Shaw’s 1887 interviews let al-Zubayr narrate through acknowledged translation filters.

Evidence

Flora Shaw, a British journalist, conducted a series of interviews with al- Zubayr in 1887 that were published in English in the journal Contemporary Review. Interestingly, Shaw was the wife of Lord Frederick Lugard, the British officer who helped establish colonial rule over Nigeria and much of central Africa (for example, Uganda, not far from al-Zubayr’s Sudan). In these interviews, which took place over the course of four months, Shaw asked al-Zubayr for his side of the story. … His interviewer was herself aware of the different filters through which al-Zubayr’s case would be perceived by his audience, and she wrote in the first article of the series that “I had the powerful sense of strong differences and gaps between what [sic] the content of what he recounted and what I had heard about him.” She thus tried to tell her readers that there were many elements in this narrative that they could not see: the translator, the differences in understandings of geographical and political entities that existed between her and al-Zubayr, his passionate way of speaking, and the scrutiny of the soldiers guarding him. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 558

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how ‘the Sudan’ as an entity was understood differently by European versus Sudanese speakers in 1887.
• XREF: Shaw/Lugard link makes this a hinge between Egypt-Sudan and West/Central African colonial history.

Related

• Flora Shaw, wife of Lugard, interviewed al-Zubayr in 1887 (similarity 0.95)
• British empire journalism and administration were linked through the Lugard marriage (similarity 0.84)