Yousif Kuwa: “I Am Not a Commander. I Am a Teacher”

[John Ashworth]

Yousif Kuwa: “I Am Not a Commander. I Am a Teacher.”

1 Apr 2026
Julie Flint
World Peace Foundation

It was May 1993 and I was at home in London, just back from southern
Sudan, when the phone rang. “This is Yousif Kuwa. I would like to meet
you.” I had no idea who Yousif Kuwa was. A commander in the Sudan
People’s Liberation Army, he said. The Guardian had given him my
number.

I was furious that the paper had given an SPLA commander my number and
read them the riot act as soon as we hung up. But I was also
intrigued. The SPLA had split in 1991, dividing the southern SPLA
along tribal lines and isolating the Nuba SPLA in northern Sudan from
the south, their only supply route since the Khartoum government
imposed a blockade on the Nuba Mountains to choke the rebellion there.
Inter-factional fighting in the south had claimed hundreds of
thousands of lives. Famine was spreading under a new government
offensive against John Garang’s Mainstream faction and intra-SPLA
fighting for resources was compounding civilian suffering. Since the
split, I had written, “the SPLA’s ‘mistakes’ had been no less lethal
than the ruthless oppression of an Arab regime bent on making the
south in its own image.”

The SPLA did not take kindly to criticism of this sort. Who on earth
was this man claiming to be an SPLA commander? Why was he seeking me
out? I did not know that he had also contacted my friend Alex de Waal
of African Rights for the same purpose: to bring attention to, and
support for, the Nuba people – African tribes in the Arab north of
Sudan who were the unseen and largely unreported victims of what the
late Nuba activist Suleiman Rahhal called “one of the great crimes of
contemporary Africa”.

It was only when he was dying in 2001 that Yousif, a teacher, admitted
the degree of his own disappointment with the rebel movement he had
joined in 1984, despairing of political effort to save the Nuba, one
of Africa’s oldest cultures, from extinction. “Had it not been for Dr.
John’s vision of a united Sudan, I would have left the SPLA long ago.
Not all my soldiers are angels, but it was not like in the south.
Tribalism… A lack of political activity… The soldiers’ behaviour
also…”

Yousif was fiercely loyal to Garang, rejecting all criticism of him.
It would always be a point of disagreement. “He was a well-educated
fellow, knowledgeable. Not only that: pan-African. I don’t believe he
is a dictator. He consults everybody. Up to now.”

Yousif – everyone called him that – was unique in the SPLA, a large,
lumbering man with a ready smile who by the age of 40 had come to
believe there was no alternative to armed struggle for the 1.5 million
Nuba who had been sealed off from the world ever since the National
Islamic Front seized power in 1989. For him, war was not “fun”; he
hated it. He did not want to “annihilate” or “exterminate” his
enemies; he wanted to engage with them, to understand them and, when
necessary, to compromise with them. His language was of
reconciliation, not genocide. His vision was of a just peace for all
Sudanese, regardless of race, religion or sex. And, he told me a few
days before he died, with that irrepressible smile of his, “especially
for the womenses [sic]!”

At our first meeting, in a hotel on the Edgware Road, Yousif invited
me to breakfast in his room. It was quieter than the restaurant, he
said when I demurred, and he had a lot to say. He had just begun
saying it when breakfast arrived, piled high on a table with
collapsible sides. I waved the waiter away. “I will fix the table,” I
informed the commander. But I could not. the flaps refused to budge. I
was vaguely aware of Yousif watching me flounder. “Shall I try?” he
proffered. eventually. “You can try,” I said, huffily, “but this table
is broken!” Yousif stretched out and the flaps rose, magically.

He smiled. “In the jungle, we understand these tables!”

It was the gentlest of put-downs by a man who, we would discover when
we accompanied him back to the Nuba Mountains two years later, was
loved – not feared – and who showed, in the cruellest of times, that
armed struggle need not be incompatible with human rights and care for
civil society. In one of the darkest moments of war, in September
1992, when some of his people were asking how much more they could
endure, Yousif had convened an Advisory Council to debate what should
be done. They met under the trees. Civilians outnumbered soldiers.
After speaking for two days, to tell the story of the war up to that
point, he said: “I can take the whole responsibility for all that has
happened, up to this day. But from today on, it will be us to decide:
either we continue fighting, and this would be our responsibility, or
we stop fighting, and this would be our responsibility also. After
that, we will let the individuals take their decision. If we decide to
fight and some prefer to go to the government, they are free to do so.
Somehow, someday, they will be back. And if we decide to surrender and
some want to go to the south and fight, they are also free to do so.”

