Letter from Darfur Pieter TeschDavid Drew, chairman of the Westminster All-Party Group on Sudan, while leaving the presidential palace on the banks of the Blue Nile in Khartoum recently, said to his two colleagues: "Lucky enough, we were spared being taken to the stairs where Gordon was speared by the Mahdists."
On a previous visit, Vice-President Ali Osman Taha had taken the Labour MP to the spot where Charles Gordon, the ill-fated British general, was killed in the then governor-general's palace in 1885 as the Mahdist forces overran Khartoum, a scene immortalised by Charlton Heston in the film Khartoum. It took the British another 13 years to defeat the Mahdist army in the bloody battle of Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, with an Anglo-Egyptian force commanded by Gen Horatio Kitchener. The recaptured city is now seat of the national assembly in the independent state of Sudan.
The international community now involved in Sudan - in the south, where the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 brought an end to the civil war, and in trying to find a solution to the civil war in Darfur in the west - now rightly or wrongly looks to the former colonial power for wisdom.
Strictly speaking, Sudan was never a British colony in the chain along east Africa from the Cape to Cairo, but was a condominium jointly ruled with Egypt. Nonetheless, the British tried to keep the Egyptians out of Sudanese affairs until the nationalist President Nasser forced them to grant Sudanese independence in 1956.
It may be that when visiting diplomats look closer they will learn that many of the modern grievances of southern Sudan or Darfur in the west, such as marginalisation, are rooted in the colonial policy of promoting development centrally, around Khartoum. This policy has left the south and west at the mercy of young colonial administrators who hunt big game and study exotic tribes.
On a recent visit the British parliamentary delegation found that the Sudanese by and large value their British historical links, but expect different things from the UK government, depending on their perspective.
In Juba, the capital of the new autonomous south Sudan, photographs can still be seen of the young crown princess Elizabeth landing on the White Nile on her way back from Kenya after the death of her father, George V.
The old Juba Hotel, where the future queen stayed, is in ruins after Africa's longest civil war, while the Dutch knocked down the old governor's residence to make way for the brand new building which houses the Joint Donor's Office, which channels European aid to the government of south Sudan.
In a meeting in el Geneina, the state capital of west Darfur on the border with Chad, Prince Asaad Abdul Rachman Bay el Dein, younger brother of the Sultan of the Massalit, the local major African ethnic group, told the British parliamentarians of his pride at the photo of his father attending the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952. Darfur was only incorporated into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan after the Fur Sultan Ali Dinar heeded the call for jihad against the British by the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople in 1916. The reaction was a swift but bloody campaign which saw warplanes being used for the first time in Darfur and the death of the sultan.
But Prince Asaad has now asked the British to send troops for the new hybrid African Union UN force, or Unamid, which is unlikely to happen. In Juba, the speaker of the southern Sudan legislative assembly, Lt-Gen James Wani Igga, reminded the British parliamentarians that the southern mutineers of the old colonial army asked the British in vain for help and mediation in 1955.
Opposition leader Sadig al-Mahdi, the great-grandson of the Mahdi who led the successful jihad against the Egyptian rulers of Sudan and their British backers in the 1880s, reminded the parliamentarians of the pitfalls of western intervention where humanitarianism was disguised as imperialism.
A strong alliance of imperialists and Evangelical Protestants forced the reluctant Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, to send Gen Gordon to Sudan to sort out its problems, defeat the "Mohammedan fanatics" and "save the negroes" from the Arabs. Similar emotional but simplistic imagery is used by the powerful Christian Right and Neocon coalition to argue for western intervention under the guise of the UN. Study carefully the history of Sudan first, cautions David Drew.