Rising Black Internationalism

During the interwar years, Black nationalism and internationalism owed a great debt to a Sudanese intellectual and his more luminous counterpart, Marcus Garvey. Born in 1866 to an Egyptian family of Sudanese descent, Dusé Mohamed Ali was a member of the organizing committee for the First Universal Races Congress held in London in 1911. He became a renowned Pan-Africanist after the congress and began publishing a journal titled African Times and Orient Review (ATOR) the following year. While its run only lasted a few years, it is notable for publishing the literary debut of Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Begun in 1914, the UNIA boasted a membership of approximately two million by 1919 (when ATOR ceased publication). Ali worked as foreign affairs correspondent for Garvey’s Negro World, served for a time as the UNIA’s foreign secretary, and died in 1945.⁹ While Garvey has largely overshadowed Ali in history, the Sudanese journalist nevertheless played a central role in early twentieth-century Black internationalism and Garvey’s career.

Garvey believed that African Americans should create their own alternative to mainstream society. Encouraging his followers to join in a struggle for Africa’s redemption, Garvey did not stop at condemning racism and encouraging economic independence; rather, he sought the return of African Americans to their ancestral continent and the emigration of Blacks to and from the Caribbean. An international phenomenon, Garveyite groups stretched from Florida to Seattle, Senegal to South Africa. Importantly, women—including UNIA cofounder Amy Ashwood, UNIA national organizer Maymie De Mena, and Pan-Africanist feminist Amy Jacques Garvey—were active in the 1920s Garveyite movement. While Marcus Garvey himself had a masculinist vision of Black liberation and believed that Black men would lead the fight to improve the lot for those throughout the diaspora, historian Keshia Blain notes that women like Amy Jacques Garvey, Maymie De Mena, and Henrietta Vinton Davis challenged male supremacy and tried to change the organization’s patriarchal leadership structure. In seeking Black American repatriation to Africa, Garvey’s return plan failed after lengthy talks with Liberia. Garveyism—numbering four hundred million members—declined, no doubt accelerated by his 1925 imprisonment and following deportation. Despite its decline, Garveyism continued to inspire future generations.¹⁰

The following decade, African American consciousness of Africa was stimulated by epochal events that occurred in Ethiopia. In October 1935, an Italian army of 120,000 invaded Ethiopia. The army wrought havoc on that country’s countryside, bombed villages, and spread poison gas by air. The Italians occupied the capital city of Addis Ababa in May 1936, and the following month Haile Selassie fled into exile in Europe. Following an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani in February 1937, scores of Ethiopians were killed in revenge. Guerrilla resistance continued during the five-year occupation, and many women who had been raped by Italian soldiers joined Ethiopia’s resistance movement. By May 1941, Addis Ababa had been retaken, and Selassie reestablished his throne.¹¹

Ethiopia’s defense of its sovereignty galvanized African American internationalism and engagement with the ancestral continent. When African Americans opposed US neutrality in the Italo-Ethiopian War, it was not Black America’s first twentieth-century effort to influence an American foreign policy decision toward Africa or the Caribbean. The first occurred with the 1915 US occupation of Haiti. However, the historian Michael Krenn has noted that it was not until the 1930s and the Ethiopian invasion by Italy that a growing number of Black Americans started to liken their own civil rights struggle with the broader, international battle that people of color waged against colonialism and racial discrimination.¹²

Importantly, Black women played a significant role in drawing attention to Italy’s predations. On June 22, 1935, twenty-four-year-old Eloise Robinson—donning a shirt that read “Hands Off Ethiopia”—walked up to the Italian consulate in Chicago, chained herself to a street-post, and staged a dramatic protest. A little over three months later, on October 4 (the day after the invasion had commenced), a crowd of one hundred female students at Hunter College picketed in front of the Italian consulate on New York’s Upper East Side.¹³ Following the invasion, Amy Ashwood Garvey delivered a speech in support of Ethiopia in London’s Trafalgar Square. Garvey, who worked with the International African Service Bureau (a revolutionary Black organization that advocated for racial equality, anticolonialism, and self-determination), boldly declared, “We will not tolerate the invasion of Abyssinia… . You said you brought us from Africa to Christianize us, but the only Christianity you gave us was three hundred years of enslavement.”¹⁴ Such episodes not only highlight the diversity of forms that Black solidarity with Africa could take outside the pages of Black newspapers, they also point to the reality that any examination of Black engagements with twentieth-century Africa demands a serious accounting of Black women’s formative role in this history.¹⁵

