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When the Land Screams: Tuti’s Tāya
In the heart of Sudan’s capital, where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge, the green expanse of Tuti Island stretches out, as if it were put there deliberately to connect the two rivers or perhaps as a testing ground.
/ answered
When bodies are used as flood defence and Survival is engineered through resistance
(This is a tale of a community that guarded its heritage against erasure and were protected by their land in return.)
An island at the confluence of the Nile, when geography shapes fate
In the heart of Sudan’s capital, where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge, the green expanse of Tuti Island stretches out, as if it were put there deliberately to connect the two rivers or perhaps as a testing ground.
The island is a complex geographical formation bordered to the east by Khartoum North, to the south by Khartoum, and to the west by Omdurman. Above it, the open sky offers no shelter and around it is an unpredictable river which at times arrives to deposit silt while at others, it carries raging flood waters.
Tuti’s geographic formation makes it, in addition to being an agricultural island spanning approximately 950 feddans, a constant testing ground for survival. Being surrounded by water, with no natural barriers and rising only a few metres above the Nile, flooding is not a seasonal anomaly but a regular, annual occurrence. For the island’s inhabitants, there was no choice but to become adept at ‘reading the river’ in order to anticipate any flooding. They have developed into experts of hydrology and in engineering solutions before the waters rise and start lapping at their doorsteps. While in some places disaster protection systems are designed on paper in air-conditioned rooms, in Tuti, the tāya system is designed on the land using human bodies and heritage. In this way, a geographic liability was transformed into a gateway for innovation, and life-threatening danger became an incentive for solidarity and building collective memory. The tāya was not a temporary measure taken during flooding but has developed into permanent means of resistance that is reconfigured every year with the change of water, land and people.
But what is the tāya? In Tuti, the tāya is a tent that is put up at the first signs of flooding. Inside the tent work begins and roles are distributed with one team tasked with monitoring water levels day and night, another tends to those stung by the insects and scorpions that emerge with the rising water while yet another team moves the furniture out of at-risk homes, distribute food and keep up precise and regular lines of communication. This makeshift emergency headquarters of fabric walls on mud ground and filled with good intentions emerges in moments of need and is dismantled as the danger recedes. The tāya is what people build in the absence of institutions and when all they have is one another.
From bodies holding back the water to a system that teaches how to prevent drowning
Tuti’s tāya was not a written system or project created by an institution, but was the result of an act of disobedience. In 1944, when the British colonial governor ordered the evacuation of the island to make way for his imperial projects, the people stood in quiet defiance, a silence rooted in certainty. Their objection was just the beginning, the floods completed the story.
When flooding occurred in Tuti in 1946, the colonial authorities retreated, leaving the residents to face the rising waters on their own. These in turn, did not cry out for help or flee the island, but instead, they formed a barricade with their bodies to stop the water and thus, they built the first tāya out of nothing.
This was the first collective exercise in self-protection. Over time, this act of flood-prevention, was developed evolving into a social and architectural system that was rooted in popular memory. Every year the tāya was revived in accordance to local conditions and became a system that is alive, transforms and is passed down through generations. This ‘architecture of survival’ was how Tuti’s tāya became one of the most ingenious examples of communal solidarity in the face of natural disaster and neglect.
When the warning is silt and the missing sound of a bird
In Tuti, the tāya is not an echo of sirens but an awareness of what is absent. When the blue water of the Nile changes into a sinister hue, when the cormorant vanishes, when the smell of clay recedes and it becomes extremely moist. These are the signs of flooding that are not captured by instruments but by those who have lived near the river for so long they are able to understand its murmurs. Tuti’s children are not given theoretical lessons about these signs, they inherit them through stories and casual conversations and spontaneous play on the riverbank. The moment the tāya is declared there is no shouting and no alarms are sounded but there is an immediate shift from ordinary life to a life of vigilance, where every person knows their place just as surely as they know their own name.
When the community becomes one
The tāya is a living embodiment of collective organisation where the entire neighbourhood is transformed into a network of human nodes. In terms of women, the tāya system highlights the central, familiar role of Tuti’s women, one that extends far beyond traditional stereotypes.
