The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Must Egypt be nothing but a geographical expression? Must her five million inhabitants be as cattle over which are imposed drovers at will? . . . Egypt wishes to liberate herself from her debts on condition that the powers leave her free to apply urgent reforms. The country must be administered by Egyptian personalities . . . She does not always want ministers representing this or the other European influence.

  Yet the advancement of the new middle class was blocked at every turn. During Tawfiq’s tenure of office, the European noose became ever tighter. In July 1880, six European powers completed arrangements for the settlement of Egypt’s debt and finances. The terms required the government to assign two-thirds of its revenues to servicing debt. The remainder was set aside for administrative expenditure and left nominally in the hands of the government, but foreign controllers retained substantial powers, including the right to veto changes in taxation and fiscal legislation and to prevent the raising of new loans. In the words of one British official, Alfred Milner, Egypt was financially ‘tied hand and foot, unable to move, almost unable to breathe, without the consent of Europe’. European officials, moreover, were assigned top positions in railways, ports, customs, posts and telegraphs, even the khedive’s secretariat.

  The position of Tawfiq was invidious. He was required to serve as no more than a constitutional monarch, stripped of executive powers and removed from the traditional sources of authority hitherto available to Egypt’s autocratic leaders. Critics regarded him as little more than a debt-collector for foreigners. He himself was not inclined to offer much of a challenge. A former British diplomat, Wilfrid Blunt, recorded that he had ‘grown up in the harem more than with men and had been unable to rid himself of a certain womanish timidity which prompted him always to yield his opinion in the presence of a stronger will than his own’.

  The focal point of opposition became a group of army officers whose careers were threatened by cutbacks in the military budget demanded by European financial controllers. Within the officer corps there was already considerable tension between native-born Arabic-speaking fellah officers and the old Turco-Circassian establishment which had monopolised the higher echelons of the army since the era of Muhammad ‘Ali. Only four native Egyptians had managed to climb to the rank of colonel. Faced with the need to make cuts, Turco-Circassian officers sought to protect their own numbers and ensure that the brunt fell on native Egyptians. In July 1880, the Turco-Circassian minister of war, Uthman Rifqi, issued a decree restricting the maximum number of years of military service to seven, thus removing the ladder by which fellah recruits had reached the officer corps after entering the army at the bottom ranks.

  In February 1881, a fellah officer, Colonel Ahmad Urabi, emerged as the leader of a group of dissident colleagues prepared to challenge the military hierarchy. Born in a village in the eastern Nile Delta in 1841, the son of a religious elder, Urabi showed talent and ambition from an early age. After completing his primary education at the mosque university of al-Azhar, he entered a military school in 1854 and in just six years rose from the rank of common soldier to become Egypt’s youngest ever colonel at the age of nineteen. His career was then blocked by the Turco-Circassian establishment. He gained no further promotion. Placed under the command of a Circassian general, he recalled: ‘He showed a blind favouritism for men of his own race, and when he discovered me to be a pureblood [Egyptian] national, my presence in the regiment distressed him. He worked to have me discharged from the regiment, to free my post to be filled by one of the sons of the Mamluks.’

  During the 1870s, Urabi took part in the disastrous campaign to invade Abyssinia, returning home with demoralised troops facing demobilisation. Learning that he and two other colonels were about to be dismissed and replaced by Turco-Circassian officers, the three men decided in January 1881 to take action, setting out their grievances and demands in a petition sent to Khedive Tawfiq. They called for the war minister Rifqi to be dismissed and replaced by a native-born Egyptian officer; and for the cuts in troop numbers to be overturned. They were summoned to the Ministry of War and arrested. But two units of the Khedival Guard stormed the ministry building, freed the officers and marched straight to Abdin Square to stage a demonstration outside the khedive’s palace. At an emergency session of the cabinet, Tawfiq capitulated, agreeing to fire Rifqi and to make concessions over soldiers’ pay and terms of service.