The same stands true concerning Sudan with, among others, the first Black American woman to make a documented appearance in the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium: Eslanda Goode Robeson. Born in 1896 in Washington, DC, Eslanda Goode attended the University of Illinois but ultimately earned her degree in chemistry from Columbia University. She became the first African American to work at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital and in 1921 married renowned singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. Her first book—a biography of her husband—was published in 1930, and in 1934 she began graduate study in anthropology at the London School of Economics and University College, London. She aimed to learn more about African history and culture. “I wanted to go to Africa,” she wrote in her formative African Journey. “It began when I was quite small. Africa was the place we Negroes came from originally. Lots of Americans, when they could afford it, went back to see their ‘old country.’”¹⁶ In 1936 she traveled with eight-year-old son Pauli through South Africa, Basutoland, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, and Sudan. In a lecture she later delivered at First Methodist Church in Hartford, Connecticut, Robeson recalled that she and Pauli had come up with a game that they often played called “Matching People.” When they would meet a new set of Africans, they would try to tell each other which ones they could match. “Always in groups,” she recounted, “we would find several people who so closely resembled Negro friends whom we knew … that they could easily have passed for immediate relatives. So many of our new African friends looked so much like our old American Negro friends, that we felt very much at home among them.”¹⁷ In her August 19, 1936, journal entry, Robeson recounted their visit to Wadi Halfa, Sudan. “The Africans hereabouts are extraordinarily handsome,” she wrote. “They belong to the Shilluk Tribe and are about seven feet tall… . Their skin is bronze-black, well oiled and beautifully kept … Pauli just can’t get over their height. ‘They are taller than Daddy, but they are not as broad,’ he said. ‘Nobody can be as everything as Daddy.’”¹⁸

By 1937 an African American former YMCA missionary named Max Yergan had persuaded Paul Robeson, five other prominent Black Americans, an African, and five white liberals to join him in organizing an International Committee on Africa (ICA). The ICA was founded for several purposes, not limited to but including educating the public about Africa, petition, and protest. Paul and Eslanda Robeson were the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of Yergan’s idea for the committee, and, though Eslanda’s role was initially small, it grew when the committee transformed into the Council on African Affairs (CAA) in 1941. Operating until 1955, the Black-led CAA aimed to educate the public about Africa and promote its liberation.¹⁹

The 1930s–1950s were cataclysmic decades in the history of Black America’s relationship with Africa. While Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia launched extraordinary interest in that region of the Horn of Africa, African Americans would not ignore Sudan, Ethiopia’s western neighbor. Just as African Americans may have found solidarity with Ethiopia through a shared sense of suffering from violent white statecraft, the post–World War II period showed that some Black writers expressed kinship and solidarity with the Sudanese. No empty or romantic musings, these sentiments were infused with political meaning and consequence.

Egypt, Sudan, and African American Opinion

In 1938—three years after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia commenced—Sudanese nationalist elites organized the Graduates’ General Congress. Representing Sudan’s intelligentsia, the northern Sudanese educated class that formed the congress did so with the intention of presenting a united front to the Condominium government. The British, for their part, wanted the educated class as an ally. The congress, however, was soon divided between those who wanted union with Egypt and those who wanted an independent Sudan. In time, rival Sudanese nationalist groups were organized as political parties: the Ashigga Party emerged in 1943 and favored union with Egypt under the Egyptian crown; the Umma Party emerged in 1945 and called for complete Sudanese independence. Northern Sudanese activists applied the Atlantic Charter—the Anglo-American agreement affirming the right of nations to self-government and self-determination within their boundaries—to the Sudan. While the Condominium government rejected this attempt, the activists’ actions put self-government and self-determination on the postwar agenda.²⁰

Egypt’s cabinet explained that the country would not accept any settlement that did not support unity of the Nile Valley and the immediate withdrawal of British troops. Egypt’s government went so far as to ask the infant United Nations Security Council for “the total and immediate evacuation of British troops from Egypt including the Sudan and to terminate the … administration in the Sudan,” but the UN did not provide a ruling.²¹ Egyptian prime minister Nokrashy Pasha, speaking before the Chamber of Deputies in December 1946, posited, “[A] very natural link … binds together the two parts of the Nile Valley, ties of language, kinship and interest in olden and recent times, ties which cannot be assailed or severed and which everyone in Egypt maintains.”²² Egyptian sentiments notwithstanding, in June 1948 Sudanese governor-general Sir Robert Howe announced the Executive Council and Legislative Assembly ordinance. The partially elected Legislative Assembly was responsible for proposing laws. Discussions occurred in the Assembly concerning self-government, self-determination, and a federal constitution for the Sudan. In April 1952 the Assembly enacted the Self-Government Statute, which provided for an all-Sudanese council of ministers that would be responsible to an elected parliament. Just three months later, the Egyptian monarchy was overthrown, and the new government recognized Sudan’s right to self-determination and self-government. The British government approved the Self-Government Statute in October, and self-determination and self-government were achieved when the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement was signed on February 12, 1953. The agreement stated that the Condominium would be terminated within three years, after which point a referendum would be held deciding between independence or union with Egypt. On December 19, 1955, the House of Representatives approved a resolution declaring Sudan’s independence. Sudan unanimously declared its independence two weeks later, on January 1, 1956.²³

Much of the political intrigue in Egypt and Sudan occurred concomitantly with the rise of Black American internationalism and the boom of Black newspapers. These realities converged on the pages of these papers. Ranging from short blurbs to longer editorials, this coverage not only provides African American views of Egypt and Sudan but also broader understandings of race, colonialism, and northeast African history. While Black newspaper coverage on the Britain-Egypt-Sudan situation was not monolithic, the overarching sentiment was decidedly pro-Sudanese. The architecture of this position comprised three distinct yet interlocking elements: recognition of Sudanese Blackness, Egyptian Arabness, and Egyptian mistreatment and colonialism of the Sudanese. Taken together, solidarity with the Sudanese was articulated through the grammar of race, a double-edged sword that resulted in amity for the Black Sudanese and antagonism for Egyptians Arabs. Support for one nonwhite people (Arabs) was sacrificed at the altar of solidarity with another (Black Africans). This oppositional duality set a precedent for Black American discourse pitting northern Sudanese Arabs against southern Sudanese Blacks during the postcolonial era.

