Egyptian nationalists conceived of Sudan as the nation’s vital spirit

Evidence

Kämil mourned the amorphousness of Egypt’s political geography, particularly with regard to the Sudan, in corporeal terms that soon gained great currency in the nationalist movement. In a speech he gave in Toulouse, in July of 1895, Kämil presented an almost medical depiction of the violence committed against the Egyptian government by the British occupation government in 1884, when, during the Mahdïya, the British forced the Egyptians to evacuate the Sudan,“the Sudan which we consider the spirit of our dear land, on which hangs the life of our country, and its death.” The loss of this spirit had depleted the force of the khedive and had deprived Egyptians of any sense of direction in the most important workings of the country’s infrastructure. Egyptians were not even allowed to police themselves in their own cities. Even worse, for Kämil, the vitality of the army, an institution crucial to any viable nation, had been completely sapped. In the few Sudanese territories still held by Egypt after 1885, army command was monopolized by British officers, which cost Egyptian soldiers their sense of patriotism, forcing them to fight like automatons for the very people against whom they should have been rebelling. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 717

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the corporeal idiom (amputation, orphanhood) through which Egyptian nationalism expressed the Sudan relationship.