Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose,” Isaiah had prophesied, “and a highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it…the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein…and the ransomed of the Lord shall return.”

  It was unclear whether the stick figure was walking toward a sunset or a sunrise.

  GORDON COULD NOT resist Ismail. A prince of the world of desire and power that Gordon renounced yet pursued, the khedive wallowed in earthly pleasures like a hippo, but appealed from the depths for the redemption of his Sudanese kingdom from the slavers.

  “The lesson must be made clear,” said Ismail, “even in those remote parts, that a mere difference of color does not turn men into wares, and that life and liberty are sacred things.”12

  Ismail knew that good intentions bought him British support for his empire. At the same time, he profited cynically from the slave trade. No judge of character, Gordon believed him, and cast himself as Ismail’s redeemer. Blaming Nubar Pasha and the “Greek or Hebrew” speculators for the “rottenness of Egypt,” he cast Ismail as the victim, “quite innocent (or nearly so),” of unscrupulous Levantines. “You have no idea of the intrigues here,” he wrote to Augusta, “it is a regular hot-bed, and things cannot last long like this.”13

  To inspire Ismail’s redemption, Gordon turned down Baker’s large salary, accepting only two thousand pounds to cover his expenses. “My object is to show the khedive and his people that gold and silver idols are not worshipped by all the world. They are very powerful Gods, but not so powerful as our God.”14

  Ismail, used to artful diplomats and swivel-eyed bankers, happily ceded the worthless commodity of moral comfort. He flattered his awkward, ascetic employee, saying that Gordon was his ideal. “When that man comes into the room, I feel I am with my superior.”15

  “The Khedive is an honest fellow, and I like him very much,” Gordon decided as he accepted the title of governor of Equatoria. In a two-week whirl at Cairo, the new governor alienated most of Ismail’s ministers, collected a staff of European and American adventurers, told them not to call him “His Excellency,” visited the dentist, and took ship for Suakin. “I wear Engineer undress, with fez. It is very fine in its effect!” Then he vanished in the direction of the equator.16

  ISMAIL RETURNED TO more important business. Equatoria was not his only imperial project, and the entertaining naïf Gordon not his only ally. While Ismail pandered to Britain’s slavery obsession with boilerplate about sacred life and liberty, the greatest slaver in the Sudan wore an Egyptian fez and took a governor’s salary.

  A crown would have been more appropriate. Zubair Rahmat was the informal king of the Gazelle River district, the province to Equatoria’s northwest. Born in an Arab village near Khartoum, he had followed the expanding slave trade into the Gazelle River, using his connections among the Arab tribes to set up an export network reaching as far as Tripoli and Jeddah. The massive wealth he accrued bought him a private army, and notoriety among the British abolitionist lobby. In 1869, Ismail had sent twelve hundred Egyptian soldiers from Khartoum to the Gazelle River with orders to crush Zubair’s militia and incorporate the district—and its lucrative slaving—into his Sudanese provinces. Zubair’s men massacred the Egyptian troops. So Ismail tried a more emollient approach. Instead of killing Zubair, Ismail made him governor of the Gazelle River district, accepting in return an annual tribute of fifteen thousand pounds. In effect, Zubair’s bribe paid Baker’s salary: the slave trade in one province funded its repression next door.

  Untouchable, Zubair took over the Gazelle River slave trade. He ruled from a pastiche of an African chief’s palace, where visitors waited on carpeted divans among chained lions. His network of thirty zaribas became the infrastructure of a government-licensed slave factory. He grew so rich that, on hearing that a rival slaver had bought an amulet rendering him immune to lead, he melted down twenty-five thousand silver dollars and armed his men with silver bullets.17

  In 1873, Ismail’s collaboration with Zubair deepened with the invasion of Darfur. Constant British pressure on Egypt to adhere to the Ottoman antislavery edict of 1857, and the consolidation of Egyptian control in the Nile Valley north of Khartoum, had gradually closed the lower reaches of the Sudanese Nile to slave shipping. This forced the slavers away from the river and onto the Forty Days’ Road, the ancient overland route that ran north through the desert from El Fasher in Darfur. The transit revenues of this trade further enriched Zubair’s biggest rival in the slave trade, the sultan of Darfur, who also happened to be the only African power west of the Nile capable of resisting Egypt’s imperial expansion. So Ismail and Zubair carved up Darfur. Zubair invaded from the south, and Ismail Ayoub Pasha, the governor of Khartoum, invaded from the east. In November 1874, Zubair’s troops killed the sultan of Darfur and captured El Fasher. Ismail gained a new province, and Zubair got control of the caravan routes.

