author
Charles Neufeld
1856–1918
Best known for a gripping firsthand account of captivity in Sudan, this German-born merchant wrote from hard experience rather than secondhand history. His memoir helped give English-language readers a vivid picture of Omdurman at the end of the 19th century.
2 Audiobooks
Under the Rebel's Reign
by Charles Neufeld
A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve Years Captivity at Omdurman
by Charles Neufeld
About the author
Born in 1856 and later known in English as Charles Neufeld, Karl Neufeld was a German merchant whose life took an extraordinary turn in Sudan. He became widely known after being held by the Mahdist state for around twelve years and then publishing a memoir of that experience.
His best-known book, A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve Years' Captivity at Omdurman, drew on those years in captivity and introduced many readers to daily life, politics, and danger in the region as he had seen it. The book's appeal comes from its immediacy: it reads as the work of someone who lived through the events he describes.
Neufeld died in 1918. Today he is remembered less as a conventional literary figure than as a witness whose writing preserves a dramatic and unusual personal record of Sudan in a turbulent era.