The nineteenth century history of the Mission for Central Africa was the story of a failure. The Mission was founded at a time when the Roman Catholic Church had forgotten how to set up foreign missions. It settled in Egyptian Sudan during the rule of the Khédives, at a time when Mohamed Ali was modernizing the moslem State. The rule of the Khédives over Sudan was a combination between the past Ottoman empire and future European colonial empires. The missionaries had to deal with three types of power : the Egyptian state, the slave traders and the African leaders. Thanks to the support of the Austrian empire, the mission managed to build a working relationship with the Egyptian administration. The missionaries and the slave-traders, very powerful in Southern Sudan had conflicting relations hips. The interaction between the Catholic Church and the Bari, Dinka and Nuba leaders showed a slow adaptation of the mission to its environment. The failure of the missionary stations in the Nile Valley in the 1850s can be explained through the impact of the slave trade at that time and also through the difficulty for Europeans to understand African culture. On the other hand, the destruction, in the 1880s, of the mission situated in the Nuba mountains was the result of the failure of the Egyptian administration. The mission was destroyed by the Mahdists when they defeated the khédive's army.
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