This includes the skill of observation whereby many women, especially older women with long experience, were skilled in reading the signs of the river and the sky. Their confidence in these interpretations was often decisive in the decision of whether to call for tāya. The women also had an active and effective role in assessing the situation and debating the need to raise the alarm and their opinions were respected in informal councils. During and after the alarm, women played a central role in allaying fears, organising the transport of children and the elderly and securing essential supplies in a way that would ensure life could go on amid potential chaos. It was a form of quiet, yet powerful, community leadership. They prepared food in the courtyards of mosques, not only for their own menfolk, but for the strangers who had become brothers in the cause.
The elders would watch the river as though reading a will written upon its surface. The young men carried mud on their shoulders while some would fill sacks with stones taken from the remains of a collapsed wall. Even the children knew the weak points along the barriers and which corners needed reinforcing with more clay.
Every home becomes a supply station, every street a lifeline, and every courtyard a tāya command post whose doors never close. During this time life is not only reshaped, but the community’s very capacity is tested, its ability to form a self-reliant system, without the need for any outsiders.
1946 when bodies replaced mud
In October 1946, when the Nile was in spate, the small island stood up to face it with no equipment, funding or promises of help. The men gathered along the banks, arms interlocked, their legs submerged to the knees, their sleep-deprived eyes focussed. In storage rooms food was emptied out of their sacks without hesitation so that they could be used as sandbags—for water does not wait anything. Women mixed mud with water their bodies transformed into factories for making urgent clay bricks.
When the news reached the world
The following passage is based on a dramatized, yet realistic, simulation inspired by the testimonies of Tuti’s residents. It aims to bring the sensory image closer to the reader without compromising the on-the-ground reality of community practices. What was happening in Tuti was no secret. When news of the community’s self-organisation reached international institutions, the United Nations sent a delegation of experts. They saw with their own eyes: a man reading rising water levels using a notched stick; a young girl rushing to save her deaf neighbour; a woman burying seeds in a clay pot, so that life could return after the flood. One of them remarked in astonishment “this is not disaster management… this is a celebration of life in the face of death!”
Between the roar of war and the whisper of the flood: today’s Tāya is on a knife’s edge
Since the outbreak of war in 2023, the tāya has not been what it once was. The community that once operated as a single, synchronised body has become fractured under the weight of displacement, absence, and fear. Participation has declined, families have been scattered, and the cost of living has soared. The sand that was once gathered from the shore must now be bought or replaced with rubble from destroyed houses. There are only seven of the experts who know how to build the barricade left on the island. And yet, the tāya has not disappeared. The greater the danger, the more stubborn it becomes. It does not require numbers to function, only memory, and memory does not die; it passes from one person to another.
Contemporary challenges: will the sound of the Tāya fall silent?
Today, this ingenious heritage faces existential threats.
Climate change: Flood patterns have grown more extreme and unpredictable. Sudden, violent inundations or unprecedented droughts now challenge the precision of traditional observation—once rooted in relatively stable historical rhythms, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports on the Nile Basin region.
Urban expansion and infrastructure: New dams have altered the Nile’s channels, and the urban sprawl of Khartoum and Omdurman are reshaping the dynamics of water flow around Tuti, changes that the old tāya system may not fully account for.
Displacement and eroded cohesion: The displacement of families and mounting economic pressures have, in many ways, weakened the organic social cohesion that once fuelled the tāya system. Passing on this knowledge to new generations now requires conscious, deliberate effort.
The Tāya is not a tent, but a sixth sense born of place and people.
In Tuti, barricades are built with clay and a lot of trust. The tāya itself is not declared because the state demands it, but when geography gives the sign and lessons are memorised from history. Here, water is not a seasonal crisis but a recurring test of the people’s ability to remember themselves as a community, not as individuals.
With every flood season, the residents reactivate their communal memory. No one asks another “What should I do?”—action begins instinctively, as if collective consciousness had anticipated the question. Only communities that have learned to live beside the river without being overcome by it can create such a system that becomes part of these people’s practiced heritage.
