 However, he was recalled, following the death of the Mahdist leader Muhammad Ahmad in June 1885, and Bahr El Ghazal got abandoned by Ahmad's successors.Thus, the settlement was largely left to itself for almost one decade and ""reduced to an ill-presided collection of tumbledown buildings of raw bricks"", but was then all the more re-elevated to the global stage of imperialist competition around the "Scramble for Africa"