The National Records Office (NRO) serves as the National Archives of Sudan, an institution dedicated to the preservation of government records and archives, in addition to holding a wide range of other Sudanese documents and manuscripts. It currently holds over 30 million documents, organised between 300 archive collections, ranging from Sudanese kingdom documents to government intelligence, newspapers and photographs, amongst much other significant content. Some items date back as far as 1504 AD.

The NRO was established in 1916 under the British mandate, when the British Financial Secretary suggested the assembly of financial, managerial and legal records into a single office. In 1948, the British Administrative Secretary established ‘The Sudan Archives Office’ and assigned its responsibility to a committee called ‘The Sudan Archives Committee’. The office was administered by British historian and university professor Peter Malcom Holt, assisted by Sudanese Mohamed Ibrahim Abu Salim, who later ran the office until 1995 and played a significant role in its development. He was later succeeded by Ali Saleh Karrar. In 1965, the office was renamed to ‘The Central Archives Office’, then in 1982 took its current name of ‘The National Records Office’.

The NRO’s long-term vision has been to enhance the Sudanese nation’s memory and identity by preserving documentary heritage, but also by enabling public awareness of this heritage, since it has been mostly hidden from public view and is therefore relatively unknown. To achieve this vision, the NRO has been working with Sudan Memory since 2018 to improve recording and data management facilities and skills, and to digitise a significant number of items to make available to the public online.

What is presented here is a selection of scanned materials that showcases this collection. For more information on the collection, please contact the collection contributor.