Introduction: Standing Tall

1The musée de l’Armée, the national army museum of France, preserves a remarkable photograph in its archives: the portrait of an officer in the Egyptian Army, a second lieutenant named ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa, who stopped in Paris in 1867 while traveling from Mexico to Egypt. Taken in a studio that once faced the Hôtel national des Invalides, the former military hospital which the museum now occupies and where Napoleon Bonaparte rests in his tomb, this image represents one of the earliest portrait photographs – possibly the earliest portrait photograph – of a person of Sudanese origin. This photograph also commemorates a moment of triumph, if not for France, then for this Sudanese Egyptian soldier, who stands tall and proud in his uniform fifteen years before Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882, and thirty-two years before Britain and Egypt jointly conquered the Sudan in 1898 and established the Anglo-Egyptian colonial regime.

2When ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa posed for his portrait, he had just completed four years of military service in Mexico with a battalion of “blacks” (nègres) in the Egyptian Army who traced their origins in the Sudan. He and his peers had bolstered the armies of Napoleon III, who invaded Mexico in 1862 and installed a monarchy under Maximilian (brother of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, Franz Josef) and his wife, Charlotte (daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium). The Sudanese soldiers had faced a grinding, low-grade war that pitted them against Mexican fighters, the “liberals” or “republicans” who were determined to re-establish a republic half a century after their country had wrested independence from Spain. The Sudanese soldiers had also survived sickness, especially yellow fever, which notoriously inflicted high death tolls in the coastal regions where they served.

3At this moment in 1867, France had just withdrawn its forces and abandoned its Mexican plans. The Sudanese soldiers returned to Egypt as part of this evacuation. The collapse of the French intervention followed sustained Mexican resistance and belated but strenuous opposition from the United States, whose federal government was regrouping after the U.S. Civil War (1861-65). In withdrawing, Napoleon III left Maximilian – weak and delirious from chronic dysentery – to face advancing Mexican forces alone.

4This ignominious departure notwithstanding, ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa and his Sudanese comrades had cause for celebration when they reached France, early in May 1867, en route to Egypt. After landing in Toulon on the Mediterranean coast, they went to Paris for a week’s leave, where they received promotions at a ceremony honoring the Mexico returnees. The photograph in the musée de l’Armée testifies that ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa had special cause for celebrating. Pinned to the chest of his crisp white uniform sits the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest signal of merit, which Napoleon III bestowed on him and several of his peers at a ceremony held on May 9^th at the Tuileries Palace (Hill and Hogg 1995: 116-17).

5This article examines the photograph of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa for the multiple insights that it imparts. It approaches the subject through the lenses of both mobility (Sheller and Urry 2006) and global microhistory (Andrade 2010; Subrahmanyam 2011; Ghobrial 2019), in an effort to understand how one soldier moved – and how circumstances nudged and propelled him – locally and on world stages, with consequences for the making of history in many places and on various scales. This investigation involves several countries – Sudan, Egypt, France, and Mexico above all, as well as the United Kingdom, the United States, and others – while showing how their histories were not just “connected” (Subrahmanyam 1997) but tightly interwoven. It offers evidence for the history of photography as a technological, cultural, and political medium that was developing rapidly in the nineteenth century along with the expansion of empires. As an exercise in biography, the article suggests how a soldier like ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa could be what I call a “subaltern elite”: at once powerful and power-lacking, subordinate and privileged. Understanding ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa as a subaltern elite can help us to grapple with what might otherwise seem like a paradox: how a person like him, who had his portrait taken in a Parisian studio that was using cutting-edge photographic technology, while sporting a ribbon bestowed by an emperor, could vanish without a trace in the historical record after returning to the Nile Valley along with his cohort. The effort to extract and assemble the fragmentary evidence associated with his photograph ultimately makes this article a study in method – in this case for historical reconstruction in light of the opportunities and limitations of sources.

6The first part of this article explains what brought the Egyptian Army battalion to Mexico. The second briefly discusses the book which inspired this article: Richard Hill and Peter Hogg’s A Black Corps d’Élite (1995), which included this photograph. This section also summarizes the roles performed by the Sudanese battalion in Mexico. The third part focuses on the photograph as a material object and considers what we can glean from visual evidence to confirm the identification of this soldier as ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa. The fourth surveys what else we know about his life and career. The fifth considers Parisian studio photography in 1867, how ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s portrait fit within the shifting landscape of this medium, and what the musée de l’Armée’s copy can tell us. The sixth part concludes by reflecting on the significance of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s image as the first known portrait photograph of a person of Sudanese origin.

