Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  This time, it worked. Led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Free Officers Movement overthrew the British puppet King Farouk. In 1956, President Nasser announced his intention to nationalize the Suez Canal—in order, he claimed, to fund the construction of a new Aswan dam. Britain and France conspired with Israel to secure the Canal and overthrow the rebels. American pressure forced their armies out of Egypt. Seventy-four years after Gladstone had promised a British withdrawal from Egypt, it finally occurred. The age of colonial powers had given way to the age of superpowers. At Port Said, a mob toppled the giant statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps with high explosives.

  Nasser led Egypt into a dead end of pan-Arab militancy and Soviet sponsorship. After the revolution, the cosmopolitan strollers no longer filled the Ezbekiyyeh Gardens. The traces of Khedive Ismail’s brave new Cairo crumbled. In 1971, Ismail’s wooden Opera House burned down, taking with it the original costumes, scenery, and score of Verdi’s Aida. The Abdin Palace became a museum. Ismail’s gardens at Giza became a public zoo, and his Giza hunting lodge became the Mena House Hotel, site of the first Egyptian-Israeli peace talks. In 1999, property developers tore down the Mattatias building, in whose café Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abdu had dreamed of revolution.

  General Gordon’s star rose and fell with the empire he loved and hated. After 1918, public cynicism about Britain’s leaders and their motives found glib expression in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. One of the icons whose clay feet were exposed was Gordon, characterized by Strachey as an imbalanced alcoholic. As empire passed out of fashion, Gordon’s statue was moved from Trafalgar Square to a public garden next to the Thames.

  IN 1899, BRITISH TROOPS hunted down Khalifa Abdullahi and the last of his followers in the woods two hundred miles south of Khartoum. Cornered, Abdullahi and his emirs laid out their rugs and weapons and sat down to wait for the Maxim bullets. Abdullahi was shot three times in the chest, one bullet through the heart. Once again, Osman Digna survived by slipping away at the last moment. He got as far as the Red Sea coast before, betrayed as he took a boat for Arabia, he was taken prisoner. The British imprisoned Abdullahi’s surviving emirs at Rosetta on the Nile Delta. Many of them died there, allegedly from neglect. The dead included Mahmoud Ahmed, Kitchener’s opponent at Atbara.

  After the battle, the Mahdi’s nephew Mohammed Sharif Pasha returned to Aba Island. When the British heard a rumor that he intended to stir up a new revolt, troops surrounded his house and killed him. The same year, the British allowed the archslaver and erstwhile pasha Zubair Rahmat to return to the Sudan. In 1913, Zubair dictated his autobiography to the British civil servant H. C. Jackson, who reported the “tottering and uxorious old Arab” to be fond of “the delights and dalliances of Cairo,” but otherwise a “venerable, courteous old gentleman.” Zubair died peacefully in 1913. A major thoroughfare in modern Khartoum bears his name, honoring the slaver who hunted his fellow Sudanese, and who might, but for the humanitarian lobby in London, have saved Gordon’s life.4

  HAVING CONQUERED THE SUDAN with the barbarous tools of modern war, for the next fifty-seven years Britain ruled it in enlightened selfishness. Contrary to imperial logic, the Sudan absorbed more resources than it produced. The Mahdi’s jihad had caused the deaths of millions from war, starvation, and disease. Some parts of the Sudan had been entirely depopulated. The surviving tribes were as divided by the Mahdi’s legacy as they had been united by his rule.

  Britain built a new capital at Khartoum, its avenues laid out according to Lord Kitchener’s sketch. To render the Sudan independent from Egypt, British administrators constructed a new Red Sea outlet, Port Sudan; Suakin, its Egyptian neighbor, promptly decayed. The British also organized modern systems of law, transport, and communications. By 1911, revenue had increased seventeenfold. By the 1920s, aggressive policing of Sudan’s southern and western borders had, for the first time in Sudanese history, virtually stopped the slave trade that had once consumed millions.

  Yet the underlying religious and tribal divisions of Sudan endured: northern Arab Muslims against southern Christians or animist Africans; settled riverain tribes against desert nomads. These divisions were not healed by the pragmatic British policy of installing the Mahdi’s heirs as their proxies. Under the Mahdi’s posthumous son Said Abd al-Rahman, his family aligned with the British to become the Sudan’s leading political dynasty. Meanwhile, Egyptian politics continued to spill over into Sudan. In 1924, Egyptian nationalists assassinated Sir Lee Stack, governor-general of the Sudan, in a Cairo street.

