Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  The armies of Allah had depopulated the countryside and treated the farming population as a source of free food and fresh manpower. The 150,000 residents of Omdurman obtained most of their grain from the south. But by 1888, there were no reserves of grain at Omdurman, because Abdullahi’s general al-Zaki Tamal had massacred the farmers in order to take control of their lands. When the rains failed in 1888, tribes across the Sudan suffered mass starvation. At night, jackals came into the villages and dragged half-dead people from their beds. Abdullahi issued orders for the centralization of all grain stocks at Omdurman. The entire population of the Nile Valley south of Berber either died in its homes or staggered to the capital.

  If they survived the journey, they found that Abdullahi used food as a political weapon. Abdullahi’s fellow Baggara had first access to any grain at discounted prices, and while an inflated market in looted grain ran in Omdurman throughout the famine, there was no food for the riverain tribes. People took the dried camel skins from the roofs of their shacks and roasted them, they made a kind of bread from powdered animal bones, and they died in the marketplace as they searched for scraps.

  “As one walked along, one could count fifty dead bodies lying in the streets, and this quite irrespective of those who died in their own homes,” wrote Father Joseph Ohrwalder, an Austrian missionary held in Omdurman. In the market, vendors stood over their goods with big sticks in their hands, beating back the walking, sunken-eyed skeletons. “Sometimes twenty or thirty of these miserable, starving people would join together and, regardless of the blows showered upon them, which covered their bodies with wounds and bruises, they would wildly attack the sellers, madly seize whatever they could lay their hands upon, and swallow it on the spot, begrimed with dust, and probably besmeared with their own blood.”

  Those fortunate enough to buy food used weapons to fight their way back home past gangs of starving vagrants. Cannibalism broke out. When soldiers broke into the home of one half-starved woman, they found that she had eaten all but “an ear and a piece of a leg” of her infant son. There were so many dead bodies that the khalifa ordered his men to simply tip them into the Nile or dump them in the desert to the north of the town, where the wind and sand polished their bones “like glass.” The next harvest was better, but it attracted a plague of locusts. For the next four years, seasonal swarms ate everything in their path.15

  The more Abdullahi favored his fellow Baggara, the more he alienated the Ashraf and the riverain tribes. The Mahdi’s family had never accepted Abdullahi as their leader. In the famine, the Mahdi’s widows had starved along with rural peasants. Abdullahi had already made the Ashraf junior partners to a dynastic union, marrying off his daughter to the Mahdi’s son Mohammed. But when Mohammed attempted to strengthen his power base by marrying a cousin from the Ashraf, Abdullahi forbade the marriage.

  In 1891, the Ashraf hatched a plot to overthrow Abdullahi. When he heard about it, his Jihadiya fought a gun battle in the streets of Omdurman with the Ashraf’s followers. The captured leaders of the revolt were shipped upriver in a Turkish steamer to Fashoda, where they were beaten to death with clubs and axes by al-Zaki Tamal and his men. Abdullahi kept the khalifa Mohammed al-Sharif in prison, in case he was needed for future military mobilization of the riverain tribes. After this purge, the Ashraf did not trouble Abdullahi again, but the conspiracy confirmed his paranoia that he faced revolt at any moment.

  Abdullahi retreated further from his subjects. He built a long wall around his home and the houses of his brothers and bodyguards. His early propaganda of angelic interventions and endless jihad turned into an erratic stream of despotic pronouncements. He banned pilgrimage to Mecca: Now the only acceptable haj was to the Mahdi’s tomb. He suspended almost all religious education: Only a minimal number of boys were trained as tax collectors and accountants in the treasury. He declared the Shaygia tribe to be outlaws and unleashed the Baggara on a four-day rampage of murder. He ordered all subjects to pray at Omdurman’s central mosque, an order derived less from piety than from the desire to break up what he called “social life,” the private gatherings at which his enemies might conspire. With manpower reduced by the famine, he banned the export of slaves. Only his powerful eastern ally Osman Digna dared to ignore this ordinance; Digna’s long guerrilla campaign against the Red Sea ports had been waged with little other intent than to reopen the slave route to Jeddah.16

  Hidden from the people and drip-fed with gossip and espionage, Abdullahi succumbed to fear and megalomania. He claimed that the domed shrine erected over the Mahdi’s grave, designed by a government architect captured at Khartoum, and built from materials recycled from some of its grander mansions, had been his own work. On his occasional expeditions outside his compound, he rode in a carriage retrieved from Khartoum. In case he wanted to ride a horse, he kept a giant slave whose sole duty was to lift him in and out of the saddle.

