Faith, War, and Slavery: A History of the Colonial Conquest of Sudan (1881-1898) written by Patricia Teixeira Santos, professor of African History at the Faculty of History of the Federal University in São Paulo (Brazil), and coauthored by Suresh Kumar, professor at the Faculty of African Studies of the University of Delhi (India), is a joint Brazilian-Indian book published by two prestigious universities in the Global South and printed in India. Emerging from the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development, a seminar presenting alternative narratives to Western scholarly discourse, the book was first published in Portuguese in 2013. After a positive international response, it was translated and published in English in 2021.Footnote ¹

The publication was initiated by Santos, who in the 2000s recognized the urgent problem of the lack of studies on non-Portuguese-speaking African countries in Brazil, a country where more than 50 per cent of the population identifies as Black. The authors’ second motivation was to study how colonial processes and slavery played out outside of Latin America.

Santos and Kumar focus on the rise and fall of the Mahdist state (1881–98) under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad al-Mahdi and his successor Abdullahi al-Khalifa, through the lens of the Comboni missionaries, which had been the leading Roman Catholic religious group in Sudan. Founded by Daniele Comboni, who established a male and a female order in 1867 and 1872, respectively, in Verona, Italy, the Comboni missionaries were also known as the Fathers and Sisters of Verona and the Mothers of Nigrizia, the latter referring to an old Roman Catholic term for Central and West Africa. In 1877, as vicar apostolic of Central Africa, Comboni assumed spiritual direction of the Catholic missions in the region. His vision, based on the ‘Regeneration of Africa through Africans’ (83) coincided with the weakening position of the Catholic church in Europe and its growing interest in colonizing Central Africa. Their missionary activities were aimed at reaching the animist and Muslim populations of southern Sudan, offering them conversion to Christianity and instruction in the catechism. The missionaries were particularly interested in rescued Black slaves, to whom they offered a career as missionaries, hoping in this way to create antislavery, Christian communities. With the Mahdist revolution of 1881 and its accompanying policy of forced conversion to Islam, a large group of Comboni missionaries were imprisoned or forced to live under constant guard. After the death of Mahdi in 1885, due to the political unrest in Sudan, they realized that they should no longer negotiate their stay in that country and began their flight to Cairo. By focusing on the story of the Comboni mission in late nineteenth century Sudan, Santos and Kumar show how the Roman Catholic church participated in what became the British subjugation of Sudan.

The analysis of the South's colonial past through the lens of missionary activity is deeply rooted among historians in Brazil, a country that, like Sudan, was the target of European political and religious intervention. There, Jesuit missionary activity strongly shaped colonial experiences of indigenous peoples subjected to Christianization, theologically justified war, and enslavement. Santos and Kumar thus imply that histories of war, faith, and enslavement allow us to compare Brazil and Sudan's colonial pasts. They suggest that what were seemingly local realities in Brazilian and Sudanese societies might be considered as the result of a political, religious, and economic clash between the broader universe of white colonizers and indigenous forces.

The most outstanding element of Santos and Kumar's study is its original research, based on the archives of the Comboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus and the Mothers of Nigrizia, in Rome, where the authors collected extensive missionary correspondence, letters, newspapers, and testimonies of missionary prisoners, much of it in Italian. These sources are very similar to those of the Jesuits in the early modern Portuguese Empire. European missionaries described everyday life in detail, collecting and relating information on social relations and other observations in order to consolidate their position. One example was the effort of Comboni missionaries to liberate African children from slavery. Santos and Kumar argue that this was done primarily to create space to convert these children to Christianity and eventually prepare them for a missionary role, according to the idea of missionization of Africa by Africans. The Mothers of Nigrizia offer especially rich sources generated from their perspectives on the religious and social lives of Muslim and African women, whose universe was not accessible to male missionaries. Before their capture by the Mahdist forces, these missionaries provided spiritual and moral assistance to African women; in captivity, they were forced to adopt Islamic moral codes. Nevertheless, their testimonies also attest to the vulnerable position of religious and indigenous women under various regimes and colonial projects.

Santos and Kumar complement these religious sources with documents written by European military officers and merchants, and by Muslims in Sudan, especially those focused on the Mahdi's writings and household. The translated version of the book contains several parts: forewords by the authors and by Patricia Maria Oliveira Lima, the Brazilian ambassador to Sudan; translations of the Portuguese-language authors’ note and preface; an introduction; four chapters; and a conclusion. Chapter One considers the history of Sudan from the Egyptian conquest in 1829 to the Mahdi's takeover in 1881, considering Egyptian-Sudanese and Anglo-French interventions. The authors describe the political reconfiguration of various colonial projects that led to cultural, social, religious, and political conflicts before the formation of an independent government in northern Sudan. Chapter Two discusses how relations between Christians and Muslims evolved to better understand clashes and confrontations before the advent of the Mahdist state.

The missionaries’ experiences with Muslims during the Mahdist state follow in Chapter Three, where the authors try to bring out Mahdist strategies for consolidating authority on the one hand and the Comboni survival strategies on the other. This brings us closer to the clashes and negotiations between two religious projects: the Islamic messianism and the Catholic vision for Central Africa. The Mahdist state tried to maintain traditional networks and alliances with local ethnic groups of southern Sudan while integrating various forms of local economic organization and power. Simultaneously, the authors consider the experiences of imprisoned missionaries to demonstrate how the imprisonment of missionaries helped to justify the Catholic church's involvement in British ‘pacification of Sudan’ (129).

Chapter Four deals with the careers of religious men and women who fled the Mahdist state to British-dominated Egypt. This coincided with the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878–1903), who sought greater dialogue with the non-Catholic world. It is in this chapter that we see most clearly how elements of the Roman Catholic church aligned their interests with Victorian-era colonization. While the Comboni missionaries promised to strengthen Christianity in Africa through Black African missionaries, the authors show that these ideas were nothing more than the need to spread Christian values and Catholic morality that conformed to the ideas of the white Western world.

Santos and Kumar offer a thorough analysis of the multilayered interplay of the Catholic church's involvement in the colonization of Sudan. While seeking converts, the Mothers of Nigrizia also moved closer to Sudanese society and in some cases created bonds of female solidarity with rescued enslaved women. One of the study's most striking contributions is the attention the authors pay to Italian nuns who actively negotiated colonial space, became part of local communities, and joined family networks by getting married to non-Catholic merchants and traders.

In addition to its archives, its gendered analysis, and its comparative approach, the book also represents a perspective on the history of the Global South that scholars in the North ought to heed. By addressing Brazilian historical practice of approaching religious sources with anthropological interest and extracting information from those sources in order to reveal negotiation and survival tactics during the colonial encounter, and by animating how faith articulated with war and slavery, Santos and Kumar's account goes beyond the mainstream historical narrative of early colonial Sudan, which is based on sources stemming from British-Egyptian rule and military history. This does not mean that the two historiographies contradict each other. Rather, the letters of the imprisoned missionaries, only fragments of which have been translated into English, complement the Anglo-British view of the Mahdist state. When it came to colonization, diverse sorts of Europeans presented a remarkably united front.