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, another wave came seeking wealth and remittances. A further wave followed 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 community numbered about 1,000.
Sudanahye draws on historical documents from archives in Cairo, Arabkir and Durham, along with a growing collection of oral histories and a photo archive. Boghosian said the documents largely record business and some political activity, rather than children’s or women’s perspectives. Photographs show more of community life and interactions with other communities. Oral histories carry emotion.
Boghosian has taken the project on the road, holding his first events in Cairo, London, Berlin and Amsterdam. Last month, he held his first event in Armenia. In March, a separate U.S. tour took him to Boston and New York, where he worked with Project Save, the oldest archive focused solely on preserving photography of the global Armenian experience. Its recent venture, Archive Alive, uses multimedia exhibits to spotlight grassroots initiatives, connect groups and bring archival materials under a common institution. Sudanahye was one of its first featured projects.
Evidence for the Courtroom
The archive’s value isn’t only sentimental. Project Save Director Arto Vaun said human rights attorneys recently asked the group for photographs dating back as far as 100 years to support cases at the Hague concerning the 2020-2023 ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. “That history never stops,” Vaun said.
Vaun described a photography project, not a genealogy project. “Let's say you're doing a search of a Sudan family photo - it's like, well they were in Sudan, but then they were in Paris and then they moved to Soviet Armenia and then from there, one half ended up in London,” he said. “Because it's Project Save, we have the ability to close that loop.”
Christopher Tounsel, University of Washington’s Director of African Studies, linked the work to accountability. He said accountability can establish an international precedent and uphold agreements including the UNESCO World Heritage List and the 1954 Hague Convention. Their authority, he said, means little if violations bring no repercussions. He added that colonialism had often relied on claims that people had no history. Those able to claim one could assert they were “at the bare minimum your social equals” and “fully human.”
Culture Without the Big Three
Boghosian also joined the Garod Collective, a New York-based community group that hosts Armenian cultural events, for a workshop about building a diaspora from scratch today. The question was whether people could honour culture beyond the traditional “big three” institutions: church, school and social club.
Collective founder Cynthia Nahhas pushed the point. “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?” she asked. Nahhas said she wants to connect with her culture in her own modern way, through workshops that translate queer songs into Armenian. Since the Collective’s founding last April, she and co-founder Nanor Vosgueritchian have held an Armenian Mapping Workshop, a writing workshop, afternoons of backgammon, musical performances and a barbecue.
Tounsel offered a measured view. “Investing in diaspora is not about dilution, it's about an identity that's evolving. It's not becoming less of what it was. It's becoming more of something new,” he said.
Sudanese people Boghosian interviewed told him they value the country’s former tolerance of diversity, which allowed an Armenian to call themself Sudanese. Many hope that tolerance will return.
Why This Matters:
When armed groups loot a national museum and use it to finance a war, the cost hits a country’s memory as well as its treasury. Sudan’s formal institutions couldn’t protect more than 100,000 artefacts. Volunteers with photographs, oral histories and a social media account are filling part of the gap, without a state budget or a multilateral mandate. That’s a striking case for private initiative as a backstop when public institutions fail. It also shows why documentation matters for enforcement. Tounsel’s warning is blunt: treaties like the 1954 Hague Convention lose their authority if violations carry no consequences. Archives that survive can provide the evidence courts need. Whether the Hague or any other forum acts on that evidence remains an open question.