  The incident propelled Urabi to national fame. In the following months, he became the leader of an alignment of disparate groups calling themselves the ‘National Party’: liberal reformers wanting a Western-style constitution; rural landowners determined to preserve their fiscal privileges; Muslim conservatives hostile to the spread of Christian influence; peasant representatives burdened by taxation. Urabi portrayed himself not simply as an army leader but as the ‘delegate of the people’. His origins as a fellah, once regarded with scorn, now counted in his favour. Like Egypt’s pioneering journalists, he spoke the tongue of the masses. According to Wilfrid Blunt, Urabi ‘began to be talked of in the provinces as “el wahhid”, the “only one” . . . for he was the only man of purely fellah origin who had for centuries been able to resist successfully the tyranny of the reigning Turco-Circassian elite.’

  Blunt tracked him down to a modest rented house near the Abdin barracks. The doorway and passage were crowded with supplicants. By appearance, Urabi came across as ‘a typical fellah, tall, heavy-limbed, and somewhat slow in his movements’, Blunt recorded. ‘He seemed to symbolize that massive bodily strength which is so characteristic of the laborious peasant of the Lower Nile.’ But when he smiled, Blunt saw a ‘kindly and large intelligence within.’

  The showdown between Tawfiq and the opposition came seven months after their first confrontation. Having at first appeared to be conciliatory, Tawfiq reversed course, dismissed his reformist cabinet and appointed his brother-in-law, a hardline Turco-Circassian, as minister of war. Urabi and his colleagues responded by organising a demonstration outside the khedive’s palace in Abdin Square on 9 September. Urabi then entered the palace to present Tawfiq with new demands. These included the appointment of a new cabinet, the enlargement of the army to 18,000 men and the convening of a national assembly. According to Urabi’s account of the meeting, given subsequently to Wilfrid Blunt, the conversation with Tawfiq was blunt:

  TAWFIQ: I am khedive and I shall do as I please.

  URABI: We are not slaves, and shall never from this day forth be inherited.

  Once again, with only the Turco-Circassian elite to support him, Tawfiq was obliged to capitulate. He agreed to install a new cabinet and to convene a new assembly.

  On the streets of Cairo, the reaction to Urabi’s coup, according to Blunt, was euphoric. ‘It is literally true that in the streets of Cairo men stopped each other, though strangers, to embrace and rejoice together at the astonishing new reign of liberty which had suddenly begun for them, like the dawn of day after a long night of fear.’ A flood of national sentiment poured through Cairo and other towns. British and French officials reported that the khedive had lost all prestige.

  The reaction of France and Britain, however, was one of mounting alarm. Both feared that unless Tawfiq’s authority was restored, their system of ‘Dual Control’ of Egypt’s finances might be at risk. The French foreign minister, Léon Gambetta, took the lead in proposing a vigorous response. In December, he drafted a Note intended to make clear that France and Britain were determined to support the khedive. The British prime minister, William Gladstone, preferred a more measured approach. He wrote on 4 January 1882: ‘“Egypt for the Egyptians” is the sentiment to which I would wish to give scope: and could it prevail it would I think be the best, the only good solution of the “Egyptian question”.’ But he was nevertheless keen to remain allied to France on the matter and hoped that a joint Note would serve to rein in Urabi and his nationalist supporters. In its final form, the Note pledged the ‘united efforts’ of France and Britain to guard against all internal and ex
ternal threats to order in Egypt and ‘avert the dangers to which the Government of the Khedive might be exposed’.

  To Urabi and his supporters, this sounded like a direct threat of intervention. The colonels and the nationalists united in an attempt to limit some of the foreign fetters imposed on Egypt. In February, Urabi was installed as minister of war in a new nationalist-minded administration. Tawfiq’s reputation slumped further. He was accused of acting on behalf of European interests and of betraying his own country.

  The failure of the Joint Note put strains on the Anglo-French approach. France favoured trying to break the nationalist movement; Britain hoped for a compromise. Both were worried that Urabi would repudiate Egypt’s massive debt. After months of dispute, they agreed in May to a spot of gunboat diplomacy: a fleet of four warships – two French, two British – was sent to Alexandria.

