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Britain Funding Sudanese Activists to Hide Sudan’s National Treasures

Smoke billows during air strikes in central Khartoum as the Sudanese army attacks positions held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) throughout the Sudanese capital on October 12, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
Smoke billows during air strikes in central Khartoum as the Sudanese army attacks positions held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) throughout the Sudanese capital on October 12, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
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Britain Funding Sudanese Activists to Hide Sudan’s National Treasures

Smoke billows during air strikes in central Khartoum as the Sudanese army attacks positions held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) throughout the Sudanese capital on October 12, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
Smoke billows during air strikes in central Khartoum as the Sudanese army attacks positions held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) throughout the Sudanese capital on October 12, 2024. (Photo by AFP)

The British Council is using a £1.8 million ($2.3 million) grant to help prevent the pillaging of Sudan’s national museums during its ongoing civil war, Britain’s The Telegraph reported.

The grant from the tax-payer-funded body had been dedicated to conserving several heritage sites in Sudan before the war broke out, but has since been diverted to help civilian efforts to prevent the pillaging of national museums and historic sites, it said.

Museums across Sudan have been raided since the start of the civil war in 2023, and artifacts looted from significant sites have been sold on the illegal art market.

Museums linked to ancient cities and pyramids have had their artifacts relocated and hidden during the war, which has cost at least 20,000 lives, the newspaper said.

The move follows the looting and damaging of major museums in the country, including sites linked to British colonial expeditions in Sudan, which had received funding from the UK prior to the conflict.

“Our priority is the safety of our project teams and participants and we carefully monitor this, but we’re flexible where we can be to allow projects to continue their heritage protection activities where it’s feasible and safe to do so,” The Telegraph quoted Stephanie Grant, the director of the British Council in Sudan, as saying.

“Cultural heritage faces serious threats in times of conflict and it’s vital that there are global efforts to defend culture in crisis,” she said.

The British Council had been funding projects in Sudan prior to conflict breaking out in April 2023, with £997,000 provided to sites including the Khalifa Museum in the capital, Khartoum, which had ties to British imperial history.

This had been the home of the Khalifa, who succeeded the Islamic leader Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi, who defeated British forces at the Battle of Shaykan and in the Siege of Khartoum, an action which cost General Charles George Gordon his life in 1885.

A project titled Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage was allocated £1.8 million to help preserve and document Sudanese customs. It used the Ethnographic Museum in Khartoum, which was also to be upgraded as part of the project, as its base.

The Khalifa House was looted along with the Sudan National Museum, the Natural History Museum was burnt out, and the Darfur Museum was destroyed, with experts on the ground estimating that tens of thousands of artefacts had been stolen.

A report by Sudan’s National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums has revealed that artifacts linked to the ancient kingdom of Kush, and displays linked to British general Gordon, have been ransacked during the war.

British Council staff are no longer on the ground in Sudan, but funding from its Living Heritage fund is being provided to Sudanese experts and local communities who have relocated and hidden remaining museum artefacts in order to preserve their cultural heritage, The Telegraph said.

The work has so far helped safeguard stores from museums linked to the ancient sites of Kerma and Jebel Barkal, the Port Sudan Museum on the coast, and the UNESCO site at Meroe, home to 2,300-year-old pyramids.

Despite the ongoing war, there are also ongoing projects to build and protect community museums including at El Obeid, another site linked to a battle in the Mahdist War that drew Britain into Sudan in the 19th century.

Amani Bashir, the director of the Sheikan Museum in El Obeid, said that “tangible and intangible cultural heritage in Sudan” remains of “the utmost importance to communities” amid the ongoing conflict.

She added: “All societies are proud of their heritage and it serves as the identity and brand or sign that distinguishes each group from others.

“The other is therefore working hard to preserve it, continue it, and own it for current and future generations.”

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Japanese Poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, Master of Modern Free Verse, Dies at 92

Shuntaro Tanikawa, a Japanese poet and translator, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Tokyo, on May 25, 2022. (AP)
Shuntaro Tanikawa, a Japanese poet and translator, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Tokyo, on May 25, 2022. (AP)
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Japanese Poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, Master of Modern Free Verse, Dies at 92

Shuntaro Tanikawa, a Japanese poet and translator, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Tokyo, on May 25, 2022. (AP)
Shuntaro Tanikawa, a Japanese poet and translator, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Tokyo, on May 25, 2022. (AP)

Shuntaro Tanikawa, who pioneered modern Japanese poetry, poignant but conversational in its divergence from haiku and other traditions, has died. He was 92.

