Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  The Sudanese called the Egyptian system the Turkiyya, the rule of the Turks. Levying implausible taxes on the Sudanese, local administrators ruled through the kourbash, a long hippo-hide whip applied to the soles of the feet. Local government and military officers partnered with the slavers and shared their profits. When the tribes could not pay their excessive taxes, the local officials forced them to surrender their children to the slavers and took commissions on the proceeds. All ranks used slaves as currency and concubines. In the Nile Delta, thousands served on the sugar and cotton estates of the Turkish elite. Sudanese conscripts became Egypt’s cannon fodder. At the infantry school at Aswan, they received a calico vest, vaccinations, and basic Islamic instruction. Of the first thirty thousand conscripts abducted by Mehmet Ali, three thousand survived.20

  THE TRADE MUTATED through the economic and ethical assault of European traders and missionaries. In 1838, Britain obliged the sultan to cancel all government monopolies, opening the entire Ottoman Empire to Free Trade. Sudan was remote enough for the pashas of Egypt to ignore this attack on their business, but by the late 1840s the European appetite for African ivory produced European demands for open access to the Sudan. A trickle of European adventurers joined the Arab and Turkish traders in the shabby settlement at Khartoum: Andrea Debono, a Maltese merchant following his goods to their source; Alexandre Vaudey, a French clerk in the Egyptian government; Bruno Rollet, who began working for a French slaver and branched out alone; and John Petherick, a Welsh engineer who came looking for gold and stayed for the gum trade. Misfits of indeterminate morality, they came to the end of the earth in search of oblivion and wealth, abandoning European costume and custom to dress like Arab traders and take Abyssinian concubines.21

  The traders worked constantly to break the Egyptian monopoly on the White Nile and open the river to free navigation, and their governments supported them, appointing them as local consuls. In the Sudan, the flag followed trade. And the trade boomed: Between 1840 and 1870, the quantity of ivory imported to London doubled, but demand was so great that the price doubled, too. In 1851, the Khartoum merchants sent 12 boats downriver carrying 20 tons of ivory; in 1863, they sent 240 boats and 100 tons. Each ton represented the deaths of at least ten mature bull elephants or fifty females, or even more immature males and females. Stocks collapsed in the slaughter.22

  As the elephant herds shrank, the traders copied their Arab partners and used slaving to underwrite their ventures. Importing high-powered rifles, they exacerbated tribal disputes, enlisted private militias of local collaborators, and launched brutal attacks on native villages, enslaving the survivors and paying their local helpers in slaves and low-grade “Manchester goods”: rough cotton, baubles, and glassware. They bribed the Egyptian authorities, and launched joint ghazwas against “hostile tribes.”23

  The opening of the Nile to European trade and exploration also opened it to missionaries and humanitarians. The Anti-Slavery Society lobbied the British government, which pressured the pashas of Egypt, laying the steps of a diplomatic dance in which the pashas made placatory gestures toward the abolitionists, while deepening their dependence on the trade. In 1857 Britain forced Sultan Abdul Aziz’s predecessor Abdul Mejid to ban the trade in African slaves throughout the Ottoman Empire. Two provinces were exempt. At Mecca, the affront to business interests and religious conservatism set off a jihad against the Ottoman authorities, who backed off and permitted slaving in the Hejaz. In Sudan, the trade was too distant and too lucrative to control, and Abbas Pasha simply ignored the ban and continued enslaving adult males into the Egyptian army. Under British pressure, his heir Said Pasha announced the ban and ordered his governors to intercept slave caravans. This convinced the British consul that “his desire to suppress slavery was a genuine one.” Shortly afterward, Said treated himself to a new bodyguard of five hundred Sudanese slaves.24

  A combination of European pressure, Egyptian decrees, and diminishing ivory stocks pushed the slave trade south. Khartoum, now a sleazy boomtown of thirty thousand shady inhabitants, became the financial and logistical base, providing boats, mercenaries, supplies, rifles, and money at 100 percent interest. The ghazwas moved beyond the law to the Gazelle River region, a patchwork of forest and White Nile tributaries opened up by two of the Khartoum consuls, Britain’s John Petherick and Sardinia’s Bruno Rollet. An irruption of Egyptian soldiers, Arab slavers, and European traders took over the district. Their massacres and round-ups left a trail of dead bodies and burned villages. Leaving the youngest and oldest to starve, they added the fittest males to their militias and enslaved the rest. The traders paid their militiamen one slave for every three months’ service and allowed them unlimited wives and concubines. They used children as slave porters and soldiers. They partitioned the region among themselves like medieval warlords. Each kingdom had its complement of Egyptian soldiery and slaver militias, and its capital at a central zariba, the fortified camp where slaves and ivory gathered for shipment. The Gazelle River district became a giant factory of death.25