Acknowledging Sudanese Blackness

One of the foundational elements of African American newspaper coverage of Sudan was its focus on the literal blackness of the Sudanese. J. A. Rogers was one writer responsible for such descriptions. Born in September 1883, Joel Augustus Rogers hailed from Jamaica before relocating to Chicago in his early twenties. A writer, historian, journalist, and publisher, Rogers was an acquaintance of Marcus Garvey, wrote for the UNIA weekly Negro World, and lectured to local UNIA chapters, and researched Africa’s global history. In the 1930s Rogers conducted research in Egypt and Sudan, and he traveled at the behest of Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert L. Vann to cover the Italo-Ethiopian War.²⁴ In 1931 the African American Philadelphia Tribune published Rogers’s following observation: “I have seen Jews in Abyssinia, the Sudan, and North Africa so dark and with hair and features so Negro-like that in America they would be thrust a mile deep in the Jim Crow car, if such a thing were possible.”²⁵ Over fifteen years later, Rogers doubled down on his earlier observations regarding the phenotypical similitude. “In the Sudan,” he wrote in a 1947 Pittsburgh Courier piece, “say at Khartoum, Omdurman and Atbara, both the Arabs and non-Arabs would at once be called Negro in America. They were more Negroid than the people in any American Negro district.”²⁶

Percival Prattis joined Rogers in his comparisons of Sudanese to African Americans. Born in 1895 in Philadelphia, Prattis had studied at Hampton Institute and was stationed in France during World War I. Honorably discharged in 1919, he began editing the Michigan State News (Grand Rapids) but moved to Chicago in 1921 to become city editor of the African American Chicago Defender. In 1936 Prattis moved to Pittsburgh to take a position with the Pittsburgh Courier, which by the mid-1920s had become America’s leading Black paper. Named city editor, Prattis also worked as a reporter and was sent on assignment to the Middle East.²⁷ Prattis’s opinion about the similarities between Black Americans and Sudanese were unambiguously conveyed in his piece “Sudanese Are the People in Egypt Who Are Most Like American Negroes,” which appeared in the Courier on August 6, 1949. “They seem most like my own people in physical appearance and general attitude,” Prattis wrote. He clarified his opinion further: “I would exclude the mulatto portion of the American Negro population. The Sudanese I saw were brown or dark brown, rather uniformly. Few were what you would call black.” Continuing that the Sudanese had “features … like those of American Negroes, though perhaps a bit finer,” Prattis noted that their noses were “less bulbous,” their lips “generally thinner,” and their hair “short but of a rather fine grade.” Prattis then proceeded to list a handful of prominent African Americans whose features would have apparently proved his point. “If Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Jesse Owens or Larry Doby were seen walking along the street in Cairo, they would be regarded as Sudanese.”²⁸

Six years later, Prattis reiterated his opinion on Sudanese–African American resemblances by claiming, “There is perhaps no other group in Africa which more nearly resembles the American Negro than the Sudanese.”²⁹ Unlike Robeson and Rogers—but like Horace Cayton—Prattis expressed a genealogical connection linking Sudanese with African Americans. “The Sudanese,” he wrote, “of whom perhaps some American Negroes are kin, have contributed generously to the culture of mankind.” But how, exactly, were the two peoples related? Slavery provided Prattis’s answer. “From 1600 to 1870,” he claimed, “thousands of slaves were taken from the Sudanese ‘Slave Coast.’ Some of these … were brought, as slaves, to America. It is not only to Nigeria, Liberia, and that region that the American Negro must look to find his racial kinfolk. He must also look to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.”³⁰

Whether or not Black Americans and Sudanese were linked by a shared history of slavery, the two peoples were connected by present-day marginalization. He pointed his readers to the plight of the Sudanese in Egypt on multiple occasions. “The Sudanese are very numerous in urban Egyptian communities. But … they are found principally in menial, domestic and unskilled occupations. They seem to be stratified on a lower level of Egyptian life.” Yet this reality was contrasted with another: “Everybody praises these Sudanese for their industry, their native intelligence, their politeness, their kindness and their honesty.”³¹ Prattis followed these sentiments with another statement in October 1951: “Almost everybody admits that the Sudanese are the finest human beings you meet in Egypt. The Egyptian ruling class classifies them as Egyptians, but it doesn’t treat them as such. Sudanese are second-class citizens in Egypt. They do all the dirty work.”³² The following month, in an editorial aptly titled “American Negroes Should Be Concerned about What Is Happening in Egypt,” Prattis likened the experience of Sudanese in Egypt with that of Blacks in the United States: “The Sudanese in Egypt are regarded as a servant class and are largely restricted to menial types of service. In the large hotels in Cairo, the Sudanese are employed almost exactly as are Negroes in Southern hotels in the United States. The clerks and cashiers are whites, Egyptians and other nationalities. The bell boys and bell captains and porters are Sudanese.”³³

Against the backdrop of Sudanese discrimination at the hands of Egyptians, African American writers characterized the Sudanese as Black, while Egyptians, conversely, were Arab. But what in fact did “Arab” mean? How was it understood in Egypt and Sudan? Finally, how did African Americans looking to the shores of the Nile interpret those two nationalities through the lens of Arabness?

