[3] Early in 1882 the Rizeigat tribesmen of Southern Darfur rebelled, led by Sheikh Madibbo ibn Ali, a convert to the cause of the religious leader known as the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad.

At Om Waragat he lost 800 of his men in the first 20 minutes of the battle and was himself wounded three times but managed to fight his way back to Dara.

When Hicks Pasha's expedition was annihilated at the Battle of Shaykan in 1883, Slatin finally surrendered to his old enemy the Mahdist Emir Madibbo, refusing to make any further sacrifice of life in a hopeless cause.

When the Mahdists reached Khartoum, an attempt was made to use him to induce the commander Charles George Gordon, now Governor-General of Sudan, to surrender.

This failing, Slatin was placed in chains, and on the morning of 26 January 1885, an hour or two after the fall of Khartoum, Gordon's head was brought to the camp and shown to the captive.

After the sudden death of the Mahdi the same year, Slatin was kept at Omdurman by his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, being treated alternately with savage cruelty and comparative indulgence.

[1] At length, after over eleven years captivity, he was able to escape,[15] with the help of Sir Reginald (then Major) Wingate of the Egyptian Intelligence Department and a local Sheikh of the Ababda tribe[citation needed],[16] in a perilous 1000 km and three-week journey across the desert, reaching Aswan, Egypt in March 1895.

[4][14] The German version was published by the Brockhaus Verlag in Leipzig entitled "Feuer und Schwert im Sudan.

[9] Raised to the rank of Pasha by the Khedive,[1][3][7] Slatin was appointed an honorary Companion of the Order of the Bath by Queen Victoria.

[21] On the eve of his surrender to the Mahdi at Christmas 1883, he had resolved, if he regained his liberty, to use the knowledge he would acquire while in captivity for the eventual benefit of the country, and after a year's rest he took part, as an officer on the staff of the Egyptian army, in the campaigns of 1897–98 which ended in the capture of Omdurman.

[11][12][13] In 1900 he was appointed inspector-general of the Sudan,[1][11][13][24] in which capacity his mastery of Arabic and his profound knowledge of the land and peoples proved invaluable in the work of reconstruction undertaken by the Anglo-Egyptian government in that country.

[13][14] His position as inspector-general of the Sudan terminated in 1914 due to the commencement of hostilities in World War I between Great Britain and Austria-Hungary.

[23] In 1918, on behalf of the Austrian government led by Renner, he was instrumental, through his British contacts, in ensuring the supply of food and coal from Czechoslovakia for the beleaguered and starving inhabitants of Vienna.

[8]: 288–289, 296, 300–301  In 1922 after the early death of his wife he moved to the South Tyrol and lived in a villa in Obermais a quarter of Meran.

[6] In 1936, a drinking fountain was erected in Khartoum in his memory, but the bronze portrait plaque and dedication were removed in 1956 by the Sudanese government, after Sudan became independent.

In 1967 the public-service German television channel ZDF produced a movie in two parts about Rudolf Carl von Slatin.

[49] In October 2011 a stamp was issued commemorating Slatin Pascha, Emmerich Teuber and the Viennese Scoutleader Kara Barteis.

[50] His captivity and escape inspired the comics creators Mino Milani and Sergio Toppi for a comic story with the title "L'Uomo del Nilo" (The man of the Nile) in a series with the title "Un uomo un'avventura" (A man, an adventure) by Sergio Bonelli Editore[51][52]