  Ismail launched another war against his rival to the east of the Nile, the independent Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. Apart from holding the source of the Blue Nile, the Abyssinian highlands overlooked the other export route of Sudanese slavery, the road from Berber, on the Nile south of Khartoum, to Suakin on the Red Sea. Ismail engaged French and Danish mercenaries to lead his troops. He fomented civil war in Abyssinia by shipping hundreds of Remington rifles to its rebellious border tribes. He launched a series of border campaigns to secure the Abyssinian foothills that, strategic value aside, also happened to be a source of valuable female slaves. Yet the feeble performance of Ismail’s conscripts, and the fierce response of King John of Abyssinia, led to a deadlock, with Abyssinian troops hovering in the hills overlooking Massowa. So in 1875, at a cost of £1 million, Ismail sent an army of thirty thousand into Abyssinia, to “re-establish Egyptian prestige” and “secure the future tranquillity of the border districts” so that Egypt might “retain her African empire.” While Ismail indulged Gordon’s evangelizing abolitionism in Equatoria, his generals and governors enslaved Christians in Abyssinia.18

  BY THE EARLY 1870S, Ismail was broke. Egyptian loan stock soaked up so much capital in the European stock exchanges that in 1869 Ismail’s rival for credit, Sultan Abdul Aziz, had banned him from taking out foreign loans for five years. It had taken over £1 million in bribes and the raising of Egypt’s annual tribute to £700,000 to restore his right to borrow abroad. In the meantime, Ismail’s European cronies had set up banks in Egypt, so that the khedive might borrow domestically, with the loans secured against Ismail’s private estates. In 1870, he borrowed £7 million from the Franco-Egyptian Bank. In 1872, he borrowed £4 million from the Oppenheim bank at Alexandria, £3 million at Constantinople, and then another £2 million at Alexandria. In 1873, when revenue was £7.3 million, of which £6.3 million went on the interest on his existing loans, Ismail took another huge loan from Henry Oppenheim, converting the national debt of £27 million into a long-term loan of £32 million. This device freed up cash, but created a spiral of compound interest and coupon payments that swiftly throttled the economy. Even the loans did not add up. Commissions, bribes, theft, and devaluation shredded their value on the way from the bank to the treasury. Of the Oppenheim loan, a paper credit of £32 million had shrunk to £17.8 million by the time it reached Egypt. The difference could only be made up by further loans, on increasingly reckless terms. By 1874, Ismail had received over £37 million in Egypt’s name, and personal loans of just under £10 million. The amount to be repaid, over periods of between ten and thirty years, was £139,767,000 on the national debt, and £27,760,000 on his private debt. Revenue for 1874 was £10 million.19

  Ismail did find the money for a private palace complex in the shadow of the Pyramids at Giza. He diverted irrigation channels to create a horticultural fantasia in the desert, where artificial streams plashed under fairy-tale bridges and the air tinkled with the chirping of caged African
birds. Like a genteel debtor, the khedive devoted his income to keeping up appearances. When Nubar Pasha tried to slow the rush to the precipice, Ismail sacked him. When Nubar’s replacement, Ismail Sadyk Pasha, concocted a plan that mortgaged what remained of Egypt’s future, Ismail was delighted.

  Ismail owned a fifth of Egypt’s arable land, but he paid no tax. The European traders in Egypt earned a lot of money, but they paid no tax. The next-highest earners were the Turkish landlords, who reduced their income tax by bribing the inspectors, but were still liable for annual assessment on their landholdings. Ismail Sadyk Pasha made the landowners an offer: If they paid six years’ tax on their landholdings in one year, the land would be taxed at a 50 percent discount forever. He called this deal the Muqabala, the Compensation. It was not clear who compensated whom: The landowners produced £8 million in cash, tiding Ismail over for a few months, but Ismail lost millions in future revenues. After that, only one source of tax revenue remained: the fellahin. 20

