Defeated Egyptian rebels were degraded and sent to Sudan as punishment

Evidence

I myself saw the nucleus of the Soudan contingent leaving Cairo for Suez. It was a sorry and not easily-to-be-forgotten spectacle. The Egyptian soldiers were placed in vans and cattle-trucks like animals. They quitted the capital without arms, as prisoners, and with all the circumstances of dishonour. Their native officers were selected from those who were most obnoxious to the new regime, and their very appointment was an avowed and undisguised measure of punishment and repression. On the 1st of Jan. 1883, two steamers were moored alongside the wharf at Suez. The deck of one was crowded by the disgraced and disbanded soldiers of the First Regiment (of which Arabi had been colonel); upon the deck of the other stood Arabi and his six companions. An hour or two later the disarmed Egyptian soldiers were forced to witness in sullen silence the Mareotis [Arabi’s ship] steaming down the Red Sea, headed for Ceylon. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 513

Categorization

• XREF: Connects neatly to the broader comparative question of how Britain treated Egypt’s own soldiers vs. how Egyptian troops later acted in Sudan — a hinge between the two colonial theaters this reader is tracking.