7In referring to “the Sudan”, this article covers what are now the two countries of Sudan and South Sudan. This usage is intentional, because neither country existed as a discrete entity in the nineteenth century, and because ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa, like the others in his battalion, had intimate connections to places that straddle today’s national borders.

The French intervention in Mexico and the call for the “Black Egyptian Battalion”

8Napoleon III, Emperor of France, invaded Mexico in 1862. Far from reflecting broad French public opinion or interest, the invasion was his vanity project – or as he called it, the grande pensée du règne (“the great idea of the reign”). Napoleon III acted when the United States, a growing power in the Americas, was distracted by civil war, and when Mexico was fragile, having just overcome a three-year civil war of its own. Mexican republicans, many of Native American or mixed Spanish and Native American background (mestizos), had defeated monarchist elites, who were associated with the creole Spanish-heritage population and with ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church. Led by the lawyer-turned-military strategist Benito Juárez (1806-1872), the newly re-established Republic defaulted on debts to British, French, and Spanish concerns in 1861. While Britain and Spain opted for a negotiated financial settlement, France used debts as a pretext for war (Barker 1979).

9Several motives inspired Napoleon III to invade. He dreamed of reviving a French empire in the Americas. He wanted to attain imperial glory akin to what he thought his uncle, Napoleon I, had achieved. He sensed prestige in Mexico’s civilizational history, including associations with the Aztecs and with earlier empires that had left such tangible legacies as the pyramid complex of Teotihuacán, near Mexico City. Napoleon III acted from religious sectarian motives, too. With support from the Vatican, he wanted to boost the Catholic presence in the Americas to counterweight Anglophone Protestantism. Napoleon III sensed potential for wealth in mineral resources (he hoped that Mexico had gold) and sensed potential for maritime trade. He was excited about the prospect of digging a canal in Central America like the one that Ferdinand de Lesseps was cutting in Egypt through the isthmus of Suez, but imagined Nicaragua, not Panama, for its placement (Barker 1979; Lecaillon 1994). Finally, Napoleon III and his agents turned to Mexico as a laboratory for modernist thought: to show that humankind could dominate the environment in ways that ranged from conquering diseases to drawing maps for the purpose of claiming terrain (Puyo 2017).

10Napoleon III devised a plan to install a European monarchy that would serve as a proxy for his interests in Mexico. He invited Maximilian and Charlotte to assume this new throne and claimed that Mexicans were eager to welcome them as emperor and empress. He also promised Maximilian financial and military backing. But Napoleon III miscalculated the outcome of the U.S. Civil War and what that would mean for the rest of North America (Sainlaude 2019). He also underestimated the strength of the Mexican resistance and the cost of his enterprise when political pressures closer to home, in relations with Prussia, were rising.

11The cost of the venture was high for reasons of public health, too. From the moment French soldiers landed on the eastern shore of Mexico, it became clear that disease – especially yellow fever – might kill more men than war, and that conquering the environment was not as easy as some had expected. Commonly known in Spanish as el vómito negro because of the blood that blackened the vomit of its victims, yellow fever ran rampant in the port of Veracruz and the low coastal region from which the French army was coordinating invasion.

12Yellow fever brought ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa and his battalion to Mexico. So many French Army soldiers died from its ravages that, late in 1862, French authorities asked Sa‘id Pasha of Egypt for reinforcements. Specifically, they asked for 1 200 to 1 500 “blacks”, by which they meant dark-skinned soldiers whom they believed would have an innate resistance to tropical diseases. In a period when Muhammad ‘Ali’s dynasty was eager to maintain strong relations with France (which, inter alia, had supported its efforts to wrest Syria from Ottoman control in the 1830s), Sa‘id Pasha acceded, but agreed to supply only 500 (Hill and Hogg 1995: 17). He authorized rounding up men who had been seized and drafted as soldiers during raids against non-Muslim communities in regions beyond the Nile junction at Khartoum. The Egyptian Army had initiated these raids in the 1820s, when it overthrew the remnants of the Funj Sultanate and justified them as a form of tax collection. These raids entailed seizing people along with livestock, crops, and other items of value, the use or sale of which sustained the Egyptian military order and the new Turco-Egyptian colonial regime in the Sudan (1821-c. 1885). Men, women, and children who were captured in this way typically found themselves attached to Muslim households or to the military, where they became Muslims according to Islamic laws and conventions of slavery.

