How a Sudanese refugee in Uganda is keeping his homeland alive through food

This is the fourth article in a series from Sudan that we are publishing this week, highlighting that country’s travails and citizens’ efforts to overcome them. Read the first three articles here, here, and here.

A group of men sits in a semicircle outside El-Frazdug Khalfallah Alian Assoul’s small restaurant, sipping ginger-infused coffee from glass cups. They gossip in Arabic, pausing only to call for another cup of coffee, before continuing their chatter, seemingly impervious to the heat of a cloudless sky.

The ritual carries them home, to Sudan.

Since civil war broke out there in April 2023, more than 11 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Bringing only what they could carry on their backs, tens of thousands have made their way to this refugee settlement in central Uganda.

Here even the simplest daily routines are inflected with loss. Mr. Assoul knows that the men who gather at his restaurant each day would rather be somewhere else. Still, as he serves their meals and mingles beneath a feather-white tarpaulin propped up by reeds, he hopes in a small way to resurrect the home they left behind.

“If you eat alone, you must find someone and tell him to come to share with you. That is the habit of Sudanese people,” Mr. Assoul says. “When we share food, we are sharing our news and emotions.”

Inherited recipes

Food has long been an important part of Mr. Assoul’s life. When he was growing up in the city of Omdurman, just across the Nile from the capital, Khartoum, residents greeted new neighbors with steaming plates of bamia mafrooka, a green okra soup, and kisra, a paper-thin sorghum flatbread.

When he went away to university in Khartoum, his mother taught him to cook over the phone, giving step-by-step instructions for how to soak lentils for soup and fry onions in oil until they were tender.

The first attempt was a disaster. “I put it in the rubbish,” Mr. Assoul says, laughing. But he continued to practice, memorizing his mother’s recipes. His favorite was kawara, a soup made from cow’s feet and vegetables.

He was living in Khartoum with his family when fighting began last April between the Sudanese army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. As water shortages gripped his neighborhood, Mr. Assoul watched as the jasmine and roses that grew in his window withered. Below, he saw smoke from explosions and heard pops of gunfire. Bodies of soldiers lay unclaimed on the street.

After a month, his parents and siblings fled to the southern Sudanese state of White Nile. Mr. Assoul did not join them, instead taking a winding path that eventually led here. “I needed to discover my life,” he says, hoping to make his own fortune and provide for the family.

Four months ago, he established his small restaurant on a dusty slope at the edge of Kiryandongo, where a length of dirty rope divides the settlement from the neighboring town of Bweyale.

Between 600 and 700 Sudanese arrive in Kiryandongo each week, according to local officials. Their first port of call is the settlement’s reception center, where they receive cards confirming their refugee status.

Just outside its doors, a vibrant market hums. Women serve spicy Sudanese tea from rickety stands, and barbers cut hair at their open-air stalls, their services advertised in brightly colored Arabic script.

Mr. Assoul calls it “Little Khartoum,” and his restaurant is here, too. He named it Malik el-Kawara or “King of Kawara,” after the cow foot stew he made from his mother’s recipe.

Over plates of kawara and niaymia – a sauce of stewed tomatoes, dried okra, yogurt, and peanut butter, served with bread and scooped up by hand – his customers talk of family still in Sudan.

“There is a new community of Sudanese people here,” Mr. Assoul says. “We started that through food.”

Sharing love

Invariably, the conversation turns to ongoing war.

When it does, Khalid Hammad Salih, one of Mr. Assoul’s regulars, falls silent.

A pharmacist, he has not seen his family since the third day of clashes between the army and the Rapid Support Forces last year, when he sent his wife, children, and parents away to Egypt. Mr. Salih can no longer remember the last words they said to each other, only the terror he felt for them as he watched them go.

He stayed behind in Sudan, intending to supply medicine amid the fighting. In the meantime, the war taught him to cook. “You need to eat, so you have to learn,” he says bluntly.

Still, more than anything, he longs for his mother’s gurusa, or wholemeal pancakes. Recalling how she always served them alongside chicken soup, Mr. Salih removes his sunglasses and quickly wipes tears from his eyes. He opens his mouth, but no words arrive.

He arrived in Uganda this June, and says he plans to bring his family from Egypt to join him. For now, however, Mr. Salih eats at Mr. Assoul’s restaurant three times a week, arriving mid-morning and staying until the sky begins to darken.

“When we are sharing food, we are also sharing love,” he says, his face finally splitting into a wide grin.

Remembering Sudan

Across a red dirt road from Mr. Assoul’s restaurant is Firdaus or “Paradise,” a bakery operated by Adam Sulieman Mustafa. His sole product is a pitalike bread, prepared using a recipe taught to him by his uncle in Darfur.

When he recalls the fighting there, Mr. Mustafa speaks bluntly and simply, as if listing measurements in a recipe. “We were not able to go out to bring food for our children,” he says. “We just stayed at home.”

He sold his house in Darfur to open his bakery in Uganda, and now rises each morning at 2 a.m. to begin work. Mixing flour, yeast, and salt and tenderly kneading the dough brings him back to a time before war.

“My bread lets people remember Sudan,” he says.

Mr. Mustafa supplies Mr. Assoul, who also finds himself lost in a flood of memories whenever he eats food from home. Most often, the tastes bring him back to the last Ramadan he spent with his family before the war, quietly breaking their fast together.

Sudanese food sometimes tightens the knots of homesickness in his heart, and he cannot eat at all. For the same reason, he often avoids calling his mother.

When they do talk, however, they always speak of food. Last time, she shared her special trick for making kawara. He should add sweet potatoes to it, she said, the next time he cooks his own.

Asim Zurgan contributed reporting and translation from Kiryandongo.

Part 1: A journalist recounts his daughter’s miraculous birth in war-torn Sudan

Part 2: ‘They are our people’: How community kitchens are piecing Sudan back together

Part 3: She fled war in Sudan. Now she grapples with returning.