The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  His immediate need was to come to terms with the Italians. At a ceremony at Menelik’s camp at Wichale in northern Wollo in May 1889, Menelik and Antonelli signed a treaty demarcating the extent of territory claimed by the Italians. Menelik agreed to cede to Italy the far northern provinces of Bogos and Hamasien and a small slice of the Christian high plateau that included Asmara. The border between Italian territory, later known as Eritrea, and Menelik’s northern province of Tigray lay along the Mareb River.

  The Italian version of the treaty, however, differed from the Amharic version, as Antonelli, speaking both languages, must have known. The text of Article XVII of the Amharic version gave Menelik the option of using Italy’s good offices for contacts with other countries. In the Italian version, Article XVII required Menelik to make all such contacts through Italy. The Italians insisted that Article XVII made Abyssinia an Italian protectorate. Menelik protested that the Italians were trying to cheat him of his country.

  In January 1890, the Italians issued a proclamation formally establishing their Colonia Eritrea, incorporating all the territories they occupied in northern Abyssinia as well as the coastal strip from north of Massawa down to French-controlled territory around the Gulf of Tadjoura. But the dispute over the meaning of the Wichale treaty rumbled on unresolved. Italy continued to claim its right to a protectorate over Abyssinia. Menelik demanded Italy withdraw the claim. After three years of argument, Menelik decided to abrogate the treaty altogether.

  It is with much dishonesty that [the King of Italy], pretending friendship, has desired to seize my country. Because God gave the crown and the power that I should protect the land of my forefathers, I terminate and nullify this treaty. I have not, however, nullified my friendship. Know that I desire no other treaty than this. My kingdom is an independent kingdom and I seek no one’s protection.

  Despite protestations of friendship, both sides began to spar across the Mareb River border. In March 1895, Italy’s commander in Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, advanced into Tigray, taking Adigrat. Returning briefly to Rome, he was acclaimed a national hero and given funds for a full-scale conquest. Back in Massawa in September, he issued a proclamation annexing Tigray to Eritrea and moved to Makelle to establish a fortress there.

  Menelik responded to the Italian invasion by ordering a massive mobilisation:

  Assemble the army, beat the drum. God in his bounty has struck down my enemies and enlarged my empire and preserved me to this day . . . Enemies have come who would ruin our country and change our religion. They have passed beyond the sea which God gave us our frontier . . . These enemies have advanced, burrowing into the country like moles. With God’s help I will get rid of them.

  With the support of provincial governors, he gathered an army of 100,000 men and set off on the 500-mile march to Tigray. In December 1895, his vanguard annihilated an Italian outpost on the mountain of Amba Alagi in southern Tigray and laid siege to Makelle, forcing the Italian garrison there to surrender. Despite the setbacks, Baratieri remained confident that his Eritrean forces, armed with more than fifty field guns, were more than a match for the Abyssinian hordes. Pressed by Rome to bring Menelik to heel and restore Italian prestige, he led an attack on Menelik’s army at Adwa on 1 March 1896 but was routed. By the end of the day, some 4,100 Italians were dead or missing and about 2,000 were captured, out of an original total of 8,500; in addition, some 4,000 Eritrean auxiliaries were killed or captured, out of 7,100. Menelik’s casualties were at least as high, but his army remained a fighting force. The Italians were left with shattered remnants.

  In the aftermath, the Italians publicly renounced their claim to a protectorate and recognised Abyssinia as an independent sovereign state. Menelik, rather than engage in another round of debilitating warfare, allowed the Italians to keep Eritrea with the Mareb River marking the frontier. Other European states also recognised Abyssinia’s independence. By the end of the scramble for Africa, Abyssinia was the only African state in the entire continent to achieve this status.

  Secure on his imperial throne and fortified by international recognition, Menelik himself joined the scramble for territory, adding lands to the east, west and south that had never previously been part of Abyssinia’s empire. He extended his rule further into Oromo territory, seized Somali territory on the Ogaden plateau, and raised the Abyssinian flag as far south as the shore of Lake Turkana. Between 1896 and 1906, he doubled the size of the empire, imposing Amharic language and culture on subjugated populations. Soldier-settlers, known as neftennya, were sent to peripheral areas to ensure imperial control. Christian administrators presided as a ruling elite from fortified villages.

