Egyptian anti-colonial nationalists simultaneously dreamed of dominating the Sudan

Evidence

As long as the Sudanese respected that sense, their participation was welcome; but if they registered any protest against Egyptian views on the Nile Valley, as the Mahdists clearly did, they were rendered invisible. To writers in the paper al-Jarïda, even the name Sudan, with its implication of geographical, cultural, and political distinction from Egypt, made the place and its people too separate and autonomous. The idea of Egyptian domination of the Sudan loomed vibrantly; the belief in empire was still stoked by Egyptian nationalists. But the true masters of empire building, the British, gave up nothing. Though the nationalists in this chapter analyzed and adopted the instruments of cultural and political hegemony so well used in the British empire, they were still nowhere near to regaining their authority over the Sudan, or their own country. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 779

Categorization

• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s goal: Egyptian nationalism was itself a colonial project toward the Sudan, echoing the ‘subaltern imperialists’ pattern in other colonial hierarchies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The layered irony — anti-colonial nationalist rhetoric adopting the instruments of the very colonial hegemony it fought, against a people it claimed as brothers — is dense enough to sit with.