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sixPurity and Conquest in theAnglo-Egyptian Sudan

Janice Boddy

There is a scene in the film Topsy-Turvy1—about the musical partnershipof Gilbert and Sullivan—in which London actors dining at the Savoy ponderthe news that General Charles Gordon is dead. The year is 1885. The men areindignant and perturbed. Gordon, ardent Christian and campaigner againstthe slave trade, hero to his countrymen, and governor of Sudan in OttomanEgypt’s employ, was killed by followers of the Mahdi, a charismatic Muslimholy man, while besieged by them at Khartoum. Several times the Mahdi hadsought Gordon’s conversion, to no avail. Gordon’s death two days before aBritish rescue mission reached the town was a brutal blow to imperial pride.

The struggle between Gordon and the Mahdi would frame relations be-tween British officials and Muslim Sudanese for decades to come. More, itpersonified the encounter between civilization and savagery, science and su-perstition, Christianity and what politicians and the press called ‘‘the falsereligion’’ of Islam, polarities that so energized the late Victorian age. Throughthe lens of Victorian popular culture—poetry, novels, fiction for boys—theempire appeared a modern Camelot, defended by Christian gentlemen whowere stoic, entrepreneurial, just. Here Gordon became a mythic figure, the

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archetype of a superior race sent to battle ‘‘heathens’’ on the fringe of thesettled world, a martyr for Empire and Christendom both. The young WinstonChurchill phrased it thus:

That one man, a European among Africans, a Christian among Moham-medans, should by his genius have inspired the efforts of 7,000 soldiers ofinferior race, and by his courage have sustained the hearts of 30,000 inhabi-tants of notorious timidity, and with such materials and encumbrances haveoffered a vigorous resistance to the increasing attacks of an enemy who,though cruel, would yet accept surrender . . . is an event perhaps withoutparallel in history. (Churchill [1899] 1987: 57)

For more than a decade the Mahdists held Sudan. Then, in 1898, Kitch-ener led an Anglo-Egyptian force to reconquer the region and occupy Khar-toum.2 Upon hearing of Kitchener’s victory, Queen Victoria telegraphed,‘‘Surely he is avenged!’’ (Magnus 1958: 133). Journalist G. H. Steevens wrote,‘‘When civilisation fights with barbarism it must fight with civilised weapons,’’and ‘‘the deadliest weapon against Mahdism’’ was a railway, built to speedimperial troops through the desert, along the Nile, and into the obdurate heartof Islamic Africa ‘‘with machine-like precision’’ (Steevens 1898: vii, 22).

And with goods. For the railway also brought Victorian commodity cul-ture—products and the ideas they conveyed. Churchill, a cavalryman in thecampaign and war correspondent for the Morning Post, described how troopsencamped at the advancing railhead were sustained:

Every morning in the remote nothingness there appeared a black speckgrowing larger and clearer, until with a whistle and a welcome clatter, amidthe aching silence of ages, the ‘‘material’’ train arrived. . . . At noon cameanother speck, developing in a similar manner into a supply train . . .[carrying water] . . . and the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whiskey,soda-water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the worldwithout discomfort. ([1899] 1987: 175)

Not mentioned but surely also delivered was soap—an amenity of conquestthat bore a heavy semantic load.

Anne McClintock (1995: 207) notes that at the start of the nineteenthcentury, soap was scarce in Britain ‘‘and washing a cursory activity at best,’’ butby century’s end it was being mass-produced and held a privileged place amongmanufactured goods. Ideas about cleanliness condensed a range of bourgeoisvalues, among them monogamy (clean sex), capitalism (clean profit), Chris-tianity (being cleansed of sin), class distinction, rationality, racial purity. More,a close practical connection obtained between Victorian preoccupations withhygiene and evolutionary thought. Washing bodies, clothes, and homes—workdone mainly by women—joined sexual purity rites such as race and classendogamy as techniques, in Foucault’s terms, for ‘‘maximizing life’’ and ensur-ing the ‘‘longevity, progeniture and descent of the classes that ‘ruled’ ’’(Foucault 1990: 123; see also Davin 1997). Soap had become both an instru-

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ment and a symbol of bourgeois civilization, figuratively marking off the ‘‘cul-tivated’’ and ‘‘developed’’ from the ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘barbarous,’’ and ‘‘unwashed.’’

Yet Victorian ideas about the healthy, vigorous, racially clean bourgeoisbody did not emerge in a Europe focused solely on itself. Rather, as Ann Stoler(1995: 7) argues, ‘‘they were refracted through the discourses of empire and itsexigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and theracialized contexts in which those confidences were built, could not be disen-tangled.’’ The imperial politics and language of race furnished a scaffold towhich domestic distinctions of class and nation were secured; the reverse wasalso true. Scholars from Mary Douglas (1966) to Timothy Burke (1996) haveshown that beliefs about the disorderliness and filth of others are claims for theintegrity and merit of one’s own social group. By invoking the discourse ofcleanliness and filth, bourgeois Britons set themselves off from a host of ‘‘un-ruly others,’’ be they prostitutes, Irish, or Sudanese.

Commodities such as soap and Western clothing, along with the conceptof hygiene and concern for racial purity on which they relied, figured in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century efforts by Britons to imagine, domesti-cate, and latterly improve the Muslim population of northern Sudan. Britishreports of Muslim Sudanese as dirty, lazy, and superstitious were legion, anddrew on opposing self-perceptions to erect boundaries between ruler andruled. In light of Gordon’s sinister end, such boundaries were especially firmfrom the time of the abortive relief sortie (1884–85) to beyond the reconquestof Sudan. Yet once the British were in control, productive administrationdemanded that some native failings be remedied; Sudan would have to be‘‘civilized’’ to some degree.

My purpose is twofold. First I illustrate the closely linked themes ofhygiene, religion, race, and social evolution in popular late Victorian publica-tions which, depicting events in Sudan, justified its violent overthrow in theBritish imagination. Second, and more briefly, I suggest how these ideas in-flected colonial discourse surrounding pharaonic (female) circumcision, com-monly practiced in Muslim Sudan even today.3 Colonial officials judged phar-aonic circumcision a consummate ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘an insurmountable barrier tofull social relations between British and Sudanese’’ (Deng and Daly 1989: 35;see Kenrick 1987). Though their efforts to stop it were supported by prominentSudanese women and men, the interference was resented and, in the late1940s, pharaonic circumcision became a nationalist cause. Yet the body sur-faces of colonizers and colonized had been marked with political import farearlier than this, well before the reconquest began.