Shifting Meanings of “Egyptian” and “Sudanese”

Egyptian identity in the early twentieth century dovetailed with Arabness, whiteness, and emerging ideas of the Third World. To begin, Egypt is the most populous Arab country, with nearly one in four of all the world’s Arabs being Egyptian. The country’s Arab heritage dates back to the seventh century and the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639–642 CE. However, Arab national consciousness among the general Egyptian populace is not documented in the nineteenth century, and when the Arab nationalist movement arose in opposition to Turkish hegemony (ending the 1916 Great Arab Revolt), the Greater Syrian Arabs took the lead in the fight for Arab unity for the following twenty years. Nevertheless, during the 1920s, Egyptian solidarity with neighboring Arab peoples began to rise, and Cairo became a focus of intellectual life and popular culture in the Arab region. The country’s growing interdependence with eastern Arab countries as a result of the Middle East Supply Centre during World War II, the 1945 formation of the Arab League (headquartered in Cairo), and the ever-boiling Palestinian situation amplified Egypt’s identity as an Arab state. Egypt’s leadership position in the Arab League became increasingly significant when Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power.³⁴

A 1952 coup brought the Egyptian Nasser and his army officers to power, ending over twenty centuries of foreign dynastic rule. The country became the Arab Republic of Egypt. In standing up to the former colonial powers and pursuing the dream of pan-Arab unity, Nasser became the Arab world’s de facto leader. Egypt’s foreign policy from 1955 to 1967 was partially grounded in Third-Worldism. Nasser attended the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, which established the roots of the Non-Aligned Movement through a Yugoslavian, Indian, and Egyptian partnership; he opposed the British-designated Baghdad Pact military alliance and tried to replace it with an indigenous Cairo-led security order; and he announced a Soviet-inspired arms deal with Czechoslovakia that ushered in Egypt’s two-decades-long link with the Soviet bloc. Egyptian nationalism during the 1950s and 1960s was replaced by a state policy of Pan-Arabism, a political movement that called for Arab unity, combated the old colonial powers of Britain and France, and—from the 1970s on—was anti-imperialist (particularly against US intervention in the region).³⁵

South of Egypt, “Arab” in the Sudanese context can only reasonably be described as a hybrid concept. Degrees of Africanization spread the farther south one goes, and historically southern slaves brought northward experienced Arabization, or ta’rib. Ta’rib commenced with the entry of Arab Muslim nomads in the early Islamic period and involved the gradual percolation of Arab identity and Arabic language among peoples in northern Sudan. Arabization quickened after the fall of Nubia’s Christian kingdoms in the fourteenth century and reached consolidation with Islamic culture after north-central Sudan’s Funj sultanate rose in the sixteenth century. Arabization did not, however, result in a cultural monolith. Today peoples like the Daju, Fur, and Nubians are deeply Arab and Muslim but speak their own non–Afro-Asiatic languages rather than Arabic, and there are Arabic speakers who are not adherents of Islam and instead identify as Christian or Jewish. Still, until decolonization in the mid-1950s, learning Arabic as a first language often led to the acquisition of Arab identity as families forged pedigrees to claim lineage from noble, Arabian-origin male descendants.³⁶

British policies favored a small elite from these northern Sudanese “Arab” communities after the Anglo-Egyptian conquest, and members of this cadre eventually crafted an idea of a self-consciously Sudanese Arabic national identity. In the process—and somewhat counterintuitively, from a racial standpoint—the term “Sudanese” (sudani), which derived from an Arabic word for blackness, was adapted.³⁷ In the 1930s a new Arab nationalist politics emerged, creating a genealogy stretching far into Islamic Arab history. According to the historian Amir Idris, “It suggested a primordial and essential identity shared by all those who lived in the north regardless of their particular historical experiences.” Importantly, he adds, race and descent became important in determining Sudanese nationalism’s course. “Being an Arab,” Idris contends, “became a criterion for citizenship and leadership in Sudanese nationalism.”³⁸ By the 1950s, some Sudanese nationalists sought to quickly spread the Arabic language throughout a linguistically diverse land. Southern Sudan began to witness the implementation of the Arabist vision. Although vernaculars (local ethnic languages) were used in all village and primary schools, while English was employed at the intermediate and higher levels, Arabic was introduced as a main subject in the Ater Intermediate school, the Rumbek Secondary government school, and Juba Training Centre in 1949.³⁹ It could be said that these measures were the fruit of an Arab ideology articulated by the Graduates’ Congress to the Condominium Government back in 1939. “Education should be orientated towards the Arab and Islamic, but not African, culture, because the Sudan had much in common with the Arabic countries of Islamic Orient … [they argued that education in the South could not be improved by a subsidized missionary system] but [only] through the opening of government schools, similar to those in the North, and where the Arabic language would provide the lingua franca.”⁴⁰

