Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  “Sir Charles Wilson is clearly responsible for all those delays but, poor devil, he had lost any nerve he had ever possessed,” Wolseley wrote in his diary. He did not consider his own contributions to the fiasco: his insistence on advancing by the White Nile, the weeks lost to his Canadian voyageurs, the boats run aground, and the caution with which he had advanced on Berber. As he left the Sudan, Wolseley would fight two successful rearguard actions, one against the Mahdi, the other against the reputation of Sir Charles Wilson.14

  Freed from its promise of action, the government aligned itself with the public’s extravagant grief for Gordon. Packed services were held at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral, before a phalanx of mourners that included the Princess of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Granville. Shelfloads of songs, poems, abolitionist polemics, and imperialist appeals sprouted on bookstalls. The poet William McGonagall beat his fellow bards to the obvious rhymes for “Khartoum,” producing a dirge that fully justified his reputation as Britain’s worst poet.

  ALAS! Now o’er the civilised world there hangs a gloom

  For brave General Gordon, that was killed in Khartoum,

  He was a Christian hero, and a soldier of the Cross,

  And to England his death will be a very great loss.

  Like many of his contemporaries, McGonagall preferred to believe that Gordon had succumbed not to his own folly, but to treachery.

  Yes, the black-hearted traitor opened the gates of Khartoum,

  And through that the Christian hero has met his doom,

  For when the gates were opened the Arabs rushed madly in,

  And foully murdered him while they laughingly did grin.15

  A series of Gordon Boys’ Clubs opened for the encouragement of Gordonian tendencies among British youth. Spontaneous subscriptions poured in for memorials in stone and paint. The government engaged the admired Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Sir Hamo Thorneycroft to immortalize Gordon in bronze for Trafalgar Square. So many painters volunteered their speculations about Gordon’s last moments that the Royal Academy held a special exhibition. William Joy, a remorseless melodramatist in oils popular for historical items like Young Nelson and his Grandmother, and Flora MacDonald’s Farewell to Bonnie Prince Charlie, contributed a fantasia of Gordon’s last moments that would become a defining image of the Victorian era, either in spite or because of its inaccuracy.

  In General Gordon’s Last Stand, a mass of spear-waving Dervishes crowd around the foot of the stairs in the palace courtyard, their freshly laundered white jibbas contrasting agreeably with their black faces. As the defense collapses, Gordon stands at the head of the stairs in his Royal Engineers uniform, its redness suggesting the blood that is about to be spilled. A giant Dervish mounts the stairs, and is about to throw a spear into Gordon’s body at point-blank range. Although Gordon’s revolver is cocked, he leaves it hanging limply at his side. His only attempt to defend himself is to raise his left arm across his body before, like Jesus, he is pierced on his right side. To the public who sanctified his memory, Gordon died like a Christian martyr.

  Gladstone had escaped the Sudan, but he could not escape his own sacrifice. His coalition did not survive until the summer recess. On June 8, Parliament rejected his proposal to add a penny to beer and liquor taxes in order to fund the constant military involvements of empire. A cabinet exhausted by rivalry finally took the opportunity to resign, allowing Lord Salisbury to form a minority Conservative government.

  Gladstone cleared out his office. In the bare room where he had sealed Gordon’s fate, he knelt in prayer, “a moment to fall down and give thanks for the labors done, and the strength vouchsafed me there; and to pray for the Christlike mind.”16

  “KNOW THAT SHORTLY I shall come with the Hizb Allah to Egypt, for the affair of the Sudan is finished,” the Mahdi announced in February 1885.

  At Khartoum, the Mahdi planned the expansion of the new caliphate. He looked east to Christian Abyssinia, west to Morocco—from where admirers had written offering to join the revolution—and, above all, north to Egypt.

  “We will be on hand for the sake of religion, to expel the enemies of Allah from the land of the Muslims and eradicate them to the last man if they do not surrender or turn to Allah,” he warned Khedive Tawfik. Adopting Gordon’s printing press, the Mahdi sent out hundreds of proclamations into the countryside. While he waited for the response, he indulged in the fruits of victory.17

  In the hours after the fall of Khartoum, the Ansar had massacred, mutilated, and decapitated thousands of its inhabitants. They had enslaved thousands more, and had driven many out of the city and into the desert. Gordon’s mutilated remains had been thrown down a well. After the slaughter, the Mahdi’s three khalifas had rounded up the female survivors, brought them to his camp at Omdurman, and divided them into groups according to skin color. Penned up under the sun, many still spattered with the blood of their murdered husbands and sons, they had awaited their division among the Ansar’s leaders.

