This paper aims at investigating history teaching in late colonial Sudan against the background of political, ideological and educational developments unfolding in the postwar Nile Valley. Based on a wide range of untapped Arabic and English sources (teachers' handbooks, pupils' textbooks, syllabuses, visual aids, inspection reports, writings of colonial educators), it will highlight significant connections between the “text” and the “context” of Sudanese school history. Firstly, the paper will examine how controversial periods and issues in modern Sudanese history such as the Turkiyya, the Mahdiyya and the slave trade, were dealt with in schoolbooks produced in the immediate postwar years (1945-1950). School historical narratives, it will be argued, were not part of a single homogeneous and hegemonic discourse in late colonial Sudan. Various, sometimes conflicting, perspectives were entwined in school texts. Secondly, the paper will relate these historical representations to the contexts in which they were produced and deployed. In the period 1945-1953, relations between Sudan, Egypt and Great Britain were characterized by heightened political tension. Theoretically ruled by both Egypt and Great Britain under a “hybrid” regime (the Condominium), Sudan had in fact been controlled by the British Sudan Government for half a century. After World War II the country's future became a fighting ground between Sudanese independentists (backed by the British authorities in Khartoum) and Sudanese unionists (supported by the Egyptian government and Egyptian nationalists). Was Sudan heading towards an independent state or a union with Egypt? The outcome of this political and ideological struggle, which was underpinned by strategic, economic and cultural interests, seemed highly uncertain in those volatile times. As British and Egyptian positions on the “Sudan Question” increasingly polarized, the Sudan Government decided to speed up the administrative and political processes leading to Sudanese self-government. In an attempt to thwart Egyptian ambitions and get support from the Northern Sudanese intelligentsia, the British hastily reunited the northern and southern parts of the country and accelerated the Sudanization of the administration (1946-1947). The paper will show how the peculiarities of postwar Nile Valley politics, coupled with a “paternalist-progressive” shift in British colonial policies in Africa, shaped historical narratives designed for Sudanese schools. It will demonstrate that these contexts are crucial for understanding dark representations of the Turkiyya, apologetic depictions of the Mahdiyya (a historical enemy of the British) and ambivalent attitudes towards the slave trade in late colonial Sudanese textbooks.