A History of the World in 100 Objects

by MacGregor, Neil

  The main function of the drum was music-making, marking community events such as births, deaths and feasts. Europeans dubbed these slit drums ‘talking drums’, because they were used to ‘speak’ to people at ceremonies and also to transmit messages over long distances – their sound could carry for miles – calling men either to a hunt or to war.

  In the late nineteenth century, Sudan was a society under threat. European and Middle Eastern powers had long had a presence in Central Africa, drawn by its abundance of ivory and of slaves. For centuries slaves had been taken from southern Sudan and Central Africa, brought north to Egypt and then sold on across the Ottoman Empire; many Central African chiefs collaborated with the slave-traders to carry out joint raids on their enemies, selling the captives and sharing the proceeds. This intensified when the Egyptians took control of Sudan in the 1820s, and slave raiding and trading became one of the most profitable and powerful industries of the region. It was centralized by the Egyptian government in Khartoum, which by the late nineteenth century had become the greatest slave market in the world, servicing the whole of the Middle East. The writer Dominic Green assesses the situation:

  The Egyptians had built up a substantial slave-trading empire, running from the fourth cataract of the Nile all the way down towards the northern shores of Lake Victoria. They had done this with some support from European governments, who were obviously concerned to get their hands on ivory as opposed to slaves, but were also concerned about the humanitarian aspect. The Egyptian khedives, the rulers of Egypt, played a double game, where they signed on to anti-slaving conventions pushed on them by the Europeans, and then pretty much continued to make money out of the slave trade.

  The drum, which could have been seized as booty by slave-raiders or given by a local chief, almost certainly came to Khartoum as part of that trade. Once it arrived in Khartoum it began a new chapter of its life and was refashioned to take its place in this Islamic society. We can see this when we look at its sides: on each flank a long rectangle has been carved, running almost the whole length of the body, containing circles and geometric patterns – recognizably Islamic designs added by the new owners to protect against the evil eye. On one side the design is incised in the body of the wood, but on the other the wood has been cut away so that the design stands proud. This thinning would materially change the sound of the drum, evidence that although it might continue to be used for its original purpose of music-making or calling people to arms, it would now do so with a different voice. A musical instrument had become a trophy, and the new carvings were in fact branding, a statement of the north’s political dominance over Central Africa and of allegiance to Islam.

  The drum had come to Khartoum at a critical moment in Sudanese history. The Egyptian occupation had brought with it many aspects of European technology and modernization, and a new kind of profoundly Islamic resistance was on the rise against it. Egypt was then technically part of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, but many Sudanese Muslims rejected what they saw as a very easy-going Islam that nevertheless brought with it political repression. In 1881 a religious and military leader arose: Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the mahdi – the one guided by God – and summoned an army to jihad, to reclaim Sudan from the lax, Europeanized Egyptians. It was called the Mahdist Revolt, and it was the first time in modern history that a self-consciously Islamic army took on the forces of imperialism. For a time, it swept all before it.

  Britain had a fundamental strategic interest in a stable Egyptian government. The Suez Canal, built by the French and Egyptians in 1869, was an economic lifeline, the critical link between the Mediterranean and British India. But the building of the canal, other large-scale projects and chronic financial mismanagement by the Egyptian khedive had caused soaring national debt. When the Mahdist Revolt in Sudan added to the strain, Egypt looked as if it was going to founder in bankruptcy and civil war. In 1882, concerned for the security of the canal, the British moved to protect their national interests. They invaded, leaving an Egyptian government to rule with British advisers. Not long after, when the Mahdists besieged Khartoum, the British turned their attention to Sudan. As the power of the mahdi grew, the Egyptian government sent General Gordon to lead the Egyptian Army in the Sudan. His forces were cut off; Gordon was hacked to death in Khartoum and became a martyr in Britain. The Mahdists took over Sudan, as Dominic Green describes:

  Gordon underwent one of those terrible Victorian deaths of being chopped to pieces and then reconstituted in marble statues and oil paintings all over Britain. Khartoum fell in January 1885, and once the outcry had subsided Sudan was pretty much forgotten about by the British until the mid 1890s. This was the time of the ‘scramble for Africa’; the British strategy was essentially to build a north–south connection from Cape, as they said, to Cairo. The French were working from east to west, or west to east, and an expedition under a Captain Marchand was despatched. It landed in West Africa and started staggering through the swamps towards the Nile. The British realized this and sent a force, a relatively small one, under Horatio Herbert Kitchener, and eventually in 1898, thirteen years after the siege, Kitchener’s army faced off against the Mahdist army.

  On 2 September 1898 Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian army destroyed the Mahdist forces at Omdurman – the battle included one of the last cavalry charges of the British Army, and one of the participants was the young Winston Churchill. On the Sudanese side about 11,000 died and 13,000 were wounded. The Anglo-Egyptian army lost under fifty men. It was a brutal result – justified by the British as protecting their regional interest against the French, but also as avenging Gordon’s death at Khartoum and putting an end to what they saw as the shameful slave trade.