Tuti’s tāya is not a romanticised memory, but a living socio-ecological system that teaches us:
How to protect ourselves, how to read the signs of the land and how to save one another without waiting for an official alarm. In the age of satellite communication and apps, the form of the tāya may change, but it will live on so long as the island believes that true warning begins with awareness, and that survival begins when we listen to the river’s murmers—not its screams.
From Tuti’s Tāya to Aba Island: why this genius means of survival did not spread across Sudan?
When the White Nile floods its banks at Aba Island, or when Sennar, al-Rusayris, al-Dinder, or even the outskirts of Nyala are submerged… where does this ingenuity hide? And why is Tuti’s tāya not replicated there?
On Aba Island, people confront floods with the same spirit of resistance, but in a less organised manner. Local residents rely on traditional mud barricades, sandbag buttresses, and communal effort. Organisations and the state often act too late, or not at all. And yet, life goes on.
In Al-Dinder, where soil becomes mud traps, instinctive forms of tāya have emerged. Residents raise their houses on stone or mud foundations and build makeshift barriers out of leftover construction materials. While no one has given this practice a specific name, everyone understands that what they are building is a lifeline. In these areas, ‘survival’ is shaped more by community partnership than by technical knowhow, and more by lived experience than by formal study. In Nyala and Sennar, as the effects of climate change intensify, erratic floods have become more frequent. Solutions are often improvised and lack sustainability, forcing communities to rebuild their homes year after year. Small projects—retaining walls or drainage channels—quickly erode in the face of torrential rains. Some villages draw inspiration from what they have seen on television of Tuti’s tāya, but without technical guidance or structural support.
So, questions remain:
If the tāya emerged out of necessity and was engineered locally, why didn’t it spread to other regions confronted with similar circumstances? And why isn’t it shared as a form of knowledge? And finally, why weren’t any community protection policies built around them?
Perhaps the answer has nothing to do with engineering. Tuti’s tāya was never only about clay barricades, it was an expression of a profound understanding of the terrain, a confidence in collective selfhood, and the distillation of flood memory into architecture. Other regions lacked this type of documentation, this communal recognition and this vital link between individual experience and the common good. And perhaps—just as the state fails to distribute resources equitably—it fails to generalise the use of such a creative system because it is made by the people and not by officials.
Author’s note:
Some passages describe imagined scenes, but they are grounded in oral heritage and in the documented practices of Tuti’s community during times of flood. They have been written in a descriptive style to bring the sensory and intellectual experience closer to the reader, without compromising the reality of events or the credibility of the community system portrayed.
This type of narrative is known in heritage studies as “interpretive simulation” and is used to embody human values that cannot easily be interpreted in technical language alone.
Cover picture taken by Zainab Gaafar
References
- Amin, D., Keshta, E., Ragab, R. et al. Impact of Climate Change on Hydrological Extremes (Floods and Droughts) in the Upper Blue Nile Basin. Earth Syst Environ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41748-025-00709-9
- IFRC. reliefweb.int. Sudan Floods 2024 - DREF Operation (MDRSD034) 6 Sep 2024 https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-floods-2024-dref-operation-mdrsd034
- IOM DTM Sudan Flash Alert: Rain and Flooding in Rabak (Geziret Aba village), White Nile (Update 001): 21 December 2024 https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/dtm-sudan-flash-alert-rain-and-flooding-rabak-geziret-aba-village-white-nile-update-001-21-december-2024
- OMNIA SHAWKAT, May 1, 2018, Tuti Island... Welcome to the Nile flood, Info Nile website https://infonile.org/en/2018/05/totti-island-welcoming-the-nile-flood/
- Samah Abdel Rhman, Mohammed Ahmed Tambal, Hanan Mohamed, Hassan Elsawahli Eltayeb, Ibrahim Elmadih Ibrahimet al. Increasing urban flood resilience through public participation: A case study of Tuti Island in Khartoum, Sudan. Journal of Flood Risk Management (2024). 24 p. /10.1111/jfr3.12966 (DOI)
- Save the Children International. Flood disaster risk reduction and anticipatory action activities in Blue Nile, Sudan (2024) https://www.preventionweb.net/publication/flood-disaster-risk-reduction-and-anticipatory-action-activities-blue-nile-sudan
- Wikipedia, 2024 Sudan floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Sudan_floods
-
When bodies are used as flood defence and Survival is engineered through resistance
(This is a tale of a community that guarded its heritage against erasure and were protected by their land in return.)
