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From the Cape to Cairo
Beginning in 1896, the British carried out military expeditions in Sudan in order to reassert control over the Upper Nile region. Opposing the British were the Mahdists, followers of the deceased Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi (d. 1885) who was a Sudanese political and religious leader of mixed Arab and African descent. Coinciding with the British reconquest of the Sudan was this cartoon drawn by Joseph Keppler, a frequent contributor to the American political satire and humor magazine, Puck. Keppler portrays the conflict between the British and Sudanese as a struggle of the representatives of “civilization” against the forces of “barbarism.” Although the imagery used to depict the “barbarians” is not specifically evocative of the Middle East, it is a reflection of the predominant Western attitude toward the enterprise of colonialism and imperialism at the dawn of the twentieth century. Keppler’s cartoon reinforces what we have observed in Sam Keen’s commentary from “Faces of the Enemy,” that the theme of “civilization versus barbarism” is a recurring negative stereotype deployed in the dehumanization of a perceived hostile Other.
Name: From the Cape to Cairo
Material: Color offset lithograph
Size: Unknown
Date: 1898
Place of Origin: New York City
Location: Unknown
Source and Registration#: Created by Joseph Keppler
John Woods
Professor of Iranian and Central Asian History and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago
Alexander Barna
Outreach Coordinator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago
