Egypt’s authority in the Sudan had collapsed decades before this brotherhood rhetoric

Evidence

After the thoughtfulness of his earlier comments about the Sudanese, these paragraphs registered a startling obliviousness to the recent and cataclysmic events of the Mahdïya. Lutfï al-Sayyid claimed that “it was necessary after that to return conditions” to their antebellum status, but no such return ever occurred. The Mahdï had caused the Sudan to be lost to Egypt, and in the twenty-five years that had elapsed between the fall of Khartoum and Lutfï al-Sayyid’s writing, Egypt remained a partner only nominally in the administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium.And when he encouraged both Egyptians and Sudanese to regard each other as brothers and not to respect the borders that separated the two countries, Lutfï al-Sayyid asked his readers to conjure a new geography and imagine an alternative reality with the sheer force of hope and rhetoric. He invited his readers to rethink their cultural and political map from within.And as the resilience of his ideas shows, many accepted the invitation. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 778

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how post-imperial memory and rhetoric diverge from actual administrative control; recalls rhetoric-vs-power patterns in other postcolonial nationalisms.