The Mahdist regime inverted master-slave hierarchies, degrading Egyptian officers to slave status

Evidence

Like Slatin Pasha, Ibrahïm Fawzï was familiar with the role-playing of master and slave, and this scene shows how horribly, for him, the roles had become reversed. Despite his insistence to the contrary, Fawzï Pasha became a slave, socially lower than those over whom he had recently been master. The Mahdists overturned the very structure on which Fawzï based his social and cultural identity. He lost his social autonomy with the loss of authority over his slave, a slave who linked him to his previous status and rank. Even worse, his own words and protests meant nothing. He followed the prescribed script, offering the answers he imagined the Mahdist leaders wanted to hear, but only the intercession of another Sudanese leader, who remains unnamed, saved him. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 625

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s chapter-1 understanding of Ottoman-Egyptian captives like who was taken during the Egyptian-Sudanese colonial encounter. Also relates to Slatin Pasha’s own account of enslavement in Sudan.