  The Mahdi chose first, taking all the girls of five years of age for future service in his harem. Then his three khalifas chose their concubines, followed by the rest of the Ansar. Those women who were not enslaved were left to starve. For weeks after the fall of Khartoum, women wandered naked through Omdurman’s market, begging for food. Mothers who had given birth in the street lay dying with their babies.18

  The Mahdi’s emirs took the best gardens in Khartoum. Khalifa Abdullahi camped in the grounds of Gordon’s palace; Khalifa Sharif in the Catholic Mission; and Khalifa Ali wad Helu took the house of Albert Marquet, a murdered merchant. The Ansar moved into the houses of the poorer Copts and Egyptians. Mirrors and fine china were destroyed with axes, cloth was hacked into squares to decorate jibbas, and gold and silver were stacked in the Mahdi’s personal treasury.

  Smashing up General Hicks’s stables for materials, the Mahdi built two wooden houses, one for him and one for his harem. Publicly he continued to urge moderation on his followers, but in private he indulged in Turkish sensualities. The Mahdi developed a taste for Persian rugs. He dressed in fine linen shirts and an embroidered silk cap. After years of sleeping rough, he took to sleeping in a bed taken from the house of a Khartoum merchant. After the hunger, he treated himself to colossal feasts. He had always been heavy-set, and the splendor and the savories made him enormously fat.

  He acquired so many concubines that they could no longer be crammed into their quarters and had to be accommodated in Gordon’s palace. Occasionally he ventured into Khartoum for “pleasure and debauchery” in the palace of his enemies; as in the days of his youth, the largest building in Khartoum was again a seraglio. He received his inner circle reclining on a gold-brocaded pillow, while female attendants fanned him with ostrich feathers or massaged his feet, hands, and neck. When he washed, the dirty water was distributed among those fortunate enough to drink it for its magical powers; the palace eunuchs also sold small pouches of the earth on which he had walked. When he presented himself to the faithful at the mosque, he changed into his old jibba, waddling through the crowd as his eunuch attendants cleared a path with whips, and women fell to kiss his footsteps. When he returned to his hut, he took off his jibba.19

  Outside the Mahdi’s hut, a shanty town sprang up at Omdurman. In the heat of early summer, with unburied bodies still littering Khartoum and Omdurman, these ramshackle huts became a hive of disease. Typhus, dysentery, and smallpox broke out. On June 16, 1885, as Gladstone prepared to leave office, the Mahdi fell sick with a fever. His wives attempted to cure him with traditional medicine. They brought him gourds filled with liquid butter and a concoction of pomegranate skins. They cupped him with heated gazelle horns and slabs of iron. They injected his urine into his eyes, they wrote prayers on his stomach and hands, and they wrote koranic passages on a piece of paper, washing it off and giving the inky water to the Mahdi to drink. Nothing worked.

  The Mahdi’s aides summoned Hassan al-Zeki, an Egypti
an doctor who had served in the Khartoum hospital under Gordon. Al-Zeki suspected typhus, caught from a flea on the plague of rats that had appeared in early summer. There was nothing he could do.20

  Within days, the Mahdi’s family and the khalifas gathered by his bed. Outside his hut, a crowd of anxious Ansar massed, waiting for the inevitable miracle. Inside, his inner circle watched his last hours. Mumbling and feverish, the prophet appointed Khalifa Abdullahi as his heir.

  “La Illaha illallah, Mohammed rasul Allah,” the Mahdi repeated several times. “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Messenger.” Then he crossed his hands over his chest, stretched his limbs in a final convulsion, and died. He was forty-two.21

  Beside the Mahdi’s body, his inner circle knelt before Khalifa Abdullahi and acknowledged him as Khalifat al-Mahdi, the Mahdi’s khalifa. As the corpse was washed, scented, and wrapped for burial, the news spread through Omdurman. The Ansar rallied in grief, unable to comprehend that their prophet had succumbed to mortal disease. Khalifa Abdullahi joined the Mahdi’s family at the grave dug in the floor of his hut, as thousands pressed around its walls to throw in a handful of dirt.