  In 1956, when the British left Egypt, they left Sudan, too. The new Sudanese government sent back the statues of Gordon and Kitchener to England. Gordon’s took up residence in the grounds of the Gordon Boys’ School in Woking, Surrey. The khalifa’s house at Omdurman became a national monument, replete with carriage. The Mahdi’s tomb was rebuilt with a shiny silver dome. Lovingly maintained, it became an international pilgrimage site. Outside Omdurman, the memorial to the Twenty-first Lancers killed in the wadi by Jebel Sarghum was fenced off to protect it from stones thrown by local patriots.

  Within two years of the British withdrawal, Sudan fissured into tribal and religious violence. Following a military coup in 1958, all power passed to the northern Arab tribes. When they reneged on their promise to grant federal rights to the southern tribes, the southerners began what would become the world’s longest-running civil war. Sudan became a Soviet client, and large parts of the Omdurman battlefield became a military base stocked with Russian radar equipment. By the late 1960s, aided by transfers of Soviet weapons from Nasser’s Egypt, the northern armies had killed over half a million southern civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands more. In 1983, President Jaffar Nimeiri announced the imposition of traditional Islamic punishments and made Sudan the first Sunni sharia state. In 1985, Nimeiri executed Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, a prominent advocate of Islamic reform, for apostasy. Later that year, the Mahdi’s grandson Saddiq al-Mahdi overthrew Nimeiri. But in 1986, al-Mahdi was himself overthrown by the National Islamic Front, led by Omar Hassan al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi.

  With the withdrawal of Soviet aid after 1989, Sudan collapsed into a failed state. Cited by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism, its only exports became refugees, slaves, and radical Islam, its only imports the grain from the United States and United Nations that prevented widespread famine. In the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden arrived as a guest of the government. The Egyptian government alleged that he imported hundreds of mujahideen from Afghanistan and intrigued with the banned Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

  “The rubbish of the media and the embassies,” bin Laden insisted to Robert Fisk of the London Independent. “I am a construction engineer and an agriculturist.”5

  As proof, bin Laden pointed to the new road he had built, connecting Khartoum to Port Sudan. Fisk’s article appeared under the headline Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace.

  In 1998, when President al-Bashir wanted America to lift its sanctions against Sudan, he expelled bin Laden and his followers. Among the engineers and agriculturists who left with him for Afghanistan were Ayman al-Zawahiri, suspected to be the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, and Wadih el-Hage, later imprisoned for life for his role in the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

  The Clinton administration responded to the embassy bombings with gunboat diplomacy, launching Tomahawk missiles against suspected terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan. The administration claimed that its single Sudanese target, the al-Shifa chemical plant in Khartoum, had been used to produce a precursor of VX gas. The al-Bashir regime claimed otherwise.

  In 2000, another extensive drought brought foreign aid workers back into Sudan. That year, government fighter jets dropped mustard gas on Christian rebels in the south. Dependent on foreign aid, al-Bashir endorsed a peace plan. Revisiting Gordon’s proposal of 1884, the plan offered autonomy for southern Sudan. Given that oil fields had lately been discovered in the south
, few believed al-Bashir.

  As the negotiations edged forward, the National Islamic Front continued to wage war on its own subjects. Its weapons included mustard gas, forced conversion, and systematic murder, rape, and slavery. In the western province of Darfur, Janjaweed militias, covertly supported by the government, initiated a campaign of ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate killing. On its southern border, Sudan supported the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan militia that enslaved children as soldiers.

  In May 2004, Sudan was re-elected to the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission. Two weeks later, an American-led Security Council resolution condemned the Sudanese government for the Darfur crisis. That July, the U.S. Congress voted to define the Darfur war as genocide. In September 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed this analysis. Human rights groups, modern heirs of the nineteenth-century “humanitarians,” were crucial in mobilizing their government.

  To ease the pressure, President al-Bashir signed a cease-fire agreement that no one expected him to honor. He began negotiating a power-sharing agreement with the Darfur rebels and consented to the presence of African Union peacekeepers. These gestures unlocked a quarter of a billion dollars in aid money. NATO helped airlift supplies and African Union troops into Darfur. A new Western involvement in Sudan had begun. As in the nineteenth century, it started with a humanitarian impulse.

