Egyptian nationalists ventriloquized invented Sudanese voices they could not find in reality.

Evidence

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. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 862

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Edward Said’s orientalism framework applied within the colonial world — Egypt inventing its own ‘other’ in the Sudan.
• SEED: The concept of ‘ventriloquism’ in nationalist propaganda is a rich, transferable tool for analyzing how colonies project invented identities onto other colonized peoples.