Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations, Figures & Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- Egyptian Army Ranks & Turkish Honorifics
- Transliteration Note & List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Ali Jifun's Fashoda Homecoming
- 1 “Backbone of the Egyptian Army”
- 2 “Servants of His Highness the Khedive”
- 3 “Flavour of Domesticity”
- 4 “Brotherhood that Binds the Brave”
- 5 “Tea with the Khalifa”
- Epilogue: Mutiny at Omdurman
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: ‘Ali Jifun's Fashoda Homecoming
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations, Figures & Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- Egyptian Army Ranks & Turkish Honorifics
- Transliteration Note & List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Ali Jifun's Fashoda Homecoming
- 1 “Backbone of the Egyptian Army”
- 2 “Servants of His Highness the Khedive”
- 3 “Flavour of Domesticity”
- 4 “Brotherhood that Binds the Brave”
- 5 “Tea with the Khalifa”
- Epilogue: Mutiny at Omdurman
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Fashoda will be different from what I remember it in the days of Meg Niadok Wad Yor, and I can scarcely hope to see my country again myself. But, such as I am, I shall serve the Government as long as my horse will carry me, and if I live to see No. 2 Company of the 12th Soudanese behave as I hope and know they will when the great day comes at Omdurman, then I shall be ready to go, and Ali Gifoon will not perhaps have lived for nothing.
‘Ali Jifun, “Memoirs of a Soudanese Soldier” The Cornhill Magazine, October 1896‘Ali Jifun was coming home. Some forty years since he had last seen fōte chol, “the country of the Shilluks,” he watched as the fort at Fashoda came slowly into view, the Nile flowing past him on its way north to Khartoum, and to Egypt. Captured as a young man by Baggara slave dealers and enrolled into the Egyptian Army, ‘Ali Jifun had fought in countless battles over the years throughout Northeast Africa, and once even as far abroad as Mexico. And now here he was on the morning of 19 September 1898, this old Shilluk soldier returning to his place of birth, not yoked as a slave, but as an adjutant-major in a conquering army. Indeed, at saghkolaghasi he was the highest-ranking Sudanese soldier in the whole Egyptian Army at the time.
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- Information
- Slaves of FortuneSudanese Soldiers and the River War, 1896-1898, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011