Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  The ‘soldiers of God’ marched across the Egyptian border in the heat of summer in 1889. On 3 August, at the small village of Tushki, just north of Wadi Halfa, they were destroyed by the Egyptian army led by its new sirdar (commander-in-chief)), General Sir Francis Grenfell. Although the British officer had purchased his first two commissions, he proved on merit to be an able soldier, eventually reaching field marshal rank, by the time he retired in 1908. He had fought at Tel El Kebir, and in Sudan, most notably defeating the Mahdist army at the Battle of Suakin the previous December.

  The Ansar commander, Abdal Rahman al-Nijumi, was killed alongside 1,200 of his men in a five-hour battle. Over 4,000 were captured. The victory demonstrated the improvement of the reformed Egyptian army, which in this battle had a core of only a squadron of British 20th Hussars. The Ansar had marched over seventy miles into Egypt, carefully avoiding the Egyptian garrison at Wadi Halfa, but it had not inspired any local popular support, unlikely anyway in such a remote area. The battle ended the Islamist threat to Egypt from the south.

  The Khalifa in Omdurman obviously needed to re-valuate the Mahdi’s prophecy of universal jihad. The north, populated by millions of Muslims, had been cut off. The far south was less promising: the terrain was tough and very few Muslims lived there. And Emin Pasha’s forces continued to resist. In the early 1890s local warrior kingdoms allied with Belgian officers from the Congo Free State defeated Mahdist southern advances. Internal tribal antagonisms were intensified by military defeats as well as drought, famine and epidemics. Many Sudanese began to question Allah’s blessings on the Mahdiya. Tribal revolts ensued and the Khalifa took years to ensure his dominance. Gradually, he tried to transform the Mahdist theocratic state into a more traditional Islamic monarchy in which the succession would pass to his son.

  The re-conquest

  For a while it appeared that Sudan was immune to the frenzied European ‘scramble for Africa’. Not for long. Baring in Cairo was still determined to concentrate on domestic reforms, but eventually he began to change his mind. The re-conquest of Sudan had little to do with revenge for Gordon or the need to subdue an Islamist state, and had everything to do with European politics. The British Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, an energetic imperialist, decided to stop any other European power from controlling the flow of the Nile waters. The Belgians had shown interest in the region, so had the Germans, but the French, as always, were deemed the primary threat, epitomized later in the 1898 Fashoda crisis, which almost sucked the two imperial powers into war over Sudan. The British in Cairo became thoroughly alarmed by talk of French gunboats on the Nile and their (unlikely) erection of dams.

  More immediate prompts for the British re-entry into Sudan were the perennial military difficulties of Italian armies. In March 1896, at Adowa, the Italians had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Ethiopian army under Emperor Menelik II. The Italian government formally requested a British military diversion in the north of Sudan to prevent a Mahdist assault on the weakened Italian garrison in the border town of Kassala. Lord Salisbury decided that an initial push into northern Sudan to seize Dongola was a suitable reply to the Italians and a convenient warning to the French. Baring had come to the conclusion that Britain had to re-occupy the Sudan to keep out other Europeans, and that he could get the Egyptian treasury to pay. It was a neat solution. This was a second-chance forward policy – on the cheap. Some British officers, however, cloaked their official imperial ambitions and personal sense of grievance over Gordon’s death under a veil of humanitarian concerns for the perceived chaos in Sudan and the need to end the slave trade.

  This invasion was methodical. A new railway was built into northern Sudan; it was a different gauge from the Egyptian system, a clear signal that the British intended to rule a separate southern state, distinct from Cairo, although the diplomatic niceties would still prevail. Gunboats, in sections, were re-assembled above the fifth cataract. Vast amounts of supplies and ammunition were prepared, all under the watchful eye of the new sirdar, General Sir Herbert Horatio Kitchener. He had been the last British officer to have been in contact with Gordon before the fall of Khartoum. So for Kitchener it was personal. Despite his stern and calm appearance, Kitchener was often full of anxiety about the success of his mission. He did not want to become the third British general to face an inglorious death at the hands of the Mahdists. He disguised his inner concerns with meticulous attention to detail.