13These practices explain how and why the Egyptian Army in the 1860s included so many men of Sudanese origin who had only relatively recently become Muslims with Arabic names. These men had been born and grew up in regions corresponding to what are now South Sudan, the Nuba Mountains region of central western Sudan, and the border zones near Ethiopia. Hints to their pasts appear in Egyptian and French Army military ledgers, which often identified them in ways that signal their non-Arab pasts. The names of the soldiers called “Ramadan Kuku” and “Kuku Sudan” (Hill and Hogg 1995: 71), for example, suggested that they came from the Kuku community near today’s Ugandan border.

14Again, the French Army sought soldiers from regions where tropical diseases were endemic, whom they expected to have immunity, and the Egyptian Army complied. In January 1863, 446 soldiers, almost all of Sudanese origin (exceptions being their commander, who was possibly from Syria, plus an Egyptian, a Somali, and a “Burnawi from the Chad Basin” [Hill and Hogg 1995: 21]), found themselves on a French ship, La Seine, sailing westward from Egypt. The soldiers had little idea, as they left, where they were going and why (Nur 2007: 6-7).

The Black Corps d’Élite and their service in Mexico

16The most extensive study to date about this Egyptian battalion – and an essential source for examining the story of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa – is A Black Corps d’Élite, published in 1995 by British historians Richard Hill and Peter Hogg, who built on a 1933 short study by Egyptian prince and historian ‘Umar Tusun, a descendant of Muhammad ‘Ali. Hill and Hogg conducted this labor of love over the course of fifty years and published it near the ends of their lives. It is rich in details and reflects painstaking research in the Egyptian, Sudanese, and French archives (Sharkey, forthcoming). Yet A Black Corps d’Élite also rambles in its narrative, which makes it difficult to follow, and its sourcing is inconsistent. Sometimes the book adopts a patronizing tone towards the Sudanese soldiers, despite its authors’ claims to recognize them as an elite; it disregards the violence they experienced by calling them, for instance, “victims of misclassification” not enslavement, while suggesting that the type of slavery they experienced was mild or benign (Hill and Hogg, 1995: ix).

Identifying ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa from the photograph

19Sabers: the fact that some of the Sudanese soldiers in Mexico carried long military swords proves to be a detail of critical importance. Before considering why, it makes sense first to highlight features of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s photograph as a material object and record.

21Compared to the other photographs in the album, the image of the Sudanese soldier is larger, 37.5 cm long and 26.5 cm wide. A handwritten caption states: “Capitaine au Bataillon égyptien du corps expéditionnaire du Mexique, 1867” (“Captain in the Egyptian battalion of the expeditionary forces of Mexico, 1867.”) The photograph is firmly glued to the page, with no evidence of prior detachment, and therefore no caption on the back.

23Close reading of Hill and Hogg suggests that they identified the soldier as ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa by combining visual evidence in the photograph with known details of the battalion’s service in Mexico. In one passage they remarked that “the superior tactical mobility of the Mexican enemy over the more sedate French Army was due primarily to the high proportion of the Mexican mounted men to their total strength.” French Army authorities in Mexico realized that they needed to convert some infantry troops to cavalry and that the Sudanese soldiers, who patrolled routes near the railhead, would be far more effective on horseback. Hill and Hogg then added these illuminating details: “‘Abd al-Rahman Musa (2 Lt. [second lieutenant], No. 4 coy [company]), who had evidently received some mounted training before he came to Mexico, was put in charge of the training of the cavalry troop of 45 men… These erstwhile infantrymen were not just a detachment of mounted infantry but cavalry in the classic sense, mounted on local-bred or U.S. horses and equipped as light cavalry with sabers and carbines. Their sabers were captured enemy stock” (Hill and Hogg 1995: 74).

24In short, though without explaining their reasoning, Hill and Hogg appeared to identify the soldier as ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa by “reading” the photograph – and specifically the object in the soldier’s left hand – for evidence: the man in the photograph holds a long saber. Comparing this object with museum specimens (San Jacinto Museum of History 2022) suggests that the sword of the Sudanese soldier was, in fact, Mexican. It was a sword of the kind that Mexican soldiers used in their unsuccessful war against American settlers, which led to the founding of the breakaway Republic of Texas in 1836 and the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845.