This emphasis on Arabism did not go unopposed. Recognizing the growing power and influence of the northern elite, Adam Adam—a medical practitioner in Khartoum who came from a Darfurian slave family—founded Kutla as-Suda (the Black Bloc) in 1938. He argued that all Blacks, being “the only true Sudanese,” should unite at a time when Arabized townspeople used the term “Sudani” as a slightly derogatory term to describe un-Arabized Black men. Attracting people from the Nuba and Fur people—there were then not many people from southern Sudan in Khartoum—Adam hoped that the movement could develop into a political party. Resolutions were passed demanding that their rights be recognized and that power never be handed to Arabs. However, the Ashiqqa and the Umma Parties, which each objected to the Black Bloc, accused it of racism. The British were compelled to concede to Ashiqqa and Umma pressure and refused the bloc the right to be licensed as a political party.⁴¹ In a striking display of how racial identities were marshaled in the Sudanese political sphere, this attempt at Black inclusion was stifled in the face of accusations of bigotry, and none other than the British overlords were there to enshrine the exclusion.

While the history of Arab identity in Egypt and the Sudan stretched back for a thousand years, American conceptualizations of Arabness in the early twentieth century were far newer and less politically significant than in those two countries. However, such understandings were not devoid of meaning. In nineteenth-century American discourse, “Arab” was often used figuratively and could—and did—convey a transitional point between Black and white, primitive and civilized, foreign and native. As one illuminating example, literate Black enslaved persons on the plantation were at one time described as Arab.⁴² Anti-Asian legislation began while the first Syrian immigrants arrived in significant numbers to the United States, and Syrian immigrants wanted to communicate that they were not from Asia in order to avoid anti-Asia legislation and immigration restrictions. Jim Crow persuaded early Syrian newcomers that they had to contest their Asiatic racial designations and legally prove their “whiteness.”⁴³ Arab immigrants in the early twentieth century pursued whiteness and petitioned the government to grant them this designation. The government obliged; important judicial decisions in 1915 and 1944 solidified Arabs’ legal definition under the law as white.⁴⁴ Against the backdrop of Jim Crow and legal US classifications of Arabs as white, African American newspapers presented the Egyptian-Sudanese relationship as one not only between colonizer and colonized but also—in a dynamic all Black readers could understand—between light-skinned rulers and Black ruled. The racialized nature of such coverage resulted in a decidedly pro-Sudanese position in Black newspapers and consequently expressions of anti-Arab prejudice.

In the early twentieth century, Egypt figured into African American discussions of race in curious ways. Importantly, it was the ancient Nile Valley civilization that was invoked. In 1922 British archaeologist Howard Carter famously discovered the tomb of the ancient Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen.⁴⁵ In a forum held around 1922 at Denver’s Grace Community Church, W. E. B. Du Bois discussed how the recent excavations represented a civilization that was older than the white race. “As a matter of fact,” he declared, “it can be proven by history that King Tut-Ankh-Amen himself was part negro. History also records that Egyptian civilization came from the southern part of Africa, the land of the negro, and not from the north by way of Asia.”⁴⁶ Years later, in The World and Africa, the famed sociologist pushed against British historian Arnold Toynbee’s characterization of Egyptian civilization as “white” and noted that the science of Egyptology had blossomed concomitantly with the apex of King Cotton and American Black enslavement. “We may then without further ado ignore this verdict of history, widespread as it is, and treat Egyptian history as an integral part of African history.”⁴⁷ J. A. Rogers joined Du Bois in shining a light on ancient Egypt’s Black heritage, writing that Cheops, “a Negro,” built the Great Pyramid of Giza and that several Ethiopian “or unmixed Negro” individuals ruled ancient Egypt.⁴⁸

Some went beyond pointing to ancient Egypt’s Black heritage and went so far as to claim that African Americans were descended from ancient Egypt. Black writers in the nineteenth century like Samuel Ringgold Ward and William Wells Brown claimed African American links to the architects of ancient Egypt, and by the mid-nineteenth century northern educated Black Americans and abolitionists generally believed that Black Americans were descendants of ancient Egyptians. In his 1854 commencement address at Western Reserve College, Frederick Douglass cited Herodotus in his argument for the link between ancient Egyptians and African Americans. And later, during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, many prominent Black intellectuals took interest in contemporary Africa.⁴⁹ If African Americans may have had a history of linking themselves with ancient Egyptians, those like Percival Prattis were not invested in making the same claim of connection with the modern Egyptian populace. If ancient Egypt represented a glorious heritage to which they could point to debunk racist stereotypes, modern Egypt appeared to represent something altogether dissimilar.