After two more days of discussion in which many different views were
aired, with powerful interventions from two women, the Nuba voted to
continue fighting.

Yousif’s own vision had been shaped by the humiliation of his youth.
“We were taught the history of the Arabs and when we were taught about
ourselves it was as slaves. At primary school in Miri, the headmaster
took a big chair and sat under a tree and didn’t teach. At secondary
school, the teacher said: ‘Who works in homes except the Nuba guys?’
You can accept being insulted by a common man, an ignorant man. But
when it comes to someone who’s supposed to be well-educated, an
Islamic man who’s supposed to believe in equality… Someone comes from
the jungle – and knows these things better than you!”

At Khartoum University, where he gained a BA in political economy,
Yousif immersed himself in the library. “I read anything related to
the Nuba. I discovered that before the Arabs came we had a very big
and civilized kingdom. Why are we not taught such history? There is a
policy to assimilate us into the Arab-Islamic culture to the extent
that a lot of us do not know their mother tongue and despise their own
culture.”

He founded a youth organization, Komolo. He read Chinua Achebe and
Julius Nyerere. He criss-crossed the Nuba Mountains by bicycle,
encouraging the people to have faith in themselves. “I determined to
serve the people. I said I will build my civilization, unite
regardless of tribe or religion, and I will forgive anyone who
humiliated me before.”

The task facing Yousif in London, which he had never before visited,
was daunting. After the SPLA divided, and then fragmented, Khartoum
launched its greatest offensive yet. Government soldiers and allied
militias killed with impunity, burned villages, looted and burned
food, destroyed household golds, stole food. Children were separated
from their parents. By government count, more than 150,000 Nuba were
corralled into more than 90 militarized “peace camps”, providing
labour for government garrisons and Arab farms. Hundreds of Yousif’s
men died trying to cross the Nile, first in the dry season and then in
the wet, to get supplies – ammunition for soldiers, food and medicine
for civilians.

But help was not forthcoming.

“We have asked the UN for food. But they are not taking us seriously.
We are like a people drowning in the river and they are standing on
the bank shouting encouragement. The international community is
killing us. They are submitting to the Khartoum government and people
are dying of starvation. The people who died from hunger and sickness
are far, far greater than those who died because of war. We do not
fear bullets, but I feel bitter when a lot of people – especially the
children – die because of malaria.

“It is our policy not to let our people depend on relief. Do not give
us ready-made solutions, but help us to help ourselves. We need
schools. We need to provide all people with clear and clean water. The
government destroyed all the pumps. We want solar energy. Wind energy.
Clean energy!”

Two years later, in 1995, Alex and I flew into the Nuba Mountains with
Yousif. It was the beginning of a humanitarian airlift, initially
supported by only a handful of NGOs that would grow into an
international relief effort and, eventually, a ceasefire for the Nuba.
But first we needed to break the blockade imposed by Khartoum. Alex in
Nairobi hunted for a pilot willing to risk it – two agreed and then
pulled out – while I waited with Yousif in the bush in southern Sudan,
a staging post for the onward flight to the mountains. During five
days of waiting – with Yousif aggravating me daily by saying “I told
you he would not come!” – Yousif visited a local doctor and was told
he needed treatment in hospital. Prostate cancer, later confirmed in
London, was suspected. He said nothing to us.

Finally we heard an engine. A plane circled and landed at our small
airstrip. Yousif ordered his men to start loading ammunition, packed
in the large jute bags used for rice. Alex’s colleague at African
Rights, Yoanes Ajawin, told Yousif we could carry him, and a few of
his men, but we could not load weapons. Yousif argued that he could
not return empty-handed after years away, but had to concede.

