ABSTRACT
Al-Zubayr Pasha Rahma Mansur (1830-1913) is a particularly sinister figure in the English literature dealing with the nineteenth century Sudan. He has been execrated as “Sultan and Slaver”1 and the “greatest slaver who ever lived”2 while being credited with being “practically the ruler of the Bahr al-Ghazal”3 or even “the absolute ruler of an area larger than France.”4 More recent scholarship has reduced the scale of his grandeur to that of a merchant prince5 without, however, clarifying the source and extent of his power in the Bahr al-Ghazal. What follows is neither a biography nor a political history. Rather, it will describe the society and institutions which nourished al-Zubayr and in which he flourished, with particular emphasis upon the zariba system. For al-Zubayr was not acting in a vacuum, he was part of a larger movement of numerous independent Khartoum based predominantly Muslim merchants entering the Bahr alGhazal in the 1850s in search of ivory.6 As the profits from ivory dwindled, these same merchants turned to the slave trade in the 1860s and 1870s.
