European prisoners of the Mahdi wrote with greater cultural assurance than Egyptian prisoners

Evidence

Obviously, Fawzï’s relationship with the people of the Sudan was extremely complicated (he did marry a Sudanese woman and father a son by her). Those closest to him in Omdurman, and then in prison, were Europeans. But although he turned to the memoirs of other European prisoners of the Mahdï to provide, as he wrote, a more complete spectrum of historical truth to his own narrative, his accounts of the Sudan during the Mahdïya differed from theirs in significant ways.Two narratives, those of Rudolph Slatin Pasha and Charles Neufeld, best exemplify these differences. Slatin Pasha was an Austrian officer employed by Isma`ïl as the governor of Dara province, and he surrendered to the Mahdï before the fall of Khartoum. Slatin Pasha spoke fluent Arabic, converted to Islam, and was eventually able to escape to Egypt three years before the battle of Omdurman. Several years later, he wrote an account of his experience titled Fire and Sword in the Sudan, which became very popular in Great Britain. Neufeld, another chronicler of the Mahdïya, was a German merchant with little of Slatin’s experience in the Sudan who found himself in prison in Omdurman not long after Slatin had fled. He was freed with Ibrahïm Fawzï, and quickly wrote a book, A Prisoner of the Khaleefa, that offered his perspective on the Mahdïya. As both narratives show, neither Slatin Pasha nor Neufeld was troubled by the contradiction of identifying with both the colonizers and the colonized. Even when in chains in Omdurman, they viewed themselves much more assertively, and wrote their accounts with much greater cultural assurance, than Fawzï did. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 605

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Egypt-vs-Sudan coloniality framework seen throughout this volume; Slatin and Neufeld’s assured European identity contrasts with Fawzï’s ambivalence as an Egyptian both colonized (by Britain) and colonizing (Sudan).