  Occasionally a European government made inquiries in response to rumors that its Khartoum consul had been raiding on the Gazelle River, at which the consuls denounced each other as wicked slavers, but there were no real investigations. In 1859 the British Foreign Office appointed John Petherick full consul. Emboldened, Petherick attempted to set up a private army. Claiming he was “amongst turbulent and warlike tribes,” Petherick asked the Foreign Office to license the importation of five hundred muskets, eighty elephant guns, and two tons of lead for bullets. At the same time, the British consul at Cairo received a report from the Austrian representative at Khartoum that a British resident was involved in slaving. Apart from Mrs. Petherick, there could be no other suspect. But the foreign secretary, Lord Russell, was more amused than alarmed.

  “Mr. Petherick has a wild Arab sort of manner, fitter for those districts than St. James’s,” noted Russell, issuing Petherick with a fraction of his shopping list. “A fourth of the number should suffice.”26

  The complicity of Egyptians and Europeans in the slaughter on the Gazelle River came to light through a series of expeditions funded by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, with the aim of mapping Africa’s system of Great Lakes, key to the sources of the Nile. In February 1858, John Hanning Speke, having discovered Lake Tanganyika with the orientalist Richard Burton, pushed on alone to find a “beautiful sheet of water.” Identifying it as the fabled Lake Nyasa, source of the White Nile, he renamed it Lake Victoria. In 1862, Speke returned with James Grant to map it. When they vanished in the forests, Consul and Mrs. Petherick set out to find them. They, too, disappeared, so the society engaged the big game hunter Samuel Baker. In February 1863, as Baker worked south from Khartoum, he ran into Speke and Grant, who had located the falls on the north of the lake where the waters of the White Nile began their three-month, four-thousand-mile journey to the Mediterranean. By calculating water volumes, they had inferred that the White Nile had a second source somewhere to its northwest. In March 1864, Baker found it, a “sea of quicksilver” that he named Lake Albert for Victoria’s recently deceased Prince Consort.27

  Baker’s Albert Nyanza, Great Basin of the Nile recounted in detail the terrain, tribes, and untrammeled slaving of the territory between Khartoum and the Great Lakes. Baker received a knighthood and the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. John Petherick was dismissed and his consulate abolished. British moral outrage fixed on the Sudanese slave trade as an affront to humanity comparable to the East African trade, and on Khedive Ismail as its ally against evil.

  ISMAIL WAS MORE WORRIED about money than morality. Even during the cotton boom he had borrowed large sums from European banks to subsidize his lavish ambitions and the £9 million debt inherited from Said Pasha. In 1864, he took £5.7 million from the London bank of Fruhling & Goschen to pay off the Suez Canal indemnity, and in 1865 a further £3.3 million from the Anglo-Egyptian Bank. As the economy slowed and his sham companies collapsed, t
he borrowing accelerated. In 1866, he borrowed £3 million more from Fruhling & Goschen to cover the bankruptcy of the Egyptian Trading & Commercial Company; in 1867, £2 million from the Imperial Ottoman Bank; and in 1868, when revenue was £7,277,785, a colossal £11 million from his friend Henry Oppenheim. The loans were issued at 7 percent interest—9 percent on the 1867 loan—and after commissions licit and illicit, as little as half the money reached Ismail, with a corresponding smaller fraction passed on to the state. Tame journalists might point to the frenzy of public works, the gas lamps in the streets, and the sewage pipes beneath them as evidence of Egypt’s stability, but by 1869 Ismail’s kingdom ran on credit, and the £2 million tab for the opening of the Suez Canal was a mere fraction of his debt. In the weeks that de Lesseps planned his guest lists, Ismail’s Agricultural Society and his steamship line both went bankrupt, leaving the Egyptian government to buy up £3.3 million in shares.28