Of Dervishes and Gentlemen

Soon after news of Khartoum’s fall reached London in February 1885, atorrent of ‘‘Gordon literature’’ flooded British shops and streets. Disconsolateeditorials, letters, and biographies drenched the reading public in lament.


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Cromer (1908, v. 1: 432), no Gordon defender, ventured that Gordon’s pub-lished journal was ‘‘probably read by every educated man in England.’’ Morethan twenty-five books about the man appeared within a decade of his death.But Victorian writers of popular fiction who used the saga as their backdropoffered more than elegiac praise: they gave hope of vindication, of redeemingthe imperial master-narrative.

G. A. Henty, former war correspondent and prolific author of boys’ adven-ture books, wrote two novels centered on Gordon’s plight: The Dash for Khar-toum, which appeared in 1892, and With Kitchener in the Soudan, publishedin 1903. They are complex assertions of Victorian social values and, given theirwide and impressionable readership, worth exploring for the images of Africa,Arabs, and Empire they contain. Both are lively yarns with obvious pedagogi-cal intent; Henty usually wrote a preface, sometimes addressed ‘‘Dear lads,’’ inwhich he laid bare the moral of his tale. Though he stuck close to reportedevents, he burnished the brutality of imperial exploits to convey a wholesomeimage of Britons abroad: his heroes are always chivalrous, dutiful, humanelybenevolent. To the anthropologist, these highly formulaic tales are myths,imparting sacred truths in the guise of secular entertainment. Doubtless theyschooled many a future officer of imperial Sudan.

The Dash for Khartoum depicts Mahdists as barbaric foes whose coura-geous if misguided exploits shatter the smug expectations of well-drilled butunseasoned British troops while affirming their racial supremacy:

As if utterly heedless of death the Arabs rushed forward through the leadenstorm, but were mowed down like grass before it. . . . the wild courage of thenatives was of no avail against the steady discipline of [the British troops].(Henty 1892: 123)

Though the ‘‘dervishes,’’ as followers of the Mahdi were called, are brave, theirfighting tactics are chaotic:

as for these slippery black beggars, the less we have to do with them thebetter I shall be pleased. You go at them, and you think you have got it yourown way, and then before you can say knife there they are yelling andshouting and sticking those ugly spears into you and your horses, and danc-ing around until you don’t fairly know what you are up to. There ain’tnothing natural or decent about it. (Henty 1892: 135)

Contrast the ‘‘wild,’’ ‘‘indecent,’’ ‘‘unnatural’’ tactics of the Sudanese with theconduct of the British, who remain civil and disciplined even under duress: asthe camel corps cross the blazing desert, supplies of water run dangerouslylow, yet the men ensure there is always enough for tea.

This first story set against the background of Gordon’s demise concernstwo British boys, Edgar and Rupert, one from a titled family, the other not, whoare switched as infants. When they cannot be told apart it is decided that thewealthy family shall raise them as twins. Well educated and now in his teens,Edgar learns of the mix-up from the treacherous woman—the selfish untitled


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mother—who had engineered it. Convinced that he is the pauper, he runs offto join the campaign to extricate Gordon from Khartoum. In the desert a fewdays before the city’s fall Edgar is caught and made the slave of an Arab shaykh.As he now speaks a little Arabic, he learns that his captor has come to the frontnot from faith but for profit—to plunder British baggage camels. In this he hasmet some success.

When Edgar overhears news of Gordon’s death in January 1885, his hopeof rescue dissolves. According to his captors, the Mahdi has declared all whitecaptives to be his personal property and requires that they be sent to Khartoum.But the wily shaykh intends to keep Edgar for himself, and to avoid detectionhe disguises Edgar in Arab clothes and has his skin stained dark. The entou-rage departs for Kordofan, beyond the reach of British troops.

Once in the shaykh’s village Edgar resolves to learn ‘‘the native language’’and customs well enough to make his escape. He applies himself patiently andresourcefully to his servitude. Though young and slight, he works diligently inthe fields and accomplishes twice as much in a day as the shaykh’s southernSudanese slaves, both of them full-grown men. He makes himself useful,showing people what to do with their looted supplies—how to open tins, boiltea, prepare cocoa and arrowroot. One stolen camel carries medical suppliesand, despite his lack of formal knowledge, Edgar’s innate good will and practi-cal common sense enable him to become physician to the shaykh’s people,dispensing quinine, cleaning and dressing wounds. In short, he is a civilizinginfluence: hard-working, eminently practical, an envoy of modernity in thebarbarians’ midst. When the camp is threatened by dervishes sent by theMahdi to punish the shaykh’s defiance, Edgar shows his captors how to form amilitary square and use their rifles effectively, thus enabling them to thwart amounted force twice their size with few casualties of their own. For this hewins his freedom.

Meanwhile Rupert, who had joined the Gordon relief campaign laterthan his ‘‘brother,’’ learns by a series of coincidences that Edgar—whom heand his parents have been desperate to find—has been abducted. As the impe-rial force retreats down the Nile in 1885, Rupert is granted leave to stay behindand search for his ‘‘twin.’’ He has a wig made up to resemble native hair,blackens his skin, and with the lure of payment in camels and cash engagessome friendly Sudanese to accompany him. He too has learned some Arabic,rapidly learns more, and is careful to mimic the gestures of his companions lesthis breeding reveal his foreignness. At length Edgar and Rupert serendipi-tously meet in the desert. They take a few moments to recognize each other, asboth look and act like Arab Sudanese. Ultimately it is Edgar’s voice that giveshim away: his accent signals his true identity, race, and class.

