The Sudan Handbook

thE intERnational PREsEnCE in sudan 273

expedition to conquer the new province of Equatoria in 1869 and became

its Governor-General on behalf of the Khedive Ismail. The era of the

Turkiyya in Sudan saw the growth of a small community of Europeans,

many of whom were based in Khartoum. They were a mixed group:

alongside missionaries, a few engineers, geologists and medical officers,

Khartoum’s earliest expatriate European community included numerous

self-employed male adventurers of modest social origins striving for

the success they had not achieved at home. Profit was the motive.

Inter national pressure on Egypt to open Sudan up to trade increased

commercial opportunities. In 1849, for example, the gum arabic trade

was liberalized and international merchants travelled to Kordofan to buy

this prized commodity. In southern Sudan, meanwhile, the slave trade

burgeoned: a barter system saw merchants exchanging cowrie shells,

trinkets or Venetian glass beads for slaves and ivory.

From the mid-nineteenth century Sudan became the object of moral

attention on the part of the European public, with a focus on the slave

trade. Having played a role in developing the trade, Europeans now

intervened to help suppress it. In 1848 a Maltese Catholic missionary

established Khartoum’s first modern Christian mission with the express

aim of fighting slavery. By the 1870s, Sudan had become a key example

of the rising disagreement over how best to suppress the trade. Those

in Sudan who were engaged in attempting to curtail the trade became

increasingly at odds with campaigners outside the country, who held

militant views about ending both the trade and slavery itself as an

institution.

The rise of the Mahdist movement in the late nineteenth century

saw most Europeans and Egyptians leave Sudan and encouraged an

outpouring of literature in Europe identifying the Sudanese as a people

suffering under tyranny, desperate for foreign intervention to free them.

Anti-slavery became a rallying cry for groups seeking to promote the

cause of civilization in Africa; an alleged resurgence of slave-trading

during the Mahdiyya was used as one of the justifications for invading

Sudan in 1898.

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).