Led by France, the European powers decided that Ismail would have to be removed altogether and prevailed upon the Ottoman sultan, nominally the supreme authority in Egypt, to act. The sultan was in as much debt to European financiers as Ismail and had little option but to agree. On 26 June, a telegram written in Turkish was delivered to the Abdin Palace addressed to ‘Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt’. His amenable son, Tawfiq, was installed in his place.
Ismail did well enough in retirement. A few days later, he sailed into exile on board his yacht Mahrousa, taking with him a vast amount of treasure from his many palaces. European governments added to his comfort by paying him a ‘competency’ valued at £2 million.
31
EQUATORIA
The empire that Khedive Ismail sought to create across north-east Africa fared no better. He wanted it to run the length of the Nile, reaching southwards for 3,000 miles from the Mediterranean as far as the equator. The route to the south had been opened up in the 1840s as a result of expeditions ordered by his grandfather Muhammad Ali, who hoped that gold and other riches would be found in the vast unexplored region upriver from Khartoum, the fly-blown garrison town he had established in 1824. Hitherto, the sudd, a dense 100-mile-long swamp of papyrus, ferns and rotting vegetation, had blocked the way. But in 1841, a Turkish naval officer, Selim Qapadan, had forced his way through the sudd and proved the Nile to be navigable as far as Gondokoro, in the land of the Bari, 900 miles south of Khartoum. Beyond Gondokoro, the river broke up into cataracts that continued intermittently for about eighty miles. Although the Egyptians found no trace of gold, they unlocked one of the greatest reserves of elephant country in Africa stretching for hundreds of thousands of square miles along the White Nile and its tributaries.
News of this new highway drew an increasing number of ivory traders, merchants, adventurers and missionaries to Khartoum. Some came from Europe – Greeks, Italians, Austrians, French and English – founding a cosmopolitan community with its own comfortable houses, shops and churches. A monthly camel post kept them in touch with the outside world, and luxuries such as wine, Bass’s pale ale, French biscuits, soaps and perfumes were imported via the northern desert.
One of the first traders to explore southwards was a Welsh mining engineer, John Petherick, who had previously been employed by Muhammad Ali to search for iron ore deposits in Kordofan, a venture that was unsuccessful. He made several expeditions to the Bahr el Ghazal, one of the main tributaries of the White Nile, returning with a hoard of ivory. The only use that local Zande tribesmen made of ivory, he reported, was for ornaments such as bracelets and necklaces. Ivory could readily be exchanged for beads, cowries and copper bracelets.
An ivory ‘rush’ was soon underway. Each year, in November, when the north winds began to blow at Khartoum, a flotilla of trading boats set out up the White Nile on an annual expedition to collect ivory. In 1851, there were a dozen boats; by the end of the season they had collected some 400 quintals of ivory, about 40,000 pounds, costing them about 1,000 francs in beads. Sold in Cairo, the ivory was worth 100,000 francs. In 1856, more than forty boats set out, returning with 1,400 quintals.
The trade became increasingly rapacious. Once supplies of elephant and ivory close to the Nile and its tributaries were exhausted, traders mounted expeditions inland employing armed gangs of Arab hirelings to establish fortified camps, zaribas, from which they sent out raiding parties. As well as plundering for ivory, they traded in slaves, taking advantage of local tribal rivalries to encourage villagers to attack their neighbours, abduct women and children and drive off herds of cattle and sheep which were ransomed for more ivory. A vast swathe of territory became known as zariba country.
One of the pioneers of this zariba trade was a Frenchman, Alphonse de Malzac, who became known as the King of the White Nile. After making a reconnaissance of Dinka territory in 1854, he established a zariba eight days’ march into the interior. According to missionaries, he adorned his stockade with the heads of his victims and created such terror that whole tribes fled the neighbourhood. His ivory business was so successful that after his first season he needed 500 porters to transport his ivory to the banks of the Nile.
By 1862 the number of boats setting out from Khartoum on the annual expedition had reached some 120. They carried parties of up to 300 armed Arabs, many of them former criminals, hired by traders to act as their private armies on raids to the south. ‘There are no longer merchants but only robbers and slavers on the White Nile,’ the Austrian consul reported from Khartoum.