Similar themes unfold in With Kitchener in the Soudan (Henty 1903).There the second son of an all but bankrupt earl secretly marries a governess,an orphaned woman of good family, and falls out with his father, who hadwished him to make a lucrative match. The son alters his name and moves


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with his wife to Egypt. He speaks Arabic and in 1883 enlists in the Egyptianarmy as a translator in a disastrous expedition against the Mahdi that fewsurvive.4 He is given up for dead. His wife, however, feels sure her husband isalive—that, aided by his language skills, he would have disguised himself as anArab and somehow escaped the Mahdi’s spears. Never losing hope, she re-mains in Cairo, where she teaches to support their son, Gregory. Gregory, inturn, learns several dialects of Arabic and ‘‘the negro language’’ from thefamily’s Sudanese servant. When, in the mid-1890s, his mother dies, Gregoryresolves to find out what became of his father and arranges to be taken on as atranslator in Kitchener’s avenging force.

Once in Sudan, Gregory rapidly proves his worth by staining his skin dark,donning a jibba—the dervishes’ patched cotton tunic—and crossing the desertto infiltrate the Mahdist camp as a spy. He returns unscathed with informationthat Kitchener uses to secure the site where the advancing railway is to join theNile. Next, Gregory is assigned to a gunboat. His vessel engages craft carryingdervish fighters and their families across the Nile to where they are massing foran assault on imperial troops. When a boatload of natives is struck by a shelland sinks, Gregory gallantly leaps into the river to save a drowning woman; thetwo wash up on shore beyond the British lines, whereupon Gregory is cap-tured by a dervish emir. The emir has sworn to kill any unbeliever he meets.Yet before he can strike, the rescued woman, who happens to be the emir’sfavorite wife, cleverly intervenes by throwing her robe over Gregory, placinghim under her protection. Thus released from his vow, the emir praises Greg-ory’s courage, confessing that he would never have risked his own life for astranger’s.

Gregory replies,

What I did, Emir, I believe any white officer who was a good swimmerwould have done. No Englishman would see a woman drowning withoutmaking an effort to save her, if he had it in his power. As to the fact that shewas not of the same race or religion, he would never give it a thought. Itwould be quite enough for him that she was a woman. (Henty 1903: 173)

Eventually, Gregory breaks free and rejoins the imperial force. After thedervish defeat, he makes inquiries of those who had lived through the siege ofKhartoum. Gregory learns that his father had indeed survived the Kordofanbloodbath in 1883—the only white man to do so. He had escaped disguised asa dervish, and made his way to relative safety with Gordon in Khartoum. Butearly in September 1884, he had joined the ill-fated party heading north viathe risen Nile to report on conditions in the beleaguered city. When theirsteamer ran aground, all were murdered by the Mahdi’s allies. Gregory visitsthe site and miraculously, hidden behind a rock, finds his father’s diary re-counting his audacious battlefield escape, telling how, wearing a bloodstainedjibba, he had befriended a wounded dervish and successfully doctored him bymustering his common sense. And the document reveals Gregory’s noble


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birth, that he is now the rightful earl. The present claimant, a cousin, de-scribed by his peers as a ‘‘consummate ass’’ (Henty 1903: 217), is thus undone.

The mythic elements in these tales are legion. That they are variants ofthe Prince and the Pauper theme is clear: nobility is in British blood, and will‘‘out’’ in chivalrous deeds; more, they assure the newly elevated middle classthat one needn’t be born a prince to be a gentleman, indeed that every gentle-man is noble at heart. Female characters are predictably few, deployed mainlyto deepen the contrast between British and Sudanese men. They tend to bekind, self-sacrificing, shrewd, thrifty, and, whether native or English, protec-tive of the white youth in their power. Henty’s Sudanese women are intel-ligent, lively, and glib, forthright with their husbands and other men. Yet liketheir British counterparts they are also modest and vulnerable; importantly,their own male defenders fail to protect them as they should. The breed-ing and native ‘‘good sense’’ of the British lads allow them to redress theArabs’ lack.

Darkening Skins . . .

A striking theme in Henty’s Sudan novels is the ability of British males todisguise themselves as dervishes and pass undetected by dervishes themselves.Henty was not the only author to use this device. A. E. W. Mason does so in hisadult novel The Four Feathers (1903), which likewise invokes Sudan and theGordon tale. There were, of course, precedents for Victorian men ‘‘passing’’ asArabs. Most prominent was Sir Richard Burton, whose Personal Narrative of aPilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah first appeared in 1855 and ran tonumerous printings. Burton’s account, like those of less venturesome Oriental-ists, had filtered into the popular imagination and taken hold.

For Victorians, dressing as an ‘‘Arab,’’ though not passing for one, was awidespread affectation; oriental costume was popular at fancy dress balls andon the London stage. Such putting on of ‘‘Arabness’’ was frivolous, perhaps,and romantic, a means to tame the exotic by emulation.5 Yet it was no lessserious for that. For in displaying the capacity to know and assume ‘‘the other’’at will, it affirmed the superiority of the self beneath the guise (see Said 1979).

In the late nineteenth century, speculation that racial and ethnic differ-ences had biological roots linked older views of social hierarchy to selectedDarwinian insights on secular, natural time (Fabian 1983; Gilman 1985; Said1979: 206ff.). Guided by the telos of progress, scholars calibrated the featuresof advanced and backward races, classes, cultures, and societies—categoriesoften conflated in Victorian works. Social and physical ‘‘types’’ were ranked asmore or less evolved. Europeans, of course, were the former, but with anadmonition. For if nature is truly dynamic, as Darwin proposed, surely thetelos could be reversed. Degeneration, Sander Gilman (1985: x) observes, was‘‘the underside of progress.’’ Its possibility threatened the confident classifica-tions on which the empire was built. Bourgeois Europeans, concerned for the


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continuing supremacy of the race, came to regard stigmatized groups withintheir fold—prostitutes, the Irish, criminals, the unemployed—as congenitally‘‘atavistic,’’ bestial, savage, dirty, actually or metaphorically ‘‘dark.’’ Supportedby the Lamarckian idea that environmentally induced characteristics could befixed in the social organism, fears of European retrogression inspired a numberof liberal movements: to improve the lives of the poor; apply newly devisedprinciples of hygiene to the seething slums; educate the masses; promotesobriety, chastity, and moderation so as to prevent overindulgence that, it wasthought, leads to insanity. Less sanguinely, they also gave rise to programs ofeugenic modification and surveillance (Nye 1985; Davin 1997).