Our pilot had the coordinates of a bush airstrip in the
SPLA-controlled mountains, but it was right at the limit of his fuel
supply. He hadn’t counted on having to fly in zigzags, under the radar
to avoid detection. Our instructions were to land when we spotted a
plain without bushes or grazing goats. What we spotted, on landing,
was a ragtag collection of men without shoes, with pants held up by
fragments of rope and bushes. Yousif’s army. Before leaving Nairobi, I
had asked Yousif if there was beer in the mountains. Not beer, he
said; only marissa, local beer brewed from sorghum or millet. Now he
pulled a child’s satchel off his back and produced… a bottle of beer.

“There is only one,” he said, “and we shall share it!”

Much has been written about Yousif’s tenure as commander-governor of
the Nuba Mountains. He established a civil administration unique in
SPLA areas and encouraged a renaissance of Nuba culture. The few
professionals left in the mountains were organized to give rudimentary
training to nurses and teachers. With guidance from African Rights.
Yousif permitted an independent human rights monitoring organisation
in SPLA-controlled areas, the first anywhere in Sudan. As Alex has
written: “In a much-neglected tradition of liberation fighters, his
insistence on seeing the task of liberation as a daily struggle of
uplifting people was genuinely inspiring. We discovered that Yousif’s
reputation as an enlightened leader, a humble man at one with his
people, was entirely warranted.”

Teaching was his passion; fighting a necessity. “I feel I am not a
commander,” he told us. “I feel I am a teacher, whose objective is to
tell the people what are their rights and how to get those rights –
even if they are taken by Yousif Kuwa! When I led my first battalion,
in 1987, I was not even trained. I did not know how to disassemble a
weapon.”

Critically, Yousif’s vision filtered down to the farthest corners of
the mountains. On a long, hot trek across the mountains in 1999, I
spotted a pawpaw high in a tree and asked the lad accompanying me,
Abboud Ismael, to get it for me. He refused. “I cannot,” he said.
“That paw-paw is a civilian paw-paw.” He walked away, but was back an
hour later with a smiling woman by his side. “This is that paw-paw’s
civilian,” he said. “You can ask her!”

Back at headquarters that night, as the cook fanned the fire under our
supper with a copy of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, I
asked Abboud why he didn’t get the pawpaw himself. “No no no no,” he
said. “Something like that, it is not good because the civilians will
be angry with you and then they can go to join with the government
forces. If you are hungry, you take your gun, you go to bush and hunt
animals. This is the law of the Nuba!”

On our last day in the mountains, researching for a book and a film we
would launch on the same day, for maximum impact, the Nuba women’s
union organised an evening farewell. Children perched in the trees.
Adults danced. Marissa was drunk. And Yousif made a speech. “These
friends have come from far to help us,” he said. “They have
encountered many dangers. We thank them. And we love them more than we
love ourselves.”

Yousif’s cancer spread. Before returning to London in hope of
treatment, he visited his friend Malik Agar, then SPLA commander of
Blue Nile, now deputy chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council
of a divided Sudan. Malik was “terribly shocked and disturbed” by his
appearance, but said Yousif was calm and composed. “He was the one
encouraging me. He said: ‘I am terminal. In a few months I might not
be with you. This is why I paid this visit. Continue the struggle. I
am going to continue from where I am. We shall meet in Khartoum!’”

That was not to be. Less than a year later, Yousif was in a hospital
in Norwich, north of London. In March 2001, a few days before he died,
he asked me for two things: a new biography of Nelson Mandela, and
help in composing an open letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan,
on behalf of the Nuba people. Why, he asked Kofi Amman, did the UN,
despite all its promises, continue to abandon the Nuba to the
depredations of the Khartoum regime?

It was his last contribution to the struggle. Back in London two days
later, working on a report for Christian Aid about the Swedish oil
company Lundin, I had a sudden moment of panic. I called the hospital
and asked for the sister on Yousif’s ward. “I’m calling to ask how
Yousif is,” I said. Her reply was immediate. “I was just going to call
you, Julie. I’m so sorry. Commander Kuwa died 10 minutes ago.”

https://worldpeacefoundation.org/blog/yousif-kuwa-i-am-not-a-commander-i-am-a-teacher/

END
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John Ashworth

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