The term Sudanese originally denoted southern slaves, not northern Arabs.

Evidence

Fawzï’s idea of cultural intervention for the resolution of Sudanese identity was based exclusively on external factors; despite his claims of intimate knowledge of the Sudan, the inhabitants’ means of defining each other is never consulted or represented. For instance, Fawzï generalizes the term Sudanese to mean all the people native to the Sudan; but for men like al- Zubayr Pasha and Babikr Bedri, the term signified the tribes of the southern Sudan.Al-Zubayr Pasha or Bedri would have referred to northerners by tribal designation or by the term arab. These men would have bristled at the term Sudanese, an epithet they would have reserved for slaves or the descendants of slaves. To mingle or intermarry with Sudanese (by which they meant Negroes) would have been a great disgrace. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 603

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the shifting referent of ‘Sudanese’ — a crucial term for the reader’s comparative project.
• CANDY: A surprising fact: northerners reserved ‘Sudanese’ as a slur meaning slave/descendant of slaves, the opposite of today’s national identity.