  The slowdown of the cotton boom had deprived the fellahin of the small pleasures of owning slaves and dodging the Corvée. “The kourbash has been going on my neighbors backs and feet all the morning,” recorded the émigré Scottish aristocrat Lucie Duff Gordon. “The system of wholesale extortion and spoliation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go.” She had written in 1865, a golden year for the Egyptian economy. “The poor fellahin are forced to take the bread from the mouths of their starving families and eat it while toiling for the profit of one man. Egypt is one vast plantation, where the master works his slaves without even feeding them.” By the 1870s, the situation was out of control. Egypt was ripe for revolution.21

  KHARTOUM WAS THE permanent boomtown of the wild south. After decades of Egyptian influence, life was almost bearable. The telegraph had arrived, and there was talk of a railway. Apart from guns and tent pegs, the local Greek merchants now offered French wines and perfume, tinned fruit and the elixir of the Briton abroad, Bass’s Pale Ale. On the river, Egyptian police boats hunted slave smugglers with sluggish enthusiasm.

  The town’s governor Ismail Ayoub Pasha greeted Gordon with a banquet, followed by dances from gyrating Nubian girls wearing only bangles and leather thongs. Aroused and drunk, Austrian consul Martin Hansal jumped up and jiggled along. Sober and disgusted, Gordon slipped away unnoticed. Obliged to return the governor’s hospitality at the British Consulate, Gordon’s party deployed from the storeroom the remainders of Samuel Baker’s supplies: Sèvres plates, crystal goblets from Bohemia, vintage burgundy and champagne. Gordon bought forty pudding bowls and whipped up a giant vat of tapioca as a Spartan finale. Then he sailed south for Equatoria, the wood-burning boiler of his little steamer Khedive puffing industriously.

  Ismail Ayoub Pasha wanted to dispose of Gordon before he could detect the intimate connection between the Khartoum government and the slave trade, and he had already cut Gordon a path through the rotten gates of the Sudd. South of the reeds, Gordon disappeared into a primeval interior of naked animists and mapless swamps, where the connected world of Cairo and the coast lost all meaning. His new subjects had words for east and west, because they moved from bank to bank of the Nile, but not for north and south. Conversely, Equatoria had a northern border six hundred miles south of Khartoum, where the Sobat and Gazelle rivers met the White Nile, and a southern border somewhere near Lake Victoria; but its eastern or western borders could stretch as far as the Indian or Atlantic oceans. Its capital, Gondokoro—Baker’s name of Ismailia had not stuck—was a collection of huts a thousand miles from Khartoum. In 1874, a telegraph message from Bombay reached London within five hours, and a steamer took thirty days. By contrast, Gordon took twenty-six days to sail the thousand miles from Khartoum to Gondokoro, and without Ismail Ayoub Pasha’s help, the journey could have taken up to a year.

  As an engineer, Gordon saw his commission as a question of logistics. He could not rule without communications, so he would begin by setting up a logistical spine for Equatoria: a chain of forts running south toward the Great lakes “at intervals of a day’s journey,” connecting Gondokoro to Foweira and Fatiko, the surviving outposts of Baker’s tenure. Then he would map the last vague section of the Nile between Fatiko and Lake Victoria, completing the labors of Speke, Grant, and Baker, while his soldiers brought up Baker’s metal steamers in sections. Launching the steamers on Lakes Victoria and Albert, he would open the lakes to “legitimate trade,” and the Christianity and Commerce that made for Civilization.22

  He repeated all of Baker’s mistakes. His Turkish fez and Egyptian soldiers marked him as a collaborator in the corruption of the Turkiyya. Announcing that the motto of Equatoria would be Hurriyet—Turkish for “Liberty”—Gordon declared martial law and restored the government’s monopoly on ivory trading, an economic blow that drove the native tribes and the slavers into an alliance. Like Baker before him, he caused outrage at the Anti-Slavery Society by hiring Abu Suud—a prime agent of the Gazelle River slave trade and a director of Rataz Agat, Khartoum’s leading slave and ivory company. He hoped to set one thief to catch many more, but his crude strategy foundered in repeated betrayals. Through it all, he depended on a minimal budget and untrustworthy soldiers.

