Wad Madani
He was born in Port Sudan, an Eastern Port on the Red Sea, in 1937 and lived the first years of his life there, before moving with his family to Wad Madani, to the south east of Khartoum on the Blue Nile. From here he was sent to boarding school in Asyut in Middle Egypt, from where he returned to Wad Madani for the summer holidays before his father’s work prompted the family to finally relocate to Luxor-Egypt. He studied journalism at the University of Cairo and graduated in 1960. It was in Cairo in 1954 that he first joined a small underground Marxist organisation initially called ‘The Vanguard of the Workers and Fellaheen’ and then later renamed ‘The Party of the Workers and Fellaheen’.