  The gallows, banned by the Mahdi as an un-Islamic symbol of the Turkiyya, returned to encourage the people’s loyalty. When the Batahin tribe turned against him, Abdullahi ordered al-Zaki Tamal to bring as many of its members as he could to Omdurman. After dozens had died in captivity, the remaining seventy were brought for public execution. After the first eighteen had been dispatched and piled by the gallows, the rope broke. Abdullahi executed a further two dozen by beheading, then sent for the town butchers, ordering them to cut off the hands and feet of the remaining twenty-seven. “Soon there was a heap of these bleeding members, whilst the bodies of the poor Batahin lay writhing on the ground, beads of anguish pouring from their brows.” Most of them bled to death where they lay, although a few survived to become beggars in the Omdurman marketplace.17

  “I WOULD NOT BE too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of those places,” Lord Salisbury told Sir Evelyn Baring in 1890. “It is their way. If they were allowed full scope, they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the Moon in order to protect us from Mars.”18

  Baring had not asked to advance up the Nile, only to expand the British foothold on the Red Sea coast by fifty miles, and secure Tokar. Salisbury granted him this adventure but, Scramble or no Scramble, he saw no urgency for further Sudanese expeditions. In Salisbury’s opinion, Britain had acquired its empire because its governments had found themselves obliged to support their traders and missionaries with troops. He distrusted the specialists at the War Office, with their conviction that trade and evangelism were the forebears of war.

  “When once you have permitted a military advance, the extent of that military advance scarcely remains within your own discretion,” he warned Baring. “Step by step, the imperious exactions of military necessity will lead you on into the desert.”

  Salisbury would only heed these exactions if they led to raw materials and new customers, or if they kept them from foreign control. His policy was one of pre-emption, but as yet he had nothing to pre-empt. In the meantime, he rewarded Sir Evelyn Baring for his patience by ennobling him as Lord Cromer.

  Nor did Salisbury see any domestic advantage in a Nile campaign. The public might be stirred by the acquisition of large tracts of desert, but Salisbury’s party was still traumatized by Gordon’s simultaneous assault on Khartoum and the Gladstone government. “They were so deeply impressed with the disasters of six years ago,” he told Cromer, “and the apparently inexorable necessity which had driven them into situations where those disasters were inevitable, that they shrink instinctively from any proposal to advance into the Egyptian desert.”19

  The government already had wars to fund. In the early 1890s, Britain’s expanding empire faced frontier disturbances from Afghanistan to Nigeria. Salisbury justified these small, expensive wars as “merely the surf that marks the edge of the advancing waves of civilisation.” But he only fought them if they were obligatory. So long as he saw no “clear balance of undoubted advantage” in diverting forces and money to the Sudan, the Dervishes were safe in their brutal paradise. When Wilfrid Blunt
called this policy “a Machiavellian one,” he did not mean it as a compliment.20

  Nonetheless, Salisbury’s policy nearly succeeded. By trading cards of low value, he built up his winning Cape-to-Cairo hand. One by one, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, and Italy assented to his claim that Britain had inherited Turkey’s rights in the Nile Valley, receiving in return British recognition of their claims. He bought off Bismarck by trading the British-held Baltic island of Heligoland for German claims to the Congo. He shunted the “tiresome little Power” Portugal out of the East African hinterland by ordering the fleet to coal up and prepare for war.21

  Negotiations with Italy were trickier, not least because Britain’s alliance with Italy underpinned Salisbury’s Mediterranean policy. Back in February 1885, as the Egyptian garrison had withdrawn from the Red Sea port of Massowa, Gladstone had frustrated a suspected French intention to annex the port by inviting Italy to take it over until Egypt could recover it. Gradually the Italians expanded from the coast, fighting King John of Abyssinia to establish their first African colony, Eritrea.