  The areas that Menelik conquered were duly recognised by Europe’s colonial powers in a series of frontier agreements intended to demarcate separate zones of occupation in north-east Africa. In 1897, a French mission signed a treaty granting Abyssinia most of the desert lowlands in the hinterland of Djibouti, a port on the Gulf of Tadjoura that France had established in 1892. France’s Somaliland protectorate was reduced largely to an enclave around Djibouti. In return, Menelik accorded Djibouti recognition as Abyssinia’s official outlet to the sea and commissioned the construction of a railway between Djibouti and Addis Ababa.

  Similar negotiations were conducted with the British in 1897 to settle the frontier with British Somaliland, an area which included the ports of Zeila and Berbera that Britain had established initially to ensure that the British garrison at Aden was kept regularly supplied with meat. Menelik’s officials argued that now that Abyssinia possessed Harar, this entitled them to all the territory between Harar and the sea. The boundary they eventually agreed upon allocated the coastal region to the British but gave virtually the entire Ogaden plateau to Abyssinia. It left the grazing grounds of Somali nomads divided by an international frontier. The Somali people were further divided when Italy proclaimed protectorates over areas of southern Somaliland and then established a colony called Somalia based on Mogadishu.

  Thus, by one of those cruel twists of fate that occurred so often during the scramble for Africa, the Somalis, a people sharing a common language, culture and religion, were divided up by the boundaries of the new territories decided on by imperial powers.

  For twenty years, a Somali religious preacher, Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, waged an intermittent guerrilla campaign against foreign occupation of Somali territory, confronting both the British in northern Somaliland and the Abyssinians in the Ogaden. To the British, he became known as the ‘Mad Mullah’. In the 1900s, the British launched five military expeditions to defeat him, recruiting to their side rival Somali clans opposed to Hassan’s Darod clan. But Hassan always managed to escape. ‘I warn you of this,’ he wrote in one of many messages sent to British officers, ‘I wish to fight with you. I like war, but you do not.’ A renowned poet, he used poetry as a propaganda weapon to sustain Somali resistance. A poem he wrote about the death of a British military commander at the battle of Dul Madoba in 1913 became part of Somali national heritage.

  As the insurgency dragged on, Britain’s War Office recorded that ‘the continued immunity of the Mullah, who now stands alone as an unsubdued native potentate in Africa, is a source of constant anxiety.’ A British official, Douglas Jardine, who served in the Somaliland protectorate from 1916 to 1921, later wrote of an enemy ‘who offered no target for attack, no city, no fort, no land . . . in short, there was no military objective’.

  The British tried to lure Hassan into surrendering by promising him a guarantee of safety, reunion with his family, and settlement in Mecca or Medina. But Hassan spurned their offer. In a poem he wrote shortly before his death, he warned Somalis against the schemes and plots of colonisers: ‘I have rejected the abundant wealth the colonizers were willing to offer me. / By abandoning my religion for the colonizer’s wealth is just accepting to be placed in the hell which I will not do. / Only dreadful result is inherited from collaborating with the colonizers.’

  Hassan died of pneumo
nia in the Ogaden in 1920 at the age of sixty-four. Facing aerial bombardment, his band of followers had dwindled to only a few hundred. But he remained defiant until the last. ‘I wish to rule my country and protect my own religion,’ he told the British.

  45

  OMDURMAN

  The shockwaves from the defeat of Italian forces in Abyssinia in March 1896 reverberated not only in Rome but in other European capitals. The British government was alarmed by the possibility of a collapse of Italy’s occupation in Eritrea that would provide an opportunity for the French to expand from their base in Djibouti and threaten British interests on the Nile. British intelligence had been aware since 1894 of a French scheme to launch expeditions to the Upper Nile from both sides of Africa – from the French Congo on the Atlantic coast and from French Somaliland on the Red Sea – and establish a belt of French territory stretching across the entire continent. A key part of the scheme was for French columns to advance to Fashoda, a provincial town on the Upper Nile, 700 miles south of Khartoum, and declare it French territory. British ministers feared that if the French gained control of the Upper Nile, then Britain’s hold over Egypt would be undermined. ‘Control of the Nile is essential to the existence and security of Egypt,’ Joseph Chamberlain declared.

