Egyptian nationalists read the Sudan condominium as public demotion

Evidence

Nationalists reacted strongly to the condominium’s implication that Egypt and England were equal partners in governing the Sudan. Made second-rate citizens in their own capital and now also in the Sudan, Egyptians had lost the meaning of their flag, which now stood for nothing, wrote Shaykh `Alï Yusuf. He printed full translations of the proclamation and, in a very public close reading, analyzed the language of the condominium’s proclamation term by term. He offered a long description of the geographic boundaries of Egypt and the Sudan, then painstakingly mapped out the razor lines of the new borders decreed by the British, which pushed the Sudan all the way into Aswan, far enough, he worried, to erase the public’s memory of Egyptian rule in the south. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 756

Categorization

• SEED: Potential angle: border-drawing as a tool of historical amnesia — colonial cartography deliberately rearranging frontiers ‘far enough to erase the public’s memory’ of prior sovereignty.