  Gordon had come to save an irredeemable regime. None of its members wanted to be there. The Cairo government used Equatoria as a dumping ground for rebels, criminals, and slave conscripts. “I never in the course of my life saw such wretched creatures dignified by the name of soldiers.” His officers colluded with the slave dealers behind his back and sold their own men. Their idea of order was to license ghazwas in their territories. To collect taxes, they strung men and women upside down and beat the soles of their feet to a pulp with a kourbash. Little of the money they extracted reached Khartoum. Their men ran amok, their principal activities theft, murder, rape, and slavery, facilitated by Remingtons from the British dealer at Cairo. At permanent war with the tribes, they became prisoners of their own forts, venturing out only to hunt slaves and cattle, delivering mail and supplies by armed convoy. “The fact is that the people who annex the province need quite as much civilisation as those they attempt to civilise.”23

  Gordon sailed south to set up his forts, his boat making four knots against a current of two knots. He crept through a “pestiferous” flat country of muddy greens and browns, a sea of “rank jungle-grass” that parted for the odd acacia tree or the conical brush roof of a native hut. Traumatized by the slave trade, the native Shilluks stared silently at Gordon as he passed, running away if he tried to approach them. He could not speak to them directly; he spoke no Arabic, and his French interpreter had died from fever after only ten days. There remained only nine Europeans in Equatoria. Gordon soon fell out with the other eight. His Bible was the only book for miles around, his letters to Augusta his only escape.24

  “No steamer as yet: very trying for the flesh.” Weeks passed in a hut waiting for supplies, the “horrid” climate alternating between burning heat and torrential rain that turned his mess kit moldy and rusted his instruments. Cockroaches nested in his rice and sugar, scorpions lurked in the folds of his mosquito net, hippos lunged out of the Nile at his boats, elephants smashed up his vegetable garden, and the mosquitoes ate him alive, queuing up under his wicker chair to drink from the veins of his buttocks. The diet was tedious and barely nutritious: dry biscuits with boiled macaroni—“most ordinary, I can assure you”—supplemented with incessant bananas and mangy bits of broiled meat. Within three months, seven of his ten staff had died or been invalided back to Khartoum, and one of his captains had broken down and shot himself. Communication broke down between his posts; his Egyptian couriers could not deliver a letter without pillaging any villages en route. When his men ventured too far from the camp, the natives murdered them with spears and stuck their heads on poles.25

  Gordon boiled his water and laced it with brandy to fortify his liver. He concocted his own supplement, “a splendid daily pill” of ginger, rhubarb, and ipecacuanha, w
ashing it down with swigs of Warburg’s Tincture, an antimalarial brew of quinine, alcohol, cloves, and ginger whose recommended dose was a single teaspoon at times of fever. He took to his sleeping bag at dusk to evade the mosquitoes, rose at dawn for the “fearful mysteries” of Bible study in the prehistoric forest, and drove his party down the river, more fearful of “the doles” than of disease or death. By the end of 1875, he had managed to build a chain of posts between Gondokoro and Foweira. He had hauled up the fifty-ton steamer Nyanza in three sections, and assembled them at the village of Dufilé, midway along the line of posts. He was ready for the final push to the lakes. Then, a few miles south of Dufilé at a place called Fola, came the crushing honor of discovering the last secret of the White Nile.26

  “IT IS ALL OVER! I started from Dufilé this morning and, keeping on the higher level to avoid the wet edges of the river, came on it about five miles from here. I fancied for some time I had heard a voice like thunder, which increased as we approached the river. At last we stood above it, on a rocky bank covered with vegetation which descended abruptly to the stream, and there it was, appalling to look at, far less to think of getting anything up and down, except in splinters.”27

  Gordon looked down on a two-mile stretch of boiling rapids, the only totally impassable stretch between Lake Albert and the Mediterranean. There could be no steamer service between Khartoum and the lakes. The great civilizing project of “opening up” Central Africa via the White Nile had been revealed as a delusion. Seeking to salvage a smaller victory over the wilderness, Gordon pushed on southward through “mosquitoes, marsh, forest and misery,” to finish his geographical work. Typically, he gave his Italian aide Romolo Gessi the glory of sailing onto Lake Albert. A few months later, their tiny force came up against King Mutesa of Uganda, a tyrant who honored his European guests by decapitating batches of insignificant subjects in their presence, and threatened the same fate for any Egyptian soldiers who entered his territory. Gordon’s force was too small and too tired to risk a battle with Mutesa. The Egyptian frontier stopped sixty miles short of Lake Victoria.28