The Sheikan Museum is one of the Sudan National Corporation and Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) regional museums, located in the city of El Obeid, North Kordofan. The museum is named after and built near the site of an historic battle between the British army, led by Hicks Pasha, and Mohammed Ahmed’s forces. It represents the first victory of the ‘Mahdist War’ against Ottoman Turkish then Anglo-Egyptian forces. Built in 1963, it was the first post-independence museum.

The museum collections focus on three major areas: the history of the Sheikan battle, including weapons and artefacts; Sudanese antiquities from pre-history to the Islamic era; the traditions and culture of Kordofan. The third area is the most recent addition, housed in a newly built entrance gallery that opened in 2021 as a community heritage resource for exhibitions and events. 

For 2018-21 the Sheikan Museum has been part of the Western Sudan Community Museums project, resulting in design and construction of the new community heritage building, restoration of the museum collection, staff training in material conservation and collection management, storage and protection of the displays and development of new displays. Sudan Memory has collaborated with the WSCM project since 2018 providing equipment and training to enable the recording and cataloguing of the Sheikan Museum collection and local community collections.

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.

Content from this collection will be available soon.