  In May 1889, after King John’s death at the hands of the Mahdists at Gallabat, Italy signed a treaty with his rival, King Menelik of Shoa, and recognized him as emperor of Abyssinia. Menelik gave Italy a piece of the Abyssinian highlands, and the Italians gave him five thousand rifles, 2 million bullets and eighty thousand pounds in cash. Then the Italian premier Francesco Crispi turned on Menelik. Invoking the Berlin Act, Crispi announced that Italy had appointed itself protector over Abyssinia. Menelik pointed to the relevant clause of his treaty with the Italians, but as his Amharic translation differed from the Italian original, this did not help him.

  As the Italians moved up the coast toward Suakin and inland toward the key town of Kassala, Sir Evelyn Baring rang the alarm. Clearly, Crispi would not settle for a temporary toehold on the coast. Italy threatened the Suakin-Berber road, and if took Kassala, it would also control the headwaters of the Atbara River, a major Nile tributary. When Baring met with Crispi in Naples, the Italian premier rejected Britain’s claim to the Nile Valley.

  This was why Salisbury allowed Baring to send Egyptian troops to take Tokar: If Britain did not get there first, then Italy would. Fortunately for Salisbury, in February 1891 Crispi’s adventurous and expensive colonial policy brought about his fall from office. His successor, the Marquis di Rudini, backed down. That summer, Britain and Italy agreed that Tokar belonged to Egypt, that Egyptian and Italian troops would cooperate against Osman Digna, and that Italy could hold Kassala so long as the war against the Dervishes required it.

  Salisbury’s diplomacy turned the Scramble into an orderly takeover. But the premier who specialized in foreign policy had less feel for domestic affairs. Outflanked by Gladstone’s promise of another Reform Act, and his accusation that the Conservatives intended to betray Free Trade and bring in protectionism, Salisbury failed to win the 1892 election outright. Although the Conservatives won the majority of the votes and a majority of English seats, they did not win a majority of Commons seats. Swayed by Gladstone’s promise of another attempt at Home Rule, the Irish Nationalist MPs turned to the Liberal Party and formed a coalition government.

  Eighty-two years of age, Gladstone returned for his fourth ministry in physical and mental decline. Already blind in his right eye, while campaigning at Chester he had been hit in his good eye by a “hard-baked little gingerbread” flung at two yards’ range by “a middle-aged bony woman.”

  His sight never fully recovered. Within a year of the election, his vision had become so fogged that reading and writing were difficult. Instead of undoing Salisbury’s foreign policy, he concentrated on holding together his narrow majority and pushing through Parliament the Home Rule Bill that he hoped would crown his career. He could not risk confrontation with his foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery. A “Liberal Imperialist” who had supported “forward” policy in Egypt in 1882, Rosebery now continued to advance Salisbury’s African policy as though the government had never changed.22

  AS A YOUNG MAN, Rosebery had three ambitions: to marry an heiress, to own the horse that won the Derby, and to become prime minister. Like Gladstone and Salisbury a product of Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Rosebery left Oxford without a degree after being forced to choose between his studies and his ownership of a racehorse. Like Salisbury, his early travels in Britain’s white colonies made him a convinced imperialist. By his early thirties, he had married Hannah Rothschild and entered politics, collaborating with Gladstone on the Midlothian campaign. In the 1880s, as Gladstone’s foreign policy failed, Rosebery became a potential Liberal leader: a Whiggish aristocratic by birth, an imperialist by choice, and one of the few Liberals of whom Queen Victoria approved.

  He was also petulant, nervous, prone to outbursts of anger, and as a rumored bisexual, the subject of a whispering campaign by the Marquess of Queensberry, the hunter of Oscar Wilde. Gladstone thought Rosebery one of the most able men he had ever met, and one of the most honest, too, but quite lacking in common sense.