Prattis acknowledged that because Egyptians were alleged to be “African people of color,” Black Americans would be inclined to them (as people trying to wrest themselves from British military oversight). He opined that Egyptians should be free to run their own country regardless of their racial identity. But he asserted, “If American Negroes are to shed any tears over the plight of the Egyptians, they should not do so on the basis of any so-called blood relationship which they believe they have with the modern rulers of Egypt. That simply does not exist.” Prattis explained that the country’s ruling class had been more or less white or European “since the Greeks landed in the fourth century before Christ.” Farouk, Egypt’s king at the time of Prattis’s writing (1951), was in Prattis’s estimation “a Turk, not an Egyptian Arab or Negro.” “The dominant political and social classes are white, mulatto, or bronze-colored. These people do not associate themselves culturally with the browns and the blacks.”⁵⁰ His position on the racial makeup of Egypt’s leadership followed comments made by George Padmore in the Chicago Defender four years earlier. Padmore said that Sudanese resented the “[Egyptian landlords and capitalists] who form[ed] the Pasha class.” These were “not real Egyptians but [rather] descendants of the former Turkish rulers,” and Sudanese resented their efforts “to turn the Sudan into an Egyptian colony.”⁵¹ George F. McCray, writing in the Atlanta Daily World, noted that the Sudanese were quick to challenge Egyptian nationalist extremists’ claim that they should control Sudan based on common racial (as well as religious and cultural) ties. “They [the Sudanese] point out that though the Northern third of the country and as far south as Khartoun [sic] the population in varying degrees is … racially mixed with Arab, Negro and Egyptian.” McCray continued, “[The southern third of Sudan is] peopled by almost 3,000,000 pure African Negroes. Nuers, Shilluks, Dinkas, who are in no way related to the Egyptians. Between the blacks of the south and the mixed Arab-Negro groups of the north are several million very dark, wooly headed peoples who are racially Negro.”⁵²

Prattis acknowledged Egyptians’ color diversity. “What I would call the native Egyptian is of all colors,” he wrote, “from black to white, with features that are more Caucasian or Semitic than Negroid and with, generally, wavy black hair.” Just as he likened Sudanese to the likes of Paul Robeson and Larry Doby, Prattis similarly compared Egyptians to certain notable African Americans. “Eyre Saitch, the tennis player, was an Egyptian type. But so are Charles Drew, of blood plasma fame, and Lena Horne and Billy Eckstine and Effa Manley and John P. Davis and Adam Powell.”⁵³ However, when Black newspapers discussed Sudan’s political future (and, more specifically, whether it would be independent or under Egyptian authority), writers highlighted the blackness of the Sudanese and Egypt’s supposed status outside the bounds of blackness. “There is a color line,” wrote Courier correspondent Hugh Weston with reference to Egypt. “The color line is very thin—not sharp as in America—but just the same, there is a color line.”⁵⁴

Arab Difference, Arab Dominance

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, African American periodicals articulated the prospect of Egyptian rule over Sudan through the grammar of dominance. “Egyptian Arabs want the Sudan reunited with Egypt,” Weston wrote in 1946. “This leads many people to feel that Egyptian Arabs might completely dominate the Sudanese, and exploit them with far less tenderness than their present English masters, while perhaps allowing a certain freedom to the Arab gangs that deal in the slave trade.”⁵⁵ George Schuyler, writing the following year in the Pittsburgh Courier, posited that the Egyptians had “imperialist ambitions,” while the British wanted to remain in Sudan “as co-partners in the fleecing of the … black natives.”⁵⁶ In 1947 the Chicago Defender noted, “The tan colored Egyptians, who … regard themselves as Caucasian feel that they have a vested right in the country of the Sudanese whose inhabitants are African blacks.”⁵⁷

In June 1947 W. E. B. Du Bois referred to Abdul Rahman Mohammed Ahmed el Mahdi’s call for Sudanese independence and made repeated references to his famous father, the Mahdi:

To-day … there appears in England the son of the black Mahdi of the nineteenth century. What does he ask? He demands that in the treaty by which Great Britain recognizes the independence of Egypt, that this recognition shall not include the Sudan as belonging to Egypt … the son of the Mahdi declared that … the Land of the blacks had never been conquered by the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Kings of Assyria … or even the great Saladin. Only after the final overthrow of the Mahdi and the Khalifa, did the Sudanese submit to unwilling rule under the English and Egyptians, who still call the Sudanese, slaves.⁵⁸

Born three weeks after his famous father’s death, Abdul Rahman Mohammed Ahmed el Mahdi had lived in poverty, was subjected to police supervision, and—before the First World War—struggled to support his large family. However, with Britain’s war against the Ottomans, the government feared the rise of Sudanese fanaticism and conciliated with the Mahdists. Mahdi was encouraged to contact the Ansar (his father’s followers) and use personal influence to win support for the government. While the government adopted indirect rule in part to curb his growing appeal, it still hoped to use him to counter any Sudanese nationalist sentiment that allied with Egypt (Mahdism’s old foe). By the 1920s Mahdi was an important Sudanese leader, and his Omdurman house became a meeting place for politically minded government officials.⁵⁹ In early 1947 the Chicago Defender noted that “Egyptian-Arab domination of black-skinned Sudanese” loomed in the background of the recent breakdown of treaty negotiations between the British and Egyptians, as well as Mahdi’s preference for “British rule over Egyptian-Arab domination.” The Defender included his recollection that “Egyptians still call his people Abed (slaves) in memory of the times when Sudanese … were sold in slave marts of Alexandria and Cairo.”⁶⁰

In late 1947 the Defender provided readers with a glimpse of what the Sudanese leader thought about Black Americans in an interview with George Padmore. In his exchange with Padmore, Mahdi—whom Padmore described as “distinctly Negroid in appearance”—expressed solidarity with the African American community. “We are proud of the colored people in America,” shared the Sudanese leader. “They are an inspiration to Africans at home. Despite the great disadvantages they suffer politically and racially, no other community of peoples of African descent can present the same amount of positive and constructive achievement as our brothers in America.⁶¹ Perhaps Mahdi, cognizant of the fact that his words would be transmitted to an African American readership, seized the opportunity to rally support by complimenting that community. Conversely, he may have been expressing authentic sentiments about his “brothers in America” and had no intention to gain any political advantage. Whatever his intentions, his exchange with Padmore in Defender was a rare but important moment that highlighted the fact that as African Americans were looking to the Nile, at least one Sudanese—and Abdul Rahman el Mahdi, no less—was conscious of African Americans. Black American engagements with Sudan were not one-sided but, rather, mutual. The following decades would continue to show this.

