After the fall of Khartoum in 1885 and the Mahdi's death, the Khalifa Abdallahi consolidated power by ordering the migration (hijra) of his own Ta'aisha kinsmen and other western tribes to the new capital at Omdurman, moving whole communities several hundred miles and settling them as a garrison population. Tribes that resisted were attacked and deported, and grain was requisitioned for the capital and the armies. Between 1888 and 1892 Sudan suffered a famine remembered as sanat sitta, the year six, caused by drought, locusts, cattle disease and the disruption and requisitioning of agriculture; contemporaries described mass death and depopulated districts. Anglo-Egyptian writers after the reconquest claimed Sudan's population fell from around 8 million to 2 or 3 million under Mahdist rule, a claim later historians including Holt and Daly regard as propaganda built on invented baselines, though they accept the losses were severe. The state was destroyed by the Anglo-Egyptian campaign of 1896-98, in which some 11,000 Mahdist fighters were killed at Omdurman in a single morning.
The Khalifa Abdallahi's Mahdist state moved western Sudanese tribes to the capital, deported opponents and requisitioned grain during a catastrophic famine
Contemporary Egyptian administrative estimates and the reconstruction by H. A. MacMichael put the Sudan at roughly 7-8.5 million before the Mahdiyya, falling to 2-3 million by the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest in 1898. Those figures were compiled by the incoming colonial administration and had an obvious interest in blackening the Mahdist record; modern historians accept a large decline from war, the famine of 1889 and epidemic disease but regard the specific numbers as unreliable.
The low end reflects historians' cautious reading of famine mortality in the affected provinces; the high end reflects the larger figures in colonial-era accounts, which modern scholarship treats as inflated. Deaths combine famine, epidemic disease and campaign killings, and none of the figures rest on records.
European captives' memoirs and Egyptian intelligence reports, used by Holt and Daly, describe grain requisitioning, forced migration and punitive campaigns against dissenting tribes.
Sudan