110-Year-Old Sudan Bookshop Struggles On

Perhaps the oldest bookshop in Sudan, maybe in all of Africa, has seen his business virtually stop.

From a piece in Africasia...

It's as if the dust-caked volumes have been sitting on the shelves of Sudan Bookshop for the past half century since some of them were published. Three weeks might pass without a single book being sold, said the shop's general manager, El Tayeb Mohammed Abdel Rahman, who has been associated with the business for decades.

But shutting the doors is not really an option for the 110-year-old store which Abdel Rahman believes is the oldest in Sudan, "and maybe in Africa."

"It is a famous place," he said, recounting how people tell him: "Please do your best not to close this shop."

Tucked away on a garbage-strewn side street in downtown Khartoum, the business reflected a "book culture" which developed under British and Egypt rule and in the post-independence years after 1956, said historian Abdullah Ali Ibrahim.

"So it is a very sad thing" to see the store decline along with the role of books in Sudanese society, Ibrahim said.