The collage that opens this chapter uses a photograph of a classroom in the Sudan under the shade of its learning tree. It might be a relatively recent scene; the time of the Covid pandemic, perhaps, as the teacher is wearing a mask. The teacher and majority of the learners appear to be male. To the right, a black and white image is reused from the past: a military figure leading a youth away from a prison truck with bars; to the left, a cut out of a book and china teacup (indicative of the resources and infrastructures that enabled the British to establish its ‘empire of tea’ (Karlsson, 2022). British forces invaded Sudan in 1898 as part of a plan to protect its imperial position in the Nile waters, and governed it as a colony until its independence in 1956, whereupon drought, famine, flood and civil wars—with bloody clashes between rival factions of rebel and military government forces—have led to the massacre of its teachers, mass illiteracy, the recruitment of child soldiers, millions of displaced persons, and the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis for civilians known to date (Fig. 5.1).