An island at the confluence of the Nile, when geography shapes fate
In the heart of Sudan’s capital, where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge, the green expanse of Tuti Island stretches out, as if it were put there deliberately to connect the two rivers or perhaps as a testing ground.
The island is a complex geographical formation bordered to the east by Khartoum North, to the south by Khartoum, and to the west by Omdurman. Above it, the open sky offers no shelter and around it is an unpredictable river which at times arrives to deposit silt while at others, it carries raging flood waters.
Tuti’s geographic formation makes it, in addition to being an agricultural island spanning approximately 950 feddans, a constant testing ground for survival. Being surrounded by water, with no natural barriers and rising only a few metres above the Nile, flooding is not a seasonal anomaly but a regular, annual occurrence. For the island’s inhabitants, there was no choice but to become adept at ‘reading the river’ in order to anticipate any flooding. They have developed into experts of hydrology and in engineering solutions before the waters rise and start lapping at their doorsteps. While in some places disaster protection systems are designed on paper in air-conditioned rooms, in Tuti, the tāya system is designed on the land using human bodies and heritage. In this way, a geographic liability was transformed into a gateway for innovation, and life-threatening danger became an incentive for solidarity and building collective memory. The tāya was not a temporary measure taken during flooding but has developed into permanent means of resistance that is reconfigured every year with the change of water, land and people.
But what is the tāya? In Tuti, the tāya is a tent that is put up at the first signs of flooding. Inside the tent work begins and roles are distributed with one team tasked with monitoring water levels day and night, another tends to those stung by the insects and scorpions that emerge with the rising water while yet another team moves the furniture out of at-risk homes, distribute food and keep up precise and regular lines of communication. This makeshift emergency headquarters of fabric walls on mud ground and filled with good intentions emerges in moments of need and is dismantled as the danger recedes. The tāya is what people build in the absence of institutions and when all they have is one another.
From bodies holding back the water to a system that teaches how to prevent drowning
Tuti’s tāya was not a written system or project created by an institution, but was the result of an act of disobedience. In 1944, when the British colonial governor ordered the evacuation of the island to make way for his imperial projects, the people stood in quiet defiance, a silence rooted in certainty. Their objection was just the beginning, the floods completed the story.
When flooding occurred in Tuti in 1946, the colonial authorities retreated, leaving the residents to face the rising waters on their own. These in turn, did not cry out for help or flee the island, but instead, they formed a barricade with their bodies to stop the water and thus, they built the first tāya out of nothing.
This was the first collective exercise in self-protection. Over time, this act of flood-prevention, was developed evolving into a social and architectural system that was rooted in popular memory. Every year the tāya was revived in accordance to local conditions and became a system that is alive, transforms and is passed down through generations. This ‘architecture of survival’ was how Tuti’s tāya became one of the most ingenious examples of communal solidarity in the face of natural disaster and neglect.
When the warning is silt and the missing sound of a bird
In Tuti, the tāya is not an echo of sirens but an awareness of what is absent. When the blue water of the Nile changes into a sinister hue, when the cormorant vanishes, when the smell of clay recedes and it becomes extremely moist. These are the signs of flooding that are not captured by instruments but by those who have lived near the river for so long they are able to understand its murmurs. Tuti’s children are not given theoretical lessons about these signs, they inherit them through stories and casual conversations and spontaneous play on the riverbank. The moment the tāya is declared there is no shouting and no alarms are sounded but there is an immediate shift from ordinary life to a life of vigilance, where every person knows their place just as surely as they know their own name.
When the community becomes one
The tāya is a living embodiment of collective organisation where the entire neighbourhood is transformed into a network of human nodes. In terms of women, the tāya system highlights the central, familiar role of Tuti’s women, one that extends far beyond traditional stereotypes.
