Radom

Radom
El Radoom, Al Radom, الردوم
ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later
Woodland in the Radom area, near the Bahr al-Arab
⛶
Geography
Country	Sudan
Province/State	South Darfur State
Coordinates	9.83, 24.85
Landscape
Area	25,900 km²
Terrain	Broken hills, savanna woodland and seasonal rivers on the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic; approximately Radom locality; the map line's outer edge leaves out ground above 4,000 m, bare or sparse ground, snow and ice, and open water
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Radom (Arabic: الردوم; also written El Radoom or Al Radom) is a cannabis growing area in Radom locality, in the south of South Darfur State in Sudan, on the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic. In 2012 an officer of the General Administration for Combating Drugs said that the Radom area ranked first in Sudan for the production of bango, the Sudanese name for cannabis, and in 2016 the same office reported that most of the cannabis in Sudan was grown in Radom locality. A field study made in 1994 dated hashish growing in the area to the 1940s.^: 115 The Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker wrote in 2026 that Al Radom National Park, one of the largest areas producing bango in Sudan, was under the control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the two sides in the war that began in April 2023.^: 12

The locality and the reserve

Radom locality lies about 380 km from Nyala, the capital of South Darfur State. The researcher Edward Thomas writes that it was part of a larger Buram locality until 2009.^: 7 Its southern neighbour is Raga county of Western Bahr al-Ghazal, in South Sudan.^: 12

The south-west of the locality takes in the Kafia Kingi enclave, which Sudan administers as part of South Darfur State and South Sudan claims as part of Raja County in Western Bahr el Ghazal State. Thomas writes that the enclave, sometimes called Hofrat al-Nahas, was part of Bahr al-Ghazal province when Sudan became independent in 1956, was transferred to Darfur in 1960 and has come under Radom locality since 2009. The town of Radom stands just outside the enclave's north-eastern tip.^{: 6–7, 54}

UNESCO lists the Radom Biosphere Reserve, nominated in 1979, with an area of 1,250,000 hectares: broken hilly country, mostly at about 450 metres, with two permanent rivers. Sudan's entry for Al Radom National Park on the World Heritage tentative list, submitted in 2021, gives 1,250,970 hectares in the south-western corner of Darfur, names the Adda and Umblasha rivers that form the reserve and says that they feed the Bahr al-Arab. According to UNESCO, the main land uses are farming (sorghum, watermelon and sugar cane), honey collection, herding and the felling of trees for trade and charcoal. The study of 1994 found the land in the north of the area sandy, suited to millet, groundnuts and beans, and the land in the south muddy, suited to sorghum, maize, rice, sugar cane and fruit.^: 116

Cultivation history

The study of 1994

In 1994 and 1995 a police officer of the forensic laboratory in Khartoum and two members of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Khartoum, Hamid Mannan Mohamed, El-Fatih Idris A. Karim and Mohamed Ibrahim Mohamed, visited the growing areas round the town of El-Radom with former hashish farmers and an armed escort, covering 1,150 km on foot and by donkey.^: 114–115 Village leaders and sheikhs told them that hashish production in the region dated back to the 1940s and that the village of El-Murraya was the first to grow it. Merchants of the Runga, Tunjur and Barno peoples were said to have brought in the seed. Traders from Ed Daein, Nyala and El Obeid came to buy hashish in the 1950s, and in the 1960s growing spread to most of the neighbouring villages, Radom town among them.^: 115

The authors found that traders funded the growing, giving farmers small loans and a share of the crop, and that the land was prepared in May and June at the start of the rains. Police activity had pushed growing from the villages near Radom to remote places in Bahr al-Ghazal and across the border into the Central African Republic, though the growers lived in the El-Radom area.^: 117 They estimated that in 1994 hashish was grown on 182 farms in 32 places, covering about 100 hectares, and that the year's production of processed hashish came to 64,385 kg.^: 117–118 Thomas cites a report in Arabic on the drug trade in the Radom Biosphere Reserve, made in the late 1990s, which found that outside investors, most of them from Darfur, financed much of the growing, and that the extension of the reserve had restricted ordinary farming and pushed people into honey gathering, hunting and drug growing.^: 98

2012 to 2022

In September 2012 Colonel Salah Sinada of the General Administration for Combating Drugs put the area under cannabis in Radom at 34,000 square kilometres, the size of Portugal. Police narcotics squads reported raids on "cannabis-producing areas" in Radom locality in April 2014, seizing 4,450 ready-to-sell cobs and about 735 kg of seed, and at the end of that year a campaign that covered the locality as far as the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic. In December 2015 the police of South Darfur said that they had burned more than 5,000 feddans of hashish farms in the areas of Songo and Radom, which Sudan Tribune called the main source of drug production in Sudan. After a campaign in November 2016 in which 6,500 acres of farms were destroyed, Sudan's Second Vice-President, Hasabo Mohamed Abdelrahman, urged the people of Radom locality to grow rice instead.

In April 2017 the drug administration said that it had taken full control of the Radom park, where it seized 20 tonnes of bango that had been buried in the ground and hidden in the forest, and a factory and stores for packing it. In September the Ministry of the Interior sent two battalions of the Central Reserve Police and the drug police, with a cargo plane and two drones, to destroy the cannabis farms of Radom locality. In November a police colonel reported about 500 farms destroyed in a month-long campaign timed for the harvest. In October 2018 the police director of South Darfur reported 3,000 feddans of hashish farms destroyed in the Radom area. In May 2021 twelve men of the drug police were killed in an ambush by drug traders at Songo, in the bush of the Radom reserve; the state's police then reported 28 arrests and the seizure of 4 tonnes of hashish and seed enough to sow 100 feddans. A police officer told Darfur24 that the state police had estimated the area under hashish in Radom at about 20,000 feddans in 2022, in rough country along the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

Since 2023

In January 2025 an officer of the South Darfur drug police, speaking without his name, told Darfur24 that the area under bango in Radom had doubled in the previous twenty months, after the drug police were withdrawn. He said that some RSF commanders financed farmers in the south of Radom for an equal share of the returns, and that some former drug police had become growers and traders when their pay stopped. The Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker wrote in March 2026 that cannabis farms had spread to the edges of inhabited villages and that bango was processed in facilities inside the farms of the park before being stored in warehouses, most of them in East Darfur.^: 13 It added that the research available did not establish that the RSF directed the drug trade as a formal policy.^: 6 The Africa Organised Crime Index of 2025 says that Sudan's cannabis is grown mainly in Radom locality, and writes that the conflict and the fall in incomes reduced both the trade and the use of cannabis in Sudan.

Places named in the reports

• Songo (Sungu, سنقو), in Radom locality about 360 km south of Nyala, is a gold-mining area that grew busy from about 2016. In 2015 Sudan Tribune called the areas of Songo and Radom the main source of drug production in Sudan, and a local community leader told Darfur24 in 2025 that the war had led gold miners there to turn to growing hashish, above all in the rainy season, when mining stops.
• Kafia Kingi, Kafan Debbi (كفن دبي) and the south of Radom are where, the drug police officer said in 2025, farmers grew freely once the police posts there were withdrawn. After the ambush of 2021 a joint force combed the areas of Dafak, Kafia Kingi and Radom.
• El-Murraya, 20 km east of Radom town, is the village where, village leaders told the authors of the study of 1994, hashish was first grown.^{: 115, 117}

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Sudan
• Bango
• Hashish