‘Ali Jifun was coming home. Some forty years since he had last seen fōte chol, “the country of the Shilluks,” he watched as the fort at Fashoda came slowly into view, the Nile flowing past him on its way north to Khartoum, and to Egypt. Captured as a young man by Baggara slave dealers and enrolled into the Egyptian Army, ‘Ali Jifun had fought in countless battles over the years throughout Northeast Africa, and once even as far abroad as Mexico. And now here he was on the morning of 19 September 1898, this old Shilluk soldier returning to his place of birth, not yoked as a slave, but as an adjutant-major in a conquering army. Indeed, at saghkolaghasi he was the highest-ranking Sudanese soldier in the whole Egyptian Army at the time.