This episode jolted Lord Salisbury’s government into action. Through a series of determined diplomatic gambits, it obtained a bundle of agreements with Italy, Germany and Leopold II which, on paper at least, affirmed British supremacy over the Nile Valley. The Anglo-German agreement of 1890 affirmed British claims to Uganda and what is now Kenya, and German to Tanganyika, an arrangement made possible by Britain’s willingness to barter the North Sea island of Heligoland for Zanzibar. Next, an accommodation was reached with Italy. Since 1885 Britain had encouraged her ambitions in Ethiopia, and had even delivered her the Egyptian Red Sea port of Massawa to facilitate operations in Eritrea. In gratitude, the Italians promised in 1891 to keep clear of the Nile Valley. Three years later, Lord Rosebery’s Liberal government agreed, after considerable internal debate, to declare a protectorate over Uganda, where the financial collapse of the British Imperial East Africa Company had coincided with the spread of tribal war. Soon after, King Leopold pledged not to push his estate’s boundaries to the Upper Nile. So, by 1894, the state of play was in Britain’s favour. At this stage France entered the game.
France’s bid for territory on the shores of the White Nile was intended to overturn the new political order in Egypt. Once it was clear that Britain was not going to abandon her position there in the foreseeable future, France became increasingly embittered and resentful. Hostility towards Britain was orchestrated by a powerful lobby of predominantly right-wing, ultra-nationalist politicians, officials, soldiers and newspaper editors, who claimed that France had been deliberately tricked by her rapacious neighbour. The only way for France to regain her rightful influence in Egypt was by an aggressive challenge to Britain somewhere on the Upper Nile. If successful, this would either compel Britain to evacuate Egypt or concede the sharing of power there. Such an outcome would immeasurably raise France’s international prestige and tilt the balance of power in the Mediterranean in her favour. Not everyone in French political circles was convinced; it was argued that if Britain was somehow forced out of Egypt then the entire Near and Middle East would be destabilised, which would hurt French interests.
Nevertheless, the anglophobe faction within the government, army and colonial service were determined to play their hand. Towards the end of 1894, Victor Liotard, the administrator of Upper Ubangi, was instructed to make his way to the Upper Nile, but a change of ministry led to his orders being countermanded. A second expedition was under consideration during the summer of 1895 which was to be commanded by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand. He was an officer of immense resolution and an experienced colonial soldier of that breed which, for the past decade, had been busy planting the tricolore across the Western Sahara, often in defiance of the wishes of Paris. Marchand was the man for the job, and in March 1897 he set off from Gabon with 163 officers and askaris and orders to negotiate ‘alliances sérieuses et des titres indiscutables’ with whomever he encountered on his trek to the Upper Nile. He was engaged upon what he and his sponsors knew to be a gamble, and which some of the latter revealingly compared to the Jameson Raid.13
In July 1898 Marchand’s party arrived at Fashoda (Kokok) on the shores of the Upper Nile after an epic journey during which, on occasions, he had ridden on a solid-wheeled bicycle, now preserved in the museum of St Cyr Military Academy. While he was pedalling across the southern Sahara, the governor of French Somaliland was making clandestine offers of protection and friendship to the Ethiopian Emperor, Menelik II.
The possibility of French intrusion in an area which was nominally a British sphere of influence was one of the reasons why the government sanctioned the first stage of the reconquest of the Sudan in March 1896. Another was the recent defeat of an Italian army by Menelik at Aduwa, which had changed the balance of power in the Upper Nile basin and gravely damaged European prestige. The advance southwards towards Khartoum was undertaken in the name of Egypt by a largely Egyptian and Sudanese army under the command of Sir Herbert Kitchener. From Protestant Ulster stock, Kitchener was a soldier of considerable energies, most of which were channelled into the furtherance of his career. He was a dedicated imperialist who believed that he was waging war in the Sudan in the name of civilisation, a consideration which did not prevent him from treating his enemies with extreme ruthlessness.
