Setting the scene of the crime: the colonial archive, history, and racialisation of the 1924 revolution in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
Résumé
This article investigates a part of the “story of the story” of the 1924 revolution, the first popular anticolonial uprising in Sudan to be framed by a nationalist ideology. Considering that the process that turns a past event into history is neither linear nor predictable, I draw on Trouillot's “catalogue of silences” to compare two sets of sources that correspond to two moments in the making of 1924 as history: first, the judicial records produced by the Sudan government during 1924, and second the Ewart Report, written in 1925, to “seal” the revolution. A comparison of these two sources reveals radical discrepancies in the narrative, as well as the silences imposed on and well-concealed fine-tunings of the various voices of the revolution. Of these two sets of sources, it is the Ewart Report that provides the most influential interpretation of the 1924 revolution.