Egyptian participants in the Sudan deliberately recruited European eyewitnesses to bolster their authority

Evidence

Fawzï declared himself the voice of true Egypt in his introduction to his book, when he stated, “I saw that it was my duty to my people and my nation [min wäjib qawmï wa ummatï] and to myself to write this book, including all that happened to me, or connected me to the events of the Sudan during this period.” And Ibrahïm Fawzï reiterated his reliability by adding a communal sense of the Sudan: “I did not limit myself to narrating events that personally happened to me, but also referred to the group of high officials in the Sudanese government who were, before the dervishes, spread out across the different parts of the Sudan, in order for us to have all the events from every possible perspective.” All those foreigners who suffered the prison of the Mahdï and lived to write about it, whether career military men like the Austrian Rudolph Slatin Pasha, European merchants taking advantage of the chaos in trade like Charles Neufeld, or the German priest Father Ohrwalder, were therefore enlisted by Fawzï as co-eyewitnesses in this book, thus conferring legitimacy on his account of the Sudanese. The act of writing this history as shared history may have, in Fawzï’s eyes, made it seem even truer to his audience. He suggested this somewhat defiantly when, even though apologizing for possible mistakes (he is, after all, just a soldier, he says), he posed a challenge to anyone else who had seen of Gordon what he saw, who had witnessed what he witnessed of the Mahdïya: “Then let him write for posterity the way I have done.” This was Fawzï’s assertion of his voice and narrative as being equally, if not more intimately, connected to the Sudan than those of the Europeans. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 581

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial debates about who owns historical narrative of colonial territories, e.g. subaltern and eyewitness authority.
• SEED: Angle: how colonized or subordinate narrators weaponize European eyewitnesses to beat Europeans at their own historical-credibility game.