Making African Connections – Royal Engineers Museum

This exhibition will explore the history of the Mahdiyya period in Sudan by drawing on the museum’s unique collection of Sudanese artefacts, documents and photographs.

The Mahdiyya, a religious and political movement launched in 1881, seized power in 1885 and ruled Sudan until 1898 when it was defeated by Anglo-Egyptian forces. In Britain, the siege of Khartoum and resulting death of General Charles Gordon of the Royal Engineers are the most famous episodes in this history. However, this exhibition will seek to explore the Mahdiyya in a more rounded way: looking at the Ottoman-Egyptian colonisation of Sudan that it ended; religious