  In January 1897 the big push began. The Khalifa was unprepared – it took months for his western army to get into position. Infighting undermined the resistance, as ever. The western troops had to put down a defiant Ja’aliyyin rebellion with much bloodshed. After minor battles, the main confrontation took place on the Karari plain north of Omdurman, where Islamic end-timers believed that the infidel would suffer a final defeat before a great Islamic sweep through the Middle East.

  At dawn on 2 September 1898, over 60,000 Ansar threw themselves with immense courage, and futility, against fixed positions, defended by Maxim guns and artillery, plus the supporting bombardments from the gunboats. As the waves of the soldiers of God fell back, the Egyptian army moved efficiently forward. By the late morning, over 11,000 Mahdist troops lay dead and another 16,000 were seriously wounded. The invading army of British, Egyptian and Sudanese brigades suffered around fifty killed. The battle included one of the last cavalry charges of the British Empire. A young Winston Churchill, who had inveigled himself into the campaign as an officer-correspondent – despite Kitchener’s avowed dislike of journalists – took part in the charge. Kitchener was a great logistics expert, but not a good strategist: one of his columns was almost overwhelmed by a surprise Ansar attack from hidden reserve forces. Eventually, the Khalifa and his bodyguard retreated to the western deserts. Kitchener then led his officers to the ruined governor’s palace to hold a memorial service for General Gordon.

  Unlike the hapless General Lord Raglan in the poorly administered Crimean War, a media event which helped to topple a British government, Kitchener’s personality dominated this war in Sudan. In the fall of Khartoum all European eye-witnesses and photographers had been killed. This time it would be different. Although he made occasional exceptions, Kitchener detested journalists, famously calling them ‘drunken swabs’. Churchill had been an exception because he was an extremely well-connected young fighting officer, who had to pay his own way and accept all liabilities. Another exception was the Daily Mail s George Warrington Steevens, a 28-year old Balliol man who had described the general in glowing terms: ‘His precision is so unhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man.’ Because of the massive popular domestic engagement with the war, Kitchener was persuaded to allow a small press contingent. They had to submit very brief reports (200 words per day) to the military censors before these were sent by military telegraph to Cairo. The military censored and manipulated the press to maintain support for the war in Sudan. Many of the journalists, most notably Churchill, who wrote a bestselling book called The River War, hardly needed media management because they were usually as jingoistic as the military commanders. Nevertheless, critics in London raised voices of protest at triumphalism following the defeat of the Dervishes, as they were called in Britain. The dissenters noted that the Sudanese had fought a modern army while usually wearing chain mail and using ancient weapons. As Steevens conceded in the Daily Mail, ‘It was not a battle, but an execution.’ In addition, liberals at home excoriated the practice of killing the wounded, even though the military explained, correctly, that the Mahdists fought on even when severely injured. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Townsend, an eye-witness to the final ‘Battle of Omdurman’ as it was dubbed, noted: ‘The valour of those poor halfstarved Dervishes in their patched jibbahs could have graced Thermopylae.’ Churchill’s own account of the famous charge noted that the cavalry fought with equal weapons, the sword and the lance – though Churchill used a Mauser pistol as well. When describing the rest of the battle, he referre
d to British discipline and machinery triumphing over the most desperate courage and fanaticism of the Middle Ages colliding with the organization of the nineteenth century.

  In September 1898 Kitchener completed his act of vengeance by ordering the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb at Omdurman by Gordon’s nephew, after which the Mahdi’s skeleton was to be thrown into the Nile. Public protests, including murmurings from the Queen, prevented Kitchener from sending the Mahdi’s skull to London as a trophy (probably as an inkwell).

