An Egyptian colonial officer’s memoirs served as self-testimony against foreign superiors.

Evidence

The act of writing memoirs for Fawzï was thus heavily laden with financial urgency, and not just a desire for wealth and fame. Frequently in his long career, he had to prove his rank and worth to different superiors—of different nationalities, but rarely Egyptian—under difficult political circumstances. The act of writing had always been for Fawzï a means of testifying: either to prove his innocence, as was the case after the `Uräbï revolution; to prove his very existence, as smuggling his letters out of the Sudan under the Mahdïya demonstrated; or to prove his rank, as his précis and all the other important documents he authored in his professional life showed. The act of writing a political history like Kitäb al-südän was also the act of creating an autobiography, an intensely personal undertaking for Fawzï, in which he created a new kind of nationalist writing not easily fitted into preexisting forms of Egyptian nationalist literature. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 553