The Wafd leaders looked for loyalty from other segments of the Sudanese population. But the Egyptian nationalist movement's influence in the Sudan was limited by the narrow scope of Egyptian political power within the Sudanese government. Egyptian nationalists were also thwarted by a difficulty in conceptualizing new groups within the Sudan, like the British-termed "negroid but detrib- alized" former slaves and children of slaves from the southern Sudan who had converted to Islam and were being educated in the north of the country, but who had little if any contact with the cultural past of their childhoods. This was an ignorance they shared with the British and with the neo- Mahdists of the northern Sudan, who had few coherent policies for how to deal politically with these former slaves.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 843