Anne McClintock notes that the threat of degeneration heightened con-cern over Victorian women’s sexuality and domestic station. ‘‘Body bound-aries,’’ she observes, ‘‘were felt to be dangerously permeable and demandingcontinual purification, so that sexuality, in particular women’s sexuality, wascordoned off as the central transmitter of racial and hence cultural contagion’’(1995: 47). For middle-class women, childrearing and ‘‘improving the racialstock’’ became national and imperial duties, and motherhood an exalted, ifdebated, role. Moreover, women were advised to employ scientific principlesin all facets of homemaking: infant feeding, childrearing, cleaning, meal plan-ning and preparation (Davin 1997). Domestic life ideally became a hub ofrationality, in contrast to the supposed disorderly, unscientific, unsanitary prac-tices of ‘‘inferior’’ groups. The maintenance of imperial boundaries of allkinds—physical, social, territorial—came to depend on domestic discipline,sexual probity and restraint, moral and physical hygiene (McClintock 1995:47). In Sudan such principles would be brought to bear, to a degree, on Arabwomen too, who were enjoined to reproductive proficiency for the good of thecolonial state.

The Victorian doctrine of degeneration also supported scholarly views of‘‘oriental’’ history as a legend of decay: the erosion of Islam and decline of itsonce glorious civilization into ignorance, indulgence, and excess. But if‘‘Arabs’’ were deemed backward, fallen from levels they had once attained,they were nonetheless considered more highly evolved than ‘‘Africans.’’ Vic-torian social geography was, as Fabian (1983) notes, both spatial and temporalat once: leaving Europe meant traveling back in time, finding ever earlier‘‘stages of man’’ the farther from Europe one went. The idea that such distancecould be lessened if not wholly overcome, that ‘‘backward’’ races would benefitfrom having the ‘‘advanced’’ in their midst, offered a persuasive rationale forimperial expansion.

However rarefied the debates of late Victorian scholars became, theirideas—like those of scholars in any age—were not created of whole cloth butengaged with issues abroad in the society of the day. Nor did ‘‘scientific racism’’remain an elite understanding: it seeped into everyday life through advertise-ments, novels, travel books, and broadsheets, thereby contributing to disposi-tions in civil society. Such a dialectic between pedagogues and the populace is,


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in Gramsci’s (1971) view, essential to successful hegemony, the socially pro-duced assumptions about the world that, having become naturalized, go un-questioned and serve to effect and regulate social relations. The scientificmystique that cloaked ideas of race and class presented them as ‘‘objective’’and morally neutral—empirical facts of life. Popular media normalized suchviews by reflecting them as only so much common sense.

Still, to understand how Victorians understood Sudan we must take afurther step: the lands of the upper Nile were anomalous, both Arab andAfrican at once. This was a liminal zone, capable of erupting into savagery atany time. Since nomads were thought to outnumber farmers—an impressionlikely created by the upheavals of the Mahdist regime—it was seen as lessadvanced than incipiently civilized Egypt, which had slipped from past gran-deur but was reviving under Europe’s sway. Egypt, for its part, and aided byEuropeans, had been on the point of taming Sudan by putting an end to theslave trade when native ‘‘atavism’’ flared. Reversing the havoc was up to Euro-pean gentlemen, confident exemplars of evolutionary fulfillment like the para-gons of Henty’s Sudan tales.

Henty’s characters who successfully pass as Sudanese Arabs leave thefrontiers of European enlightenment and cross, like Gordon, into the realm ofthe dangerous and imperfectly known. They are bent not only on gainingknowledge of their foes but also, like Gordon, on domesticating them. Still,their success at deception suggests that the skills of a Burton reside in everyBritish gentleman. Burton had perfected his mannerisms before venturing outin disguise, training himself in the gestures, postures, and pious invocationsthat mark customary behaviors in the East. Henty’s young men do likewise,though more swiftly and in predictable caricature. But for Mason’s hero HarryFeversham, who arrives in Sudan disguised as a swarthy Greek, ‘‘becoming’’ aSudanese dervish takes three whole years of sun, wind, and study to perfect(Mason 1903).

Yet the Burton analogy is inexact. For while Burton sought only to betaken for a Persian, those who would pass for Sudanese must stain their skindark, altering not just their language and habits of gesture and dress but afeature of appearance not readily subject to self-control. For them there is theadded frisson of descending the evolutionary ladder in pretense. This was,however, a temporary and reversible ‘‘devolution’’ in pursuit of a noble cause—to reclaim a lost brother, rescue a fellow officer, avenge a countryman’s death.While Henty’s and Mason’s heroes skillfully ‘‘play’’ those beneath them inrank, class, and race, the Sudanese whose identities they assume cannot returnthe compliment, for in character, word, and deed they would, the authorsimply, fail to pass for ‘‘gentlemen’’ even if their skin did not reveal them atonce.6 Gregory’s exchange with the dervish emir on rescuing women is a casein point.

The heroes not only darken their skin, they also assume the jibba, sign ofpoverty and Muslim piety and loyalty to the Mahdi’s cause. The Mahdi twice


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sent Gordon a jibba, inviting him to convert; Gordon spurned them, appalledat the thought of donning a ‘‘filthy Dervish’s cloth’’ just to prolong his life(Compton 1974: 140, 133), and is thought to have died in uniform dress. Ourfictional heroes willingly wear the jibba in order to further the mission ofcivilization, and live to reclaim their rightful place. Significantly, Kitchener,when attached to the Gordon relief expedition in 1884, had done so too, inorder to gain intelligence of the Mahdist forces holding Gordon and Khar-toum.7 In masking their whiteness and donning the clothes of the ‘‘backwardrace,’’ the boys distinguish themselves from the resolute Gordon and emulatehis avenger instead.

Moreover, their journeys home from their ordeals rehearse the evolution-ary logic of progress, from Africa to Egypt to England, jibba to khakis and redserge, dark skin to white, squalor and filth to order and cleanliness, wastelandto human production and fertile soil. Symbolically they annul the disenchant-ment and fear of retrogression occasioned by Gordon’s death. The boys enact,as it were, an implicit rescue of ‘‘Gordon’’ himself, of the civility he had cometo represent. Yet they never abandon their ‘‘real’’ identities: the inner truth ofthemselves as white, pure, and socially refined remains intact. Like Kitchener,they dissemble their race for the sake of civilization: no ‘‘going native’’ isimplied.

