Colonial documents describing Sudanese nationalism between 1918 and 1923 treated it as an existing force that had to be confronted by the authorities: British discussions revolved on how – and not if – nationalist feelings existed, and above all on how they could be controlled. As early as 1918, a report observed laconically:

In 1919, a document tellingly entitled ‘Note on the Growth of National Aspirations in the Sudan’ also noted the presence of a pro-British nationalist faction:

The latter document also makes it clear that as far as the British were concerned, nationalism was an idea that was being nurtured by the elites. What went ostensibly unremarked was that these elites had adopted the language of nationalism as an integral part of their political arguments, whether they were pro- or anti-British. In an article published in Ḥaḍārat al-Sūdān in 1924, the editor Ḥusayn Sharīf wrote: ‘Nations are not herds of goats to be shared to graze, they are human groups that by principle should govern themselves.’

The point that must not be missed is that if even a heavily censored and state-monitored newspaper such as Ḥaḍārat al-Sūdān could include a piece – one of the many – in which its author stated that the Sudanese people must choose their own rule, it meant that this kind of statement fell within the limits of what had become politically acceptable for a colonial government. The deployment of this language by the Sudanese was the most important novelty of the time.

Already before the Great War, the Sudanese had been exposed to anticolonial nationalism through the Egyptian press smuggled into Sudan and by Egyptian militants working there.