  The U.N. Security Council had promised action if the al-Bashir regime reneged on its promises. Meanwhile, an international consortium of countries developed the Sudanese oil fields. China, a major investor, warned that it would use its veto to block a punitive Security Council resolution.

  Today, the price of a child slave in Sudan is thirty-five dollars.

  Glossary

  Notes

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes

  Prologue: Port Said, 1869

  1. “We are capable”: Queen Victoria, April 29, 1851, J. Morris, 196.

  2. “ God’s diplomacy”: Richard Cobden, cit. J. A. Hobson,Richard Cobden: The International Man(London: Fisher & Unwin, 1919), 246. Figures for industrialization: Hobsbawm, 50.

  3. In 1869, Britain and India exchanged 480,000 telegrams; in Porter (ed.), 251.

  4. Opening ceremony of the Suez Canal: Z. Karabell,Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal(London: John Murray, 2003), 252–55.

  5. “incessantly”: H. P. Measor,A Tour in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land in the Years 1841–2 (London: Rivington, 1844), 119; see Fahmy, K.,All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2002), 4–8.

  6. “notoriously addicted”: British Consul Charles Murray to Lord Palmerston, No. 30, July 6, 1848 (FO78/757). “execrable,” “servants,” “a moron,” and “Several have it”:Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, trans. and ed. F. Steegmuller (Little, Brown: Boston, 1972), 82 (January 15, 1850), and 65 (December 22, 1849).

  7. Mehmet Said Pasha trembling: Malortie, 69, n.310. “He openly confessed he could not control it.”

  8. “small people”: Palmerston to the Commons, August 23, 1860,Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (IIIrd Series, London: Cornelius Buck, 1860), vol. 160, 1724. “mutton chops”: Palmerston to Cowley, ambassador at Paris, November 25, 1859, E. Ashley, The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston (2 vol.; London; Bentley & Son, 1879), II, 124. “founded” and “the future”: Palmerston, Minute on de Redcliffe to Clarendon, February 22, 1855 (FO78/1156).

  9. Livingstone’s sales figures: Jeal, 163.

  1: Ismail’s Dream

  1. “Meanwhile it is singular”: Carlyle,History of the French Revolution (London: Chapman & Hall, 1837), I, ii, 38.

  2. Description of Ismail’s reception room: McCoan, 91.

  3. Ismail’s physical appearance: Elbert E. Farman (U.S. consul at Cairo 1876–81, later the American representative on the Mixed Courts),Egypt and its Betrayal (New York: Grafton, 1908), 9; see also [Edwin] de Leon (American consul-general at Alexandria, 1853–61), 97.

  4. Ismail’s daily routine: McCoan, 91. His constitutional and the quality of his cellar: de Leon, 100 and 188; McCoan, 20.

  5. “fat and clumsy”: McCoan, 18. Dicey supplies a subsequently popular alternative version, in which an English train driver drove off the tracks onto the barges at high speed. Nubar Pasha’s account matches that of McCoa.

  6. Ismail’s finances in 1863: Malortie, 71, n.326.

  7. “Gentlemen”: Ismail, January 18, 1863, in McCoan, 22–23.

  8. “the price of cotton”: D. Landes, 240. “began to buy their own”: “The peasantry of Egypt, who suddenly gained extraordinary sums of money for their cotton during the American Civil War, spent some of their profits in the purchase of slaves to help them in the cultivation of their lands”; and, “Nearly all of the slaves who had applied at Mansura for their emancipation were agricultural, not domestic”: Consul Reade to Stanley, Alexandria, August 9, 1876 (FO141/63).

  9. Ismailia quarter: de Leon, 33.

  10. “Shades of the Pharaohs!”: McCoan, 48. TheLevant Herald was printed at Constantinople.

  11. “a thrifty, saving landlord”: M. Bell,Khedives and Pashas: Sketches of Contemporary Egyptian Rulers & Statesmen, by One Who Knows Them Well (London: Sampson & Low, 1884), 71.

  12. The Agricultural Society and the Egyptian Steam Navigation Company: Douin, G.,Histoire du Règne du Khédive Ismail (3 vol.; Rome: Stampata, 1933–38), I, 241–47 and 250–57.

  13. “I am morecanaliste”: Ismail to the French consul, January 1863, in C. W. Hallberg,The Suez Canal: Its History & Diplomatic Importance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931, 375.

  14. “to buy his liberty”: The Civil Tribunal of the Seine ruled in the case of Nubar Pasha versus the Canal Company on February 28, 1864.

