This paper explores foreign missionaries’ narratives of slavery in the Nile Valley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I approach these narratives as a distinct genre defined by the unique position of the missionary as a storyteller and the utility of slavery as a vehicle for conveying suffering. Taking inspiration from Lata Mani’s work on debates over sati and its abolition, I argue that the enslaved, much like the women of colonial Bengal, were neither the subjects nor the objects of the missionaries’ writings, but served as a discursive canvas for missionaries to situate their activities in a world of suffering and violence. Slavery, as a this-worldly trial with an allegorical relationship to the bondage of sin, lent a temporal urgency to the spiritual project of the missionaries, merging post-manumission beneficence with the salvation of souls. Through representing slavery as a particularly egregious form of violence, Western missionaries worked to obscure, and even justify, their own relationships with colonial violence. In this paper, I focus in particular on the “Report on Bianca Lemuna” published by Father Daniele Comboni in 1881. Lemuna, a young girl with albinism and a former slave, was exemplary of the story that missionaries like Comboni wanted to tell about the slave trade. The daughter of slave trader, Lemuna was abducted by rival slave traders from her home in equatorial Africa, eventually arriving at Comboni’s mission station in El Obeid, Sudan after being intercepted the forces of by General Charles Gordon. Comboni’s narrative, focusing on Lemuna’s abduction, perilous journey, the evil of her traffickers, her heroic rescue, and her later Christian life at the mission, offers a harrowing story of rupture, violence, and redemption. These elements were put to work for the threefold purpose of celebrating the liberatory capacity of colonial violence in Sudan, condemning Islam for its ties to the slave trade, and linking the redeeming power of Christianity to a narrative of bondage and liberation. Through the suffering of the journey, the nefarious villains, the valiant heroes, the promise of redemption, as well as his fixation of the racial spectacle of Lemuna’s skin, Comboni constructed a trope of the vulnerable African for consumption by Western audiences. I argue that Comboni’s “Report,” serves as an archetype of the genre, with significant parallels in slave narratives produced in other missions operating in the Nile Valley including the British Church Mission Society and the American Presbyterians.