Sudanese resistance and poor extraction doomed Egypt’s gold-mining venture

Evidence

Al-Tahtawï also wished for the extraction of the Sudan’s mineral resources, particularly its fabled gold deposits, to help Egypt gain entry into the international metals market, then dominated by Russia, Austria, and South America. This was important to Muhammad Alï, al-Tahtawï wrote, who took it upon himself to visit Fazughlï in the Sudan in 1838 to see how the gold mines he had commissioned were functioning. Al-Tahtawï compares Africa to America—"li bilädin ifriqiyatin laha shibhun bi-amrïka"— in its resources, and it was for its resources generally that Muhammad Alï invested so much manpower and money. But it all came to nothing. The French engineers hired by the viceroy could not agree on the right system of extraction, there was little gold, and the inhabitants of the Fazughlï region repeatedly and successfully attacked the enterprise.The raids of these `abid (slaves), as al-Tahtawï called them, finally caused the enterprise to be abandoned. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 240

Categorization

• SHARE: Share with anyone studying African resistance to early extractive colonialism — a concrete case where local raids, not European engineering disputes, shut down the enterprise.
• CANDY: The would-be gold rush into Sudan failed partly because the ‘slaves’ local inhabitants kept successfully attacking the mine — a sharp reversal of the extraction fantasy.