  15. “a capital for his colony”: See R. C. Stevenson, “Old Khartoum, 1821–85,” inSNR,XLVII (1966), 1–38.

  16. “the cattle-herding Baggara”: Estimated slave-holding among the Baggara, 40 percent; among riverain agriculturalists, 25 percent; in towns, 20 percent. Figures from P. F. M. McLoughlin, “Economic Development & the Heritage of Slavery in the Sudan Republic,” inAfrica, XXXII (1962), 355–89. “At Berber or Shendi”: Jean-Louis Burckhardt,Travels in Nubia (London: John Murray, 1819), 343–44.

  17. “lined on either side”: Sir H. H. Johnston,Pioneers in West Africa (London: Blackie & Son, 1912), 90.

  18. “said to excel,” and Mehmet Ali’s gift: Burckhardt, 329–30.

  19. “ten to twelve years”: McCoan, 324. Burckhardt estimated that “five or six years are sufficient to destroy a generation of slaves” (Travels, 341–42).

  20. “Three thousand survived”: Henry Salt (re Sudanese conscripts in Upper Egypt,1822–23) to the Foreign Office, February 8, 1824 (FO78/126).

  21. “trickle of European adventurers”: At his death in 1871, the Maltese Andrea Debono left £12,150. Alexandre Vaudey began as secretary to Clot Bey in 1837–39. Returning to Europe, he got accredited as Sardinia’s vice-consul and came back to Khartoum with his nephews Ambroise and Jules Poncet. He got funds from Joyce Thurburn & Co. and, via the efforts of the Sardinian ambassador at London, a letter of credit from Lord Palmerston. Bruno Rollet arrived in 1831 in service of a French slaver and launched his own venture in 1839, also funded by Joyce Thurburn & Co. (For Vaudey and Rollet’s funding, see Thurburn to Murray, April 15, 1841, FO141/19.) John Petherick, a Welsh mining engineer, was sent by Mehmet Ali to investigate the rumored gold mines of Kordofan and entered the gum trade. In 1850 he became Britain’s vice-consul at Khartoum, with permission to travel three months a year for trading. In mid-1851 he entered the ivory trade, and in 1856 was in the Bahr al-Ghazal with Bruno Rollet when slaving expanded in that district. In 1859 he was given full consular powers; the consulate was abolished in 1864.

  22. “In 1851” and “in 1863”: Petherick to Bruce, May 12, 1856 (FO141/320); Joyce to the Egyptian Trading Co., November 10, 1864 (FO84/1246).

 
; 23. “hostile tribes”: Joyce to the Egyptian Trading Co., November 10, 1864 (FO84/1246).

  24. “his desire”: Colquhoun to Russell, June 4, 1865; Petherick to Colquhoun, March 17, 1865 (FO78/2253); Green to Malmesbury, December 31, 1858 (FO84/1060). “Said treated himself”: M. F. Shukry,Khedive Ismail and Slavery in the Sudan (Cairo: Libraire de la Renaissance d’Egypte, 1938), 95, 99, 118.

  25. “two of the Khartoum consuls”: Petherick described his and Rollet’s 1856 exploration of the Gazelle River area in a letter to Bruce, December 5, 1860 (FO141/30). They were preceded in 1854 by a Khartoum-based “Egyptian” called Habashi; this surname (“Abyssinian”) was often given to the progeny of an Egyptian master and an Abyssinian slave.

  26. “turbulent and warlike tribes”: Petherick to Russell, May 5, 1860 (FO78/1542).“ a report from the Austrian”: Report of Dr. Josef Natterer, Austrian consular agent at Khartoum, to his consul-general at Cairo, April 5, 1860, enclosed in Colquhoun to Russell, May 29, 1860 (FO84/1120).“ Mr Petherick has a wild Arab sort of manner”: Russell’s drafts 1 and 2, April 2, 1861, and letter of April 16, 1861, enclosed in Petherick to Russell, London, March 29, 1861 (FO78/1612).

  27. “beautiful sheet”: J. H. Speke,Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1864; New York: Harper & Bros., 1868), 202. “sea of quicksilver”: Sir S. Baker,The Albert Nyanza, Great Basin of the Nile (2 vol.; Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co.,1866), 308.

  28. “large sums from European banks”: Ismail’s borrowing in the 1860s, his revenue in 1868, and the cost of the collapse of the Agricultural Society and the steamers, then known as the Khedivial Mail Line: Malortie, 134, 140–41.