  Very few photographs survive from the 1884-5 siege period, not least because a small Royal Engineer camera team perished. More than a decade later, many of the officers carried Kodak box cameras that had been developed in America in the 1880s. Seven journalists lost their lives in the second Sudan campaign. Others like Churchill made their name by writing an instant book. Steevens’s book, With Kitchener to Khartoum, was published within weeks of the end of the war. These books helped to transform the later Lord Kitchener into an imperial icon – despite his professed dislike of the drunken swabs. Steevens’s account was not entirely uncritical: he wrote about the eternal complaint of fighting soldiers, namely the poor quality of army boots. Nevertheless, he did play down the killing of wounded Ansar on the battlefield. Another eminent journalist, Bennett Burleigh, however, was not so discreet. Thoroughly annoyed by Kitchener’s open hostility to him, he published critical stories about the British warrior. Self-censorship, it seemed, had as much to do with personality, and potential book sales, as patriotism.6

  Kitchener could not rest on his military or media laurels. He had to face a bigger threat than the Mahdists, a rival modern power: France. If you draw a line west to east of French colonial ambitions in Africa and a similar line from the Cape to Cairo linking British pink on the map, they would intersect approximately at Fashoda on the Upper White Nile. It is now called Kodok in the Republic of South Sudan, and remains a sacred place as the ancient capital of the Shilluk kingdom.

  At the tail end of the nineteenth century, Fashoda’s significance lay in a small riverside fort. In July 1898 after an epic fourteen-month trek from the south-west, Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand struggled into the isolated outpost. He had set out with just 132 men, including a small core of Belgian and French officers, but many succumbed to disease, not combat. They were supposed to meet another French force marching south from Djibouti (French Somaliland). In the previous vacuum of British imperial power in Sudan, the French wanted to claim the headwaters of the Nile. Out of contact with Paris, Marchand was largely unaware of the extent of recent British victories in Sudan. On 18 September, Kitchener and his gunboats arrived at Fashoda. The British general spoke fluent French (he had disobeyed orders as a young cadet by volunteering to serve in the French ambulance corps in the Franco-Prussian war). So Kitchener sat down and enjoyed an amiable dinner with the French junior officer. The British had the military advantage, and so the French talked. Both men got on very well. After dining on cigars and brandy, they decided to refer the dispute to London and Paris. As they waited for the decision, they agreed amicably to fly British, French and Egyptian flags at the fort. Despite calls for war in Paris, where the British displacement of joint Anglo-French control in Egypt in 1882 still rankled, the peace party prevailed. London conceded to French rights in Morocco, and the British were left to run Sudan and Egypt. What lay behind this unusual piece of Anglo-French cordiality was not just good sense, but also mutual fear of Germany’s growing militarism not only in Europe, but also in Africa.

  British imperial policy had triumphed. London now controlled the Nile from the great lakes to the Mediterranean. Sudan, Egypt and above all the Suez Canal were safely under their military control. The French left Fashoda; the only sign of their presence today is a small patch of iron crosses where brave French explorers succumbed to disease, not British guns. That is all that remains of the Napoleonic dream for France to bestride the Nile, after the French campaigns of 1798-1801. The final postscript to Kitchener’s conquest came on 24 November 1899. Colonel Sir Reginald Wingate cornered the remnants of the Mahdist army near the present town of Kosti. The Khalifa and his bodyguard were killed. Kosti is home today to the El Imam El Mahdi University, established in 1994. It is of course named in honour of the leader of the Mahdiya revolution.

  The death of the Khalifa spelled the final demise of the Mahdiya. Sudanese independence had been snuffed out by imperial decisions taken in London and Cairo. It had taken sixty years for the Sudanese to rise up and throw off the Egyptian yoke by force; it would take just over sixty years for the British to leave and allow the Sudanese, finally, to rule themselves.

