In 1919, millions of Egyptian men and women took to the streets to protest against Great Britain's refusal to lift the protectorate that had been imposed on Egypt at the beginning of World War I. On its close, Sa‘d Zaghlūl, a seasoned politician who had previously been aligned with the moderate party, gathered a few of his associates for a meeting with the British High Commissioner, General Wingate. The group expressed their wish to form a delegation – a wafd – that would travel to London and then on to the Paris Peace Conference to plead the Egyptian ‘case’ for an end to the protectorate. Their request was rejected, and Sa‘d Zaghlūl was exiled to Malta. Egyptians reacted by taking to the streets.

The events in Egypt had immediate reverberations in Sudan. Sudan, which had been an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium since 1899, was theoretically a colony of two States. In practice, the British had had the upper hand from the beginning, but Egypt retained an important influence, not least due to the fact that the Sudan did not have its own armed forces, and relied on the Egyptian Army. Furthermore, thousands of Egyptians were serving as employees at all levels of the Sudan government. For as long as Egypt had been an informal colony and later a protectorate of Great Britain, however, the problem of Egyptian ‘infection’, as the British put it, had somehow been kept in check. Everything changed with the outbreak of the Egyptian Revolution.

In July 1919, to offset any effect Egyptian unrest might have on Sudan's status as a de facto British dominion, British administrators decided to take steps to demonstrate that the Sudanese had no desire to stand beside the Egyptians. They organized a delegation of ten notables, who included Sudan's highest religious leaders, to meet King George V in London to congratulate him on Great Britain's victory in the War. They praised British colonization, and thanked the King for all Britain's efforts in ‘assist[ing] in [Sudan’s] material and moral advancement.’ Their mission was vigorously condemned in the Egyptian press, however, likewise in Sudan: they began to be attacked as traitors or puppets of the British.