MU professor Abdullahi Ibrahim is ready to bring democracy to Sudan

A little before noon, on the last day of 2008, Abdullahi Ibrahim pecked at a laptop at the front of a space rented from the University of Khartoum, in the capital of Sudan. A white screen was ready to display images, but Ibrahim couldn't get his PowerPoint presentation to work. The room was filling with students and academics. Journalists had their notebooks open.

Ibrahim had drawn the audience with a small measure of trickery. A well-known scholar in his native country, he was slated to present a lecture titled, "Is Sudan the Sick Man of Africa?" His actual intent was much different.

When he finally scrapped the computer and took the podium, Ibrahim declared his candidacy for the Sudanese presidential election in early 2010.

A few people clapped. Reporters scratched frantic notes. Ibrahim continued standing as an audience member hurled the first accusation.

"This is duplicity," the man scolded. "We were expecting a lecture, and now you're declaring yourself for the presidency. Your first act as a candidate is sheer deception."

His friends didn't seem any more pleased. For months, Ibrahim had kept his electoral ambition a secret from everyone. He didn't tell his wife. He prepared quietly, out of sight.

After his announcement, Ibrahim retreated to a small office to collect his belongings. Already, journalists and professors were huddling. By the time he left the building, Ibrahim heard his name grinding through the rumor mill: "Abdullahi has gone crazy."

Six months and 7,000 miles removed from that moment, Ibrahim looks like a man about to be engulfed by cardboard, not controversy. Sitting at his computer, scanning an Arabic Web site, he works with his back to a huge tower of boxes that nearly touches the ceiling of his office in Read Hall. For the past 15 years, he has taught African history in this white-brick building on the campus of the University of Missouri-Columbia. Now the evidence of his tenure has been reduced to a few scattered, unpacked papers.

A stack of printouts clutters the left side of his desk in front of an overturned McDonald's cup, its contents long since dried. The dull, gray metal bookshelves, marked with little green tags that say "Clinical Nursing," are mostly empty. The books, with titles such as Libertarian Communism and Women and the Politics of Class, are stacked in hasty piles next to an orange that was peeled but forgotten.

"I need the policy, a copy of the policy, as fast as possible," the professor says quickly into the handset of an old rotary phone, holding it with two fingers of his left hand.

Like many of the students, eager to get past their final exams and on to the summer break, the professor is antsy. He's ready to go home and start the campaign that he announced so suddenly in Khartoum. He sums up why he kept his candidacy a secret for so many months: "I didn't want anyone to tell me not to do it."

There are plenty of reasons not to run. The election could be rigged. The repressive ruling regime could target opposing candidates. The winner of the race will inherit a torn nation on the brink of yet another civil war.

But that's exactly why Ibrahim decided to run — and why he believes he can win.

Ibrahim doesn't talk about history like a chain of events played out in textbooks and newspaper headlines. It's more intimate than that. Sudan's history is a story that he tells in the first person, a chronology in which he's a character.

To explain it, he'll sink into his chair, hands on his bald head, eyes looking through the ceiling as he replays scenes that he witnessed. When the narrative intensifies, he'll lean forward, elbows on his knees, his gaze unwavering. It's a story that has become prominent — and pressing — on the world stage.

Located in northeastern Africa, Sudan is among the continent's largest nations. But its 40 million residents have never tasted the liberties that Ibrahim's U.S. students take for granted, such as free elections and free speech. Since the country's independence from the British in 1956, Sudan's handful of presidents have snatched power by force and held their authority with religious mandates and political repression.

Those leaders have twisted the knife in the country's religious divide — Muslims in the north, Christians in the south — igniting civil wars that have killed at least 1.5 million. The newest regime — that of Omar al-Bashir, in power for the past 20 years — added to the bloodshed by targeting ethnic tribes in the western region of Darfur. For that, Bashir became the first sitting leader indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

But Ibrahim's history starts long before Bashir. It begins when the British still governed Sudan and Ibrahim's hometown of Atbarah was a colonial stronghold. He was born in 1942, the third of four children in a middle-class Muslim household. Ibrahim's father worked for the railway and served as a representative in the first workers' union. A new union movement was heaving against the British ruling class, and Ibrahim walked to school on streets still hazy with tear gas from labor demonstrations.