The Sudan: Family Affair

The U.S. moviegoer will soon know all about Khartoum. That's where the well-known dervish leader Sir Laurence Olivier and thousands of white-turbaned extras rode out of a Cinerama desert in 1885 and did in Her Majesty's General Charlton Heston (see CINEMA). The movie stops there, but the British did not. Thirteen years later, they recaptured the city and slaughtered 11,000 dervishes, including all known male descendants of the character Olivier portrays, the fierce prophet El Mahdi.

One member of the family escaped. The British overlooked the youngest of the prophet's twelve sons, who kept his father's sect alive, founded...