This orthodox view of the occupation of Egypt as a service to its people was challenged by those who saw the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 as having been foisted on the government by a clique of investors. Sir William Gregory, a former Tory MP and governor of Ceylon, argued that, ‘We are the only nation which had an honest sympathy with the unfortunate peasants of the Nile Valley, and yet we are forced to be the nigger-drivers, the administrators of the lash to exact the last piastre from these poor wretches for the benefit of bondholders.’4 This line was taken up and expanded by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a Tory squire with an instinctive mistrust of the machinations of all financiers, whom he cast in the same mould as the pushy and dishonest Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.5 Interestingly, traditionalist Tories and left-wing Radicals both identified the manifestations of the new imperialism of the 1880s and 1890s with the backstairs influence of capital.
Inside Egypt, British occupation provoked sullen resentment. Cromer, while publicly boasting that the fellahin were thankful for even-handed British government, confessed to the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902 that little loyalty could be expected from Egyptians if their country was invaded by France or Russia. During the winter of 1914–15, the Turko-German high command felt confident that an attack on Egypt would immediately trigger an anti-British rebellion. Such conclusions were not surprising; Britain had entered Egypt to suppress a national movement, and the sentiments behind it did not just evaporate after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, where, incidentally, the fellah soldiers had fought stubbornly. Nationalism remained a strong emotional force among all Egyptians, especially the educated class, who had the added grievance of finding themselves largely excluded from the highest ranks of the civil service, judiciary and army. Despite an energetic and highly competent police intelligence service, run by the British, nationalist agitation continued during the 1880s and 1890s and was covertly fomented by Tawfiq’s successor, Abbas II. In January 1900 Egyptian officers stationed at Khartoum, heartened by the news of British defeats in South Africa and rumours of a Russian advance on India, encouraged their Sudanese askaris to mutiny in the hope that the rebellion might lead to the expulsion of the British from Egypt.6
What then kept the British in Egypt? Free passage through the Suez Canal appeared a compelling reason, since most of its traffic was British-registered shipping; of the 2,727 vessels which used the Canal in 1881, 2,250 were British. And yet at no time did Urabi indicate that he would interfere with the running of the Canal, and it was the British administration in Egypt which terminated the Canal’s status as an international waterway at the outbreak of war in August 1914. Of course, in 1882 there was no way of knowing what Urabi might do in the future, and, most important of all, if Britain did nothing, another power could step in.
In the end, as in so many other areas where the machinery of informal empire broke down, formal, and in this case extremely swift occupation by Britain was the only alternative to annexation by another country. Moreover, there was no way of knowing whether the mood of the French deputies would change and a majority would emerge in favour of intervention, with or without British assistance. Subsequent international developments added weight to this argument. The growth of Anglo-French colonial jealousies after 1885, the Franco-Russian alliance of 1892, and with it the prospect that the Mediterranean might become ‘le lac français’ of French imperialist dreams, justified the decisions taken in 1882 and ruled out any withdrawal from Egypt. A firm grip on Egypt could also be defended when it became clear, as it did in the late 1880s, that Turkey could no longer be relied on to stop the Russian navy from passing through the Bosphorus. The cost of Egypt was high in terms of Britain’s international influence. In order to obtain support for her position there, Britain was compelled to make compromises and offer concessions to Germany and France which, had the circumstances been different, she might have refused.
* * *
Possession of Egypt gave Britain responsibility for the Egyptian empire in the Sudan. After sixty years of gradual conquest and pacification, the Sudan was still a turbulent province where Egyptian authority was fragile. Forty thousand soldiers and officials struggled to hold the lid down on unrest and gather the taxes needed to sustain the khedive’s credit. Most recently the Egyptian administration had been engaged in the suppression of slave trading, a duty undertaken by foreign governors, including the famous General Charles Gordon.
