The 1879 revolt of Ahmed ‘Urabi and the subsequent British occupation of Egypt are often considered to be the opening movements of Egyptian nationalism. Yet the entire decade of the 1870s was a vibrant period of intellectual exploration and debate in which basic questions of identity were being raised at every level of society. In order to better understand these pivotal years, I translated the play "Abu Raida al-Barbari," written by the nationalist author Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿa during his brief career as a playwright sometime between 1870 and 1872. This was one of the first plays ever to be written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and Ṣannūʿa’s creative and idiosyncratic orthography allowed him to present his audience with a world in which Cairene Arabic was the norm and all other forms of speech marked one as an outsider. By focusing on the pidgin Arabic of the titular character Abu Raida (a Nubian servant in the household of a wealthy Egyptian widow), it can be seen how Ṣannūʿa used the comedic nature of “incorrect” speech to construct a vision of blackness which could serve as a foil for his larger nationalist project. By analyzing nonstandard variations in phonetics, syntax, lexicon, and pragmatics, I show the deep connections between race making and nationalizing in this crucial period.