  The drum was found by Kitchener’s army near Khartoum after the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the city. Once again it was re-carved – or re-branded – to make a political statement: near the tail of the bush calf Kitchener added the emblem of the British Crown. It was then presented to Queen Victoria.

  Sudan was ruled as an Anglo-Egyptian territory from 1899 until independence in 1956. For most of that time, the British policy was to divide the country into two essentially separate regions – the Islamic, Arabized north and the increasingly Christian African south. The Sudanese journalist Zeinab Badawi’s grandfather fought on the Sudanese side at Omdurman, and her father was a leading figure in the modern politics of this divided country:

  It’s an interesting drum because it’s been etched with the Arabic script, because it fell into the hands of the Mahdi, and obviously Arabic is the lingua franca of Sudan and it’s the language spoken by the northern tribes. The drum is very apt, because Sudan is this fusion between Black Africa proper and the Arab world, the real crossroads, like the confluence of the Nile, where the White Nile meets the Blue Nile, in Khartoum. I showed a picture of this drum to my father, and he told me that back in the 1940s and 1950s, when my father was vice-president of the Sudanese Socialist Party and he was in southern Sudan, a fracas broke out between the southern Sudanese and the northerners who were there. At one stage he thinks he saw somebody get a drum, which looked very much like this but obviously newer, and start drumming on it to encourage other southern Sudanese to come to show their strength, to stop this argument getting out of hand between the northerners and the southerners.

  Since independence, Sudan has struggled under decades of civil war and sectarian violence, with enormous loss of life. Recently the south has asked for a peaceful separation from the north, and in 2011 there will be a referendum to decide how far such a separation might go. The story of which this slit drum is a part is by no means finished.

  95

  Suffragette-defaced Penny

  Edward VII penny, from England

  AD 1903–1918

  Our history has now reached the beginning of the twentieth century. Previously, we have been largely in a world of things that were made, commissioned, or owned by men. This object has on it the image of a king, but this particular example has been
appropriated by women – disfigured by a slogan as an act of female protest against the laws of the state. It is a British penny with King Edward VII in elegant profile, but his image has been defaced in what was then a criminal act. Stamped all over the king’s head in crude capitals are the words VOTES FOR WOMEN. This suffragette coin stands for all those who fought for the right to vote. Recent objects have been about nineteenth-century mass production and mass consumption – this one is about the rise of mass political engagement.

  Power is usually not willingly given, but forcefully taken; and in both Europe and America the nineteenth century was punctuated by political protest, with periodic revolutions on the continent, the Civil War in America and, in Britain, a steady struggle to widen the suffrage.

  The process of redefining the British political nation was a slow one. It began in the 1820s, and by the 1880s roughly 60 per cent of the male population had the right to vote – but no women. The campaign for women’s suffrage had begun shortly after the Great Reform Act of 1832, but the battle only really got going at the start of the twentieth century, when the suffragette movement was born and with it a new level of female assertiveness, indeed violence. Here are the words of Dame Ethel Smyth, who composed the song ‘March of the Women’, which was a battle hymn of the suffragettes:

  At exactly 5.30 one memorable evening in 1912 relays of women produced hammers from their muffs and handbags and proceeded methodically to smash shop windows in all the big London thoroughfares inspired by the knowledge that exactly at that moment Mrs Pankhurst was opening the ball with a stone aimed at a window of 10 Downing Street.

  Smyth was jailed, along with many other women. One day a prison visitor found her leaning out of a window, using her toothbrush to conduct her co-suffragettes in singing the song during their exercises.

  The British establishment was stunned by the vision of highly respectable women deliberately committing criminal acts. It was a big step beyond the posters, pamphlets, rallies and songs that had so far been the norm. Defacing a coin of the realm is a more subtle crime – one with no evident victims – but perhaps a more effective attack on the authority of a state that excluded women from political life. As a campaigning strategy it was a stroke of genius. The artist Felicity Powell has a special interest in subversive medals:

  The idea is incredibly clever, because it uses the potential that coinage has, a bit like the internet today, to be widely circulated. Pennies probably were the most used coin, and so to be able to get the message out, subversively, into the public realm, to those who would be consoled by it as well as those who would be shocked by it, is a brilliant idea.

  This particular coin makes full use of the fact that coins have two sides, not visible at once, and on the other side there’s an image of Britannia, which hasn’t been defaced. An image of a woman standing there, very strongly, symbolizing nationhood. There’s a real potential for shock value, real subversion, when you see what’s on the other side.

