A Sudanese slave woman openly declared her own enslavement in an Egyptian court

Evidence

Zanüba answered very clearly the questions about her actual position in this whole affair. In his own defense, one of the traders had claimed Zanüba was not his slave but his wife. Zanüba countered, in her own testimony, “I am not his wife, and I am not his freed slave. I am a slave he brought here to be sold for money.”All the papers quoted verbatim this startling declaration of identity, this clear assertion by a slave of being a slave, but one accompa- nied by no claim of connection, or belonging, to any master. She had refused to go along with the subterfuge of his claim of marriage. She thus indicted the traders, but her assertion still kept her strangely unsituated. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 697

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• FICTION: Zanüba’s self-assertion of slavery with no claim of belonging or connection is a striking, dramatically charged moment usable in narrative or historical fiction about colonial Egypt.
• XREF: Connects to scholarship on subaltern testimony and the agency of enslaved women speaking within colonial courts.

Related

• A Sudanese slave woman’s testimony questioned the very legality of her enslavement (similarity 0.88)
• A slave woman’s truthful self-identification defied the traders’ marriage subterfuge in court. (similarity 0.88)
• A Sudanese woman’s claim of Islamic identity challenged the legality of her enslavement. (similarity 0.87)
• Egyptian slave women’s court testimony made them proxies for Sudan’s fate (similarity 0.81)
• Sudanese refugee women transformed the slave insult into a badge of courage (similarity 0.80)
• Sudanese slaves themselves contested imperial labels by asserting Arab identity over black identity (similarity 0.80)
• Freed Sudanese slaves voiced ambivalent gratitude toward Egyptian masters (similarity 0.79)
• Slavery can be redefined as martyrdom and honor through religious identification. (similarity 0.79)
• Black slave women’s courtroom presence personified Egypt’s contested guardianship of the Sudan (similarity 0.78)
• Formerly enslaved Sudanese reclaimed a slur as a badge of courage (similarity 0.78)
• The custody of enslaved women stood as a metaphor for control of the Sudan (similarity 0.78)
• Sudanese former slaves mocked Egyptian captives and inverted the master-slave relation (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Sudanese slave women served as boundary markers for Egyptian racial and civilizational identity #complicates (0.60)
• Displaced Sudanese women reclaim slavery as a badge of honor and identity #exemplifies (0.55) — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1069