Sudanese tribal leaders preferred distant British rule to nearby Egyptian domination

Evidence

British attempts to shape Sudanese nationalism and differentiate such a movement from Egyptian nationalism met with great success among older tribal shaykhs, the leaders of the Sufi tarïqas, and old supporters of the Mahdï.These groups blamed the Egyptians for bringing the British into the Sudan and destroying the Mahdïya, and felt strongly that Egyptian nationalists sought only to reestablish Egyptian authority over the Sudan. For these groups, the British were indeed colonizers and non-Muslims, but their homeland was far away; one day they inevitably would leave. Egyptians had proven themselves harder to evict. So the Mahdists accepted the status quo under the British temporarily, as a “tactical alliance.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1021

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s comparative Egypt-vs-Sudan colonial project: an instance where a colonized group strategically preferred one colonizer over another because of geographic distance.