Prophecy and Mahdism in the Upper Nile: an examination of local experiences of the Mahdiyya in the southern Sudan

Abstract

The general outline of the Mahdiyya in the Sudan has been reconstructed very largely from contemporary documents. The wealth of preserved official records from both the Mahdist government and the Egyptian army has made it possible to undertake detailed studies in the military, political, diplomatic and economic history of the Mahdist state. The local experience of the Mahdiyya, however, has been understudied, and part of the reason for this has been the reticence of many historians working in the Sudan to undertake a systematic collection of oral history.1 Not only has social history suffered as a result, but the regional response to, and perception of the Mahdiyya has gone unrepresented. The internal progress of the Mahdiyya has sometimes been presented in 'nationalist' terms, knitting together the different peoples of the Sudan into a common national purpose and identity.2 Yet the Mahdist records referring to regions distant from Omdurman are essentially colonial records, documenting colonial perceptions and colonial aims as Omdurman sought to extend its control over autonomous territories: a point forcefully made for Dar Masalit by Lidwien Kapteijns, one of the few exceptions to the general rule of historians of the Mahdist period.3 The local response to the expansion of Mahdist colonial control is incompletely reported in Mahdist documents for many of the same reasons that the response to later British colonialism was misrepresented in the documents of the early Anglo-Egyptian government: the horizon of local officials in both periods was limited by military constraints, contact with the local peoples was restricted, and there was an institutional bias towards presenting as optimistic an account of governmental (and personal) progress as possible. This problem is nowhere more evident than in interpretations of the Mahdiyya in the Southern Sudan. The attitudes and approaches of the incoming Mahdist officials have been well served in the one comprehensive history of the Mahdiyya in that region,4 but local reactions and the impact of the Mahdists on local communities have remained largely a matter of inference from the impressions of British officers who entered the region in the first decade after the overthrow of the Mahdist state. In only a few cases have