Sudanese Jibbah in UK Institutions

22/09/20: dataset updated to include 5 records from the Pitt Rivers Museum

This dataset was created by Elvira Thomas during the summer of 2020 as part of her Junior Research Associate Project funded by the University of Sussex. The project is attached to the “Making African Connections” (MAC) Project of which Sussex University and the Royal Engineers Museum are partners.

The project, which was titled “Plundered artefacts and the Colonial Gaze: exhibiting Sudan at the Royal Engineers Museum after Covid-19”, investigates museum display in UK institutions of artefacts which were plundered by colonial British forces at the end of the 19^th Century. It takes an object-focus on Mahdist jibbah, tunics worn by Ansar (followers of al Mahdi) in conflicts during the Mahdist war in Sudan at the end of the 19^th C. Many of these jibbah were plundered after the Battle of Omdurman (1898), taken back to Britain and dispersed into private collections and cultural institutions across the UK. Five of these Mahdist jibbah are now held at the Royal Engineers Museum. In order to explore how these important cultural artefacts of Sudanese heritage have been historically framed in triumphalist narratives of empire in UK institutions, the project combined a case study of the museum display at the Royal Engineers Museum with a wider investigation of Mahdist jibbah held in institutions across the UK.

This dataset was created as part of the wider investigation of jibbah held in UK institutions. Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic which restricted close contact with the jibbah held at REM, this part of the project became a crucial element of research. There were three main goals for this investigation:

1. to produce an estimate of the amount of Sudanese jibbah existing in UK cultural institutions

2. to locate, record and publish a list of these artefacts to make them knowable to ‘source’ communities or anyone searching for Sudanese heritage in UK institutions

3. to analyse digital catalogue entries (accessibility, data prioritisation and linguistic analysis) of the jibbah held in UK institutions and consider to what extent legacies of colonialism are encountered in the digital display of plundered artefacts held in the UK