Nineteenth-century Egyptians collapsed Nubians and Sudanese into one ‘barbari’ identity

Evidence

But black people fell into a different and much vaguer category. Whether they were Nubian or Sudanese, a single identity was projected onto them: that of al-barbarï, or the Nubian, whose color, customs, and accent Egyptian writers sketched out in numerous essays, dialogues, and stories. It is important to note here the distinction between Nubians and Sudanese. In the nineteenth century, the native homelands of Nubians extended from Upper Egypt to the northern Sudan, in the Wadi Halfa-Dongola region. Many Nubians did not speak Arabic at home, and they picked up what vocabulary they could when working in the cities of Egypt. Many Sudanese from the North came to Cairo as native speakers of Arabic. It was rare indeed for such a distinction to be made, so that in the work of most Egyptian writers of the period it is hard to find a Sudanese eloquent in spoken classical Arabic. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 311

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Egypt-vs-Sudan comparative project: the racial conflation in the Egyptian cultural imagination tells how colonial hierarchies leveled African difference.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that al-barbari conflated Nubian and Sudanese populations despite their distinct linguistic backgrounds.