  On 12 March, only eleven days after the Italian defeat at Adwa, the British government decided to send a military expedition to Dongola, about 200 miles south of Egypt’s border with Sudan. The British had long considered military action against the Mahdist regime to avenge the fall of Khartoum and Gordon’s death in 1895 to be inevitable but it had now acquired a new urgency. The first task of the Dongola expedition was to secure control of a buffer zone in northern Sudan.

  Led by General Herbert Kitchener, Sirdar of the Egyptian army, the Anglo-Egyptian advance into Sudan was slow and methodical. Opposed by Mahdist forces along the way, Kitchener took Dongola in September. He also completed construction of a 250-mile railway across the Nubian desert from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed, bypassing four of the Nile cataracts, giving him a more direct route to the south. With the capture of Berber in September, he was little more than 200 miles from Omdurman and Khartoum.

  Galvanised by Britain’s invasion of Sudan, the French government promptly authorised action on two fronts. In June 1896, a French expedition, led by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, sailed from France for the French Congo, aiming to plant the tricolour at Fashoda before the British could reach the town. As Marchand made clear, what was at stake now was a matter of national prestige: ‘It has for a motive the task of reminding the country of its true greatness, of its mission in the world, begun nearly twenty centuries ago,’ he declared.

  In January 1897, the governor of French Somaliland, Léonce Lagarde, persuaded Emperor Menelik to give his approval to a plan for two French expeditions to advance on the White Nile from the east. In exchange, Menelik was promised French support for an extension of the borders of Abyssinia’s empire westwards into Sudanese territory as far as the east bank of the White Nile. The aim of the two French Abyssinian expeditions was to link up with Marchand at Fashoda.

  Prompted in turn by reports of Marchand’s departure for Africa, the British government was convinced of the need for a full-scale invasion of Sudan. ‘If we wait another year we may find that the French have anticipated us by setting up a French principality at Fashoda,’ said Lord Salisbury. ‘It is, of course, as difficult to judge what is going on in the Upper Nile as it is to judge what is going on on the other side of the moon . . . but . . . if we ever get to Fashoda, the diplomatic crisis will be something to remember, and “what next” will be a very interesting question.’

  Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian army was reinforced by British troops sent from Egypt. In April 1898, they routed Mahdist forces on the Atbara River. In September, Kitchener reached the Kerrari plain about seven miles north of Omdurman and set up camp on the western bank of the Nile. He had at his disposal some 25,000 men and a flotilla of ten gunboats and five steamers. The gunboats and forward artillery were soon in action, bombarding Omdurman with Lyddite shells, picking out the cupola of the Mahdi’s tomb rising high above the city’s mud walls.

  The battle of Omdurman began on 2 September. The Mahdi’s successor, Khalifa Abdallahi, assembled an Ansar army of 50,000 men, deciding to confront Kitchener in the open on the Kerrari plain. Armed mostly with swords, spears and daggers, they resembled battalions of the medieval era facing a modern enemy equipped with artillery and Maxim guns. Abdallahi relied solely on the sheer weight of numbers to win him victory. Their morale was high; their determination to defend their land against foreign invaders was profound; they retained a deep belief that God was on their side. But they lacked any sense of military strategy. Describing their advance, a British officer recalled that it was ‘reckless in its bravery and devoid of all tactics’. A British war correspondent wrote: ‘It was not a battle but an execution.’

  By midday, the Mahdists had suffered 10,800 dead and 16,000 wounded; Kitchener had lost a mere forty-eight killed and 382 wounded. After lunch, the general rode into Omdurman and set up his headquarters in the mosque. The next morning he ordered the Mahdi’s tomb to be destroyed. The body of the Mahdi was dug up and his bones cast into the Nile. His skull was taken away separately and eventually buried in a Muslim cemetery at Wadi Halfa.

