Egyptian nationalists ventriloquized imaginary Sudanese characters to serve Nile Valley unity claims

Evidence

Deprived of the opportunities that British officials in the Sudan had to study Sudanese culture and society, Egyptian nationalists still employed their own inventiveness in trying to shape the Sudan. Unable to describe (or invent, as some have suggested) Sudanese tribal culture as H. A. MacMichael could, they invented other roles for the Sudanese to play, as characters in their propaganda. In the growing sphere of Egyptian popular culture, artists with strong nationalist perspectives continued to create the “true” voice of the Sudan, hear what they wanted to hear, and exercise a kind of ventriloquism, putting words in the mouths of Sudanese characters when they could not find real Sudanese to fit the role. In the absence of the “right” kind of Sudanese political allies—that is, those who would proclaim a desire for the unity of the Nile Valley—the Egyptian artists and writers deeply involved in the promulgation of the nationalist message made up their own Sudanese. These icons were never presented within the context of their own culture, which seemed to have remained somewhat of a mystery to most Egyptians of this period, but were instead almost uniformly portrayed as friendly servants and bawäbïn (doormen), grateful and proud to be installed in Egyptian households or to be in Egypt itself. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 862

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated book theme: colonial knowledge asymmetries — British officials could describe Sudanese tribes while Egyptians could not — parallel the knowledge-power dynamics discussed in scholarship on colonial ethnography.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the strategy of cultural ventriloquism as a tool of nationalist propaganda in a contested colonial periphery.