The protest had been the biggest of the transitional period, and Hamdok lost no time in claiming it as his own. That night, he gave a statement. The Sudanese people have made it clear, he said, that there is no going back to the old regime. The next morning, back at Ozone, one diplomat plaintively asked me: “But do they favor Hamdok?” The question seemed absurd. The previous day’s protests had not been about political machinations but about recapturing the energy of the 2019 revolution. Real politics, seen from the perspective of the protest, was not that of institutions but that of movements, of the joyful confidence that comes from a mass of people feeling their own power. Demonstrations, I wanted to tell the diplomats, have their own realism.