In Henty’s Sudan books, the British civilize by violence, something theytellingly refer to as ‘‘work.’’ But his young protagonists do more: they arepeaceable envoys, demonstrating the wonders of British domestic science tothe Sudanese. This too, Henty suggests, is imperial toil. Importantly, whenthey are thus employed our heroes’ race is not disguised. The pallor of theirskin, revealed in words and illustrations, both heightens the contrast betweenthem and their antagonists and, in bringing that contrast to conscious atten-tion, affirms its relevance to Victorian modernity. The boys’ dark disguise is afleeting transgression, a strategic layer of dirt—Douglas’s matter out of place—that can always be removed by soap. Indeed, the characters suggest that,whatever their skins ephemerally show, only those who are white by birth cancross racial boundaries and impart their wisdom unchecked, thus clarifying forreaders the Arabs’ failure to measure up. Gregory teaches the emir aboutgentlemanly ways; Edgar’s diligence as both doctor and slave instructs hiscaptors in the value of hard work, scientific knowledge, and practical ‘‘com-mon sense.’’

. . . and Washing Clean

A theme that weaves through Henty’s books is the progressive influence oftrade, and the need for a host of commercially produced ‘‘things’’ to sustain acivilized life. The list of commodities Gregory is counseled to buy beforejoining his regiment is long and minutely detailed, including not only hisspecialized kit but provisions to augment the meager army fare:


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Of course you get beef, biscuit, or bread, and there is a certain amount oftea, but nothing like enough for a thirsty climate . . . so you had better takeup to four or five pounds. . . . You might take a dozen tins of preserved milk,as many of condensed cocoa and milk, and a couple of dozen pots of jam.(Henty 1903: 71)

Once beyond the railhead, Gregory needs a baggage camel and a nativeservant to manage his personal supplies.

In The Dash for Khartoum (1892) Henty reveals that some Europeangoods had already found their way up the Nile by 1884: Edgar’s shaykh, forinstance, has an ample supply of matches. He implies that other items, likesoap and Western attire, first arrived in Sudan with the European troops. Theshaykh’s camel raid nets him not just coveted rifles, but articles of Europeanclothing—khaki suits, shirts, socks, boots. The Sudanese, Henty writes, are(improbably) ‘‘puzzled’’ by the clothes, ‘‘and Edgar had to put on a shirt andpair of trousers to show how they should be worn’’ (Henty 1892: 247).

When the entourage arrives at their village in Kordofan, Edgar is requiredto reveal his whiteness to the welcoming crowd by washing, but finds it impos-sible to remove the blacking from his skin with water alone.

‘‘I wish to goodness,’’ he muttered to himself, ‘‘I had got a cake or two of soaphere, but I suppose it is a thing that they never heard of; even a scrubbingbrush would be a comfort. I shall be weeks before I get myself thoroughlywhite again.’’ (Henty 1892: 245)

The observation is anachronistic. In Wad Medani on the Blue Nile, soapwas produced throughout the Mahdist period, as British surveyors later ob-served (Henderson 1965: 33; Daly 1986: 22). And Kitchener was dismayed tolearn that ‘‘Manchester goods’’ were available in local markets despite a stricteconomic blockade (Daly 1986: 22). Indeed, peoples of the upper Nile hadbeen at least peripheral participants in the world market since the seventeenth-century caravans of Sennar, an indigenous kingdom centered near Khartoum(Spaulding 1985).

No matter. To late Victorians like Henty soap was a civilizing force, andcivilization was not a pluralizable noun. Designed to purify bodies, clothes,and homes, soap was, as we have seen, a material metonym of Britain’s indus-trial empire and the values it extolled. Its utility was not just practical, butrhetorical: it signified a social order only speciously external to its use. Putanother way, its use was a performative act: it brought about hygiene, therational, scientific, and ranked state of social affairs for which it stood. Thussoap was both allegorical object (Richards 1990: 133ff.) and a practical meansto enlighten the ‘‘primitive’’ world—Africa, of course, but also the dark andfestering urban jungles at home.

Reciprocally, producers of soap and other items of domestic hygiene drewon images of ‘‘evolutionary primitives’’—monkeys, apes, and dark-skinnedpeoples—in advertising their wares (McClintock 1995), illustrating the dialec-


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tic between empire and metropole that Stoler (1995, 2002) describes. Anadvertisement for ‘‘Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap’’ from 1887 shows the figureof Britannia holding a laurel wreath over the bust of a chimpanzee, claimingthat Monkey Brand ‘‘saves labour and prolongs life. Promotes cleanliness andsecures health. . . . Causes brightness and dispels gloom. Teaches economyand avoids waste.’’8 Here soap is not merely an instrument or symbol but anagent of bourgeois values in and of itself.

Advertisements, remember, are highly condensed communications: whilethey aim to produce sufficient knowledge to persuade, their successful execu-tion presumes a knowing subject, a reader versed in the ‘‘prior meanings’’ thatstand ‘‘as a guarantee . . . for the ‘truth’ in the ad itself ’’ (Williamson 1978: 99).With this in mind, consider a much reproduced Victorian ad for Pears soap thatrelied on familiarity with Gordon’s conflict with the Mahdi for effect.

Entitled ‘‘The Formula of British Conquest,’’ it features six half-nakedspear-carrying ‘‘dervishes’’ recoiling awestruck upon seeing the words PEARS’SOAP IS THE BEST emblazoned in white on the side of a massive rock in theRed Sea Hills. Thomas Richards, in The Commodity Culture of VictorianBritain, suggests that this ad, more than others, shows the commodity as amagic medium ‘‘through which English power and influence could be en-forced and enlarged in the colonial world’’ (1990: 123). Commodities are notsimply the vanguard of imperial rule; they create the empire all by themselves.They are the weapons that will allow ‘‘illiterate savages who cannot appreciatethe value of things’’ (Richards 1990: 121) to be subdued.

