Egyptian scientific expeditions into southern Sudan read as armed missions to tribal peoples.

Evidence

The journal is very different from the memoirs of Muhammad al-Tunisï; as an official document that would have been sent immediately to the viceroy, it excludes personal experience and narrations of cultural alienation. Instead, Selim Qapudan diligently describes his daily efforts to enforce the journey’s mission, efforts that were sometimes quite difficult to achieve in the expedition’s encounters with tribes along the banks of the White Nile. … They came face to face with tribes who had never seen men in uniform, or Europeans, and who constructed very different meanings for the expeditions when they saw the huge ships and the armed soldiers camping on their shores. Each encounter, as narrated by Selim Qapudan, required an explanation that would make sense to the leaders of the tribe. With armed soldiers surrounding and protecting the mission, the message of scientific inquiry was not always clearly conveyed. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Egypt vs Sudan colonial-tools contrast the reader is mapping: military-backed ‘scientific’ exploration was a distinct softer instrument deployed in Sudan.