  The arrival of Victorian moralists in Ismail’s empire placed him in a quandary. Repressing the slave trade meant losing one of Egypt’s most productive sectors. Contrary to humanitarian theory, Egypt’s appetite for slaves had only increased with the growth of “legitimate trade”: A growing economy created new wealth and new customers. At the British Consulate in Cairo, the register recording the names of slaves who had escaped and claimed their freedom contained a parallel column listing the names of their erstwhile owners. The list was a transection of Egyptian society: governors, judges, bankers, merchants, civil servants, policemen, butchers, and fellahin who, indentured to their own government by the Corvée, sent their slaves to the Suez Canal works as substitute laborers. The government used slaves on its public works projects. Ismail personally held nearly three thousand agricultural slaves, and thousands more staffed his palace as bodyguards, servants, eunuchs, and concubines.

  Slavery was the unacknowledged pillar of Egypt’s export and domestic economies. The sultan’s antislavery decree of 1857 made little difference. When the British consul bought the liberty of escaped slaves, he passed them to the Egyptian police, who gave them to the army, who sent them back to the Sudan in uniform, slaves again in all but rank. A decade after the 1857 ban, the British consul found over three thousand slaves for sale in covert markets at Cairo, and a further two thousand on open show at the Delta agricultural town of Tanta. Even after the cotton crash of 1866, it remained “a matter of public notoriety” that Egypt exported at least thirty thousand slaves a year from the Sudan, an atrocity equivalent in size and misery to the notorious East African trade.29

  Ismail could not fall back on the gestures and promises of his forebears, washing his hands of the trade in Cairo while quietly profiting from it upriver. As a vassal of the Turkish sultan, and a modernizer with an image to maintain, he must appear to implement the 1857 ban. Nor, under the Turkish antimonopoly edict of 1838, could he keep European merchants and missionaries out of the Sudan. These two Turkish concessions to British pressure would crush him in an economic pincer. He had to turn them into assets. If the growth of his African empire rested on British approval, then that was how it must grow: He would ride the British obsessions with open markets and abolitionism all the way to the equator.

  In the spring of 1869, when Edward, the playboy Prince of Wales, visited the Suez Canal works, he took with him Sir Samuel Baker as Arabic interpreter, and as tutor in the art of crocodile hunting. At a masked ball at his new palace at Ismailia, the khedive asked the prince if Britain might spare Sir Samuel for an expedition to suppress the White Nile slave trade and open the Nile to peaceful commerce from the sea to the Great Lakes. While the prince went on to Constantinople as the guest of Sultan Abdul Aziz, Baker left for England to collect his medicine chest and rifles. He would operate with the approval of the British government, but as an employee of the Egyptian government. He would not be the last British mercenary in Africa, but he was the first to wear a Turkish uniform.

  On Baker’s return, Ismail gave him a salary of ten thousand pounds, the ranks of Ottoman pasha and major general in the Egyptian army, a Turkish uniform that made him look like a patriotic cartoonist’s idea of the Russian bear, and a firman granting him “absolute and supreme power, even that of death” over a space in the map between the terminus of Egyptian control at Gondokoro, five degrees north of the equator, and the Great Lakes, a vacuum of ninety thousand miles square now dubbed Equatoria. Considering “the savage condition of the tribes which inhabit the Nile basin,” that they had “neither government, nor laws, nor security,” that “humanity enforces the suppression of the slave-hunters,” and that “the establishment of legitimate commerce throughout those countries will be a great stride towards future civilisation,” Baker was to “subdue” the territory, introduce “regular commerce”; open the Great Lakes to navigation; and establish “a chain of military stations and commercial depots” between Gondokoro and Lake Victoria.30

  A fierce, angry giant who had rescued his wife Florence from a Turkish harem, Baker was a hunter, not a diplomat, and he planned a military campaign. Stocking up on enough beads, cotton, and agricultural seed to draw the Equatorians into legitimate trade, and an arsenal of mountain guns and rocket launchers should they resist, he ordered six iron-hulled steamers, constructed in sections so they could be hauled over the Nile cataracts and assembled on the Lakes. Then he, the indomitable Florence, a thousand Egyptian soldiers, and a further thousand native bearers went to war.

