Sudan, discussed in chapter 4, was not a settler-colonial state, yet, rather remarkably, British officials deployed the settler-native distinction in the absence of settlers. The British demarcated two races, Arabs said to be Northern and Africans said to be Southern, and described the Arabs as settlers and the Africans as natives. The distinction was based on the concocted history and ethnography implicit in colonial modernity, which presumed that Arabs were civilized, Africans were uncivilized, and that any civilization in Africa came from abroad. Certainly the peoples deemed Arab and
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