AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	65. The politics of travelling in Africa - Translocal perspectives in African history
Paper ID	223
Author(s)	Ibrahim, Hassan Ahmed
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	This paper is primarily based on a remarkable historical document that had been missing for sometime, and which I accidentally came across during one of my several visits to the Centre for Contemporary Egyptian Historic Research in Cairo. Namely, the full text of the official report on Muhammad Ali’s only visit to the Sudan, 1838-1839. The study gives a comprehensive analysis of the background and content of this document, in particular its portrayal of the political and social fabric of the Sudanese society at that early time when information about the country was very meagre. But the focus of the discourse is on a heated historical controversy on the objectives of this trip, and the entire strategy of the over sixty years’ (1820-1885) Egyptian rule of the Sudan, that dominated the writings of Egyptian and Sudanese historians during the second half of the twentieth century, and whose repercussions are visible until today. Many Egyptian writers attributed these developments primarily, if not solely, to the keen desire of Muhammad Ali and his successors to rid the oppressed Sudanese from the spiral of misery that they had been subjected to for a long time, and to lead them towards progress and prosperity. The late Professor Muhammed Fu’ad Shukri maintained that the Pasha took the trouble and the risk of opening (fath) the country and travelling at the age of seventy along the Nile up to the remote Ethiopian borders to popularize the so-called ‘Nazariyyat al-Khulu’ (the theory of the vacuum) that confirmed Egypt’s historical and legal rights in the Sudan, and to use it to establish an eternal strong and united state in the Nile Valley for the welfare of the Sudanese and Egyptian peoples. But several Sudanese historians protested that historiography to these Egyptian writers was a form of patriotism, and that their literature was politically motivated to sell the notion of the unity of the Nile valley versus the call for independence as the only possible solution for the Sudan question. .Hence, they argued, the whole venture was closely related to Muhammed ‘Ali’s grand design of independence and regional hegemony, which triggered him to conquer the Sudan to exploit its presumed rich economic and human resources. Having dismissed this humanitarian hypothesis and established the dominant imperialist nature of the Egyptian drive, they, nonetheless, admitted that it, like all colonial ventures, was not all evil, and did have a positive impact on the future of the country, notably in the arena of modernization. The late Professor Meki Shibeika, the founder of modern Sudanese historiography, had even recorded the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Egyptian conquest, and commended Muhammed ‘Ali’s efforts to open the Sudan to the outside world and introduce agricultural technology and modern education in it.

Muhammad AlI's Visit to the Sudan, 1838-1839: A Civilizing-humanitarian Mission or an Imperialist-colonial Venture?