In the Hour of Signs (1996): Jamal Mahjoub e l'epopea mahdista

In the Hour of Signs sets out to revisit the history of the rise and fall of the Sudanese Mahdiyya with a view to counteracting the stereotypical representations offered worldwide by (Eurocentric) biographical, novelistic and filmic accounts of this famous cluster of episodes in British imperial history. This article investigates Mahjoub’s narrative strategies, focussing on the multiple perspectives of his historical and fictional characters (British, Sudanese, Egyptian) as they drift across the desertic planes and the scattered communities of the Sudan in a time characterised by intermittent warfare, messianic expectation and political experiment. The article also tries to show how this sophisticated piece of fiction reacts to recent events, offering his Sudanese readers a balanced retrospect on a foundational period of their national history. Through the fictional character of Hawi, a Sufi philosopher/quester associated with the Sudanese insurgents, the history of the proto-nationalist Mahdist movement, and its institutionalization into a theocratic state, is brought to bear on the late twentieth-century quandaries of the great multi-ethnic African nation.