  Baker faced two enemies, the Nile and the slavers, and his tenure divided into two battles. The first was exploratory: hacking his way through the Sudd, the mass of floating, rotten vegetation that blocked the Nile south of Khartoum, taking anthropological notes, and hunting his dinner. Already a legend for slaughtering swaths of Indian and African fauna, Baker’s fascination for what he might kill helped him stay sane as his expedition foundered for a whole year in the Sudd’s watery labyrinth. Up to their necks in the water, many of his men died from heatstroke and disease as they labored to cut their boats free. Even the expedition’s doctor was sent back to Khartoum. But the Bakers ploughed on, Samuel plotting their slow progress in his notebooks and devising a type of dum-dum bullet that took half the skull off a hippopotamus at thirty yards, Florence supervising the laundry and devising new ways of cooking hippo.

  In April 1871 the survivors floated free of the Sudd and down to Gondokoro, a riverside clearing marked by a ruined Austrian mission. They built some huts, sowed some maize, and renamed it Ismailia, almost in parody of the modern suburb at Cairo and the palace by the Suez Canal. On May 26, 1871, Baker paraded his entire force in dress uniform, ran the Turkish flag up an eighty-foot flagpole, and informed his audience of naked, perplexed Bari tribesmen that they had been annexed to Egypt. Then he ordered a celebratory dinner of roast beef, Christmas pudding, and rum.

  The Bari, having seen the interlopers raise the flag of the slavers’ ally, began nightly raids on the camp. These ceremonials in the middle of nowhere marked the beginning of Baker’s second battle, the “pacification.” They also marked the limit of his resources and strategy.

  Baker made war on an entire society and its economy. Some fifteen thousand Arabs worked in the Sudanese slave trade, and in close harmony with the Egyptian government. One of the major slavers on the Gazelle River, a Copt named Ghattas, was father-in-law to Ismail Ayoub Pasha, the Kurdish governor of Khartoum, who extorted an unofficial duty of two pounds per slave from every caravan his men intercepted. The slavers’ private armies far outnumbered Baker’s Egyptian troops. And as Baker wore the uniform of the Turkiyya and marched with Egyptian troops—dubbed by Baker “The Forty Thieves” for their picaresque way with Sudanese property—the tribes he had come to liberate judged him merely another Egyptian official come to hunt, kill, and enslave. When Baker responded to the Bari’s poisoned arrows by dipping into his fifty thousand rounds of ammunition and blasting the tribesmen with Snider rifles, he drove them into an alliance with the Arab slavers. This obliged Baker to raid the surrounding countrysi
de for cattle, just as the slavers did. A mission of liberation became a war of attrition against people who refused to be liberated.

  As Baker pushed south to establish his chain of bases, the devastation of slavery, and the evidence of Egyptian complicity, surrounded him. At Fatiko, the outpost of 1864 had mushroomed into a thirty-acre slaver compound, where parents sold their children and a young girl was valued at an elephant’s tusk, one new shirt, or thirteen English sewing needles. South of there, in May 1872 he announced the annexation of the Kingdom of Bunyoro, without asking Kabarega, its angry cannibal king. A farcical, brutal encounter followed, dignified by Baker as the Battle of Bunyoro. Kabarega’s warriors had no chance, even though they had the starting advantage of having disabled many of the Forty Thieves with a batch of poisoned cider. As thousands of armed tribesmen charged down on his camp from the tall grass, Baker massacred them with rifles, mountain guns, and rocket launchers. His men went on to Kabarega’s capital and burned it down, killing anyone they found. The dead were so numerous and spread over such a large area that an accurate body count was impossible. Baker lost four men.

  Kabarega did not give up. Avoiding the fatal imbalance of battle, the Bunyoro harassed Baker from the tall grass and cut him off from food and water, forcing him to retreat through swamps and ambush. Instead of becoming the storehouses from which Equatoria might receive the light of legitimate trade, Baker’s chain of forts became his redoubts from the enraged Equatorians. When his contract with Ismail expired in April 1873, it came as a relief.

  The Bakers returned to Cairo for six weeks of chilled Bass’s Pale Ale, clean sheets, and celebratory dinners. In the autumn, they took ship for England, where Samuel received an ovation from the Royal Geographical Society and the personal congratulations of the Prince of Wales. Pressed by allegations that he had killed more natives than he had liberated, Baker wrote up his journals for another blockbuster wedge of exotic savagery and English grit, Ismailia: A Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, although he appended to that title Organised by Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, in case the suppression did not turn out to be as total as he claimed.