Given the layers of meaning surrounding these women, there is great irony in the fact that the six slaves left the courtroom and were placed in the Cairo Home for Freed Slaves, an institution created by the British as a sort of training and employment clearinghouse, where manumitted black women could find paying jobs, as domestics, keeping their connection to the institution of the family respectable. Once they left the auspices of this ide- alizing home, Fatima, Sa`ïda, Halïma, Maräsila, and Maryam also left the historical record and disappeared into, one hopes, better and more stable lives. But the issues they raised for Great Britain's civilizing mission in Egypt, and Egypt's civilizing mission for the Sudan, were far from over.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 110