Body Politics and Postmortem Power: The After-Lives of the Sudanese Mahdi and General Charles Gordon

Much ink has spilled detailing the lives and deaths of Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi of Sudan, and General Charles Gordon, the British military leader killed by the Mahdi’s forces in Khartoum. But this paper concerns the after-lives of their bodies and the shrines and statues erected in their honor. Ahmad and Gordon died five months apart in 1885, their deaths stand as important makers in Nile Valley politics and British colonialism. Venerated and decimated, exhumed and reburied, thrown into the Nile and standing in Trafalgar Square, the bodies and representations of these men acquired talismanic power and were used in political mobilization in the years following their deaths.
Usually considered separately in hagiographic, colonial, and nationalist sources, this paper examines their bodies and monumentation in a comparative rubric. First, using the history of religion and emotion as analytical frameworks, this paper examines the social impact and eschatological meaning of their deaths and the religiously politicized power of their bodies. Second, my work will examine how the burial and treatment of the bodies drew on older traditions of martyrdom and defined new political moments. Finally, this paper examines the memorialization of the deaths, the tombs of the Mahdi and the statues of Gordon during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium and the early years of Sudanese independence.