AMONG THE PAGANS OF THE SOUTHERN SUDAN 3 with a British governor at the head of each, and these provinces are sub-divided into districts, under British inspectors and Egyptian or Sudanese mamurs, or submagistrates. Tribal law and custom are administered by native chiefs recognized by Government, but there is always appeal from their decisions to a government official.

The Founding of the Gordon Memorial Mission During his lifetime Gordon was in close sympathy with the work of the C.M.S., and expressed a strong desire that the Society should take up work in the Sudan. The pagan tribes to the south had been specially near his heart, but although C.M.S. was anxious to found a mission among them, it was not until nineteen years after Gordon’s death that the way was opened for work to begin.! In 1904, Lord Cromer (British representative in Egypt) offered the Society a definite sphere of work. The offer was accepted; the Committee issued an appeal for men and funds which met with a ready response, and in December, 1905, a party of missionaries left Khartoum to found the Gordon Memorial Mission in the Southern Sudan. The party was under the temporary leadership of the Rev. Ll. H. Gwynne, who is now Bishop in Egypt and the Sudan.

The Country The district allotted to the C.M.S. by Lord. Cromer is that part of the Sudan which stretches along the White Nile from the south of the Sobat River to the borders of Uganda, and lies partly in the Mongalla and partly in the Bahr el Ghazal Province. It covers an area rather larger than that of the British Isles, and its inhabitants belong to at least twenty-four different tribes, each speaking its own Janguage. The C.M.S. work has been chiefly among 1 This paper deals exclusively with the C.M.S. Mission among the pagan tribes in the south. An account of ‘the work in the Northern Sudan is given in a most interesting pamphlet, ‘‘ The C.M.S. in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,’’ by Canon W. H.. T. Gairdner, published by the Church Missionary Society, Salisbury Square, E.C.4, price 4d.