The court case that ensued revealed, more than any other event up to this point, how intricately connected the issue of slavery was to the question of controlling the Sudan, in the views of contemporary Egyptian nationalists and British officials. In this case, a woman named Zanüba, in the company of five other young Sudanese women and three Egyptian traders, had walked barefoot across the desert in the August heat to be sold as a slave in the profitable underground slave market of Cairo.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 693