‘Abd al-Rahman Musa, the subaltern elite

25What else do we know about ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa? We know why France awarded him entry into the Legion of Honor. Military authorities cited his valor on October 8, 1865, in a place called La Barranca de las Palmas, where he showed “élan and courage” (Hill and Hogg 1995: 176). The day before, a force of two hundred Mexican fighters had intercepted the train from Veracruz, robbed the passengers, and killed nine soldiers onboard. The next day ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa led fifteen Sudanese cavalry soldiers in a retaliatory attack on these enemy fighters as they retreated.

26Otherwise, we have very little information about ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s life and career. According to the veteran ‘Ali Gifoon – whose recollections of the Mexican campaign were recorded, translated, and adapted in 1896 by a British soldier named Percy Machell – ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa was “Egyptian” (misri). Specifically, ‘Ali Gifoon (or perhaps Machell) described him as an “Egyptian officer,” and called him “‘Abd al-Rahman Eff. Musa,” with the interpolation of the title “Eff.,” short for effendi, signaling his somewhat higher status and training (Machell 1896, no. 2: 187). ‘Ali Gifoon served under ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s command in the cavalry that the French Army formed. He was among the mounted soldiers who protected mails between the railhead at Paso del Macho and the next town of Cordoba. “Originally,” ‘Ali Gifoon remarked, “the mail had been entrusted to Mexican irregular horsemen, but these had been so often intercepted that the General [François Achille Bazaine] decided to try the Sudanese” (Machell 1896, no. 3: 326).

27Whereas ‘Ali Gifoon (or, again, Machell) described ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa as “Egyptian,” Egyptian Army records listed him as Dinka – suggesting origins in what is now South Sudan – and cited 1850 or 1852 as the year he entered the military (Hill and Hogg 1995: 176; Tusun 1933: 80). If he was a young man when conscripted, then he was probably born in the late 1820s or early 1830s and might have been in his mid-thirties when the photograph in Paris was taken. Trying to reconcile descriptions of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa as both Dinka and Egyptian, Hill and Hogg suggested that that the epithet “misri” may have “suggest[ed] domicile in Egypt” (Hill and Hogg 1995: 176). Perhaps he had lived and served for so long in Egypt that the other soldiers regarded him as a transplant. Another possibility is that he was a muwallad, meaning a Sudanese of mixed parentage (Sharkey 2003: 30) – in this case, the child of an Egyptian father and a Dinka mother.

28Military records show that when ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa left Egypt for Mexico in 1863, he held the rank of sergeant (jawish). By the time he had his photograph taken, he was a second lieutenant (mulazim thani), having attained that rank on January 3, 1866, near the end of his tenure in Mexico. Upon returning to Egypt, at a ceremony that the Egyptian Army held to welcome the Mexico returnees, he received another promotion, by two ranks, to captain (yuzbashi) (Hill and Hogg 1995: 176). But then he disappeared; or rather, historians have not been able to find any later record of his life.

29Hill and Hogg may have been thinking about a person like ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa when they poignantly summarized the post-Mexico careers of the Sudanese soldiers. They noted that the festivities and honors which French authorities lavished upon them in Paris, during their week of leave in May 1867, were “the sweet foretaste of the bitter years ahead.” Following their return to Alexandria, the Egyptian Army disbanded the battalion and scattered its members, sending most back to the Sudan, where they engaged in extractive wars of tax collection and subjugation. In later years, historians would face a “poverty of documentation” about the veterans which may have resulted partly from the turbulence (and possibly destruction of records) that followed the Mahdist revolution (1881-85) and overthrow of the Turco-Egyptian colonial regime. The bottom line was that “all but a few veterans from Mexico lived on in a condition of statistical and biographical oblivion” (Hill and Hogg 1995: 123).

30To be sure, other actors in the Mexico story did not fare better. In June 1867, one month after ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa stood for his portrait in Paris, Mexican fighters captured Maximilian and executed him by firing squad. Less than four years later, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Prussian forces captured Napoleon III on the battlefield at Sedan. Soon thereafter, Marshall Bazaine – the man who had directed ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa to train Sudanese soldiers as saber-bearing cavalrymen near Veracruz – surrendered to Prussian forces at Metz. For this action, French authorities later convicted Bazaine of treason and sentenced him to death but commuted the sentence. Imprisoned on a remote Mediterranean island, Bazaine improbably escaped with the help of a British friend, by using ropes to climb down a cliff to the water, whereupon he sped off with his young Mexican Spanish wife in a boat (Stevenson 1899: 124).