  On the other side is the profile of Edward VII – balding, bearded and gazing off to the right. He’s in his early sixties – this coin is dated 1903. Surrounding him, running round the edge of the coin, is the Latin inscription which translates as Edward VII by the grace of God, King of all Britain, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India. A mighty title, redolent of both ancient rights and new imperial power – an entire political order devised over centuries and sanctioned by God. But running across the top of the king’s ear and right over his face in wobbly capital letters is the word VOTES, below his ear, FOR, and through his neck, WOMEN. A campaigner hammered the letters into the surface of the penny one by one, using a separate punch for each letter. It would have taken considerable force, and the result is powerfully crude, as Felicity Powell describes:

  It literally is defacement, right across the king. And what’s interesting to me is the way that the ear becomes very central. As these letters are hammered home, the ear is left more or less intact, and it’s a bit like, ‘Are you listening?’ It’s got that real force to it.

  Our Edward VII bronze penny was struck in the year of the formation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU), whose founders included Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. There had been other peaceful female pressure groups before then, but none had achieved their goal. Thirty-three years before, Emmeline’s husband had drafted the first Women’s Suffrage Bill for Parliament, which was doing well in the House of Commons until the prime minister, William Gladstone, spoke out against it:

  I have no fear lest the woman should encroach upon the power of the man. The fear I have is, lest we should invite her unwittingly to trespass against the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature, which are the present sources of its power.

  By invoking the delicacy and refinement of women, Gladstone made a calculated appeal to traditional, repressive ideas of how a lady should behave. So although the campaign for women’s votes continued and the Bill was repeatedly brought back to Parliament, for nearly a generation most women held back from direct action and unladylike encroachment on the established power of men.

  But by 1903, the Pankhursts and others had had enough. (At this point they were still calling themselves suffragists, but after a few years of activism the Daily Mail would dub these new, feisty protestors ‘suffragettes’ – a derisory, diminutive term to distinguish them from women who stuck to peaceful means.) Under Mrs Pankhurst’s leadership the suffragettes swung into direct action. Defacing coins was just one tactic among many, but the choice of the penny was particularly ingenious: pre-decimal bronze pennies, about the same diameter as the modern £2 coin, were big enough to carry easily legible lettering, but too numerous and too low in value to make it practical for the banks to recall them, so the message on the coin was guaranteed to circulate widely and indefinitely. The suffragettes also embraced the cause in person: they disrupted trials in court by calling for votes, as Emmeline Pankhurst herself did:

  The reasons why women should have the vote are obvious to every fair-minded person. The British constitution provides that taxation and representation shall go together, therefore women taxpayers are entitled to vote.

  The moderation in Mrs Pankhurst’s words belies the escalating violence of the movement. Famously, the Rokeby Venus, a painting by Velázquez in the National Gallery, was slashed by Mary Richardson, who vigorously justified her action:

  I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.

  Suffragettes embraced many other tactics that can still shock us now: they chained themselves to the railings of 10 Downing Street; letter bombs were placed in postboxes; when put in jail they went on hunger strike. The most violent, self-inflicted action came when Emily Davison was killed as she threw herself in front of the king’s horse at the 1913 Derby. The suffragettes became systematic lawbreakers in order to change the law, and defacing the penny was just one element in a campaign that went far beyond civil disobedience. How permissible is this kind of violence? The human rights lawyer and reformer Baroness Helena Kennedy considers the acceptable limits:

  Defacing coinage is against the law, so there is that issue of whether it’s ethical to break the law in certain circumstances. My argument would be that there are some times when in pursuit of human rights it is the only thing that people can do. As a lawyer I’m not supposed to say that, but I think there are occasions when the general public would agree, that somehow one has to stand up to be counted. Obviously there have to be limits of what we consider to be acceptable in terms of civil disobedience. There are some political acts which one would never condone, and grappling with the ethics of where it is appropriate and what is appropriate is difficult. The courage of these women was extraordinary, in that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. Now of course today we have people who are also prepared to sacrifice thei
r lives and one has to consider when and where that is appropriate. And I think most of us would say anything that involved harm to others has to be unacceptable.

  The suffragette campaign was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, but the war itself provided powerful, indeed conclusive, arguments for giving women the vote. Suddenly women had the chance to prove their ability in traditionally male and distinctly ‘unladylike’ environments – battlefield medicine, munitions, agriculture and industry – and once the war was over they could not be slotted back into a stereotype of delicate refinement.

  In 1918 British women over the age of 30 were given the right to vote, and in 1928 the Equal Franchise Act extended the vote to all women over the age of 21, on the same terms as men. And 100 years after our penny was stamped with VOTES FOR WOMEN, a new 50p piece was issued to mark the centenary of the Women’s Social and Political Union. On the front, the queen, a woman, and on the back a woman – a suffragette chained to a railing with a billboard next to her carrying the words, legitimately on the coin this time, GIVE WOMEN THE VOTE.