But given its historical context, there is more to the ad than this. Victorianconceits notwithstanding, an inability to decipher English hardly betrays illit-eracy, and as we’ve seen, it was unlikely that Sudanese Arabs would have beenquite so perplexed by soap. The advertisement does proclaim the civilizingmission of commerce, but with a wry and melancholy twist, for in August1887, when it appeared in the Illustrated London News, commodities were theonly British force with a prospect of penetrating Sudan.

Below the drawing is a quotation (omitted from McClintock’s version [1995:225]) from a war correspondent who covered the Gordon relief campaign:

Even if our invasion of the Soudan has done nothing else it has at anyrate left the Arab something to puzzle his fuzzy head over, for the legendPEARS’ SOAP IS THE BEST, inscribed in huge white characters on therock which marks the farthest point of our advance towards Berber, will taxall the wits of the Dervishes of the Desert to translate.

This was not an apocryphal tale. A precedent had been set by British troopsstationed in eastern Sudan in the 1880s, who picked out their regimentalbadges in white stones on the black rock faces of the Red Sea Hills (Kenrick1987: 9–10). There is more. At a halt in the hills along the uncompletedSuakin–Berber railway, begun in vain hope of reclaiming the region fromMahdist troops, imperial navvies had painted the words ‘‘Otao Junction’’ in


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Pears advertisement, Illustrated London News, August 27, 1887, p. 247


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white on a small rock, and opposite, on the boulders of a hill, ‘‘PEARS SOAPIS THE BEST SOAP 5/5/85.’’ Decades later other such ‘‘ads’’ could still bemade out on nearby hills: ‘‘Drink Eno’s Fruit Salts,’’ ‘‘Barnes and Co.’s Pre-served Provisions are the Best.’’9 The troops, themselves immersed in commer-cial culture, had created a ‘‘proper English railway depot’’ complete withpainted advertisements, facetiously claiming this hostile place for home beforeevacuating Sudan with the rest of the Gordon relief force in 1885. Not only,then, might British entrepreneurs see commodities as a means of ‘‘conquest’’;so too might thwarted British troops, in a whimsical attempt to maintain atoehold in the land where Gordon came to grief. Richards (1990) and Mc-Clintock (1995) analyze this ad as the marketers’ invention; yet Pears artistshad simply taken the navvies’ creation and completed it, the addition of won-derstruck dervishes making visible the evolutionary fantasy on which the im-perial venture relied.

In Britain, the efficacy of the Pears advertisement depended on popularunderstandings of dervishes as dirty, violent, backward, and fanatical, in con-trast to readers’ notions of themselves as clean, orderly, rational, capitalist,literate, and humane. The dervishes are pictured half clad and, of course,carry weapons—tellingly spears, not guns, albeit they used both. Though der-vishes twice broke a British square and slew the Christian hero of the age, theBritish leave only words of domestic wisdom behind as their parting shot. Butlike forsaken Israelites beholding the Ten Commandments carved on stone byan unseen hand, the Mahdists draw back agape. By drolly invoking bothbiblical themes and domestic commodity culture, the ad reassures readers thatthey belong to a ‘‘we’’ who can bring enlightenment—Christianity, cleanli-ness, and commerce—to the savage Sudanese.

Fast forward to 1898, and see how the image has changed. The secondfigure is an ad from the Illustrated London News published in 1898, onemonth after the British victory at Omdurman. It alludes to the earlier Pearsadvertisement, yet replaces the 1885 failure with 1898 success—in LeverBrothers’ name. Entitled ‘‘The March of Civilisation: Sunlight Soap at Khar-toum,’’ it shows British officers placing a sign for Sunlight Soap on a mud-brickwall while bemused jibba-wearing dervishes, a veiled woman, and an all-but-naked boy look on. Now the hidden hand reveals itself: not God but Britishtroopers write the words, and not in the wilderness but in the heart of theformer Mahdist state, the Muslim town where an exemplar of Christian civili-zation had dwelt. Note too the inference that domestic soap (and its manyreferents) will overwhelm and enlighten the Sudanese, perhaps even convincethem of the imperfections of their faith, or of the value of empirical observa-tion over conjecture and superstition. And again the ad is documentary, forbelow the drawing are printed a letter to Lever Brothers and eyewitness reportsattesting that one J. R. Williams has been ‘‘the first . . . to place your advertise-ment in Khartoum.’’ Cleanliness, Christianity, and commerce, the hallmarksof ‘‘civilization,’’ accompanied imperial forces in fantasy and in fact.


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Sunlight advertisement, Illustrated London News, October 8, 1898, p. 525

Not surprisingly, these principles were explicitly urged upon Sudanesetoo, but with a notable elision. For, fearing a revival of the zeal that had led toGordon’s death, Christians were forbidden to proselytize in the Muslim north.Instead, scientific medicine and pedagogy bore the onus of civilizing, hencedomesticating, Muslim Sudanese.

Making Prolific Mothers

Fast forward again, to 1920, twenty-one years after the Anglo-EgyptianSudan came to be. The head of the Sudan Medical Department, ostensiblyyielding to ‘‘insistent persuasion’’ by the English wife of the education director‘‘after she had witnessed the barbarous customs at circumcision and birth,’’10

has just convinced administrators to establish a school for midwives in thenative town of Omdurman, across the White Nile from Khartoum. It is inter-esting that in public accounts the Midwives Training School owed its start to aspectacle of ‘‘African barbarity.’’ There were other, less openly acknowledgedreasons for the move. World War I had just ended and government projectsdeferred for its duration were being resumed. The fertile lands of the Gezira,south of the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, were being convertedinto a mammoth cotton plantation with backing from Parliament and British


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entrepreneurs. There was, however, an abiding shortage of native labor tocultivate the crop, which fatalities during the recent influenza epidemic haddone nothing to relieve (Bell 1999: 296). Moreover, poor sanitation and thecustom of pharaonic circumcision were held to be causing high rates of infantand maternal mortality and postpartum sterility among Muslim Sudanese,those whom, despite their famed religious zeal, the British preferred to em-ploy. With the Gezira project soon to be underway, an ample and disciplinedworkforce was crucial to secure. Phrased in the language of humanitarianadvance, and surely inseparable from this in officials’ regard, midwifery reformbecame one quiet means to that end.