This includes the skill of observation whereby many women, especially older women with long experience, were skilled in reading the signs of the river and the sky. Their confidence in these interpretations was often decisive in the decision of whether to call for tāya. The women also had an active and effective role in assessing the situation and debating the need to raise the alarm and their opinions were respected in informal councils. During and after the alarm, women played a central role in allaying fears, organising the transport of children and the elderly and securing essential supplies in a way that would ensure life could go on amid potential chaos. It was a form of quiet, yet powerful, community leadership. They prepared food in the courtyards of mosques, not only for their own menfolk, but for the strangers who had become brothers in the cause.
The elders would watch the river as though reading a will written upon its surface. The young men carried mud on their shoulders while some would fill sacks with stones taken from the remains of a collapsed wall. Even the children knew the weak points along the barriers and which corners needed reinforcing with more clay.
Every home becomes a supply station, every street a lifeline, and every courtyard a tāya command post whose doors never close. During this time life is not only reshaped, but the community’s very capacity is tested, its ability to form a self-reliant system, without the need for any outsiders.
1946 when bodies replaced mud
In October 1946, when the Nile was in spate, the small island stood up to face it with no equipment, funding or promises of help. The men gathered along the banks, arms interlocked, their legs submerged to the knees, their sleep-deprived eyes focussed. In storage rooms food was emptied out of their sacks without hesitation so that they could be used as sandbags—for water does not wait anything. Women mixed mud with water their bodies transformed into factories for making urgent clay bricks.
When the news reached the world
The following passage is based on a dramatized, yet realistic, simulation inspired by the testimonies of Tuti’s residents. It aims to bring the sensory image closer to the reader without compromising the on-the-ground reality of community practices. What was happening in Tuti was no secret. When news of the community’s self-organisation reached international institutions, the United Nations sent a delegation of experts. They saw with their own eyes: a man reading rising water levels using a notched stick; a young girl rushing to save her deaf neighbour; a woman burying seeds in a clay pot, so that life could return after the flood. One of them remarked in astonishment “this is not disaster management… this is a celebration of life in the face of death!”
Between the roar of war and the whisper of the flood: today’s Tāya is on a knife’s edge
Since the outbreak of war in 2023, the tāya has not been what it once was. The community that once operated as a single, synchronised body has become fractured under the weight of displacement, absence, and fear. Participation has declined, families have been scattered, and the cost of living has soared. The sand that was once gathered from the shore must now be bought or replaced with rubble from destroyed houses. There are only seven of the experts who know how to build the barricade left on the island. And yet, the tāya has not disappeared. The greater the danger, the more stubborn it becomes. It does not require numbers to function, only memory, and memory does not die; it passes from one person to another.
Contemporary challenges: will the sound of the Tāya fall silent?
Today, this ingenious heritage faces existential threats.
Climate change: Flood patterns have grown more extreme and unpredictable. Sudden, violent inundations or unprecedented droughts now challenge the precision of traditional observation—once rooted in relatively stable historical rhythms, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports on the Nile Basin region.
Urban expansion and infrastructure: New dams have altered the Nile’s channels, and the urban sprawl of Khartoum and Omdurman are reshaping the dynamics of water flow around Tuti, changes that the old tāya system may not fully account for.
Displacement and eroded cohesion: The displacement of families and mounting economic pressures have, in many ways, weakened the organic social cohesion that once fuelled the tāya system. Passing on this knowledge to new generations now requires conscious, deliberate effort.
The Tāya is not a tent, but a sixth sense born of place and people.
In Tuti, barricades are built with clay and a lot of trust. The tāya itself is not declared because the state demands it, but when geography gives the sign and lessons are memorised from history. Here, water is not a seasonal crisis but a recurring test of the people’s ability to remember themselves as a community, not as individuals.
With every flood season, the residents reactivate their communal memory. No one asks another “What should I do?”—action begins instinctively, as if collective consciousness had anticipated the question. Only communities that have learned to live beside the river without being overcome by it can create such a system that becomes part of these people’s practiced heritage.
Tuti’s tāya is not a romanticised memory, but a living socio-ecological system that teaches us:
How to protect ourselves, how to read the signs of the land and how to save one another without waiting for an official alarm. In the age of satellite communication and apps, the form of the tāya may change, but it will live on so long as the island believes that true warning begins with awareness, and that survival begins when we listen to the river’s murmers—not its screams.
