26 ( No. 98 HISTORY and slave- raiders soon pushed beyond the limits of actual administration , and were able easily to frustrate the Khedive Said (1854-63) , who wished to abandon the whole of the Sudan . He had to content himself with issuing the first proclamation of the abolition of slavery, which had no validitysave on paper.

Henceforward , and especially from the year 1860, the negro peoples of the Nile Vailey and of the Bahr el Ghazal were the unceasing prey of the organized Arab slaving companies or “ Khartumers,” despite repeated Khedivial edicts against slavery (e.g. , 1858, 1863 , 1869, 1872) . For twenty years in succession the Southern Sudan was devastated, and the inhabitants, through raids, slaughter, famine, and the horror of caravan marches, reached the lowest level of misery ." The appointment of EuropeanGovernors of the Upper Nile or of Khartum , such as Baker. ( 1869-71 ) and Gordon (1874-79), proved only a temporary hindrance to a traffic based on greed, stimulated by lust , sanctioned by religion and by custom , on the maintenance of whicĎ the whole agricultural welfare alike of the Sudan and ofEgypt seemed inevitably to depend.

The megalomania and extravagance of the Khedive Ismail ( 1863-79) extended the frontiers of the Egyptian Sudan in all directions. On the south , Sir Samuel Baker reached the borders of Unyoro ; but his successor, Charles George Gordon, found it necessary to withdraw the most southerly Egyptian garrisons from the Bari country . Darfur was annexed in 1874 by Zobeir , the semi -independent prince of Arab slave traders , in Ismail's name. Zobeir's son , Suleiman , revolted (on his father's detention at Cairo) in the Bahr el-Ghazal Province, but the rebellion was sup pressed and Suleiman himself _slain by Gordon's lieutenant, Romolo Gessi, and Egyptian rule came within sight of the Nile-Congo divide. Another 1 The testimony of all the European observers, Gordon, Baker, Junker, Schweinfurth , Gessi, Slatin , &c . , is unanimous . The figures of the loss of life and slave captures none the less almost exceed belief.

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