General Information

There are two Niles meeting at Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city, before flowing a further 1,750 miles to the Mediterranean -- a meeting known as the longest kiss in the world. The blue Nile rises in Lake Tana in Ethiopia, but the White Nile, as Alan Moorehead writes, “is a much longer river than the Blue. Already at Khartoum it has come two thousand miles from its source in Lake Victoria in Central Africa, and except for its passage through the great swamp of the Sudd in south Sudan, its banks are inhabited nearly all the way. But the fall of the White Nile’s water over this vast distance has been barely 2,000 feet (compared to the blue Nile’s tumultuous drop of nearly 5,000 feet), and so it has a quiet and sedate appearance. Steamers and feluccas move about comfortably on its broad expanse of water. It is very much the parent stream. However the real strength of the two rivers that now unite and lose their separate identify at Khartoum lies in the Blue Nile. It provides six-sevenths of the total volume of water in the combined stream, and for six months of the year it rushes down from the Ethiopian mountains with the effect of a tidal wave, by June the force of this flood is so great that the White Nile is dammed back upon itself at Khartoum. It pauses, as it were, and stands back while the younger, livelier river pushes past carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of discoloring grit and silt to Egypt. At last in January the tremendous rush subsides, and the White Nile begins to assert itself again. Then at Khartoum you can see in the two rivers a distinct dividing line between them on the surface of the water, the White Nile not precisely white but more nearly muddy grey, the blue Nile seldom absolutely blue except for certain moments at dawn and in the evening, but more of a “brownish green.”

The Nile has the power to create and the power to destroy, but Sudan can take succor from the knowledge that “there is no record of the river ever having failed”. The great brown flood came pouring out of the desert forever, and no one could explain why it was that it should rise and flow over its banks in the Nile delta in September, the driest and hottest time of the year on the Mediterranean littoral; nor how it was possible for the river to continue in its lower reaches for well over 1,000 miles through one of the most grithful of these deserts without receiving a single tributary and hardly a drop of rain”. Truly Sudan is the land of the Nile: the land of the two Niles.

Introduction
Sudan is the largest nation in Africa, about 967,000 square miles in Northeast Africa, and one third as large as the continental U.S. Sudan stretches 2,000 miles south from Egypt to Uganda, Kenya and Zaire, and 1,500 miles west from Ethiopia and the Red Sea to Libya, Chad and the Central African Republic. The land ranges from savannah to desert. A great river system, the Nile, gave birth to one of the great original civilizations of mankind and provides the basis of life for much of the Sudan. Within the Sudan are diverse ethnic groups, languages, modes of dress, skin colors, religious beliefs and traditions.

Population
Country: estimated 28 million (June 1999). Capital: 6 million. The capital includes the three towns of Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North.

Official language
Arabic is the official language. Other main languages are English and about 32 African dialects: dialects of the southern Nilotic people, dialects of the Hematic and Semitic people close to Ethiopia on the Red Sea, Bantu dialects in the southern provinces.

Religion
Islam 70%; indigenous beliefs (southern Sudan) 25%; Christianity 5%.

Ethnic composition
Arabic and African.

Agricultural products
Cotton, peanuts, gum Arabic, sesame seeds, sorghum, wheat and sugar cane.

Industrial products
Cement and textiles

Currency
All financial transactions were and still are made in the Sudanese Dinar (SD), which was introduced a few years ago to replace the Sudanese pound. The exchange rate as of January 2007 was roughly US$1 to 200SD. Despite replacing the Sudanese Pound with the Dinar, most people still verbally refer to the Dinar as the former pound and convert accordingly. The rate is 1SD to 10 Sudanese pounds.

In January of this year, the Central Bank of Sudan has started the circulation of Sudanese pounds as a currency to take over from the Dinar. However, it is expected that the pound's introduction will not be a quick process.

The new Sudanese pound is worth exactly hundred times the currently used Dinar, meaning that 100 dinar bills will be changed into new one-pound banknotes. One-Dinar coins - the lowest entity in circulation - will be changed into one-piaster coins. The largest banknotes issued are denominated 50 pounds.

Flag
Sudan's national flag consists of a horizontal rectangle twice as long as it is wide. It is divided into 3 stripes: the top one red, the centre white and the bottom black. A green triangle protrudes into the stripes from the side next to the flagpole. The colours of the flag, which are in common with many sisterly Arab countries, are derived from a poem by a well known Arab poet, Safie AI Din AI Hili.

Natural resources
Modest reserves of oil, iron ore, copper, chrome and other industrial metals. Although Sudan probably has a large number of minerals, exploration has been limited, and the country’s real potential is still unknown.