  But the presence of foreign warships in the outer harbour at Alexandria spurred fears of an imminent invasion and served to strengthen Urabi’s hold on power in Cairo. Alexandria, a city with a European population of 45,000, long accustomed to flaunting their wealth and privileges, became a tinderbox. Anticipating trouble, thousands fled. On 11 June, a fracas between a British subject and an Egyptian coach-driver turned into an anti-European rampage in which some 50 Europeans and 250 Egyptians were killed. Urabi dispatched troops to restore order and to reinforce the city’s defences in case of a European invasion.

  In early July, the British fleet commander, Admiral Seymour, reported that Urabi’s troops were working on gun emplacements in Alexandria that threatened the safety of his ships and requested permission to bombard them if they did not accede to an ultimatum to stop. For domestic political reasons, the two French ships were ordered not to become involved and withdrew to Port Said. When Seymour’s ultimatum expired on 11 July, he opened fire, destroying not only the shore batteries but public buildings on the seafront. By sunset, the city was ablaze and Egyptian forces were in retreat. Another round of looting and mayhem followed. It took days for a party of British marines and bluejackets to restore order. Urabi withdrew his forces into the Delta, proclaimed a holy war against the British and placed army colonels in charge of Canal towns. Tawfiq, meanwhile, fled to a palace in Alexandria, seeking the protection of the British fleet.

  Fearing that Urabi might attempt to shut down the Suez Canal, the British government decided on an outright military invasion. The Canal had become a vital artery for the British Empire. More than three-quarters of the traffic it carried was British shipping. The French recognised the Canal was in danger but were paralysed at the time by one of their perennial bouts of political infighting. When the prime minister, Charles de Freycinet, asked the national assembly to vote for French participation in protecting the Canal, he was rebuffed. The British were thus left to go it alone.

  In August 1882, a British invasion force of 25,000 men took possession of both ends of the Suez Canal and prepared to advance from Ismailia to Cairo. Urabi mounted a defence at a fortified camp at Tel el-Kebir, sixty miles from the capital, but his forces were quickly overwhelmed. Cairo surrendered without a shot. Two days later Urabi turned himself over to the British. He was tried on charges of treason, sentenced to death but eventually sent into exile. Tawfiq, meanwhile, returned to the capital on 25 September and was met with obsequious cheers.

  On gaining control of Egypt, British ministers had limited objectives. They intended Britain’s occupation to be short-lived, lasting no more than three years. The plan was that during their interregnum the British would restore the khedive to authority, reform the administration, develop institutions of self-government, train and equip a loyal army and then withdraw their troops and leave behind a stable state prepared to safeguard British interests. Their overriding aim was to ensure that the Canal remained permanently secure for Britain’s use.

  To achieve all this, the British resolved to terminate the system of Dual Control under which British and French officials had jointly supervised Egypt’s finances. Though the British had no intention of turning Egypt into a protectorate, they wanted paramount influence there. British advisers were posted to every level of government. The real ruler of Egypt became the British Resident in Cairo. But Britain’s unilateral action in terminating ‘Dual Control’ was seen by the French as ‘theft’ and intensified the rivalry between them over Africa that was already underway.

  33

  THE EXPECTED ONE

  While Egypt was immersed in its own power struggles, in the provinces of its empire in the Sudan a rebellion was gathering momentum. The overthrow of Ismail as khedive in 1879 at the behest of European governments had damaged Egypt’s authority there, creating a power vacuum which enabled a charismatic Muslim preacher, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah, to spread the message of revolt. In September 1882, the month when British troops took possession of Cairo, Muhammad Ahmad’s Ansar army laid siege to the Egyptian garrison at El Obeid, capital of Kordofan province, where sporadic uprisings had started the year before.

  The man who would become known as the Mahdi was born in 1844 on a small island in the Nile near Dongola, a provincial capital in Nubia. The son of a boat-builder, he received a traditional education under religious sheikhs, showing an early aptitude for study. As a young man, he became a devoted adherent of a Sufi sheikh, Muhammad Sharif Nur al-Daim, the head of a celebrated mystical order named the Sammaniyya. His novitiate lasted seven years. In 1868, he was granted a preacher’s licence and moved to Aba Island on the White Nile, about 150 miles south of Khartoum, where he lived the life of an ascetic hermit, making occasional peregrinations to surrounding areas and gaining a reputation for extreme piety. He dressed simply in a white cotton shift, a jibba, which he repaired with dyed woollen patches when frayed or torn rather than replace it to signify his contempt for material possessions. He was also said to possess supernatural powers. His teaching of Islam became increasingly puritanical. He broke with his mentor, Muhammad Sharif, for permitting dancing, feasting and music at his son’s circumcision and attached himself to a rival sheikh.

