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A large body of devoted believers soon gathered around him, and he set up an independent sultanate in the desert, defeating four Egyptian expeditions sent against him, and capturing El Obeid, the chief city of Kordofan, which he made his capital in 1883.
On a grand square German piano is a mass of music in which the masterpieces of all countries have equal rights with the national anthem of Johore. Going directly through a mass of Oriental drapery, we are in the throne-room, where are gathered the nobility of the little Sultanate.
Far to the west, near Lake Chad, arose in 1520 the sultanate of Baghirmi, which reached its highest power in the seventh century. This dynasty was overthrown by the Negroid Mabas, who established Wadai to the eastward about 1640. South of Wadai lay the heathen and cannibals of the Congo valley, against which Islam never prevailed.
The roads are excellent in the sultanate, and thirty minutes of fast driving brought the two Americans to the zareba, within which the tiger, guarded by natives, was peacefully breakfasting on a goat. "He's a real man-eater," whispered the agent, handing his employer a loaded express rifle. "We only located him yesterday. Lured him with a goat, you know ... the smell of blood attracts 'em.
This social and industrial state of the Yorubas formerly spread and wielded great influence. We find Yoruba reaching out and subduing states like Nupe toward the northward. But the industrial democracy and city autonomy of Yoruba lent itself indifferently to conquest, and the state fell eventually a victim to the fanatical Fula Mohammedans and was made a part of the modern sultanate of Gando.
When at Singapore, he heard that the Malays of Sarawak, a district forming the southern extremity of the Sultanate of Bruni, had rebelled against the Bruni nobles, and had in vain appealed to the Dutch Governor-general at Batavia for deliverance from their oppressors.
This is the same sultanate which let the Turks through against us in the summer of 1915 and whose ruler was prominent in the sacking of Lahej. I could also point to the Imam of Yamen, strong in opposition to the Turks as a rallying point of tribal revolt, but weak and vacillating on the side of law and order.
The Mahdist rebellion was in part at least a reaction against the abolition of slavery by Egypt, and the interest of the next few years will consist in the last stand of the slave merchants in the Soudan, in Darfur, and in Wadai, east of Lake Chad, where the only powerful independent Mohammedan Sultanate still exists.
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