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the ambitions of the state 111

Many of these southerners, whose homelands lay outside the Islamized

areas of the north, fought for the Mahdists, as they had fought for the

Turco-Egyptians, because they were forced to do so; but a significant

number may have seen support for the Mahdi as a way of improving

their status.

Whatever his aspirations and those of his followers, the Mahdi did not

succeed in establishing a more just and equitable state. He died shortly

after Khartoum was captured; in his place, one of his deputies, Abdal-

lahi al-Taisha, from one of the Arab cattle pastoralist groups of southern

Darfur, became Khalifa (‘successor’). The Khalifa ruled from Omdurman,

across the river from Khartoum. Omdurman thus acquired the role it has

continued to occupy as the centre of northern Sudan’s political culture,

consciously indigenous in style, in contrast to the straight streets of

Khartoum, the capital that was built by the Turks. The Khalifa’s relations

with the riverain population of the north were tense and his hold over

the north of Sudan uncertain. In the parts of the south which the Turco-

Egyptian state had claimed, he had almost no power. Tales of widespread

starvation, brutality and the death of more than half the population

under the Khalifa’s rule were spread by the British to build support for

their schemes of revenge against the killers of Gordon. These stories

were undoubtedly exaggerated, but the Khalifa’s state was not strong,

and in the last few years of the nineteenth century it was destroyed by

an advancing army of Egyptian and British troops.

Egypt itself had come under British occupation in 1882. (Egyptian

political and financial instability were seen as a threat to imperial inter-

ests.) In 1896, with the Egyptian government and army under close British

control, the ‘reconquest’ of the Sudan, as it was called in an attempt to

emphasize the legitimacy of Egypt’s claim, was launched. ‘Sudanese’

battalions played a central part. These were units of the Egyptian army,

officered largely by the British and made up of men from the south of

Sudan, often of slave origin. Omdurman was captured in 1898; the Khalifa

was killed eleven months later at Um Diwaykrat, in South Kordofan.

The use of Egyptian soldiers and money in the campaign made the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors overthrow^ of^ the^ Khalifa^ much^ easier^ but^ it^ left^ an^ uncertain^ political^

(www.riftvalley.net).