From Tuti’s Tāya to Aba Island: why this genius means of survival did not spread across Sudan?
When the White Nile floods its banks at Aba Island, or when Sennar, al-Rusayris, al-Dinder, or even the outskirts of Nyala are submerged… where does this ingenuity hide? And why is Tuti’s tāya not replicated there?
On Aba Island, people confront floods with the same spirit of resistance, but in a less organised manner. Local residents rely on traditional mud barricades, sandbag buttresses, and communal effort. Organisations and the state often act too late, or not at all. And yet, life goes on.
In Al-Dinder, where soil becomes mud traps, instinctive forms of tāya have emerged. Residents raise their houses on stone or mud foundations and build makeshift barriers out of leftover construction materials. While no one has given this practice a specific name, everyone understands that what they are building is a lifeline. In these areas, ‘survival’ is shaped more by community partnership than by technical knowhow, and more by lived experience than by formal study. In Nyala and Sennar, as the effects of climate change intensify, erratic floods have become more frequent. Solutions are often improvised and lack sustainability, forcing communities to rebuild their homes year after year. Small projects—retaining walls or drainage channels—quickly erode in the face of torrential rains. Some villages draw inspiration from what they have seen on television of Tuti’s tāya, but without technical guidance or structural support.
So, questions remain:
If the tāya emerged out of necessity and was engineered locally, why didn’t it spread to other regions confronted with similar circumstances? And why isn’t it shared as a form of knowledge? And finally, why weren’t any community protection policies built around them?
Perhaps the answer has nothing to do with engineering. Tuti’s tāya was never only about clay barricades, it was an expression of a profound understanding of the terrain, a confidence in collective selfhood, and the distillation of flood memory into architecture. Other regions lacked this type of documentation, this communal recognition and this vital link between individual experience and the common good. And perhaps—just as the state fails to distribute resources equitably—it fails to generalise the use of such a creative system because it is made by the people and not by officials.
Author’s note:
Some passages describe imagined scenes, but they are grounded in oral heritage and in the documented practices of Tuti’s community during times of flood. They have been written in a descriptive style to bring the sensory and intellectual experience closer to the reader, without compromising the reality of events or the credibility of the community system portrayed.
This type of narrative is known in heritage studies as “interpretive simulation” and is used to embody human values that cannot easily be interpreted in technical language alone.
Cover picture taken by Zainab Gaafar
References
- Amin, D., Keshta, E., Ragab, R. et al. Impact of Climate Change on Hydrological Extremes (Floods and Droughts) in the Upper Blue Nile Basin. Earth Syst Environ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41748-025-00709-9
- IFRC. reliefweb.int. Sudan Floods 2024 - DREF Operation (MDRSD034) 6 Sep 2024 https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-floods-2024-dref-operation-mdrsd034
- IOM DTM Sudan Flash Alert: Rain and Flooding in Rabak (Geziret Aba village), White Nile (Update 001): 21 December 2024 https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/dtm-sudan-flash-alert-rain-and-flooding-rabak-geziret-aba-village-white-nile-update-001-21-december-2024
- OMNIA SHAWKAT, May 1, 2018, Tuti Island... Welcome to the Nile flood, Info Nile website https://infonile.org/en/2018/05/totti-island-welcoming-the-nile-flood/
- Samah Abdel Rhman, Mohammed Ahmed Tambal, Hanan Mohamed, Hassan Elsawahli Eltayeb, Ibrahim Elmadih Ibrahimet al. Increasing urban flood resilience through public participation: A case study of Tuti Island in Khartoum, Sudan. Journal of Flood Risk Management (2024). 24 p. /10.1111/jfr3.12966 (DOI)
- Save the Children International. Flood disaster risk reduction and anticipatory action activities in Blue Nile, Sudan (2024) https://www.preventionweb.net/publication/flood-disaster-risk-reduction-and-anticipatory-action-activities-blue-nile-sudan
- Wikipedia, 2024 Sudan floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Sudan_floods
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