Sudanese colonial administrators produced the field’s canonical ethnography assigning racial identities.

Evidence

These administrators had easy access to the many tribes and regions of the Sudan. Not only did they share their knowledge with London by means of confidential intelligence reports, but they also published their findings and research in ethnographies and other works. Right after World War I, a group of academic-minded administrators founded a journal in which to publish their increasing data on the Sudanese. In the first issue of this journal, Sudan Notes and Records, H. A. MacMichael published an article in which he asserted the racial differences between the Nuba of Nubia and the Nuba of South Kordofan, the former being Arabs and the latter Negroes. Four years later, his most famous work, A History of the Arabs in the Sudan, appeared, and it has since become a classic in the field of Sudanese anthropology and history. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 837

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broad literature on colonial ethnography inventing tribal/racial categories — parallels Mamdani’s ‘define and rule’ and the Hamitic hypothesis. — connects to: Colonial ethnography supplied the classificatory categories apartheid segregation built upon. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 567
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did MacMichael’s Arab/Negro Nuba distinction reverberate in later Sudanese civil war divisions?