An Egyptian soldier leveraged European co-eyewitnesses to legitimate his Sudanese captivity account

Evidence

All those foreigners who suffered the prison of the Mahdï and lived to write about it, whether career military men like the Austrian Rudolph Slatin Pasha, European merchants taking advantage of the chaos in trade like Charles Neufeld, or the German priest Father Ohrwalder, were therefore enlisted by Fawzï as co-eyewitnesses in this book, thus conferring legitimacy on his account of the Sudanese. The act of writing this history as shared history may have, in Fawzï’s eyes, made it seem even truer to his audience. He suggested this somewhat defiantly when, even though apologizing for possible mistakes (he is, after all, just a soldier, he says), he posed a challenge to anyone else who had seen of Gordon what he saw, who had witnessed what he witnessed of the Mahdïya: “Then let him write for posterity the way I have done.” This was Fawzï’s assertion of his voice and narrative as being equally, if not more intimately, connected to the Sudan than those of the Europeans. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 581