Although the first recorded account of the acquisition of slaves from the Sudan was inscribed in stone near the second cataract of the Nile during the reign of Egypt's First Dynasty Pharaoh Djer (c. 2900 BCE), the modern history of slavery in the Nile basin begins with the conquest of the Sudan by Muhammad Ali of Egypt in 1821 and the enslavement of Africans in the southern Sudan by Muslim Arabs from the north. Thereafter and throughout the nineteenth century, a well-organized slave trade provided thousands of African slaves for Egypt and the Middle East until the Sudanese revolution by the Mahdi in 1881. After the conquest of the Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1898 British administrators curtailed the slave trade, but slavery in a variety of forms continued. The independence of the Sudan in 1956 brought to a head the deep tensions between the African traditionalist and Christian southern Sudanese and the northern Sudanese oriented to...