of freedom.
From pharaonic times, Nubia, now known as northern Sudan, was either under Egyptian control or a target of Egyptian control. An active indigenous slave trade had been conducted from antiquity, mainly by slave raiders from Nubia seeking slaves in what is now the southern part of Sudan (known as Nilotic Sudan). Slave trading was formally tolerated up to and including the period of Ottoman rule (1822-1877), when the Sudan was a province of Ottoman Egypt, which forcefully expanded southward beyond the fertile Blue Nile to exploit agricultural and other resources of the region. In 1877, Sudan passed to British rule; by the end of his term in 1880, General Sir George Gordon, governor of Egyptian Sudan, had formally suppressed the slave trade (Funk & Wagnalls; Wai passim).
Enforcement of the ban was problematic, however. One aspect of this was the method that the British used to rule the Sudan, the so-called Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of 1898, which for many years divided colonial governments between north and south. This system of government was inherited more or less intact in the 1880s, as the British Empire gradually acquired Egypt as a possession from the waning Ottoman empire; as a province of the Ottoman Turks, Egypt had since 1822 expanded Sudan's southern borders by programmatic invasion of tribal territory below the Blue Nile (Wai 377ff; Mayotte 499; Viorst 48). According to Sikainga (5-8, et passim), British rule did not sufficiently or effectively challenge a well-entrenched and, on its own terms, efficient slave system. Under a practice similar to indentured servitude known as murgu, for example, master and slave agreed on a fee paid by the slave to the master. The slave was more or less free to earn money in any way desired, and some slaves were able to buy their freedom. As a practical matter, agreements between master and slave are perforce no contract between equal parties. Further, murgu served best those ma...