  Rumours were rife in many parts of the Sudan at the time that the turbulence and mayhem the country was suffering heralded the coming of a mahdi, the messianic figure said to be sent by God to prepare the world for Judgement Day. In March 1881, after experiencing a series of visions, Muhammad Ahmad disclosed to an inner circle of disciples that he was the Expected Mahdi. Among the disciples was a Baqqara tribesman, Abdallahi Muhammad, the son of a soothsayer of the Taaisha, who had set out from Kordofan in 1880 on a journey to seek the Mahdi and made his way to the Nile after hearing reports of Muhammad Ahmad’s reputation. Abdallahi was to become the most prominent of the Mahdi’s military commanders.

  In June 1881, shortly after his thirty-eighth birthday, Muhammad Ahmad publicly claimed to be the Mahdi and sent letters to leading clerics all over the Sudan asking them to rally behind him and signing himself ‘Muhammad al-Mahdi’. The Sudan, he declared, needed to be purged of its corrupt Egyptian and Turkish rulers and returned to the austerities of the true faith. Anyone who did not accept his divinely appointed mission would be ‘purified by the sword’. In Khartoum, the Egyptian governor-general responded by dispatching a fully equipped military force to Aba Island to arrest the Mahdi, but his small band of fanatical followers, armed only with spears and clubs, routed it. The Mahdi’s victory was hailed as a miracle.

  Rather than wait for further reprisals, the Mahdi ordered his followers to head for the Nuba mountains of southern Kordofan, citing the example of the Prophet Muhammad’s hijra from Mecca to Medina twelve hundred years before. He had visited Kordofan twice before, preaching to local tribes and making contact with local leaders disaffected with Egyptian rule. At his remote refuge at Jebel Qadir, he gathered a variety of followers – Ansar, as he called them, a name the Prophet had used. Some accepted him as the true Mahdi, the Expected One, the direct successor of the Prophet, who had come to restore justice and harmony after years of oppression. ‘We shall destroy
this and create the next world,’ the Mahdi told them. Others who flocked to his banner included slave dealers, boatmen and soldiers of fortune, aggrieved by Egypt’s efforts to prohibit the slave trade, which Islam allowed. But the mainstay of his following were Baqqara cattle-nomads who had long resented the Egyptian yoke. The message the Mahdi preached to them was simple: ‘Kill the Turks and cease to pay taxes.’ The Baqqara also saw opportunities for plunder. The patched jibba was adopted as the uniform of the Ansar as a sign of equality.

  Led by Abdallahi and two other khalifas, the Mahdi’s Ansar army embarked on a jihad to overthrow Egyptian rule, overrunning one Egyptian outpost after another in Kordofan and defeating a well-equipped Egyptian force sent by Khartoum. By September 1882, only the garrisons at the provincial capital at El Obeid and one other town had managed to hold out. After a frontal assault on the garrison at El Obeid failed, the Mahdi set up camp on the outskirts of the town and settled down for a siege.

  An Austrian priest, Father Joseph Ohrwalder, who had been captured at a mission station in the Nuba mountains, was taken to see him there. Ohrwalder was to be held the Mahdi’s prisoner for ten years. He recalled:

  His outward appearance was strangely fascinating; he was a man of strong constitution, very dark complexion, and his face wore a pleasant smile . . .

  Under this smile gleamed a set of singularly white teeth, and between the two upper middle ones was a V-shaped space, which in the Sudan is considered a sign that the owner will be lucky.

  His mode of conversation too had by training become exceptionally pleasant and sweet. As a messenger of God, he pretended to be in direct communication with the Deity. All orders which he gave were supposed to come to him by inspiration, and it became therefore a sin to refuse to obey them; disobedience to the Mahdi’s orders was tantamount to resistance to the will of God, and was therefore punishable by death.