Egypt borrowed a European figurehead to cloak its own colonial rule in the Sudan

Evidence

As it turned out, Mtesa’s forceful message was only a smokescreen; he permitted Gordon and the army to finish the way station, and he allowed the villagers to trade freely with the Egyptian soldiers. When the outpost was finished, the army hoisted the Egyptian flag over it, then shot off a twentyone-gun salute “announcing the conquest of this district. With regard to all this, Mtesa displayed affection and friendship to Gordon, and said to us,‘We are one hand, and I derive my strength from the Egyptian government, which extends my authority over the governed, for their security and welfare.’”50 Fawzï rewarded Mtesa for his capitulation by telling the reader that, after that point, the king became the strongest ruler in “unknown” Africa [majähil ifrïqïya], and that his people developed to a degree that far outstripped natives of neighboring regions. Gordon’s language and his capacity to threaten dominate this narrative of the setting up of empire. Using the classical forms of imperialism, Gordon stated the terms of the army’s expansion: the government wanted nothing more than to spread civilization and justice throughout. But there existed much more within the partnership of “we” implied in the sentence, as remembered and reconstructed by Ibrahïm Fawzï, for it established Gordon as a tool, a carefully chosen figure through whom Egyptian hegemony in the Sudan was articulated. In Fawzï’s description of him, Gordon became the instrument for the ventriloquism of the khedive. Gordon spoke for Egyptian authority, for a government that coopted his identity as a European to legitimize its own goals in the Sudan. Gordon’s presence, his words, and his uniform provided a disguise for Egyptian officials in the Sudan, such as Fawzï. Gordon spoke formally, as a colonizer and as a Briton, which cloaked the actions and goals of Egyptians in the Sudan at that time. In his shadow, however, lurked the real colonizers, the Egyptians Ibrahïm Fawzï mentioned frequently throughout the book who performed the actual building of infrastructure in the Sudan; even after the Mahdïya, Fawzï mentioned Egyptians who served as clerks and doctors to the khalifa. Gordon may have spoken the language of treaty and conquest, and in so doing may have represented the khedive, but it was ordinary Egyptians, those who looked at the Sudanese from a much less lofty perch, who truly instructed the Sudanese about government. Though many of these contributors remained anonymous, their actions accumulate in the book, testimony to Fawzï’s pride in those whom he considered to be the real modernizers of “unknown Africa.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 590

Categorization

• XREF: Gordon-as-ventriloquized-instrument is a striking case of a colonized/subaltern power co-opting a European’s imperial identity, reminiscent of role-reversal dynamics readable against Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
• SEED: Angle: ‘ventriloquism as colonial tool’ - how a non-European empire dressed its expansion in a European persona and the analytical payoff of noticing who actually does the building.
• DEEPTHINKING: Fawzï’s narrative inverts the usual colonizer/colonized binary: Egyptians were simultaneously agents of empire and victims of it, and they used a British figurehead to hide their own colonizing role. This resists one-line summary.