31The silence of the sources regarding ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa permits us to hope that his own life after Mexico was calmer, happier, and longer than the lives of many of his Egyptian and French Army counterparts. But alas, we do not know. Even Richard Hill knew so little about him that he did not include ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa in his biographical dictionary of the Sudan (Hill 1967).

32In my book Living with Colonialism, I devised the term “subaltern elite” to describe the northern Sudanese men who worked for the Anglo-Egyptian colonial administration in the early twentieth century, as typists, accountants, surveyors, and more (Sharkey 2003). I argued that their advanced educations in Arabic and English made them elites relative to the Sudanese population. But their subordination in the colonial hierarchy made them subalterns, in the sense advanced by scholars of the South Asian Subaltern Studies school of historiography. These scholars used the military term “subaltern” to suggest people of liminal status, neither entirely powerless nor very powerful, who seemed to hover on the edges of history (Guha and Spivak 1988).

33A man like ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa was a subaltern elite in this sense. He became a knight of the Legion of Honor, holding the highest military honor that the French government bestowed, but then vanished from the historical record. “Can the subaltern speak?” asked the literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in one of the most famous articles to emerge from the Subaltern Studies collective (Spivak 1988). She meant: can we find sources to recover the stories of not-famous or not-powerful people in history? Her answer amounted to a cross between “slightly,” “maybe,” and “if we are creative in how we use sources.” Applying these ideas to the case of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa, we can perhaps catch hints of his life and career – whispers if not loud voices – from military records, coupled in this case with visual and material clues from his photograph.

Picturing ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa in Paris

34Indeed, there is more that we can learn from – or at least, ask about – ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s image when we approach it as a material object relative to the history of photography.

35Consider this history in brief: ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa had his picture taken in 1867 when photography was rapidly developing. Forty years earlier, in 1827, Nicéphore Niépce had taken the first photograph or “heliograph”: a view from his windowsill, made with a camera obscura containing a bitumen-coated pewter plate that he exposed to the sun across several days. Niépce’s business partner, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, improved the method, and in 1839 introduced the Daguerréotype: a technological advance that had limits, since the photographer could generate only a single copy of an image on a metal plate, with no possibility for duplication. The invention of the calotype in 1841 and the wet collodion (collodion humide) process in 1851 enabled studios to generate a negative image from which they could make multiple positive copies on paper. In 1852, the year he recast himself as Emperor Napoleon III, Louis Bonaparte became the first French president to have his photograph taken. Like other dignitaries of his age, such as Queen Victoria in England, Abraham Lincoln in the United States, and – appropriately for this story – Maximilian and Charlotte in Mexico, Napoleon III encouraged the sale of his photographs for publicity and propaganda (Boisjoly 2009: 8-17; Ibsen 2010: 17-19).

36In the 1850s in Paris, photography became cheaper and more accessible to the public, thanks to an invention by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disderi, which yielded what became known in French as the photo-carte or the portrait-carte, and in English as the carte de visite (the English name for this object came from French but was not the name that French people commonly used). Patented in 1854, the carte de visite was a small, pocket-sized image in a format of about nine by five centimeters. Disderi’s invention made it possible to make multiple negatives from a single image, quickening replication. Cartes de visite became so cheap that people could buy them by the dozen or even the hundreds, and – as their Franco-English name suggests – could give copies to friends when they dropped in for visits (Boisjoly 2006). What is striking about the image of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa is that it is not a carte de visite. Its format was larger and grander; it would have been more expensive. By the standards of the 1860s, his was a high-end, formal studio portrait.

