King Gbudwe hated and despised both Egyptian Arabs and whites, dismissing them all in a memorable phrase as "dirty little crop-headed barbarians".
In the early 1870s, he fought a vicious civil war with his brothers after the death of their father, and after consolidating his power he went on to win several battles against the Arabs, French, and the British.
In 1882, after one disastrously unsuccessful attempt, an official expedition was sent against him by the Egyptian authorities in Bahr el Ghazal Province, whose governor at the time was the Englishman Lupton Bey.
One of Evans-Pritchard's informants summarizes his subsequent relations with his fellow Azande: "When he heard it said of a prince that he had many followers he made war against him, and he sent one of his sons in The Modern Mid Western Equatoria to reside there and to rule over the non Zande referred to as Awuro to be his subjects.
By this time, however, the main threat was not from the Arabs, but from the three European powers whose spheres of interest met in Azandeland - the British, the French, and the Belgian King Leopold's Congo Free State.
In 1904 Gbudwe was persuaded to lead an attack on some forts which the Belgians had built in his territory, even though - because of his policy of hostility towards all foreigners - he had still not managed to acquire significant numbers of firearms.
King Gbudwe's capital, Yambio was in an area that was allocated to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan when the border with the Congo Free State was eventually settled, and in 1905 a British column arrived there.