Many Copts emigrated to Sudan after Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s ruler (1805 – 1848) annexed large lands south of Aswan, establishing Khartoum in the 1820s. There he needed, as in Egypt, Coptic accountants and clerks to man the administration. He sent many Copts to Sudan in those capacities, and more Copts joined them later, particularly traders. They were to be found in all major towns of Sudan, such as Khartoum, Dongola, Halfa, Kassala, Gadaref, Al-Obeid, Berber, Sennar, Fashouda, and Gondokoro.
The population of these Copts is difficult to assess. Information is mainly gathered from European missionary and travellers’ accounts.
Previously I wrote about the number of the Copts in Sudan during the Mahdist State (1885 – 1898). The reader can review my article, Numbers and fate of the Copts in Sudan in the eve of the Mahdist revolution in 1881 and after the Anglo Egyptian reconquest in 1898 (July 24, 2020). The numbers given of 77 families, around four hundred souls, must have been higher before the Mahdist captured Khartoum in 1885, as many left for Egypt, others died or murdered, and yet a third group was unaccounted for. Anyway, by the fall of the Mahdist State, 69 families, around 350 persons, could be counted in Khartoum and Omdurman (Omdurman was established across the White Nile from Khartoum by the Mahdist, and it became their capital).
I can now provide my readers of the number of Copts in Khartoum, the capital of the Turco-Egyptian Sudan (1820 – 1885) in the year 1842. This comes in a letter by the Italian missionary, Fr. Luigi Montouri, written in 1842 describing his journey from Abyssinia to Khartoum, and describing the latter. Father Montouri stayed in Khartoum until 1844, when he left again for Abyssinia. Before that he established the first school of the Catholic Church in Khartoum in 1843, which included “some white, black and mulatto boys”.[1] The school made of mud-built hut included some Copts also.[2]
Fr. Montouri writes:
The city has nearly 13,000 inhabitants. With the exception of 200 Copts, a few Catholics, Turks, and Algerians, these are Arabs from the neighbouring provinces.[3]
Here we have, then, possibly the earliest estimation of the Coptic population in Khartoum after their descend into Sudan following its annexation to Egypt in 1820.
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[1] See: The Development of Catholic Schools in the Republic of Sudan by Jorge Carlos Naranjo Alcaide in HSE – Social and Education History, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2019, pp. 83-111. It was Fr. Montouri not Daniel Camboni (1831 – 1881), another Italian missionary, who established the first Catholic school in Khartoum.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Khartoum in 1842 (Fr. Luigi Montouri). Three Impressions of Khartoum During the Turkiya: (from the letters and diaries of Italian missionaries) in Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. 41 (1960), p. 102.
