The Sudan Handbook

340 thE sudan handbook

and became a professional singer two years later. He sings both in Arabic

and in his native Nubian language and has done much throughout his

professional career of more than five decades to promote Nubian culture

and language. Not shy of mixing politics with music, he was arrested

under Nimeiri’s government and in 1989 went into voluntary exile, only

returning to Sudan in 2002. In 1992, Wardi famously performed a concert

for southern Sudanese displaced by the war at Itang refugee camp in

south-west Ethiopia.

Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi (1844–1885). Religious leader

who defeated the Turco-Egyptian forces and conquered Khartoum.

Muhammad Ahmad was born on the Island of Labab, ten miles south of

Dongola. Attracted to a life of religious asceticism and worship from a

young age, he sought instruction from various sheikhs of the Sammaniya

Sufi order. On becoming a Sheikh of the order himself, he spent several

years in seclusion. In March 1881 on Aba Island, in what is now White

Nile State, he experienced a number of visions in which the Prophet

Muhammad appointed him the Mahdi, ‘the Expected One’, the religious

redeemer who would prepare the way for the second coming of the

Prophet Isa (Jesus) shortly before the Day of Judgement. Three months

later, on Aba Island, he publicly declared himself to be the Mahdi and

called for religious revival and jihad against the unpopular Turco-Egyptian

regime. His revolt gathered strength and spread following a succession

of military victories – most prominently, the conquest of El-Obeid and

the defeat of 10,000 Egyptian troops at Shaykan, both in 1881. In 1885,

the Mahdist army captured Khartoum, defeating General Charles Gordon

and his forces. He died six months later in Omdurman, aged 41.

Musa Hilal (b.1961). The most prominent of the leaders of the

government-supported militias in Darfur known as janjawid, appointed

an adviser to the Khartoum government in 2008. He is the son of Sheikh

Hilal Abdalla of the Um Jalul clan of the Mahamid section of Abbala

Rizeigat in North Darfur. He is accused of leading the janjawid, from his

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors base in Mistiriha, on a platform of Arab supremacism. In 2006 the UN

(www.riftvalley.net).