Sudanese leaders sided with Britain out of bitter anti-Egyptian memory

Evidence

In an elaborate gesture of support for Great Britain, they traveled to London, some time after Zaghlül’s own Wafd Party had arrived in Paris, and, with breathtaking irony, Sayyid al-Mahdï offered the sword of his revolutionary father to the Prince of Wales. The prince refused it, but the point had been made. The men of this Sudanese delegation were older, all survivors of the Mahdïya, and whether or not they had supported the Mahdï, they all had bitter memories of Egyptian rule in the Sudan. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s question: the Sudan’s earliest elite orientation was pro-British precisely because of the Mahdïya’s anti-Egyptian roots — setting up the divergence between Egyptian and Sudanese nationalist trajectories.