The political category ‘Sudanese’ emerged only from a recently urbanized freed-slave class

Evidence

Although there remains a great diversity of opinion about the apparent ambiguities of the White Flag League’s manifesto, it was clearly an organization built on the idea of Sudanese political self-expression and on unifying the Sudan itself.This was significant at a time when the very word Sudanese signified the black tribes of the south from whom slaves had been taken for generations and sold to the north and to Egypt. As a political entity, the descendants of these slaves—Alï Abd al-Latïf being one important example—were a recent phenomenon. These former slaves and their children, known to the British as “negroid but detribalized” had met the demand for unskilled labor in the larger cities of the Sudan shortly after the establishment of the condominium. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1029

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘Sudanese’ as a unifying political identity was a novel twentieth-century construction built on formerly enslaved southerners.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the political term ‘Sudanese’ travel from designating slave-origin people to naming a unitary nation?