In late December 1933, a group of twenty-three Ja'aliyyin tenants in the Gezira Scheme submitted a petition to the local government asking for financial assistance. The Gezira Scheme had been officially inaugurated in 1924 on 240,000 faddans in the fertile Jazira plain between the two Niles south of Khartoum. The scheme, which focused on the commercial cultivation of cotton for export, was worked on a tenancy system and managed jointly by the Anglo-Egyptian government and the Sudan Plantation Syndicate (SPS), a private firm. C. G. Davies, the district commissioner of the Gezira, visited the petitioning tenants, who explained that the returns in the scheme were insufficient to meet their needs and that they feared that they would have to make the choice between paying for the labour necessary to work their plots and purchasing sufficient dhurra (sorghum, the staple grain) to feed their families. Davies was sympathetic to the tenants' complaint. When he brought the petition to the attention of the SPS's local managers, they insisted that the tenants were exaggerating and that, as Anglo-Egyptian officials subsequently recounted, ‘the general feeling in the Gezira still was that those inside the scheme were better than those outside’. Nonetheless, the SPS's management agreed to accompany Davies on an inspection tour.