37But how many copies were there? It seems probable that the studio made at least two: one that found its way into the musée de l’Armée (and survived); and presumably another for himself (which may have vanished). Was he the only one of the Sudanese soldiers to have his solo photograph taken in a Parisian studio? Who suggested the idea, or helped him do it? Did a friend – perhaps one of the French Army officers entrusted with showing the Sudanese veterans around the city in groups of nine (Hill and Hogg 1995: 116) – bring him to the studio (and perhaps have a portrait taken, as well)? And if ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa took a copy of his image back to Egypt, and perhaps to the Sudan (where most of his battalion members seem to have gone), then what happened to it? We do know that Sudanese climates were rough on the memorabilia of the Sudanese soldiers. The ribbons that the soldiers received frayed within a few years, as General Charles Gordon observed after meeting Mexico veterans in Equatoria, near the Ugandan border, in the 1870s (Hill and Hogg 1995: 126). Would a photograph, printed on paper, have stood up to the elements if ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa had carried it to various postings? Questions like these abound, and the answers elude us.

38Considering how little we know about the life of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa before and after Mexico, it seems remarkable that we can pinpoint where in Paris he stood for his photograph within the space of a few meters. A small stamp on the photograph identifies the studio that took the portrait: “Saint-Edme, Photographe, 50 rue Fabert, Paris 7.” The address points to a building across the street from the front wall of the Hôtel national des Invalides (which, again, the musée de l’Armée now occupies, and which served as a military hospital when the Sudanese soldiers visited Paris), facing the esplanade that leads to the Seine.

39François Boisjoly, an expert on popular nineteenth-century French photography, produced an inventory of Parisian studios and included Saint Edme in his roster. Saint Edme studio, which used the wet collodion process in its photography, opened opposite the Invalides in 1861, six years before ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa posed there. Three years later, circa 1870, it moved across the river, to a site near Garnier’s Opera house, which was still under construction (Boisjoly 2009: 255). In fact, ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa reached Paris at the peak of the boom years for photographic studios in Paris. In the 1860s, so many studios opened so quickly that by 1870, when Saint Edme moved, competition was making it hard for businesses to profit. Whereas Paris had fifty-eight studios in the 1850s, by 1860 the city had four hundred – and the number kept rising (Boisjoly 2006: 30; Boisjoly 2009: 11, 14).

41One last detail seems to connect ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa and his image to the history of photography. As he posed, he gripped his Mexican saber with his left hand, while with his right, he held on to a rock – or rather, an object that looked like a rock. In 1867, four years before the invention of the “dry-plate” method reduced camera exposure times, ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa would have had to stand completely still for more than a minute to avoid blurring the image (Boisjoly 2009: 62). The sharpness of his picture suggests that he managed to pose, immobile, long enough for the camera to “capture” him, down to the scars that we can see on his chin.

Conclusion: Picturing ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa as a Sudanese agent

42Taken in Paris in 1867, the photograph of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa is significant for many reasons. It testifies to a global history that connected the Sudan, Egypt, France, and Mexico in the nineteenth century. It humanizes our knowledge of Egyptian military history by picturing one soldier. It offers a glimpse into the rich history of visual culture in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century, when photography was rapidly developing as a technology and medium of popular culture. To all this we could add that the image is highly significant for the history of the Sudan because it represents the first known portrait photograph of a person of Sudanese origin.

43Consider these points about photography in the Nile Valley and the Sudan. As photography developed in France, the United Kingdom, and later the United States (especially after George Eastman introduced the first portable camera in 1888, enabling the rise of the “snapshot”), each invention made its way to Egypt almost immediately. The appearance of photography in Egypt marked the start of photography on the African continent – preceding the medium’s debut in South Africa, Ethiopia, and other early sites of entry (Killingray and Roberts 1989).

44The earliest photography in Egypt featured ancient monuments and reflected a burgeoning European and American popular interest in the Pharaonic past and in archaeology, biblical studies, and “the Orient” at a time when the modern tourist industry, centered on the Holy Lands, was building momentum and inspiring popular interest (Bull and Lorimer 1979; Golia 2010). The first commercial photographic studios opened in Egypt around 1870, catering to wealthy local elites, prosperous European expatriates, and members of an incipient middle class in Cairo and Alexandria, where bourgeois cosmopolitans, like their counterparts in other Mediterranean lands, were enthusiastic about having their pictures taken (Killingray and Roberts 1989: 198; Hannoush 2016; Boraïe 2022). Pioneers of the genre in Egypt, like the German-speaking, Hungarian-born photographer Otto Schoefft, also took staged pictures of “native types” (Rakha 2022: 6) – a precursor to the later genre of anthropological or ethnographic photographs which presented people as essentialized types (and as illustrations) rather than individual people (and subjects of portraits) (Soubrier 2018).

