It’s been thirty years since he left, or rather that his father, a diplomat took him with him in his flight, far from his native country. Khalid Albaih is 41 years old, he is a cartoonist, and, while Sudan has just experienced yet another military coup and then a reshuffle, he publishes in the British daily The Guardian a letter, full of hope, of optimism, because he writes it while looking at his children. It was his daughter who woke him up one morning by improvising with his brother and his sister an anti-coup demonstration in his living room, to his surprise, since for years he has kept them deliberately away from the news channels and of any political discussion on Sudan. Just like his own father did with him.
“I was eleven years old, he writes, when we left the capital, Khartoum, to find refuge in Qatar. At home, we weren’t allowed to talk about it. For years, I listened from my room to my father and his friends who quarreled over politics, over the regime of Omar el-Beshir. And I didn’t understand why my father, so committed to freedoms, so worried about his country, had left. I also didn’t understand why he was preventing his children from accessing the news. I wanted to ask him, but who are you fighting for?“
To denounce the abuse of power, authoritarianism and corruption, Khalid Albaih has become a cartoonist. His drawings were published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and on his Facebook page “Khartoon”. His life is punctuated by moves, he moved to the United States, then to Denmark, before returning recently to Qatar but he was never able to return to Sudan. He went there in 2019 to celebrate the dismissal of Omar El-Beshir after 30 years of reign. But he didn’t want to stay. Too much instability, uncertainty. The coup d’état perpetrated by the army not long ago proved him right. “Today I understand my father, he said, but I also understand my children, this young generation, surprising, and much more active than we were.“And who, perhaps, will manage to turn things around and turn the page on decades of authoritarianism.