strong brick structures, besides magazines well suited for their purpose." With regard to demographics, Junker observed: "so great a mixture of tribes has resulted from the Arab rule, that it is no longer possible to lay down accurate frontiers between the several populations." The most prominent slave, who was freed during Gessi's war against Suleiman, became Hatashil Masha Kathish. While this is how he himself wrote his birth-name, other sources spell it as Hatashil Macar Aciethiec or Atobhil Macar Kathiec. He was born around 1859 as the son of a Gok Dinka chief in today's Cuiebet and captured in 1876 by slavers, who renamed him "Salim". In 1880, he met the Church Missionary Society missionaries Charles T. Wilson and Robert Felkin in Deim Suleiman, became the servant of Wilson and joined him on his way back to England. There he was baptised in 1882 under the name Salim Charles Wilson and later started doing missionary work in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, becoming known as "The Black Evangelist of the North". Deim Suleiman remained the official capital of Bahr El Ghazal and housed many shops with craftsmen famous for their skills, though Wau became the greater commercial centre. According to Father Stefano Santandrea of the Verona Fathers, the first buildings of burnt-bricks in the province were erected under the rule of Gessi as well as the first school, "to which 17 chiefs were already sending their children. They were receiving instruction (in Arabic) together with over 100 children of the local troops". Gessi declared his expectation to draw government clerks from the indigenous graduates after a few years. Santandrea also reports that "a splendid new mosque was being built, and Gessi won many hearts by this act". It was the first mosque ever in all of Bahr El Ghazal. Gessi's successor as Ottoman governor (Bey), the Englishman Frank Miller Lupton, revived the official name Deim Zubeir instead of Deim Suleiman after his arrival there in December 1881. However, according to a British ornithologist, locals called the town "Juku". Mahdiya (1884/5-1898) In early 1884, a joint campaign by Mahdist rebels led by Emir Karam Allah Kurkusawi, a former merchant, and local Southern forces defeated the Turkish-Egyptian rule in Bahr El Ghazal, almost one year before the fall of Khartoum. According to the Austrian Rudolf Carl von Slatin Pasha, one of Kurkusawi's brothers had served as a commander under Lupton Bey and therefore managed