The profits from these expeditions were considerable. An English traveller, Samuel Baker, who visited Khartoum in 1862, calculated that, in a good season, a trader employing a party of 150 men could obtain about 20,000 pounds of ivory, valued in Khartoum at about £4,000. The trader usually paid off the men in slaves and cotton pieces. This still left him with a surplus of 400 or 500 slaves which he could sell for £5 or £6 each.
The Upper Nile became the focus of Ismail’s imperial ambitions. In 1869, shortly before the opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail met Samuel Baker in Cairo and discussed his plan to mount a military expedition to annex the Upper Nile and root out the slave trade there. Baker, a wealthy, big-game hunter, regarded as one of the finest shots in England, had spent a year exploring the Blue Nile and its tributaries, accompanied by his young Hungarian lover, Barbara Maria von Sass, whom he had bought on sight for £7 at a slave market in Turkish-ruled Bulgaria and named Florence. They had since become inseparable companions. After staying in Khartoum for six months, they had embarked on a journey up the White Nile in December 1862, hoping to find its source. Baker had also been asked by the Royal Geographical Society to look out for its two missing explorers, John Speke and James Grant, who had left Zanzibar the year before.
Baker’s expedition had reached Gondokoro in March 1863. He described it as ‘a perfect hell’ where traders and their armed hirelings were forever drinking, quarrelling and firing their guns wildly in the air. By chance, only two weeks later, Speke and Grant staggered into Gondokoro on their way down the Nile after discovering its main source at Ripon Falls. Though they considered they had settled the matter, they encouraged Baker to continue his journey upriver and explore a possible second source, a lake named Luta Nzigé, which they had not managed to reach.
For the next two years, Baker and Florence wandered about the upper reaches of the Nile, beleaguered by incessant local wars, braving constant danger, often ill with fever, short of food and supplies and dependent for survival on slave and ivory traders. But they succeeded in finding Luta Nzigé, renaming it Lake Albert in honour of Queen Victoria’s late consort. Baker’s embellished account of his travels, The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, earned him widespread fame and a knighthood. He also emerged convinced about the merits of Egyptian expansion as a way of bringing order to the Upper Nile, and was therefore amenable to approaches from the Egyptian government.
Ismail offered Baker generous terms to take charge of setting up his new province of Equatoria. He proposed to give him the title of pasha, the rank of major-general and a salary of £40,000 for a four-year tenure of office. But the scope of his mission was entirely unrealistic. Provided with an armed force of 1,500 men, three substantial steamers and fourteen cannon, Baker was required to suppress a rampant slave trade, establish a chain of military stations all the way to the Great Lakes and introduce a system of ‘legitimate commerce’.
To make matters worse, shortly after arriving in Khartoum in 1869, Baker was informed that the government there had rented out the entire White Nile to traders. He summed up his assignment in pessimistic terms: ‘I was to annex a country that was already leased out by the Government. My task was to suppress the slave trade, when the Khartoum authorities well knew that their tenants were slave-hunters; to establish legitimate commerce when the monopoly of trade had already been leased to traders; and to build a government upon sound and just principles, that must of necessity ruin the slave-hunting and ivory-collecti
ng parties of Khartoum.’
Setting out from Khartoum in February 1870, Baker, accompanied by Florence, now Lady Baker, found it impossible to find a way through the sudd and was obliged to wait near Malakal until December when the river rose in flood before trying again. They did not reach Gondokoro until April 1871. At a ceremony at Gondokoro in May, Baker hoisted the Egyptian flag and proclaimed the surrounding territory – as far south as the kingdoms of Bunyoro and Buganda – to be part of the new Egyptian province of Equatoria.
In the remaining two years of Baker’s contract, he achieved little. He spent nine months trying to impose Egyptian rule on the Bari without success. Moving southwards, he reached the Bunyoro capital of Masindi in April 1872 and hoisted the Egyptian flag there, but was driven out by the young king, Kabareka. He retreated northwards and built a fort at Fatiko in Acholiland, then returned to Cairo in August 1873, leaving behind a land ravaged by slave traders, pillaging and warfare.