In 1881 the Egyptian authorities faced a new rebellion, led by Muhammad Ahmad, a thirty-seven-year-old messianic holy man, who called himself the Mahdi. As a chosen servant of Muhammad, it was his mission to purify Islam and chastise those whose faith had lapsed or become contaminated. His simple piety, powerful faith and message of spiritual rebirth won him thousands of converts, the ansars (servants), with whom he attacked and took the town of El Obeid. With the permission of Cromer, a well-equipped Egyptian army commanded by Colonel William Hicks was sent south to crush the insurrection. Led on a desert wild goose chase, Hicks was ambushed at Shaykan in November 1883, where his army was overwhelmed and its rifles, machine-guns and modern artillery captured. During the winter of 1883–4, one of the Mandi’s adherents, Uthman Diqna, started a new front in the vicinity of the Red Sea port of Suakin with attacks on local Egyptian garrisons.
It was now obvious that the Egyptian army could not contain let alone suppress the Mahdist movement, and that Egyptian administration in the Sudan was falling apart. Rather than waste treasure and men fighting a desert war to put it together again, the cabinet agreed in January 1884 to the evacuation of all Egyptian garrisons and personnel. Imperial disengagement proved as complex and vexatious an undertaking as imperial conquest. Forces rushed to Suakin in February 1884 soon found themselves drawn into a trial of strength with Uthman Diqna, and were consequently forced to make a series of limited offensives to uphold British prestige. This was preserved by victories at El Teb and Tamai, where the British soldier had his first and unnerving experiences of the tenacity and courage of the ansars, or Dervishes as they were usually called.
Overall supervision of the withdrawal from the Sudan was given to General Charles (‘Chinese’) Gordon. It was a controversial appointment, ostensibly made because of his previous local experience, but in fact engineered by the press. Gordon was already a popular hero, whose combination of bravery and intense evangelical fervour was bound to appeal to the Victorian public. Wilful and confident of his own charisma, Gordon saw himself as an agent of Providence, and, like Gladstone, answered to God for his decisions. He also had a peculiar talent for inspiring non-European soldiers: in the 1860s he commanded the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, which crushed the Taiping rebellion on behalf of the Chinese emperor, and in the 1870s he led Egyptian troops against Sudanese slave-traders. He spoke hardly any Arabic, but, despite his Christian zeal, believed that he had the hearts of the Sudanese. Their devotion to him was apparently confirmed by the enthusiastic reception he was given when he arrived in Khartoum in February. What he failed to understand was that the city’s population imagined that he had the power to summon British soldiers who, as events around Suakin had shown, could beat the Mandi’s ansars. Not that Gordon was unduly worried by Mahdism, which he mistakenly believed was shallow-rooted and unlikely to make much headway.7 He therefore jettisoned his orders to evacuate the Sudan, and instead prepared to defend Khartoum and resist the Mandi.
Gordon singlehandedly reversed the government’s policy. From Khartoum he issued a series of highly emotional but powerful appeals to the public conscience in which he called upon his countrymen to shoulder the burden of civilisation, and save the Sudan from being overwhelmed by what he considered the forces of darkness. His pleas and predicament captured the public imagination; he was an embattled warrior in a remote land who had placed Christian duty and service to humanity before expediency. Public opinion swung behind Gordon and, early in August, impelled a reluctant government to send an army to rescue him.
Gordon’s position was
becoming more and more precarious. Mahdist forces had been concentrating near Khartoum since May, which made evacuation of the city impossible. The main Mahdist army converged on the city in September and a month later the Mahdi took command of the siege. In the meantime, a 10,500- strong expeditionary force, commanded by Wolseley, had mustered and was beginning a cautious advance down the Nile. The press and the public saw the campaign as a race, but Wolseley, as ever, proceeded with care, in the knowledge that the desert had already swallowed up Hicks’s army.
By early January 1885, the advance guard of the army had reached Kurti, from where the Desert Column would move across the Bayuda desert to al Matamma. Here, a token detachment would embark on three steamers sent from Khartoum. At Gordon’s instructions, it was to contain some men in the traditional scarlet jackets rather than khaki in order to convince the Sudanese that the British really had arrived. The Mahdi, alarmed by the nearness of the relief force, ordered his generals to intercept the Desert Column at the wells of Abu Klea (Abu Tulayh).