Tanikawa, who translated the "Peanuts" comic strip and penned the lyrics for the theme song of the animation series "Astro Boy," died Nov. 13, his son Kensaku Tanikawa said Tuesday. He said his father died at a Tokyo hospital due to old age.

Shuntaro Tanikawa stunned the literary world with his 1952 debut "Two Billion Light Years of Solitude," a bold look at the cosmic in daily life, sensual, vivid but simple in its use of everyday language. Written before Gabriel García Márquez’ "One Hundred Years of Solitude," it became a bestseller.

Tanikawa’s "Kotoba Asobi Uta," or "Word Play Songs," is a rhythmical experiment in juxtaposing words that sound similar, such as "kappa," a mythical animal and "rappa," a horn, that makes for a joyful singsong compilation, filled with alliterations and onomatopoeia.

"For me, the Japanese language is the ground. Like a plant, I place my roots, drink in the nutrients of the Japanese language, sprouting leaves, flowers and bearing fruit," he said in a 2022 interview with The Associated Press at his Tokyo home.

Tanikawa explored the poetic, not only in the repetitive music of the spoken word but also the magic hidden in little things.

One of his works is titled, "I wanted to talk to you in the kitchen in the middle of the night."

"In the past, there was something about it being a job, being commissioned. Now, I can write as I want," he said.

In every work Tanikawa tackled, including the script for Kon Ichikawa’s "Tokyo Olympiad," a documentary film of the 1964 Tokyo Games, the respectful love for the beauty of the Japanese language resonates.

He also translated Mother Goose, Maurice Sendak and Leo Lionni. Tanikawa has in turn been widely translated, including English, Chinese and various European languages.

Some of his works were made into picture books for children, and they are often featured in Japanese school textbooks. He also incorporated Japanese words derived from foreign origins into his poems like Coca-Cola.

In his prose poem with that title, in which a boy is opening a Coke can, he wrote: "If, for instance, he saw the infinite universe that started or ended at the tip of his can, he was totally unaware of it. One might be able to opine that he named every bit of the unknown about to swallow him with all the vocabulary he could muster, which included his future vocabulary that was yet dormant in his subconscious."

In his debut poem that catapulted him to stardom, he is more sparse:

"Because the universe goes on expanding, we are all uneasy. With the chill of two billion light-years of solitude, I suddenly sneezed," is the way the poem ends, as translated by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura.

When asked about it, Tanikawa acknowledged it felt as though someone else had written it, but noted he still thought it was a good poem.

"Tanikawa’s poetry reflects a metaphysical and quasi-religious attitude toward experience. In simple, spare language, he sketches profound ideas and emotional truths," according to the Poetry Foundation, a US literary organization.

Tanikawa was born in 1931, a son of philosopher Tetsuzo Tanikawa, and began writing poetry in his teens, circulating with the famous poets of that era, like Makoto Ooka and Shuji Terayama.

He said he used to think poems descended like an inspiration from the heavens. But, as he grew older, he felt the poems welling up from the ground.

In person, Tanikawa was friendly and unassuming, often reading in public with other poets. He never seemed to take himself too seriously but used to confess his one regret in life was never finishing his education, having dropped out amid stardom at a young age.

His relative isolation from the bleakly serious scholarly poetry scene of postwar Japan likely helped him take his free-verse approach that went on to innovate and define Japanese contemporary poetics.

Tanikawa said he wasn’t afraid of death, implying he perhaps meant to write a poem about that experience, too.

"I am more curious about where I will go when I die. It’s a different world, right? Of course, I don’t want pain. I don’t want to die after major surgery or anything. I just want to die, all of a sudden," he said.

He is survived by his son, musician Kensaku Tanikawa and daughter Shino and several grandchildren. Funeral services were held privately with family and friends. A farewell event in his honor is being planned, Kensaku Tanikawa said.

"As they did with all of you, Shuntaro’s poems stunned and moved me, making me chuckle or shed a tear. Wasn’t it all so fun?" he said. "His poems are with you forever."