Egyptian rulers confined powerful Sudanese collaborators as gilded-cage prisoners
Evidence
In many ways, Ibrahïm Fawzï Pasha and al-Zubayr came of political age almost simultaneously. Al-Zubayr was a trader from Khartoum, born ten years after the Egyptian government had first conquered the Sudan. In the 1850s and 1860s, he built up a vast, lucrative, and well-armed trade network in the Bahr al-Ghazal region of the Sudan, becoming governor of the region in 1873. A year later he had grown powerful enough to conquer the province of Därfür, which brought him into direct confrontation with the Egyptian government. In 1875, when General Gordon had become the governor of the Equatorial Provinces (with Ibrahïm Fawzï in his service), al- Zubayr grew frustrated with Gordon’s attempts to restrict his power and tax his caravans. In what became a public drama, al-Zubayr appealed directly to Khedive Isma`ïl, who invited him to Cairo to negotiate. Once al-Zubayr arrived in Cairo, the khedive made a palace available for him, and met with him, but refused to let him leave. Al-Zubayr became a prisoner in a gilded cage, the most famous Sudanese figure in Egypt, until the emergence of the Mahdï. His son, Sulayman, attempted to rescue his father’s land from the Egyptian government but was killed by the army in 1879. Al-Zubayr was not able to return to the Sudan until 1884, when Gordon, once again governor-general of the Sudan, welcomed him as a potential alternative to the Mahdï. But al-Zubayr’s attempts to create an independent understanding with the Mahdï frightened Gordon again, and he was sent back to Cairo, to be put on a British ship and exiled to Gibraltar. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 557
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing of Egyptian vs Sudanese colonial tools — how Cairo neutralized Sudanese power brokers it could neither absorb nor trust. Fits the My Life/contemporaneous Egyptian memoirist documentary tradition evoked elsewhere in the book.
- QUESTION: How did Egyptian rule over Sudan differ from later British rule, given that the khedive treated al-Zubayr as an internal threat while Gordon treated him as a pawn against the MahdĂŻ?