  Tears rolling from his eyes, Abdullahi left the hut. He ascended a temporary pulpit that he had ordered to be prepared outside the Mahdi’s house.

  “Friends of the Mahdi,” he called to the sea of mourners, “Allah’s will cannot be changed. The Mahdi has left us, and has entered into heaven, where everlasting joys await him. It is for us to obey his precepts, and to support one another, just as the stones and walls of a house go to make a building…. Never deviate from the path which he has shown you. You are the friends of the Mahdi, and I am his Khalifa. Swear that you will be faithful to me.”22

  So many Ansar queued to take the oath of allegiance that the ceremony went on through the night. Abdullahi al-Taishi, who could not read or write, now inherited the Mahdi’s empire, supreme caliph of more than a million square miles, from Wadi Halfa in the north to the Gazelle River in the south, from the Saharan wastes in the west to the hills overlooking the deep blue waters of the Red Sea. Most of this territory was devastated. The Mahdi’s revolution had destroyed the Sudanese economy, severed its communications, interrupted its agriculture, and massacred its government.

  “Ed-din mansur,” Abdullahi announced. “Religion is victorious.”23

  Then he turned on his allies. The Mahdi had built a coalition on the twin poles of his prophetic personality and a shared loathing of the Turkiyya. By August 1885, with the exception of a couple of starving garrisons in southern Sudan, his whole empire had been purged of Egyptian soldiers and Christian merchants. He had died at the moment of revolutionary success, when the next battle was the building of a state. As the leader of the Baggara, only Abdullahi had the military power to hold the coalition together. He had no other virtue. He commanded no support among the riverain tribes. Unlike his fellow khalifas, Mohammed Sharif and Ali wad Helu, he was not a member of the Ashraf. Nor, as an illiterate tribesman from the far west, could he pretend to be a prophet. The best he managed was an energetic propaganda campaign.

  Abdullahi announced that an angel had visited him in a vision to confirm that God, the angel Gabriel, the Prophet, and the Mahdi all approved of him as “a guidance in the earth from east to west.” It transpired that at the Mahdi’s funeral, Abdullahi had unwittingly ingested a hair from the Mahdi’s head. “The heart which this hair enters is safe from hypocrisy, and it enters it with a light. All this vision is caused by this hair.” Presenting Abdullahi with “a long light in the shape of a rope,” the angel passed on the Mahdi’s wish that Abdullahi quarter it. To anoint himself and his followers as the Mahdi’s true heirs, he must eat one slice, wipe his face with the second, imbue the Black Flag with the third, and scatter the last among the Ansar as they prayed. “Every rank that you command to its place shall be clothed by that light.”

  To complement his vision, Abdullahi compared himself to the Prophet Mohammed’s heirs. “In his time, he conquered only Mecca and Khaybar; the rest of the conquest was by the hands of the Caliphs after him.” The death of the Mahdi before the conquest of “Mecca, Constantinople and other cities” did not undermine the Mahdi’s messiahship; it only passed the leadership of his jihad to his “successors and companions.” Abdullahi’s rivals cannot have failed to remember that the Prophet’s heirs had soon fallen into schism and war.24

  He dealt with the Ashraf first. Assisted by Khalifa Ali wad Helu, he disarmed the third khalifa, the Mahdi’s cousin Muhammad Sharif. Abdullahi’s brother Yacub collected all of Muhammad Sharif’s soldiers, weapons, and stores, leaving him with a paltry bodyguard. Then, when another of the Mahdi’s relatives, Mohammed Khalil Zughal, the governor of Darfur, came to Khartoum with an army—either to swear allegiance to Abdullahi or, more probably, to assist Muhammad Sharif—Abdullahi sent out his troops to head off the visitors and arrest Zughal. The new governor of Darfur was Abdullahi’s young cousin Uthman wad Adam. Within a year, Abdullahi had displaced all but two of the Mahdi’s provincial governors. Of the two, one was so far down the Gazelle River that he could not influence Omdurman politics; the other, Osman Digna, was too important an ally to disturb, as his tribesmen kept the British and Egyptians penned up at Suakin and Tokar.