In 1921, British nurse-midwife Mabel Wolff opened the midwifery schoolwith four hard-won recruits. She set to work with capable optimism, writing inher inaugural report ‘‘that constant teaching will, in time, have an effect ininfluencing the younger generation and the trained Diayas [midwives] againstthe barbarous custom.’’11 To Britons on the ground, Arab Sudanese womenconsistently failed to behave in civilized ways. Kitchener’s men had describedthem as half naked and ‘‘appallingly hideous,’’ with hair ‘‘all dripping withgrease’’ (Alford and Sword [1898] 1969: 83, 144–45). Wolff considered tradi-tional midwives to be ‘‘very conservative, completely ignorant and extremelydirty.’’12 Besides the ‘‘abominable,’’ ‘‘barbarous custom’’ of pharaonic circumci-sion,13 she complained of ‘‘the peculiar customs of the natives greasing them-selves and their surroundings.’’14 Her initial goal: to impress upon students theneed for cleanliness and order—cultivate their appreciation of soap.15

However adept she was at preaching the doctrine of hygiene, Wolff hadmixed success in curbing ‘‘the barbarous custom,’’ which, because it results ina scar that constricts the flow of bodily wastes and requires an incision toenable birth, she considered a major impediment to cleanliness and health. Asan interim measure she taught a less harmful operation that was adopted inseveral communities where her medical midwives worked. But while the se-verity of the practice was reduced, it did not disappear. Long after the colonialera the wife of a former British official wrote,

How the Arab women ever produced any children is difficult for a Euro-pean to imagine. The universal and barbaric practice of genital mutilation,whether infibulation or clitoridectomy, would make intercourse painful.There could be no birth without preliminary slashing and subsequent cob-bling together by, in the majority of cases, untrained locals using septictools. The . . . constant teaching and preaching of the Midwives’ TrainingSchool, did nothing to alter public opinion. . . . The apparent determina-tion of Arab women, enduring this primitive treatment, to continue toinflict it on the next generation, is shocking. (Kenrick 1987: 110)

Pharaonic circumcision had tainted Arab Sudanese. Britons linked it to allthat was backward, evil, ignorant, unwholesome, and unclean. Calling the


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practice ‘‘barbaric’’ invoked the specter of social evolution; it was an exercise ofdiscursive authority that precluded any need to consider indigenous women’spoints of view.16

To most Muslim Sudanese, pharaonic circumcision was not unhygienicbut purifying and religiously prescribed. Yet the Mahdi had not condoned it(Holt 1970; Daly 1986), and the Egyptian mosque-based religious scholarswhom officials engaged to wean Sudanese from charismatic Islam condemnedit, to little avail. Anxious lest British objections unduly provoke Muslim men,administrators charged the ‘‘barbarous custom’’ to unschooled, superstitiouswomen, especially older women, whom they continually reproached. As oneofficial opined, ‘‘They are ignorant, obstinate, brutal, and are quite capable ofstirring up trouble, so that the only way to deal with them is by overwhelmingpublic opinion.’’ ‘‘Mohammedan men,’’ he continued, know that female cir-cumcision is against their faith but need government help to stop it.17

In this one detects a cunning shift: Gordon’s adversaries have trans-mogrified. Now the fanatical foes are not the spear-wielding Mahdists of thePears advertisement so much as their headstrong, impious mothers, sisters, andwives. In a 1924 memo on female circumcision circulated to district commis-sioners, the British intelligence director declared that

no very great propaganda with the male population of the country can beexpected until the female portion of it which controls the children for alltheir early and impressionable years, is raised to a higher standard of mentaland moral development, which seems impossible as long as the custom ofPharaic circumcision holds.18

His view was widely shared.19 Muslim Sudanese women were deemed obsta-cles to imperial progress, namely, the transformation of domestic life that itrequired. Thus the production, edification, and control of Arab workers had tobegin with their prospective mothers, for along with its physical effects, femalecircumcision was thought ‘‘liable to cause serious mental disorder, thus furtherhandicapping a sex that is considered behind the development of the men ofthe country.’’20 Moreover, ‘‘setting aside the ordinary motives of humanity, theGovernment is deeply interested in the increase of population,’’21 which in-fibulation (but tellingly not excision) was believed to impair. So to makewomen better mothers, at once more prolific and less ‘‘backward’’ in theirnurturing abilities and techniques, officials in the 1920s began attending,fitfully at first, to women’s domestic education and health; here the midwiferyschool was the principal venture. Through such biopolitical crusades, it washoped, the seeds of ‘‘civilization’’ would take root within Muslim householdsand grow from the inside out (cf. Mitchell 1991; Steele 1998).

Colonial documents leave the impression that cleanliness and clothingwere solely European concerns, that exogenous canons of deportment werefoisted on unruly Africans through health initiatives, primary education, andthe like, with an eye to making them intelligible subjects and tractable work-


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ers. But clearly in Sudan there were indigenous logics of bodily purity too, withhistories of their own (see Boddy 1989; cf. Hunt 1999). When training Suda-nese midwives, Wolff spoke Arabic and made generous use of vernacularterms—among them the word ≠tahara, conventionally translated as ‘‘purity.’’Such renderings were illusory, masking deep incongruities of premise andbelief while lending unsuspected support to the very practices she sought tounseat. This was compounded by the fact that in Sudan as well as Britain at thetime, ‘‘purity’’ was more than a physical state. Associated with the control ofwomen’s sexuality, its presence or absence marked social boundaries, under-scored group integrity. While for Sudanese purity and cleanliness were typ-ified by the infibulated, hence marriageable, female body,22 to Wolff there wasno more unseemly instance of those traits. In the long run Sudanese womenselected from colonial repertoires, blending local practice with scientificmethods and ideals in ways consonant with their own meanings and concerns(Boddy 1998, 2003). British notions of purity as hygiene thus became en-tangled with local postulates; pharaonic circumcision, meant to purify femalebodies by removing external ‘‘masculine’’ parts and creating a more perfectand secure ‘‘house’’ of the womb, came to be performed with antiseptics, localanesthetics, and sterilized tools. Wolff ’s trust that with biomedical educationSudanese would ascend an imaginary ‘‘ladder of development’’ and ‘‘the bar-baric custom’’ would disappear now seems romantic and naïve; the intricaciesof colonial exchanges can never be wholly foreseen.