Kitchener’s war was, of necessity, a slow, piecemeal advance down the Nile. It was also a model of logistic efficiency with a single-track railway following the fighting line, which impressed the host of war correspondents who accompanied the army and sent back enthusiastic reports for the public. Press versions of the war contrasted the modern technology of the conquerors with the barbarism of their opponents and continually emphasised the loftiness of Britain’s motives. The invasion of the Sudan was a crusade for civilisation and vengeance for the death of Gordon.
Public interest in the war intensified during the winter of 1897–8 as more British troops were sent out at Kitchener’s request in readiness for a final, decisive battle with the Khalifah’s main army, believed to be 60,000-strong. The government expected a victory and was already contemplating the future political settlement of the Sudan. Salisbury put aside his reservations about the burden of governing a vast and profitless province, and accepted that British occupation of the entire Sudan was inevitable. And there was Marchand to be considered. A counterstroke to his expedition was approved by Salisbury at the end of 1897 when Major J.R.L. Macdonald was instructed to advance northwards along the White Nile from Uganda with a force of Sudanese askaris. His purpose was to forestall a meeting between Marchand and another French detachment, which was wrongly imagined to be travelling from Ethiopia to the river. There was no collision between Marchand and Macdonald; at the outset of the latter’s expedition most of the Sudanese mutinied and the campaign was abandoned.
Further north, Kitchener was making steady progress with an army of 7,500 British and 12,500 Egyptian troops, supported by a flotilla of river gunboats. The climax of the war came on 2 September 1898 on a plain near Omdurman where the Khalifah’s army delivered a sequence of frontal attacks. All were repelled by long-range rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire which killed 11,000 ansars and wounded a further 16,000. It was tantamount to a massacre which, more than any other encounter between European and native armies, illustrated the gulf between the technology of the industrialised powers and that of their opponents in Africa and Asia. The difference was summed up by Winston Churchill, then a young subaltern, and combining the duties of a staff officer with those of war correspondent. On first seeing the ansar host with its banners, mailed cavalry and masses of spear- and swordsmen, he immediately recalled pictures he had seen of twelfth-century Crusader armies.
The day after Omdurman, the British and Egyptian flags were ceremonially raised over the ruins of the governor-general’s palace in Khartoum, and a memorial service was held for its last occupant, Gordon. A Catholic chaplain prayed that God might ‘look down … with eyes of pity and compassion on this land so loved by that heroic soul’, words which moved Kitchener and other officers to tears.14 There was no sign of divine mercy on the battlefield where, much to Churchill’s disgust, Kitchener had left the wounded ansars to die. Inside Khartoum there was looting with Kitchener leading the way.15 At the same time, many of the Khalifah’s leading followers were summarily shot, some at the orders of Major, later General Sir John Maxwell, who commented afterwards that he regarded ‘a dead fanatic as the only one to extend any sympathy to’.16 As commander-in-chief in Ireland in 1916, he applied the same principle to Irish nationalists after the Easter Rising.
Accounts of the outrages at Omdurman and Khartoum provoked a group of MPs to take the unprecedented step of opposing the payment of a £30,000 reward to Kitchener for his work in the Sudan. There were acerbic exchanges over his exhumation of the Mahdi’s bones, which he had had thrown into the Nile, after having briefly considered having the skull mounted as a cup. One Tory MP, a former officer, pooh-poohed the allegations of inhumanity, and reminded the House that ‘we ar
e bringing into the Dark Continent Civilisation’ and it was ‘a fatal thing to get in the way of a nation that is fulfilling its destiny’. ‘Murder, rapine, whisky and – the Bible’ were the ingredients of this civilisation, retorted an Irish Nationalist, Michael Dillon, while a Liberal asserted that ‘imperialism is nothing but organised selfishness’.17 The debate, like others of its kind, may have served as a warning to commanders not to jettison the rules of civilised conduct whenever they waged the wars of civilisation, but the vote went Kitchener’s way and he got his cash.
He contributed some of it to the Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, his brainchild and a visible symbol of Britain’s civilising mission. Among the other subscribers to this institution were the machine-gun manufacturers, Vickers Son and Maxim, who had done as much as anyone to facilitate the triumph of civilisation in the Sudan.
