Word: mahdi
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...vast area south of the Sahara desert called by the Arabs Bilad-as-Sudan, meaning Country of the Blacks. When the British army occupied Egypt (1882), an attempt was made to bring order also to these vassal states, but for a score of years a local religious leader, the Mahdi, with thousands of fanatical followers called Dervishes, resisted the British. At Omdurman (1898) the 60,000 Mahdist spearmen were whipped. A year later the British made a treaty with Egypt, cutting Egypt in for a half share in the management of the Sudan. For all its name, the Anglo-Egyptian...
...screams of dying citizens rang in Gordon's ears as he stood unarmed at the top of the palace steps. A party of Arabs, their "bloodstained white robes [swinging] brightly in the dim light," swept up to him and halted. "Where is the Mahdi?" demanded Gordon. They made no reply...
...Where is the Mahdi?" he asked again...
...culmination of a people's long struggle to be free. At best it was the hopeful byproduct of a diplomats' compromise, reached between Sudan's master, Imperial Britain, and its expansion-minded neighbor, Egypt. The British annexed Sudan in 1899, after an Anglo-Egyptian army defeated Mahdi's followers at the battle of Omdurman. At first both London and Cairo shared the administration, but in 1925 the British kicked their partner out. Egyptian independence left Sudan as the northern bulwark of Britain's East African Empire. Sudan was Cairo's fief in the days...
Thirteen years later, in 1898, General Horatio Kitchener avenged Gordon. He led a combined Anglo-Egyptian force of 25,000 (one of whom was Subaltern Winston Churchill) up the Nile, shattered 40,000 dervishes and Fuzzy-Wuzzies at Omdurman, razed the Mahdi's tomb and regained the Sudan. But for whom...