What followed was a classic imperial battle. The British force of just over 1,000 men, many cavalrymen mounted on camels, had been told by the intelligence department not to expect serious resistance and was unaware of its opponent’s numbers and dedication. Its first sight of the enemy was the appearance of green, red and black banners, inscribed with Quranic texts, waving above a hidden ravine.
All of a sudden the banners were in motion towards us at a rapid pace led by spearmen on horseback. The enemy advanced against our square at a very rapid pace and in a dense black mass, keeping capital order.8
Skirmishers ran back to the square, which opened to receive them, making a gap through which some Dervishes surged. Infantrymen were unable to discern their attackers until the last moment, and sand and mechanical faults jammed machine-guns and rifles. Where the square had fractured there was ‘a mass of yelling men and camels – alive, dead and dying’.9 What saved the day was the presence of mind of men on an unengaged side of the square, who turned about and fired volleys into the mêlée. The breach was then sealed and the attackers driven off. It was all over in less than twenty minutes, but casualties had been high and all involved were stunned by the ferocity and daring of the ansars.
Among the dead was Colonel Frederick Burnaby of the Blues, whose famous portrait by Tissot represents him as the embodiment of the elegant and devil-may-care insouciance which was the distinguishing mark of a perfect British officer. He would doubtless have approved of colleagues who remarked after the battle that it would have been awful to have been killed without knowing the results of the Derby.10 Burnaby had taken part in the fighting near Suakin a year before, when newspaper reports of his ‘potting’ Dervishes as if they had been partridges shocked left-wing Liberals and humanitarians. That Burnaby was also a Tory candidate for parliament probably added to their indignation.
Abu Klea aroused the imperial muse. In his ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt saw the battlefield as a testing ground for the virtues fostered on the public-school playing field:
The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death had brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
Kipling turned to the defeated. In his ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ (the soldiers’ nickname for Dervishes taken from the Hadanduwa tribesmen’s characteristic bushy hairstyle), he produced an imaginary Cockney soldier’s tribute to their reckless courage:
’E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,
An’ before we know, ’e’s ’ackin’ at our ‘ead;
’E’s all ’ot sand an’ ginger when alive,
An’ ’e’s generally shammin’ when ’e’s dead.
’E’s a daisy, ’e’s a ducky, ’e’s a lamb!
’E’s a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,
’E’s the on’y thing that doesn’t give a damn
For a Regiment o’ British infantree!
So ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
An ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ‘air –
You big black boundin’ beggar – for you broke a British square!
After Abu Klea, the Desert Column moved on to al Matamma, which was reached two days later. Further Dervish attacks forced the commander to take defensive measures, and it was only on 24 January that the steamers sailed for Khartoum. The ululations of the women whose husbands had been killed at Abu Klea were heard in Khartoum, now in its last extremity, and the news of the battle drove the Mahdi to risk storming the city. The assault succeeded and on 28 January, as the steamers closed on Khartoum, it was obvious that it had fallen.
What had become of Gordon? The Mahdi, who admired his steadfastness and courage, had wanted him taken alive. Forty years after, ansar eyewitnesses to his last moments testified that he had been killed fighting, one claiming that he had shot several adversaries with his revolver before being shot himself. This evidence bore out the account of Karl Neufeld, who was taken prisoner in Khartoum, and described Gordon as displaying ‘superhuman strength’ during the fighting.11 Information along these lines reached Wolseley’s intelligence department during February, but it was contradicted later by unreliable sources which offered an altogether more dramatic story. These described how Gordon had stood, aloof, unarmed and in full dress, on the steps of the Khartoum residency, and stared contemptuously at a mass of ansars. Turning disdainfully away, he had been speared and killed.
