Egyptian nationalists framed the Sudan’s loss as a bodily amputation of Egypt.

Evidence

Both at home and while traveling in Europe, he campaigned for French and German support for Egyptians in their struggle with Great Britain. In his eloquent pleas for the recognition of his country’s difficulties, Kämil created an image of a wounded Sudan, a spectacle of victimization that evoked the figure of Zanüba, sitting alone before foreign judges. Just as Zanüba had testified she was a slave, a masterless slave, Kämil presented the Sudan as stuck in a netherworld: neither an outright colony of Great Britain nor the natural dependent of Egypt. Egypt too was off-kilter. The British occupation had overpowered Ottoman authority over Egypt, had estranged Egyptian Muslims from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the amir al-Mu´minïn, and had cost Egypt the Sudan. As a body politic, Kämil’s Egypt suffered amputation; as a people, Egyptians were orphaned. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 716

Categorization

• XREF: The body-politic metaphor for lost territory strongly connects to the reader’s comparative interest and to broader postcolonial literature on the nation-as-body.