Mahdist War

The Mahdist War (1881–1899) began as a religious and political uprising in Sudan led by Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the redeemer expected in Islamic tradition. His followers overthrew the Turco-Egyptian administration, captured Khartoum in 1885 and founded a Mahdist state that lasted until an Anglo-Egyptian army destroyed it in 1898–1899. The war ended with the creation of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, under which Britain effectively ruled the country until 1956.

Sudan had been conquered by the forces of Muhammad Ali of Egypt in 1820–1821. Egyptian rule, known locally as the Turkiyah, brought heavy taxation, conscription and forced labour, often enforced with violence. Many Sudanese also resented officials they regarded as foreign and religiously lax, including the appointment of Christians such as the British officer Charles Gordon to high office, while Egyptian efforts to suppress the slave trade, a major source of income, angered merchants. Meanwhile Egypt itself, deep in debt, fell increasingly under British and French financial control, and after 1882 under British occupation.

In the 1870s Muhammad Ahmad, a Muslim cleric, began preaching religious renewal and drawing followers. When the governor sent troops to arrest him on Aba Island in August 1881, his supporters routed them. He withdrew to Kordofan, and further Egyptian expeditions were destroyed, notably in June 1882. In November 1883 an Egyptian army of more than 8,000 men under the British officer William Hicks was almost wiped out near El Obeid.

Egypt, under British pressure to save money, decided to abandon Sudan. Gordon was sent to organise the evacuation and reached Khartoum in February 1884, but he was soon cut off. After a siege of 313 days the city fell on 26 January 1885 and Gordon and the garrison were killed. A British relief column under Garnet Wolseley arrived two days too late.

Muhammad Ahmad died on 22 June 1885 and was succeeded by the Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, who ruled from Omdurman. The new state fought its neighbours. In a long war with Ethiopia Mahdist forces invaded in 1886 and sacked Gondar in 1888, before the Ethiopian campaign ended at the Battle of Gallabat. Italian colonial troops defeated the Mahdists in Eritrea and took Kassala in 1894. Internal revolts and a major famine also weakened the state. The British officer Reginald Wingate later claimed that Sudan's population fell by more than half under Mahdist rule, but some modern scholars consider such figures exaggerated.

In 1896, after Italy's defeat at the Battle of Adwa threatened its hold on Kassala, and amid the Scramble for Africa and fears of French expansion on the upper Nile, Britain sent an Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener south into Sudan. It advanced slowly up the Nile, building a railway across the desert to supply it. After victories at Abu Hamed in 1897 and the Atbara in April 1898, it met the Khalifa's main army at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, where machine guns, artillery and rifle fire cut down the Mahdist attacks. The Khalifa escaped but was killed at Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899, which ended organised resistance.

The country became a condominium, formally shared between Britain and Egypt but in practice run by the British Empire, until Sudan gained independence in 1956. During the pursuit of the Khalifa, Kitchener's forces met a French expedition under Jean-Baptiste Marchand at Fashoda on the upper Nile, setting off the Fashoda Incident between Britain and France.

Our 1880 map shows Sudan under Egyptian rule on the eve of the revolt, and the 1900 map shows the newly established Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.