The political future of the Sudan was sealed shortly after the capture of Khartoum; henceforward the province would be governed jointly by Britain and Egypt through a British governor-general. There remained the problem of Marchand, whose presence at Fashoda had been revealed to Kitchener by Mahdist prisoners. The commander-in-chief had been given secret orders on how to proceed if he encountered French intruders in the southern Sudan. They were to be evicted, but without the direct use of force.18 Privately, Kitchener thought that Marchand’s escapade was ‘Opera Bouffe’, not to be taken seriously, but when he met the Frenchman he treated him courteously, and, tactfully, had the Egyptian rather than the British flag hoisted over Fashoda. Faced with firmness and overwhelming force, Marchand withdrew, believing that he had upheld his own and his country’s honour.
An international row followed between Britain and France with plenty of warlike noises on both sides. Checkmated and humiliated at Fashoda, the French government accused Britain of flouting its rights in the southern Sudan and bullying its representative there. Britain rejected these charges and insisted that France possessed no claim whatsoever to any portion of the Upper Nile. The public, which was both elated by the victory at Omdurman and displeased by recent concessions in the Far East, backed the government’s unbending policy. A stand had to be made over Fashoda because Britain’s rivals would certainly interpret any compromise as evidence of irresolution and would, therefore, be encouraged to challenge British power elsewhere.
Britain’s imperial will appeared unshakeable and France stepped down. She had little choice, for her people were divided by the Dreyfus scandal and her ally, Russia, refused to become entangled in a dispute over a stretch of sand in the middle of Africa. Moreover, as the French Foreign Minister Delcassé appreciated, British naval superiority would make any war an unequal contest, with France’s overseas trade suffering damage similar to that which had been inflicted by Britain during the eighteenth century. He also had the wisdom to realise that by turning Britain into an enemy, perhaps even an ally of Germany, France’s power in Europe would be fatally undermined.
* * *
Having emerged the winner of the struggle for the Nile, Britain and its partner, Egypt, had to confront the task of pacifying and ruling a huge and still largely unexplored region, inhabited by people who had hitherto known little or no outside government. There was also the Khalifah who, with a force of about 10,000 ansars, had fled south after Omdurman. He was finally run to earth in November 1899 and defeated at the battle of Umm Diwaykarat. Apparently having learnt nothing from Omdurman, the ansars again threw themselves into the killing zone created by rifle and machine-gun fire and were cut down in hundreds. It would not be too farfetched to see this engagement, like its forerunner at Omdurman, as a form of mass suicide by men who preferred death to submission to the new, infidel order. The Khalifah certainly possessed the means partly to redress the military imbalance, since he had carefully preserved the modern weaponry captured during the 1884–5 campaigns. Equally extraordinary was the failure of British commanders to understand the significance of what they had witnessed during the Sudan campaign. Major, later Field Marshal Lord Haig saw for himself the devastating effects of modern firepower at Omdurman and yet, as commander-in-chief on the Western Front between 1915 and 1918, he sanctioned offensives in which British troops faced the same odds as the Khalifah’s Dervishes.
There were sporadic Mahdist and pan-Islamic insurrections for nearly twenty years after Omdurman. The most threatening was in 1916 and led by Ali Dinar, the semi-autonomous Sultan of Darfur, who hoped for but did not receive Turko-German assistance. British propaganda dismissed him as insane, a diagnosis that was extended to nearly every Muslim who rejected British rule in Africa and Asia. Muhammad Abdille Hassan, who persistently resisted the British in Somaliland between 1898 and 1920, was called the ‘Mad Mullah’, and there were other ‘mad’ faquirs and mullahs on the North-West Frontier. Their excesses do not appear to have matched those of Ali Dinar who, Sir Reginald Wingate confided to an American newsman, had once forced a mother to eat her own baby.19 It is not known whether the journalist asked why the British had tolerated the presence of this monster in Darfur for the past eighteen years.