  While Kitchener and his army were lumbering southwards, the French were making only slow progress with their own escapades. One of the Abyssinian expeditions ended with the death of its leader, Captain Michel Clochette, en route to the Nile. The second, under the command of the Marquis de Bonchamps, was faced with months of delaying tactics by Menelik and his officials. In June 1898, a small group managed to reach the White Nile, where they hoisted the tricolour on an island, but finding no sign of Marchand’s expedition, they returned to Abyssinia.

  Marchand, meanwhile, took two years to reach the Nile. Setting out from Brazzaville with a dozen French officers and a hundred Senegalese tirailleurs and boatmen, he encountered one obstacle after another. His journey was hampered by his decision to haul an eighty-foot steamboat overland for 250 miles from the upper Ubangi River across the Congo-Nile watershed. He was then forced to wait for six months at a mud fort on the Sueh River for the start of the rainy season and for river levels to rise high enough for him to press on through the sudd to the Nile. It was not until 10 July 1898 that he sailed into Fashoda.

  It was no more than a dilapidated collection of Shilluk huts and the remains of a fort on the edge of marshland. But Marchand proudly declared it henceforth to be part of ‘Greater France’.

  In Omdurman, shortly after his victory on 2 September, General Kitchener opened a sealed packet that he had carried with him throughout the campaign, giving him a new set of orders. He was instructed to proceed up the White Nile with a small fighting force and repudiate all rival territorial claims. From the crew of a captured Mahdist gunboat, he learned that ‘foreigners’ had already arrived in Fashoda. On 10 September, he headed south at the head of a flotilla of four gunboats and twelve barges carrying 1,500 men.

  The encounter between Kitchener and Marchand at a remote spot on the banks of the White Nile on 19 September 1898 marked the climax to twenty years of Anglo-French rivalry over the partition of Africa. Kitchener invited Marchand on board his flagship for a discussion. Kitchener made clear his determination to gain possession of Fashoda. Marchand declared he was willing to die defending it.

  Rather than fight it out, the two men agreed to refer the matter to London and Paris for their political masters to resolve. British and French garrisons meanwhile occupied Fashoda amicably alongside each other, awaiting a decision. In November, the French agreed to withdraw. Under the terms of an Anglo-French accord in March 1899, the Nile valley was reserved to the British and the Egyptians.

  Britain and Egypt also signed an accord in March 1899, agreeing to rule Sudan jointly in what was termed a condominium. In reality, it left Britain in control of Africa from Lake Victoria to
the Mediterranean.

  46

  A DESERT FRATERNITY

  After the demise of the Mahdiyya in Sudan, one of the last bastions of resistance to European rule in north Africa came from a Sufi brotherhood in the central Sahara, the Sanusiyya. The brotherhood had been founded in Cyrenaica by an itinerant Algerian scholar, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi, who, after refusing to live under French rule, had set up a zawiya in 1843 at al-Bayda in the mountainous hinterland, not far from the ancient city of Cyrene. Sanusi preached the need to return to a purified form of Islam, aiming to restore what he conceived to be the original society of the Prophet.

  Sanusi missionaries were sent out from al-Bayda to Bedouin clans in the desert where they were welcomed as teachers and mediators in clan disputes, gaining profound influence over nomadic communities and forming an integral part of tribal society. Sanusi lodges were established along the entire stretch of a caravan route linking Wadai in the south-eastern Sahara with Benghazi on the Libyan coast. They were well organised and well defended with walled settlements and agricultural estates and provided a semblance of government. Turkish governors in Benghazi soon came to terms with the Sanusiyya, allowing the brotherhood to collect tax in the interior while remaining in control of the coast.

  In 1856, Sanusi moved his headquarters southwards to Jaghbub, an uninhabited oasis on the southern edge of the Cyrenaica plateau, and founded an Islamic university there. By the time of his death in 1859, the number of Sanusi zawiya in the central Sahara had reached more than forty. His son, Muhammad al-Mahdi, expanded the network further into areas of the Maghreb and the Sahel, as far west as Timbuktu. By the 1880s, the Sanusi order was believed to have almost three million followers and to be capable of deploying some 25,000 armed tribesmen.