This version of Gordon’s death was promulgated by Sir Reginald Wingate of the intelligence department, who realised that it was the only fitting end for a Christian hero. He knew that the ‘martyrdom’ of Gordon would inspire his countrymen to reconquer the Sudan as an act of vengeance. So emerged the familiar icon of Gordon facing his enemies and making the ultimate self-sacrifice for the cause of civilisation. This was how his death was seen in Britain; ‘a grave misfortune has fallen on civilisation’, announced the Spectator on 7 February 1885 as a wave of dismay and anger swept the country. Gladstone took the brunt of the blame, and was left with no choice but to pledge a full-scale campaign to recover Khartoum and punish the Sudanese.
Gladstone was let off the hook in March, when a Russian incursion across the Afghan border led to a general mobilisation. Troops were withdrawn from Sudan for shipment to India, leaving only a garrison at Suakin. In June the Mahdi died, probably from typhus, and the government of the Sudan passed to the Khalifah (successor) Abdullah bin Muhammad. His militant Islamic state posed no threat to Egypt after 1889, when an invasion force was decisively routed at the battle of Toski (Tushki).
* * *
Late-Victorian statesmen and strategists were haunted by a fear that the flow of the Nile could be artificially stopped with the result that Egypt’s agriculture would be destroyed and the country ruined. It was agreed that blocking the Nile was well beyond the capabilities of the Khalifah’s Sudan, but it could be managed by European engineers. This was the opinion of Victor Prompt, a French hydrologist who, in January 1893, published a technical paper that described how a dam could be constructed on the Upper Nile which would effectively cut off Egypt’s lifeline.12 It was, in fact, an unworkable plan, but its possibilities fascinated Théophile Delcassé, the French Under-Secretary for the Colonies. Prompt’s scheme, and French official interest in it, caused consternation in Britain which had for some time been endeavouring to secure international recognition of an exclusive sphere of influence which extended down the Nile Valley. There were also simultaneous attempts to secure control over the northern shores of the White Nile’s headwaters, Lake Victoria.
; Between 1888 and 1898 the headwaters of the Nile were the prize in an extended and at times convoluted game of chess played by the governments of Britain, Germany, Italy and France and King Leopold II of the Belgians, the owner of what was, in effect, a private estate known as the Congo Free State.
As virtual ruler of Egypt, Britain claimed to have inherited that country’s historic claims to the Nile Valley as far as Lake Victoria, and was anxious to secure its shores. This region, modern Uganda, had already been penetrated by British missionaries, and in 1888 one of their sponsors, a self-made Scottish businessman, Sir William Mackinnon, founded the British Imperial East Africa Company. Chartered by the government, this firm was empowered to develop trade and extend British influence. Hitherto, the dominant power in East Africa had been Germany. Its interests were represented by an energetic explorer, Carl Peters, who in 1884–5 had gathered a sheaf of treaties with native rulers in the hinterland of Dares-Salaam, which provided the legal foundation for what would become German East Africa (Tanganyika). Italy, keen to acquire the prestige which went with overseas possessions, concentrated its efforts on Ethiopia and the horn of Africa. France was, to start with at least, on the periphery of the contest since her ambitions lay in the Western Sahara, although in 1885 she had acquired the French Congo, a small colony on the north bank of the Congo River. The southern shores of that river and its vast, inland basin were the personal property of Leopold II. His ownership was the result of a compromise made by the European powers in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, but there was no way of knowing whether the company he formed to exploit the area would flourish. If it failed, then France hoped to step in.
1888 saw the first moves in the contest for central Africa. Each of the players was concerned to rescue Eduard Schnitzer, a Silesian Jew who had taken the title Emin Pasha when he had been appointed one of the khedive’s governors in the Sudan. After the fall of Khartoum, he had led the detritus of his staff and army southwards into Equatoria, where he was stranded. Mackinnon and Peters planned armed expeditions to extricate him in the name of humanity, and at the same time plant their national flags close to the headwaters of the Nile. They were overtaken by Sir Henry Stanley, the Welsh workhouse boy who had become successively war correspondent, explorer, discoverer of Livingstone and, from 1885, administrator of the Congo Free State. Stanley brought back the none-too-willing Emin, and, by his brief presence in Equatoria, established his royal master’s claim to the region.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 34