Which African capital sits at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile?

Khartoum, and the name is usually said to come from the Arabic for elephant's trunk, describing the strip of land between the two rivers. The two Niles keep their colours for a distance after meeting - the Blue Nile silty and brown from the Ethiopian highlands, the White clearer and greener - so the join is visible from the air.

The Blue Nile supplies most of the water and almost all the silt, and it arrives seasonally with the Ethiopian monsoon, which is what produced the Egyptian flood. The White provides the steady year-round flow from the great lakes. Egypt's dependence on water that falls in Ethiopia is why the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile has been one of the tensest diplomatic disputes in the region for a decade.

The city has been destroyed and rebuilt around that junction repeatedly - taken in the Mahdist siege of 1885 in which Gordon was killed, retaken by Kitchener in 1898, and it has been at the centre of Sudan's civil wars since. Fighting between rival military factions from 2023 has emptied much of it, damaged the national museum, and produced one of the largest displacement crises anywhere, with comparatively little international attention.