45Given these details, then, when did photographers take the first pictures of Sudanese persons? It is difficult to say, but here is what we know: as early as 1868 – in other words, one year after ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa stood for his portrait in Paris –, Assyrian-Armenian photographer Pascal Sébah took photographs at Nubian sites including Dendera and Dakka that are now on the Egyptian side of the Egyptian-Sudanese border. Copies of Sébah’s Upper Egyptian pictures, some of which show unidentified Nubian people standing amid pharaonic remains, count among the oldest photographs that the Sudan Archive of Durham University now holds. But even if we were to stretch our definition for “Sudanese” to include Nubians from the Egyptian side of the border (though it is not clear why we would want to do so), Sébah’s images are not portraits. In the mode of Orientalist photography, they include human figures, sometimes as “anonymous physical blotches” or “ghosts” which offer a sense of ageless nostalgia and scale relative to the antiquities pictured (Behdad 2013: 24). In any case, Sébah’s photographs date from between 1868 and 1893 – later than ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa’s portrait. Meanwhile, in a study of photographs in the Sudan Archive’s collection, Martin Daly and Jane Hogan observed that, “the earliest photographs of the Sudan in the collection” – and here they were referring to the Sudan as a place, not necessarily to Sudanese people – “probably date from the Gordon Relief Expedition of 1884-85” (Daly and Hogan 2005: 60-61). This was the failed, last-ditch attempt of British and Egyptian authorities to rescue Charles Gordon and remaining leaders of the Egyptian Army from besieged Khartoum, as Mahdist revolutionary forces advanced on the Turco-Egyptian capital.

46As the nineteenth century ended in the Sudan, photography entered the service of the British colonial conquerors. The historian Michele Gordon examined this phenomenon with respect to the 1898 Battle of Omdurman, which toppled the Mahdist state and enabled the installation of the new Anglo-Egyptian colonial regime. Gordon focused on one album of images preserved in the British National Army Museum, taken by the photographer Francis Gregson. She described Gregson’s images as “atrocity photography,” noting that they recorded “a range of appalling acts on the part of the Anglo-Egyptian Army, including the massacring of the enemy wounded.” Several show the “naked, looted corpses” of Baggara Arab men, whom British sources described as primitive fanatics, thereby using photographic and textual discourses to justify their own violence (Gordon 2019: 65, 78). These British military photographs from 1898, which treat the bodies of Sudanese Mahdist fighters as both subjects and objects, contrast sharply with the dignified image of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa taken more than a generation earlier in Paris.

47The image of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa contrasts with less sensational military photographs, too. Oliver Coates has studied a corpus of 1940s images of African soldiers who served in the British Army in India during World War II, and whose photographs were taken to illustrate a journal that appealed to West African servicemen. These photographs show how colonial African soldiers were a “contested group within labor history, simultaneously coerced and coercive.” “For many men,” Coates observes, in a sentence recalling the experiences of ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa, “the very experience of being photographed was a distinct novelty of their military service; some soldiers commissioned studio portraits to record their time overseas.” Many of the photographs in this “visual archive” show soldiers relaxing in their spare hours, “visiting monuments such as the Taj Mahal, meeting local children, and enjoying Chinese and Indian comedy shows,” leading Coates to suggest that we can use these images for insights into the history of leisure (Coates 2018: 205). We know that ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa had his photograph taken when he and his comrades were enjoying a week of leave-time and celebrations in Paris, so that we can treat it as part of the history of leisure as well.

48Thirty-one years before the Battle of Omdurman, ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa stood tall and proud for his photograph in the Parisian studio that faced the Esplanade des Invalides. Clad in his crisp white Egyptian Army uniform, and grasping a Mexican saber, he wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor that Napoleon III had pinned on his chest. He emerges from his image as an agent – in the sense of having been an actor and mediator – not merely the subject of others. In no way was he a victim “shot” by the camera (Sontag 1977); on the contrary, he was his image’s likely commissioner. The material evidence of his visit to Paris – the photograph now preserved in the musée de l’Armée – testifies to his role in connecting people, actions, and events across countries and continents. ‘Abd al-Rahman Musa may have disappeared from the record after returning to Egypt in 1867, but for a brief moment preserved in this image, he featured in his own photograph as a man who had a measure of control over his destiny and a role to play in the making of history.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous referee for insightful comments that strengthened the article, and Gaétan du Roy, for pointing her to some valuable sources.