…in the case of the Kababish, the government moved to improve on its traditional ways…no other tribe had so completely and with such success administered its own affairs, presenting few difficulties precisely because it was so primitive…
-Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934, M.W. Daly
Maybe not quite as primitive as the British Empire thought. Talal Asad wrote an almost impenetrable post-independence ethnography of the political pathways of Kababish power, authority, and consent, with organization charts so complex as to make the most ivory towered structural anthropologist’s head to swim. Nevertheless I didn’t find KhairAllah’s place within the Kababish confederation so hard to deconstruct. But then I never got more further details than his full name, KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid KhairAllah, The Goodness of God Son of the Goodness of the Prophet Son of the Goodness of God.