Percival Prattis offered the most remarkable commentaries on the possibility of Egypt controlling Sudan. The first example appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier on October 27, 1951. In his article “Egyptian Grab for Sudan Is Plain Imperialism of the White Ruling Class,” Prattis argued that Egypt’s fight for freedom was not the struggle of a Black people but rather of “a white ruling class” that wanted to be free of British interference. “This white ruling class,” he contended, “would not mind being a partner with the British in the exploitation of Egypt’s browns and blacks, and other browns and blacks, if it could be an equal partner.” Prattis, again employing the language of race for his readers, made the provocative decision to compare Egypt’s intentions for Sudan with apartheid South Africa’s vision for South West Africa (Namibia): “The Egyptian grab for the Sudan is plain imperialism. The white ruling class of Egypt wishes to extend its dominion in Africa at the expense of the Negroid Sudanese. That effort is similar to South Africa’s determination to add Southwest Africa to its territory… . There is not too much difference, so far as black Africans are concerned, between the ruling class Egyptian mentality and that of the rulers of South Africa.”⁶²

South African occupation of Namibia began in 1915, when the South African army conquered the German colonists there during the First World War. Namibia became a League of Nations trust territory in 1919. Though Britain received the official mandate to rule, the British transferred the responsibility to its dominion of South Africa. Following World War II the League’s trust was given to its successor, the United Nations, but the South African government refused to honor the terms of the trust and prepare Namibia for independence. The government instead treated Namibia as an additional South African province and—with the country settled heavily by white people—applied apartheid’s legislation to indigenous Namibians.⁶³

Prattis’s article accomplished several things. First, it underscored his argument to his readers that Egypt had imperialistic desires for Sudan. Second, it cast light on the racial division separating Egypt from Sudan. By stating that there wasn’t much difference between Egypt’s ruling class and that of South Africa (“as far as black Africans are concerned”), he reinforced the notion that Egypt and Sudan were racially distinct. Finally, though the apartheid regime at the time of his writing was still in its infancy (the National Party was being elected to power in 1948), the very mention of South Africa would have already conjured an understanding of racial discrimination in the minds of some Courier readers. Dating back to the nineteenth century, Black activists in the United States and South Africa engaged in political dialogue that informed their fights against such discrimination. Black Americans were mesmerized by African efforts to confront apartheid after the National Party’s election, inspiring several activists to action.⁶⁴ Prattis’s decision to reference South Africa would have made the situation in Northeast Africa more palatable to his audience, sullied Egypt’s reputation, and made the Sudanese more sympathetic figures.

In November 1951—a month after making his Egypt–South Africa comparison—Prattis doubled down on his portrayal of the racially defined oppression Sudanese could face with Egyptian rule. In his piece titled “American Negroes Should Be Concerned about What Is Happening in Egypt,” he declared, “[If Sudan were added to Egypt] the six million Sudanese would become second-grade people in the new Egyptian empire and the Sudan would be exploited for the benefit of the upper-strata of white and brown Egyptians… . The Egyptians might be worse than the British.” In an important discursive move, Prattis not only offered his opinion on what America’s position towards potential Egyptian rule over Sudan should be but also encouraged Black America to take action. “The United States should oppose this Egyptian grab of the Sudan. Negroes should tell their Senators and the State Department (Mr. Acheson) that they don’t want their country in on such a deal.”⁶⁵ Prattis’s admonition to his readers to contact their senators can be viewed in light of the fact that four years earlier he had become the first African American journalist to be granted membership in the Senate and House press galleries.⁶⁶

If Egyptians were framed as Arab overlords, African American writers conversely painted the Sudanese in a glowing light. Hugh Weston noted, “Sudanese are universally regarded as being persons with many fine qualities, among them loyalty courage and honor. Although there was considerable question about the Arab role in the war, no one has questioned the role of the Sudanese… . The Sudanese inflicted grave losses on Italy’s haughty forces that expected to make the Sudan an easy colonial conquest.⁶⁷ Prattis offered that Sudanese appeared to be “such a good, sturdy and competent people that it seems a pity they must be grabbed at by outsiders.”⁶⁸ Virtues aside, Black newspapers pointed attention to what the Sudanese wanted: freedom from both the British and Egyptians. George Schuyler noted that the Sudanese “craved” freedom from both parties; Prattis similarly wrote that the Sudanese wanted independence from both and that they would simply be exchanging “one exploiter for another” if the Egyptians replaced the British; and the Courier, reporting that “the natives of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan [were] demanding their freedom from England and Egypt,” stated, “Eventually this black nation must be free, so why not now?”⁶⁹