  Next, Abdullahi dealt with the few tribes who did not recognize his rule over the Sudan. The Kababish Arabs of northern Kordofan and Dongola had never acclaimed the Mahdi, and they had compounded this theological error by supplying the Gordon relief expedition with camels. In early 1887, Abdullahi captured a Kababish convoy and discovered two hundred Remington rifles and two hundred pounds in cash. He took this as a pretext for a campaign of genocide, displaying the head of their leader Sheikh Salih on the public scaffold at Omdurman. Then he massacred the Juhaina tribe on the western bank of the Blue Nile, whose fields produced most of Omdurman’s grain. The head of their chief Yusuf al-Mardi joined that of Sheikh Salih. Their fields went unharvested.

  In 1888, Abdullahi turned to distant Darfur. His imprisonment of Mohammed Khalil Zughal had tipped the province into open rebellion. An anti-Mahdist miracle worker, known as Abu Jummaiza from his habit of preaching under a wild fig tree, rallied a local coalition of Mahdi nostalgists and Darfur secessionists. In two years of brutal campaigning, Abu Jummaiza twice defeated Abdullahi’s cousin Uthman wad Adam before, stricken by smallpox, he was unable to lead his followers at a climactic battle outside El Fasher. Fighting with only swords, spears, and knives, Uthman wad Adam’s Ansar drove the rebels from the battlefield and massacred as many men, women, and children as they could.

  “The cavalry still continued pursuing till almost all were killed,” he reported to Abdullahi. “They followed them even as far as the caves and forests, where they tried to conceal themselves, but they were all killed. Even those who transformed themselves into apes, wolves, dogs, and rabbits—for the natives of the western countries can be so transformed—were also all killed, even to the very last. The number of their dead was countless.”25

  To complete his control over his empire, Abdullahi engineered enormous population transfers. He invited his fellow Baggara into Omdurman. He established his supporters along the road to Kordofan, his escape route should he be overthrown at Khartoum. He displaced the unreliable riverain tribes north to Dongola, as the first line of defense against invasion from Egypt. He ordered the Ansar to leave the Turkish palaces of Khartoum and decreed that they resettle around his camp at Omdurman. Khartoum became a ghostly museum of its final moments. In the streets, grass grew around white skeletons, their wrists and ankles tied together, still lying where they had been dumped during the sack of the town. Buildings disintegrated as Abdullahi’s followers ripped out fittings and smashed up brickwork for their projects.

  The Mahdi had dreamed of a tribal confederacy in the service of Allah. It had degenerated from pious millennarianism to paranoid autocracy, and a politics of war and massacre. Abdullahi’s campaigns of murder, expropriation, and population trans
fer followed years of chaos that had wrecked the Sudan’s agriculture and economy. Its exports shrank to no more than smuggled slaves and gold. In 1887, the first of a series of poor Nile floods tipped Abdullahi’s kingdom into massive famine. At the start of the revolution, the Sudan had contained about 8.5 million people. Eight years later, the pursuit of heaven on earth had killed more than half of them through war, disease, and starvation. Although Abdullahi’s priority was to centralize power at Omdurman, his warriors needed grain, loot, and fresh slaves. He had no choice but to direct their energies outward. It was time to resume the jihad.

  “The Prophet said to me, You are permitted to raid the Abyssinians in their land.” Overriding the Islamic tradition of not waging war on Christian Abyssinia, in April 1887 Abdullahi turned east. Like Khedive Ismail in the 1870s, he cloaked territorial greed with the pretext of avenging Abyssinian border raids. For nearly two years, Dervishes and Abyssinians clashed in battles of medieval crudity, hacking at each other with swords, knives, and lances, looting each other’s baggage trains and enslaving camp followers. Beneath Abdullahi’s gestures to jihad, the campaign was as naked in its violence and opportunism as a Turkish raid on the Gazelle River.

  Finally, in March 1889, Abdullahi’s general al-Zaki Tamal met King John of Abyssinia and his army at Gallabat on the Abyssinian-Sudanese border. It would be the last major battle to be fought almost exclusively with edged weapons. With appropriate chivalry, King John led the Abyssinian charge. For the first time the Dervishes faced their own tactic, the relentless human wave. But when John was mortally injured in the slashing melée and was carried back to his tent, his troops retreated with him. After the battle, the Ansar added the king’s corpse to their mountain of booty. Naturally they sent his head back to Omdurman as an addition for Abdullahi’s ghoulish collection. In 1889, the year the British army took delivery of Hiram Maxim’s new machine gun, capable of firing five hundred rounds in a single minute, Khalifa Abdullahi reached his technological nadir of the Battle of Gallabat.26