  Chapter 2

  British Rule

  Despite the formal description of an ‘Anglo-Egyptian Condominium’, Sudan was now effectively British territory. Evelyn Baring, raised to the peerage in 1893 as Lord Comer, dreamed up this confection. Thus the colonial power reversed the original ambition of Khedive Mohammad Ali to unite the Nile valley. London had expended much blood and gold to retain Sudan; the imperium was not about to hand it back to Cairo, especially after the martyrdom of Gordon and the Battle of Omdurman. British commentators felt that the Mahdist revolution had been partly the result of long years of Turco-Egyptian misgovernment. Now Britain would provide an honest and efficient administration.

  For the next half-century Sudan was left largely to its own devices, except when issues of imperial security were concerned. Several Mahdist pretenders emerged, but they were easily suppressed. Nevertheless, they reinforced a general British mistrust of political Islam. British rule was strongest in the central areas of habitation along the Nile. Peripheral areas remained largely untouched until they posed a threat to the centre. Darfur, for example, was not conquered until May 1916 when Sultan Ali Dinar rose up when the Turks joined the German side in October 1914. In a brief campaign, the British crushed the Fur army just outside El Fasher and the Sultan was killed. The former palace of Ali Dinar in El Fasher is now a run-down museum, with a few artefacts of the sultanate. I last visited the small but charming ‘palace’ in 2004, when a new war had begun in the region. The museum’s curator was a diligent man, but he had not been paid in a while and he had no money to maintain one of the few surviving relics of Darfur’s independence.

  In the south, the Khartoum government did little except make the Sudd more navigable. British officers from the Egyptian army ran a skeleton administration while encouraging British Christian missionaries to spread their religion and language as a bulwark against the advance of Islam. Arabic was actively discouraged as were northern Muslim merchants. Egyptian and northern Sudanese officers and troops were removed and they were replaced by locally raised troops under British officers using English as the language of command. They formed the Equatorial Corps.

  The north was administered by a coterie of mainly Oxbridge graduates, fluent in Arabic, who comprised the Sudan Political Service (SPS). By and large, this small elite – about 400 in all in the fifty years of its existence – ran the north with an efficient, independent and honest paternalism. But the SPS had a modicum of central direction. This was not the case in the south where officers contracted from the British army – known as ‘Bog Barons’ – ruled their vast satrapies through the power of their own often quirky and flamboyant personalities. They learned the local African languages and ruled sometimes as if they were paramount chiefs. As long as they kept order, they were left to their own devices. Collectively, this created a muddle because the British could not make up their minds what to do with the south. This characteristic British style of ‘muddling through’ lasted for nearly fifty years and it had a terrible legacy. The Arabs in Khartoum were trained by the colonialists to focus on Egypt, the centre of British power. As a consequence a succeeding generation of Arab administrators grew accustomed to ignoring the south and the west. And, historically, neighbouring states held as much sway, if not more, over the east, west and south as Khartoum did. This was a recipe for endless border wars.


  The possibility of north-south conflict was not yet on the horizon. The British were initially more concerned not only about the revival of Mahdism, but the possibility of conflicts between the two main Islamic sects, the Ansar (which later transformed itself into the Umma Party) and the Khatmiyya (which formed later the Democratic Unionist Party). Both sects were hereditary family affairs that were to produce decades of political in-fighting in Khartoum. Eventually a more powerful Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which morphed into the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party, became dominant. When the British destroyed the Mahdist movement, they scattered the seeds of Islamist regeneration for a century.

  Under strong and able Governors General such as General Sir Reginald Wingate (1899-1916) Sudan began to prosper. Wingate had earned his spurs during the Mahdist war as an intelligence officer fluent in spoken and written Arabic. His more famous second cousin, Orde Wingate, also became an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer in the Sudan Defence Force. Both Wingates were highly opinionated and independently minded. Sir Reginald Wingate did less well when promoted to service in Egypt as High Commissioner; characteristically, he refused to go, even when his replacement, Lord Allenby, had already arrived.