The history of Kalakla as a distinct community goes back about 450 years, to the late sixteenth century, when Sheikh Ali bin Muhammad bin Kanna arrived at the Al-Manjara area of what is now Khartoum. He came from Al-Azhar Al-Sharif in Cairo, the thousand-year-old center of Sunni Islamic learning, and was of the Kawahla people. Around the same time Hamdallah bin Muhammad Al-Awadi arrived from Shendi on the River Nile. The two men's families intermarried, and the shared lineage eventually took the name Kalakla, which collected all of their descendants under one identity. The original settlement sat at Al-Manjara; later the community migrated south to its current location south of Al-Hammadab and Al-Shajara. People worked in agriculture, cut trees, and processed lumber.

When Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi declared himself the expected Islamic reformer in 1881 and established the Mahdist state, two scholars in the Kalakla area gained particular standing. Sheikh Abd al-Qadir Wad Umm Maryoum, based at Kalakla al-Qaala, was the elder, and the Mahdist authorities appointed him as the local emir and judge. Sheikh al-Nazir Khalid al-Mahi, based at Kalakla al-Qubba, became Abd al-Qadir's junior partner and was eventually presented to the council of Caliph Abdullah al-Ta'ayshi, the Mahdist state's leader after the Mahdi's death in 1885, to contribute to jurisprudential deliberations. Both men are now buried in Kalakla; their tombs are landmarks of the neighborhood. The mosque of Sheikh Ali Fatai Al-Ulum in Kalakla al-Qubba was founded 500 years ago and still stands.

Kalakla sits in southern Khartoum State, within the Jabal al-Awliya locality, at latitude 15.4678 and longitude 32.4856 degrees. It is bordered on the east by the lands of Mahas, on the northwest by Haraz Umm Qaddad, north of al-Azuzab. It ends on the east in Eid Hussein, extends south to al-Dukhinat, and parallels the course of the White Nile on its western side. The White Nile here is the defining feature: the river that comes up from Lake Victoria meets the Blue Nile at Khartoum proper, a few kilometers to the north of Kalakla, and the district sits on a stretch of riverbank that has held a farming community for centuries.

At the start of the 2023 war in Sudan, on 24 April, seven people were reported killed in an airstrike on a residential area in Kalakla. In July the Kalakla al-Qubba area saw widespread abuses by Rapid Support Forces fighters, including reports of killing, looting, and rape. In September the water and electricity to the neighborhood were cut. That same month, at least twenty people, two of them children, were killed in a Sudanese Armed Forces airstrike on Kalakla al-Qubba, an indiscriminate strike on a residential area in a war that has seen many such strikes. The neighborhood was caught between the two sides in the ugliest sense: besieged by one, bombed by the other, drained of the basic services that kept daily life running. Before that, on 30 May 2022, 33 people had already been wounded during a protest that police tried to disperse, part of the broader resistance to the 2021 coup.

Despite everything, the district's landmarks are still listed in the present tense. The Central Reserve Forces (Abu Tira) Command. The Kalakla Turkish Hospital, a Turkish-funded medical facility that has been a point of reference in the neighborhood since its opening. The tombs of Sheikh Abdul Qadir and Dam Maryum in Kalakla al-Qalaa and Sheikh Al-Nazir Khalid Al-Mahi in Kalakla al-Qubba. The 500-year-old mosque of Sheikh Ali Fatai Al-Ulum. The Sheikh Al-Rukini Ibrahim Complex. The shrine domes of Sheikh Wad Jadallah and of the jurist Al-Faki Dafa Allah. The 1885 khalwa of Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Zein. A neighborhood is, among other things, what its living institutions remember. Kalakla's memory stretches back to the Zarqa Sultanate, the Blue Sultanate of the Funj, which is how this district dates its founding documents. Four and a half centuries of continuous habitation are not nothing to lose. They are also not easy to lose entirely.