The period bookended by the end of World War I (1918) and Sudanese independence (1956) was dynamic on several fronts. Sudan—the Anglo-Egyptian possession where the bizarre and ill-fated Hunt-Washington cotton project occurred—started the period as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium and ended it in independence. Egypt, one of its colonial overlords, itself became independent from Britain but desired to maintain hegemony over its Sudanic neighbor. While Ethiopia began and ended this period as a sovereign state, it endured a harrowing Italian occupation in between. Half the world away from the United States, the Italian invasion ignited African American internationalism and anticolonialism and—importantly—invited that community to fix its eyes on the ancestral continent. Each of these developments converged to result in a partisan, multilayered Black American discourse concerning Sudan during those cataclysmic years. While Booker T. Washington may have been silent on the Sudanese in the early twentieth century, Black writers addressing millions of Black readers of Black newspapers were not.

African American writers during this period voiced unabashed respect for Sudan and solidarity with Sudanese. While such sentiments ranged from recognitions of similar phenotypes to claims that African Americans were linked to Sudan through slavery, perhaps nowhere was Black American affinity more manifest than in the way that African American newspapers described Sudanese in relation to Egypt—that is, as a Black people subject to potential subjection from Arabs. This articulated dichotomy delineating Arabs rulers from Black ruled made the Sudanese more relatable to Black Americans subjected to systematic racism but also portended words African Americans would use about Sudan during its postcolonial era, when Black southern Sudanese would wage war against northern Sudanese Arab regimes.

Black American newspaper engagement with Sudan was racialized before its independence and the racially fraught postcolonial civil wars that injected “Arab” and “Black” with even stronger meaning. The Black press was foundational in fostering African Americans’ relationship to Sudan. Just as Black papers had covered the Hunt-Washington scheme in the early twentieth century, they continued to shine a spotlight on Sudan for Black readers through both World Wars right up to and through independence. Black anticolonialism was not limited to criticism of white imperialists. The case of Egypt shows that it could target an African country as well. Prattis, for all his pejorative language concerning the Egyptians, advocated for Egyptian independence and claimed that it should play an important role in the Near East. “But,” he continued, “it can’t play its proper role if it only seeks a change for freedom in order to get a strangle hold on somebody else.”⁷⁰

Finally, Black newspaper attention to the Sudanese as fellow Black people is critical when interrogating the terms of African American racial solidarity with African peoples. While this is certainly evident with Egypt during the period under study in this chapter, the same matter applies to the ways African Americans made meaning of Ghana’s 1957 independence moment. While that nation is commonly misunderstood as the country that ushered in postwar African independence, it was in fact Sudan (which did so in 1956). However, it was Ghana that enthralled African Americans. This fascination, writes the historian James Campbell, was rooted in Ghana’s location on the same coast where millions were transported into transatlantic slavery and augmented by the appeal of Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who had spent time in the United States.⁷¹ The New York Amsterdam News noted a “common bond between American Negroes and Ghana” and added, “There is more than meets the eye behind the birth of the new nation of Ghana… . To the millions of colored people around the world Ghana represents the first robin of spring after a long cold and dark winter.” This “first robin” reference, the historian James H. Meriwether rightly suggests, signaled that Ghanaian nationhood held more significance than independence in Asia or North Africa. Ghana’s independence was—apparently—the first Black African nation to throw off the colonial chains.⁷²

But what about Sudan, Ghana’s counterpart on the other side of the continent? Patrick Manning asserts that Sudanese independence garnered little attention from the African diaspora because it was perhaps deemed an exceptional case, while Meriwether posits that few African Americans at the time linked Sudanese independence to “Black Africa.”⁷³ However, the African American newspaper coverage presented here clearly shows that Black Americans understood Sudan to be “Black” by the time it became independent in 1956, a year before Ghana. Something—whether West Africa’s connection with US slavery, Nkrumah, or other elements—distinguished Ghana from Sudan in the Black American imaginary. An attempt to explain this discrepancy may shed light on the ways that African Americans across space and time have decided what makes someone or something Black. Simply put, the implications of seeing Ghana as the first sub-Saharan African state to become independent after World War II are problematic for several reasons. It would presume that blackness, globally speaking, is preeminently one with intimate connections to the Atlantic world, transatlantic slavery, and a dynamic that most readily features white Europeans and Americans as the harbingers of oppression. According to such logic, Sudan—with its geographic distance from the Atlantic, long-running history of non-European slaveholding, and legacy of Arabs exploiting Blacks—would rest outside such bounds of blackness. Excluded, its monumental achievement would be marginalized by the very African world that could have been galvanized months before Ghana’s liberation moment. It is a counterintuitive, self-limiting calculus.

As Sudan went from colony to independent country, the United States established diplomatic relations with the new nation.⁷⁴ In perhaps their most significant appearance in Sudan since the Tuskegee project, African Americans entered the country and labored in the service of the US government. The next chapter begins with African American reaction to Sudanese independence, explores the observations and contributions made by Black Americans in Sudan during the late 1950s and 1960s, and examines changing representations of Sudan in Black newspapers as the young nation devolved into civil war.