Posting Egyptian bureaucrats to Sudan marked them as dispensable

Evidence

The use of the Sudan as a site of exile reinforces even further the almost schizophrenic constructions of the Sudan as both a natural part of Egypt and a place for the removal of Egyptians from Egypt.And even when such removal was not officially a prison sentence, as when bureaucrats were ordered there for service in the administration of the territory, it symbolized autochthonous bureaucrats’ dispensability and their distance from the workings of government. Like al-Tahtawï, many Egyptian civil employees who were sent to the Sudan grew deeply embittered. For them, the province was the farthest possible distance from Cairo, and a site at which there was little chance for advancement. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 344

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to studies of internal imperialism and metropolitan attitudes toward colonial service as equivalent to exile.