Egyptian colonial courts and press conflated Nubian, Sudanese, and Ethiopian identities

Evidence

How would any of this have mattered to the six Sudanese slave women seated in the courtroom of the military tribunal in September 1894? The slavery trial, with its unfamiliar crowds and officials and angry speeches, must have seemed carnivalesque to these six bewildered witnesses. What matters is that they themselves, the circumstances that brought them there, the darkness of their faces, and most of all, their unknown place of origin were simultaneously familiar and yet a mystery to the judges, audience, defendants, lawyers, and journalists in the courtroom.They were the ciphers who inspired another heteroglossia. Few of their contemporaries sitting near them were certain of the geography of the Sudan or the differences among the many tribes and kingdoms still thriving along the White Nile and Blue Nile in the late nineteenth century.The newspaper accounts of the trial reveal a constant conflation of the terms Nubian, Barbari, Sudanese, and even habashï (Ethiopian) when referring to darker-skinned people of the south, whether slaves, servants, or soldiers. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 107

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the broader ‘invention of Africa’ literature (Mudimbe) on how colonial knowledge collapses distinct identities.