Al-Nadim’s fictional freed slaves voiced nostalgia for mastery as civilizing care

Evidence

The dialogue begins when Sa´id meets Bakhïta and asks her where she is now working, and she answers that she has no work, and that she wishes they were still slaves, still being cared for and fed by their masters. Sa´id reminds her that they were also regularly beaten by these same masters, and Bakhïta concedes that she finds pleasure in freedom. But still she laments, “We came from our country like beasts [zay al-bahä´im], and it was our masters who taught us about Islam [al-kaläm wa al-hadïth] and taught us about cleanliness, food, drink, how to dress and how to speak properly, since we spoke in a way that no one could understand.” Continuing to praise the kindness of her masters, Bakhïta recounts how she was like a daughter to her mistress—“If my master tried to beat me, she would argue and yell at him.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 682

Categorization

• SEED: Bakhïta’s monologue is a rich primary source for an essay on how colonized and formerly enslaved subjects internalize the civilizing narrative — the ‘grateful slave’ figure transposed into Egyptian nationalism.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Egypt-Sudan comparative project: it shows an Egyptian nationalist, himself resisting British occupation, reproducing the same civilizing rhetoric toward Sudanese slaves that the British used toward Egyptians.