  He also had no diplomatic experience. In Africa, Rosebery charged where Salisbury had tiptoed. Salisbury had approached the question of the Nile from the Mediterranean, but Rosebery worked from the other end of the river: If the security of Egypt rested ultimately on its water supply, then Britain must control Lake Victoria, the source of the White Nile. In turn, this required land access to the lake from the coast of Kenya. Facing Belgian and French expansion in the Congo, Rosebery judged that he must act immediately to secure the headwaters of the Nile. Without consulting Gladstone, he planned the immediate annexation of Uganda, the creation of a railway connecting it to the East African coast, and the expansion of British influence into the southern Sudan.

  In Rosebery’s plan, Gladstone recognized the hatching of the “African egg” that he had warned against, and the mutation of his party. He responded scathingly, “I thought it was a pleading from a Missionary society or from the Company, or should have thought so, but for the date from the Foreign Office.”

  Gladstone’s perennial ally Sir William Harcourt joined in, calling it “Jingoism with a vengeance,” and promising that he preferred to “die a thousand deaths, rather than have anything to do with it.” Capitalizing on the split between ancient and modern Liberals, Salisbury weighed in, insisting he had always intended to annex Uganda when the time was right.23

  Gladstone threatened to veto Rosebery’s plan. Rosebery responded by offering to resign. To save the government and his Home Rule Bill, Gladstone backed down. In September 1892, he suggested a compromise: Pending a final decision, the government should temporarily subsidize the East Africa Company’s operations in Uganda, while a commissioner went there to ascertain the situation. Rosebery accepted this and, like Gladstone, tried to create a situation that would force his opponent’s hand. Rosebery won, and not just because the tide of political and public opinion had turned for Imperialism. While Gladstone invited the French ambassador for talks on a British withdrawal from Egypt, Lord Cromer issued a cry for help from the other end of the Nile.

  That summer, Khedive Tawfik had died suddenly, less from illness than his doctors’ ineptitude. Cromer expected Tawfik’s eighteen-year-old son Abbas II to be as pliant as his father. Abbas, freshly graduated from an Austrian military school, resented Cromer’s attempt to fit him with the short khedivial leash. Impertinently, the new khedive appointed nationalists as ministers. To Cromer, this smacked of Urabist anarchy. He requested the urgent reinforcement of the British garrison.

  Gladstone replied that he preferred to “put a torch to Westminster Abbey” rather than to send more troops to Egypt. But his Home Rule Bill had just passed in the Commons, and he could not lose Rosebery now. Gladstone gave Cromer his troops, and Rosebery control over the government’s Egyptian policy.

  Gladstone’s Egyptian tragedy of 1882 repeated itself as the farce of 1892. Though he could not create a policy, the old prime minister continued to stall Rosebery’s plans for another year, eve
n as the French press announced the departure of a Gallic expedition for central Africa. Once again, the Home Rule controversy broke the stalemate, and once again domestic divisions had crucial effects on foreign policy.

  On September 9, 1893, the House of Lords rejected Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. Gladstone hung on for another six months. At one point, he took a month’s holiday in Biarritz and forbade the cabinet from convening in his absence. But on March 3, physically exhausted, partially deaf, and mostly blind, he faced his final failure. He resigned, and retreated to the Lords.24

  Gladstone wanted Sir William Harcourt to succeed him as prime minister, but Queen Victoria insisted upon Lord Rosebery. Two days into his premiership, Rosebery moved on Africa.

  “The time has arrived when British policy [regarding] the Great Lakes, which form the sources of the Nile, must be defined,” he told Cromer.

  As British, French, and German plans converged on the center of Africa, the smallest of their competitors, Belgium, capitalized on the rising tension. Despite ruling a small European country better known for chocolate truffles than military prowess, King Leopold II had already secured in the Congo a gigantic colony the size of the Sudan. Using humanitarianism as a cover for exploitation, he instituted a regime of industrial deforestation and systematic slavery that enforced the benefits of the European way by chopping the hands off any Congolese who objected. Leopold now gained further leverage by offering Belgian support to both Britain and France, each of whom wanted to block the other’s advance into central Africa. He obtained an agreement from Britain first: In May 1894, Rosebery agreed to lease to Belgium the left bank of the White Nile from Lake Albert to Fashoda for the rest of Leopold’s lifetime.25