To replace Baker, Ismail hired a 41-year-old British army engineer, Colonel Charles Gordon, famous for his exploits in the Crimean War and in China. Gordon was a mercurial figure, a military mystic who saw himself as God’s instrument and believed he possessed mesmeric power over primitive people; he was notorious for his fits of violent temper and for his impulsiveness; but he also possessed boundless energy, an authoritative manner and a sense of mission that seemed well suited to the task. Ismail gave him the same mandate as Baker’s: to extend Egyptian territory to the Great Lakes, and to crush the slave trade. He offered Gordon £10,000 a year, but Gordon chose to accept only £2,000.
Arriving in Equatoria in 1874, Gordon set up headquarters at Lado, north of Gondokoro; hauled river boats beyond the cataracts and launched them on Lake ‘Albert’; and extended Baker’s line of fortifications towards the Victoria Nyanza. He sent a detachment of troops under the command of a young French officer to Mutesa’s capital, hoping to establish an Egyptian garrison there and turn Buganda into a protectorate, but was disappointed when Mutesa detained them. ‘Mutesa has annexed my soldiers; he has not then been annexed himself,’ Gordon noted glumly in his diary. He encountered many other frustrations. ‘I have been a good deal worn,’ he wrote to a friend at the end of 1874, ‘and I fear my temper is very very bad, but the people are trying and it is no use unless one is feared.’ Exhausted and disillusioned, Gordon returned to Cairo in 1876 and resigned.
As well as Equatoria, Ismail sought to expand his empire into other regions of the Nile. During the 1850s, Ja’ali traders from northern Sudan had penetrated lands along the Bahr al-Ghazal, one of the western tributaries of the White Nile which joins the main river 600 miles south of Khartoum. As in Equatoria, they constructed zaribas, forced the local population into slavery and sent thousands each year across Kordofan to the Red Sea coast for sale in Arabia. A Ja’ali trader named Zubayr Rahma Mansur emerged as the principal warlord in the Bahr al-Ghazal region, employing a private army of 1,000 men and using slave labour on farms and plantations around his base at Daym al-Zubayr. His network extended deep into the independent territory of Dar Fur. When the Egyptian authorities attempted to curb zariba activity in Bahr al-Ghazal, Zubayr marched against them. Recognising that he was too deeply entrenched to be overcome by force, the Egyptians in 1873 appointed him as governor of their new province of Bahr al-Ghazal. The following year, Zubayr joined forces with the Egyptians to invade and conquer Dar Fur, seizing its capital, El Fasher, in November 1874.
Ismail’s territorial ambitions also included lands along the Red Sea coast and the Horn of Africa. In 1867, he obtained from the Ottoman sultan leases on the strategic ports of Suakin and Massawa. In 1872, he appointed a Swiss adventurer, Werner Munzinger, as governor of the region, giving him the rank of pasha. Using Massawa as a base, Ismail then ordered an invasion of the highlands of northern Abyssinia. In 1875, a Danish artillery officer in his service, Søren Arendrup, led an expedition into Hamasien but it was routed by the forces of Emperor Yohannes. Another expedition led by Munzinger into Danakil country failed at the same time. Ismail tried to suppress news of the disasters and prepared for another invasion. In January 1876, an Egyptian force, which included nine American officers, left Massawa for the highlands but it too suffered heavy losses and was forced to retreat. Once again, Ismail tried to suppress news of the outcome.
The Somali coast also became a target. In 1875, Ismail’s forces occupied Zeila in the Gulf of Aden and gained control of the inland trading centre of Harar. But an Egyptian expedition further down the east coast to Jubaland ended in fiasco.
The idea for an east coast expedition had originally been proposed by Colonel Gordon from his base in Equatoria. Gordon believed that a better route into the centre of Africa could be found by striking inland from the east coast rather than up the Nile. He noted in his diary of 21 January 1875:
I have proposed to the Khedive to send 150 men in a steamer to Mombaz [Mombasa] Bay, 250 miles north of Zanzibar, and there to establish a station, and then to push towards M’tesa [in Buganda]. If I can do that, I shall make my base at Mombaz, and give up Khartoum and the bother of steamers, etc. The centre of Africa would be much more effectually opened out, as the only valuable parts of the country are the highlands near M’tesa, while south of Khartoum is wretched marsh. I hope that the Khedive will do it.
