ABSTRACT
W h e n Charles George Gordon was steaming from Brindisi to Port Said on his last mission to the Black Country, he wrote to Lord Granville on 22nd January, 1884, that “ the Sudan is a useless possession ; ever was and ever will be so. No one who has ever lived in the Sudan can escape the reflection ‘ what a useless possession is this land ’ ” .1 The opinion thus expressed by Colonel Gordon coincided with that arrived at by both Colonel Prout and Colonel Colston, two of the American officers who, in the seventies of the last century, carried out a systematic reconnaissance of the Sudan for Ismail, the Khedive of Egypt. Prout said that Darfur “ is wholly unable to repay Egypt the original cost of conquest, much less the expense of military occupation Colston, speaking of the more promising Kordofan, was equally pessimistic.