Coda

Colonial discourse linking enlightenment and evolutionary progress withcleanliness, discipline, commerce, ‘‘proper’’ motherhood, and the tacit princi-ples of Christianity was ubiquitous and imposing. Moreover, it endures.

Fast forward one last time, to 1994. I have returned to the northern Suda-nese village where, as a student, I began ethnographic fieldwork nearly twodecades before. But now I am a ‘‘lady professor’’ and my standing has radicallychanged. No longer is it permissible for me to ‘‘waste’’ time sitting and talkingwith women friends. Instead I am escorted on a round of semi-official visits tothe clinic and girls’ and boys’ elementary schools. So it happens one morningthat I am ushered to the front of a class of nine- and ten-year-old boys. Imme-diately the teacher stops his lesson. I utter the mandatory greetings; the chil-dren as a body rise and respond in a loud rhythmic chant. The teacher thengives a signal, and the boys begin reciting in singsong English, accompaniedby illustrative gestures:

Every day, when I get up, I wash my face, I wash my face.Every day, when I get up, I brush my teeth, I brush my teeth.Every day, when I get up, I wash my hands, I wash my hands.Every day, when I get up, I comb my hair, I comb my hair.


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Somehow it seemed fitting that the litany should be in English. I, perhaps theclosest thing to a British school inspector to visit since independence in 1956,am an appropriate, if reluctant, witness, able to confirm that imperial valuesare still being promoted, and in their consummate tongue.

Tellingly, however, the soap the boys use is neither Pears nor Sunlight, buta local Sudanese brand.

NOTES

This chapter is based on research for a book, Civilizing Women: British Crusadesin Colonial Sudan, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. I am extremely grate-ful to the women of Kabushiya and Gedo regions of northern Sudan for our continuingconversations. Several individuals and institutions have greatly facilitated the archivalportions of this work: El Haj Bilal Omer of the Institute of African and Asian Studies,University of Khartoum; Clare Cowling, Archivist, Royal College of Obstetricians andGynaecologists; S. M. Dixon of the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine; thePublic Records Office, London; the National Records Office, Khartoum; the RhodesHouse Library, Oxford; the Church Missionary Society Archive, Birmingham Univer-sity; the Rathbone Archive, Liverpool University; the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies Archives, London University; the Middle East Archive, St. Anthony’s College,Oxford; and the British Library. Jane Hogan of the Sudan Archive, Durham University,has been an invaluable help and fund of knowledge. My research and writing havebeen supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,the Connaught Fellowship Fund of the University of Toronto, the Harry Frank Gug-genheim Foundation, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy.Warmest thanks to them all; while they have contributed to the chapter’s insights, itsfaults are mine alone.

1. Mike Leigh, writer and director; Simon Channing-Williams, producer; USAFilms, 1999.

2. Ostensibly the invasion was undertaken on behalf of Ottoman Egypt, colonialmasters of Sudan from 1821 until the Mahdi’s rise to power in the early 1880s.

3. The ‘‘pharaonic’’ procedure (≠tahur faraowniya, or pharaonic purification) in-volves removing a girl’s external genitals (excision), then stitching up her genital open-ing (infibulation), leaving a small passage for urine and menstrual blood.

4. The expedition was led by a British officer in the Egyptian army, Hicks Pasha,against the Mahdi’s troops, who had taken El Obeid in Kordofan.

5. In this regard it was not unlike spirit possession as it affects northern Sudanesewomen (Boddy 1989).

6. See McClintock 1995: 69 on ‘‘colonial passing’’ in Kipling’s Kim. She suggeststhat Kim is able to ‘‘pass’’ because of his ambiguous racial heritage; being half-Irish, heis ‘‘racially closer to the Indians than if he had been wholly English.’’ This is not true ofthe thoroughly English heroes of Henty’s books.

7. Thanks to Douglas Johnson for pointing this out. The episode is captured inthe film Khartoum (Robert Ardrey, writer; Basil Dearden, director; Julian Blaustein,producer; MGM/UA, 1966), starring Charlton Heston as Gordon and Sir LawrenceOlivier (in blackface) as the Mahdi.

8. Illustrated London News, September 17, 1887, p. 353.


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9. P. B. E. Acland to Robin Baily, August 11, 1932, Sudan Archive, Durham(hereafter cited as SAD), 533/3/30. See also Acland memoirs, SAD 707/15/13.

10. M. E. Wolff to British Social Hygiene Council, February 1933, SAD 582/10/16.

11. Midwives Training School, First Annual Report, 1921, SAD 579/3/15.12. The account of Wolff ’s first encounters with Sudanese women was written by

her colleague, E. M. Kendall, matron of the Midwives Training School from 1946 to1955 (Kendall 1952: 42). See also O. M. F. Atkey, ‘‘Female Circumcision in theSudan,’’ April 7, 1930, National Record Office, Khartoum (hereafter cited as NRO),Civsec 1/57/3/121 and 1/44/2/12, 1924–37.

13. Annual Report, Midwifery Training School, Omdurman, October 20, 1921,SAD 579/3/15.

14. M. E. Wolff to director, Medical Department, March 7, 1921, SAD 579/3/7.15. ‘‘Elementary Practical Lessons for Midwives of the Sudan,’’ n.d., SAD 581/5/7.16. These were, of course, different from those of Europeans; as briefly addressed

below, the Sudanese women with whom I conducted research said they perform cir-cumcisions to make female bodies pure, clean, and smooth (Boddy 1989).

17. Medical Department Circular, February 17, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/4b.

18. C. A. Willis to district commissioners, February 19, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/8.

19. H. A. MacMichael to R. V. Bardsley, February 23, 1924; Bardsley to Mac-Michael, February 25, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/5–6.

20. Medical Department circular, February 17, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/4b.21. Willis to district commissioners, February 19, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/8.22. These issues will be pursued in Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colo-

nial Sudan. See also Boddy 1989.

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Documents

Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan