What the Seligmans Saw: Funerary Rites and Slave Rights in Sudan

In 1909, ten years after British and Egyptian forces invaded the Sudan and officially ended slavery, its living legacy was captured in a photograph of a funeral. Charles and Brenda Seligman, while conducting the first formal anthropological survey of the Sudan, photographed a Shilluk burial – a significant event in the experience of the two pioneering ethnologists who saw death rites as central to understanding the “politico-religious outlook of a subject race”[1]. But this funeral, for an unnamed individual, did not happen in Shilluk territory in what is now South Sudan. It took place in urban Omdurman, across the river from the new colonial capital of Khartoum, hundreds of miles to the north. Here, the performance of Shilluk identity and social life stood in marked opposition to their legacy as slaves, who Orlando Patterson famously described as “socially dead.”

Using this photograph from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, this paper analyzes two different historical narratives emanating from the image and the centrality of slavery to each. First, it investigates the materiality and intellectual history of the photograph and the funeral it depicts, informing the Seligmans’ foundational ethnographic writings on death in Shilluk culture and the ways in which anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion – including J.D. Frazer, E.E. Evans Pritchard and David Graeber – draw from this event. Second, the photograph reveals crucial information about Shilluk culture and politics in Omdurman, such as flying a political flag at the center of the funerary ritual, and demonstrates how this photo can be an optic for understanding both the legacy of slavery and contemporary politics in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural tapestry of urban Omdurman.

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[1] C. G. Seligman and Brenda Seligman, Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1932), xii.

See more of: Remembering the Dead: Slavery and Mortality through Visual Culture, a Comparative Perspective
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