‘The house of the leader ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, a local restaurant. The most evident manifestation of the neglect of the heritage and the symbols of nationalism.’ This was the title of a newspaper article published in 2009 by Ajrās al-Ḥurriyya, the organ of the then principal Northern Sudanese opposition party, the SPLM-North (Sudan People Liberation Movement, North Branch). The article appeared two years before the government closed down the newspaper. The reference was to the home of the man who is known as the leader of the 1924 Revolution. The photograph of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf's home that accompanied the article is a visual corroboration of its title; it shows a rather dilapidated one-storey house, indistinguishable from any of the other homes that surround sūq al-‘arabī, one of the central and most overcrowded areas of Khartoum. The article went on to blame the government for this neglect and suggested that the house be restored and ‘turned into a sacred museum that contains the belongings of the 1924 movements and the White Flag League dispersed between individuals’, concluding that ‘this much is the simplest thing we can offer them, as they fought at a time when the struggle was very tough.’

Other sites in Khartoum bear witness to unheeded pleas that 1924 be remembered. For example, a neglected obelisk in shari‘a al-Jāma‘a is a memorial to the death of ‘Abd al-Faḍīl al-Māz., one of the protagonists of the last mutiny in November 1924. The monument is plastered with all kinds of advertising; a passer-by would scarcely notice it. The obelisk bears witness to the fact that the state itself had participated at some point in the effort to commemorate 1924. In the 1970s, the similar conjunction of events that brought Ja‘far Numayrī to power also encouraged a significant effort to retrieve memories of that crucial year. The result was an impressive number of publications sponsored by the Afro-Asian Institute of the University of Khartoum, including Al-Riwāyāt al-Shafawiyya li-Thuwwār 1924, consisting of two volumes of typescripts of dozens of interviews with protagonists of 1924; a volume on the trials of the members of the White Flag League and other supporters; and a comprehensive bibliography of the primary and secondary sources on the events.