Egyptian explorers pictured Sudan’s south as wild because it lay beyond Islam

Evidence

The land itself was forbidding, its heat considered overwhelming even for Egyptians accustomed to the intense sun of the Sahara. From the first exploratory expedition led by Qapudan in 1840 to the famous Nile odyssey of Sir Samuel Baker in the 1860s, reports that floated back to Egypt told of the dense vegetation that physically blocked ships’ passage up the White Nile in various parts of the Sudan. The farther south into the Sudan explorers trekked, the farther away from the influence of Islam they wandered.There, they confronted tribes with unrecognizable costumes and customs that only intensified the wild image of the Sudan. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 345