It took over thirty years to subdue the animist tribes of the southern Sudan who objected to the naturally unwelcome novelty of taxation, and refused to renounce such customs as stock rustling and inter-tribal feuds. Thirty-three punitive expeditions were needed to persuade the tribesmen of the remote Nuba Mountains to accept the new order. No newspapermen accompanied the small detachments, and so the public remained ignorant about what occurred during these campaigns, which was just as well for the authorities in Khartoum and Cairo. ‘The less attention is drawn to these matters the better,’ observed Lord Cromer after he had read a report of the summary public hangings that had followed the suppression of a small uprising in the Sudan in 1908.20 Another form of deterrent was applied in 1928 when a party of Dinka and Guer chiefs were treated to an exhibition of machine-gun and artillery fire during a visit to Khartoum.21
Impatient and exasperated officials often resorted to more forceful methods of coercion. During the 1917–18 operations in the Nuba Mountains, villages and crops were burned, and tribesmen and their families driven into the bush to die of thirst.22 At Wingate’s suggestion, aircraft had been brought from Egypt to bomb and strafe Ali Dinar’s army, and thereafter they were frequently deployed against tribes in the deep south of the Sudan. The results were horrendous; in February 1920 incendiary bombs were dropped to start bush fires and flush out Nuer warriors, and they and their herds of cattle were regularly bombed and machine-gunned.23 Casualties were often high (in one sortie against the Bahr-al-Jabal islands in January 1928, 200 tribesmen were killed), but the victims, like their counterparts in Europe during the Second World War, were not easily cowed.24
The official justification for these harsh measures was that they brought stability to remote and turbulent districts. And yet there was something profoundly incongruous and distasteful about the employment of aircraft to intimidate people whom Britain claimed she wished to regenerate. Administrators, who had been taught to believe in their country’s civilising mission and who dedicated their lives to its fulfilment, were ashamed of what was euphemistically called ‘air control’. It was suspended after 1930, although flights continued over potentially disaffected areas as a reminder of what lay in store for the insubordinate. The brief resort to air power as a means of punishment revealed, as did the episodes that followed the fall of Khartoum, the gulf which separated the lofty, humanitarian ideals of British imperialism and the methods of its agents.
8
The Greatest Blessing that Africa has Known: East and West Africa
There were two ‘scrambles’ for Africa during the 1880s and 1890s. The first was a sedate, although sometimes acrimonious, diplomatic game in which statesmen pored over maps and drew lines across them. The second was a more robust business in which individuals ventured into largely unknown hostile regions and cajoled or coerced their inhabitants into accepting new masters and new laws. This activity was confined to a h
andful of men whose fixity of purpose gave them the strength to endure extremes of discomfort and danger. One described Africa as ‘a training ground for young men’ with a taste for reckless adventure for, ‘once started on safari – i.e. the line of march in Africa, one never knows where it may lead to, nor does one very much care.’1 Of course some did; for Kitchener and his equally ambitious French counterparts, Joseph Simon Gallieni and Joseph Jacques Joffre (the conqueror of Timbuktu), the byways of Africa led to the highest commands in the First World War. Others, like Louis Hubert Lyautey, Wingate and Frederick, later Lord Lugard, stepped sideways and became senior proconsuls.
Lugard set his stamp on East and West Africa. He was a tough, lean officer with a straggling walrus moustache, which was exceptionally extravagant at a time when no self-respecting fighting man went bare-lipped in the tropics. Kitchener’s growth may have been more famous, but Lugard’s was more striking. It helped give him, and for that matter other bristly officers, a fearsome appearance, which may have been advantageous whenever he had to overawe natives. In 1887 Lugard, with three campaigns under his belt, was at a loose end. Having been diagnosed by his physician as exhausted, he immediately decided that, ‘What I needed was active hard work – rather than rest.’ Africa would provide his cure, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to offer his services to the Italian army in Eritrea, his sword was accepted by the missionary Lakes Company. During 1888 and 1889 Lugard commanded their levies in a war against slavers around the shores of Lake Nyasa.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 35