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Long before cotton weaving was a British industry, West Africa and the Sudan were supplying a large part of the world with cotton cloth. Even to-day cities like Kuka on the west shore of Lake Chad and Sokota are manufacturing centers where cotton is spun and woven, skins tanned, implements and iron ornaments made.
So far as Zobeir was concerned, there were two counterbalancing considerations; on the one hand, Evelyn Baring now declared that he was in favour of the appointment; but, on the other hand, would English public opinion consent to a man, described by Gordon himself as 'the greatest slave-hunter who ever existed', being given an English subsidy and the control of the Sudan?
The authority of the Khedive over the Sudan therefore ceased, though this did not imply the cessation of the Sultan's suzerainty in those regions. Further, England had acted as if the Sudan were no man's land by appropriating the southernmost part in accordance with the Anglo-German agreement of July I, 1890; and Uganda became a British Protectorate in August 1894.
He was at once proclaimed Governor-General of the Sudan, with the widest powers. He was on the point of starting off again on his journey southwards, when a singular and important incident occurred.
The expedition to Bechuanaland in 1884, under the command of Sir Charles Warren, was accompanied by a detachment of three balloons, and the following year balloons co-operated with the Sudan Expeditionary Force, when Major Elsdale carried out some photographic experiments from the air.
Behind all these influences, however, stood from the first an indigenous Negro culture. The stone figures of Sherbro, the megaliths of Gambia, the art and industry of the west coast are all too deep and original evidences of civilization to be merely importations from abroad. Nor was the Sudan the inert recipient of foreign influence when it came.
The aeronef was then eleven hundred miles from the Wargla oasis and almost on the northern frontier of the Sudan. About two o'clock in the afternoon a city appeared in the bend of a large river. The river was the Niger. The city was Timbuktu.
The national plans, formulated and vigorously and systematically prosecuted, in the course of the concluding years of the first, and the opening years of the second, epoch of the Formative Age of the Faith, by the Bahá’í communities in the United States, in Persia, in the British Isles, in Latin America, in Canada, in India, Pákistán and Burma, in ‘Iráq, in Australia and New Zealand, in Germany and Austria, in Egypt and the Súdán, have raised the number of Bahá’í centers established in both hemispheres to two thousand five hundred maintained by representatives of the white, the black, the yellow, the red and the brown races of mankind, comprising ten in the Arabian Peninsula, over thirty in Egypt and the Súdán, over forty in the recently opened European goal countries, over fifty in the British Isles, over sixty in Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania, over seventy in Germany and Austria, over ninety in Canada, over ninety in India, Pákistán and Burma, over one hundred in Central and South America, over six hundred in Persia and over one thousand two hundred in the United States of America.
Then, to the disgust of all, the Khedive named as his successor Rauf Pasha, whom Gordon had recently dismissed for maladministration of the Province of Harrar, on the borders of Abyssinia . Thus the Sudan, after experiencing the benefits of a just and able government, reeled back into the bad old condition, at the time when the Mahdi was becoming a power in the land.
If we travelled, as we have lately imagined, on swift-footed dromedaries in a huge circuit from Timbuktu through the Sudan, the Libyan desert, and the land of the Tuaregs, we should at last come to Morocco, "The Uttermost West," as this last independent Sultanate in Africa is called.
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