Black slave women’s courtroom presence personified Egypt’s contested guardianship of the Sudan

Evidence

The press of Cairo and Alexandria covered the trial with attention to minute detail, as did the foreign language papers of Egypt and the European press, particularly the British papers. With some exceptions, notably two Egyptian editors and the editor of the English-language Egyptian Gazette, all the newspapers proved proud defenders of Egyptian nationalism and the wealthy defendants. Every day from 3 to 15 September 1894, reporters from the various newspapers elbowed each other for room in the packed courtroom to record the day’s proceedings. No matter what the individual newspaper’s political perspective, all the articles expressed profound shock at the sight of such prominent pashas sitting next to the Bedouin slave traders in the dock. The accounts also reflect an equal degree of surprise at the spectacle of three of the six black slave women testifying against the pashas.While slaves frequently petitioned the shari`a courts of Egypt on domestic matters, their presence, not to mention their testimony, in a case of such national ramifications was rare, if not completely unprecedented. Although Zanüba’s testimony was crucial to the prosecutor’s case, had she sat there silently her presence would have been just as dramatic. It was the bodies of these women, with the question of who clothed, named, and fed them—who owned them—around which the metaphor for guardianship of the Sudan lay and on which the whole issue centered. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 696

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s comparative Egypt-Sudan coloniality project — the ownership-of-women metaphor channels the guardian-vassal colonial relationship the reader is tracking.