In 1863 Mexico had placed a moratorium on it’s interest payments to France, Spain and the UK.
Napoleon III chose to invade Mexico, and started a campaign under Maximillian to create a french Colony. His troops fell Ill from the tropical diseases, so he petitioned the Ismail Pasha the Khedive of Egypt, for Nubian Soldiers from the “Egyptian Army” with the hopes they would endure the climate and diseases.
The Khedive, who wanted to associate Egypt more with Europe than with Africa responded promptly to this request, 453 enslaved Sudanese where ferried on the Nile to Alexandria
They went on to win tactical battles for the french and were awarded medals and high praise at a parade in Paris, for their outstanding contribution to a war, that Napoleon III eventually withdrew from.
The surviving 350 odd returned to Egypt as decorated soldiers who went on to change history on the continent, like with the case of Slave abolitionist Samuel White Baker’s armed bodyguards he had named “the 40 Thieves” were Sudanese troops that had returned from Mexico to Sudan, were assigned to protect Baker, by the new Khedive.
The Memoirs of a Soudanese Soldier in Mexico chronicled the life of Lual Dit from the Shilluk tribe, renamed Ali Effendi Gifoon/Jifun. Was translated by Percy Machell and published in Cornhill Magazine in1896.