When subsequently learning that Mombasa was under Zanzibari control, Gordon proposed instead using the Juba River, further north, as a base. Ismail was captivated by the idea and, ignoring Zanzibari claims to the coastline there, hastily organised an expedition. ‘The mouth of the Juba is ours,’ he asserted in a dispatch to Gordon. The expedition consisted of four warships and 550 Egyptian soldiers placed under the command of a former Royal Navy officer, Captain H. F. McKillop.
McKillop sailed into Kismayu, a Somali port at the mouth of the Juba River under the control of Zanzibar, in October 1875, but the expedition made no progress in travelling into the interior and soon ran short of supplies. In Zanzibar, Sultan Barghash complained about the intrusion and the British government obliged Ismail to order the expedition to withdraw.
Although Ismail’s plans for a great empire in north-east Africa had foundered, he remained determined to hold on to his territories on the Nile. He had expended vast sums of money on them. They ran for some 1,640 miles from north to south and some 660 miles from east to west. Yet the administrators he had appointed to Khartoum were corrupt and lethargic. Outside Khartoum, the Egyptian government had little authority, except in parts of Equatoria. The provinces of Bahr al-Ghazal, Darfur and Kordofan were swarming with slave traders. In an attempt to establish a more effective regime, Ismail dismissed his Egyptian governor-general in Khartoum and asked Colonel Gordon to take his place.
It was a bizarre appointment. Gordon was an ardent Christian, a foreigner with a poor grasp of Arabic, unable to converse fluently with officials and dependent on translators. He knew nothing of life in Khartoum or in the provinces other than Equatoria. He was also inexperienced in the routine of administration and anyway held an abiding contempt for bureaucracy. An irascible, impetuous character, he relied heavily on intuition but was a poor judge of character and ill-equipped to deal with scheming underlings.
But Gordon himself saw the hand of God at work and threw himself into the task with relish. ‘I go up alone with an infinite Almighty God to direct and guide me and I am glad to so trust Him as to fear nothing and indeed to feel sure of success,’ he wrote. Arriving in Khartoum in May 1877, he began by issuing a stream of statutes and decrees from his double-storey palace overlooking the Blue Nile, trying to break through government inertia. But he found greater satisfaction by keeping on the move, seeking to solve the problems of empire by personal intervention. Much of his time he spent travelling by camel and horseback, covering distances of forty miles at a stretch, rushing off to Darfur to deal with an incipient revolt, dealing with slave caravans in Kordofan, riding to Berber and Dongola in the north, heading eastwards to patch up relations with Abyss
inia. But exhaustion and disillusionment eventually overtook him again. When Ismail was deposed in 1879, Gordon decided to resign.
32
DELEGATE OF THE PEOPLE
On the streets and in the coffee houses of Cairo and Alexandria, the mood of resentment about European intervention in Egypt steadily spread. There was much talk about ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’. The new khedive, Tawfiq, was widely regarded as a puppet of European powers. A new middle class was fast emerging, native-born intellectuals, journalists, teachers and administrators, all seeking greater access to the world of the elite dominated both by Europeans and the old Turkish-speaking ruling class known as Turco-Circassians. Urban populations were growing rapidly. Between 1850 and 1880, the populations of Cairo and Alexandria increased by 40 per cent. As a result of school expansion, urban centres now possessed a critical mass of literate residents able to form their own networks. Arabic-language newspapers, though subject to censorship, provided a platform for their ideas. The advent of modern roads, railways and the telegraph enabled them to set up national links. The railway between Cairo and Alexandria cut travel time from four days to eight hours.
The voices of dissent grew ever louder. Large landowners as well as the urban elite became increasingly critical of the austerity measures imposed by European financial controllers and agitated for a greater political role for themselves. A Persian political activist, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, resident in Cairo since 1871, drew crowds of young Egyptians to his gatherings at coffee houses where he warned that Islam was under attack from Europe and called for Muslim states to protect themselves from European ambitions. His message was taken up by the press, inspiring articles demanding greater independence from both Europe and Istanbul. Secret associations, some with revolutionary leanings, began to form. In 1879, a nationalist organisation, Hizb al-Watani, issued a manifesto urging liberation from foreign oppression:
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 33