The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the Suez Canal, stirred up eventually revolt in the Sudan, for political, economic, and religious reasons.  Led by a Sudanese Negro, Mohammed Ahmad, who claimed to be the Messiah (Mahdi), the Sudan arose in revolt in 1881, determined to resist a hated religion, foreign rule, and interference with their chief commerce, the trade in slaves.  The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able mulatto general, Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the heathen Dinka, drove Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years.  It was not until 1898 that England reentered the Sudan and in petty revenge desecrated the bones of the brave, even if misguided, prophet.

Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England’s designs on Abyssinia, and the Italians, replacing her, attempted a protectorate.  Menelik of Shoa, one of the smaller kingdoms of Abyssinia, was a shrewd man of predominantly Negro blood, and had been induced to make a treaty with the Italians after King John had been killed by the Mahdists.  The exact terms of the treaty were disputed, but undoubtedly the Italians tried by this means to reduce Menelik to vassalage.  Menelik stoutly resisted, and at the great battle of Adua, one of the decisive battles of the modern world, the Abyssinians on March 1, 1896, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians, killing four thousand of them and capturing two thousand prisoners.  The empress, Taitou, a full-blooded Negress, led some of the charges.  By this battle Abyssinia became independent.

Such in vague and general outline is the strange story of the valley of the Nile—­of Egypt, the motherland of human culture and

“That starr’d Ethiop Queen that strove To set her beauty’s praise above The sea nymphs.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[4] [Greek:  “autos de eikasa tede kai hote melanchroes eisi kai oulotriches.”] Liber II, Cap. 104.

[5] Cf.  Maciver and Thompson:  Ancient Races of the Thebaid.

[6] Journal of Race Development, I, 484.

[7] Petrie:  History of Egypt, I, 51, 237.

[8] From West Africa to Palestine, p. 114.

[9] Depending partly on whether the so-called Hyksos sphinxes belong to the period of the Hyksos kings or to an earlier period (cf.  Petrie, I, 52-53, 237).  That Negroids largely dominated in the early history of western Asia is proven by the monuments.

[10] Petrie:  History of Egypt, II, 337.

[11] Chamberlain:  Journal of Race Development, April, 1911.

[12] Petrie:  History of Egypt, II, 337.

[13] Reisner:  Archeological Survey of Nubia, I, 319.

[14] Hoskins declares that the arch had its origin in Ethiopia.

[15] Maciver and Wooley:  Areika, p. 2.

[16] Acts VIII, 27.

IV THE NIGER AND ISLAM