The cure worked, though not quite as intended. The new Cecil had picked up a sense of humor among the gold diggers of South Africa, had filled out his frame with a subtropical diet, and had become an enthusiast for Britain’s moral and economic mission in the world. Exercising his new confidence, he fell in love with Georgina Alderson, the daughter of a mere lawyer, and married her against his parents’ wishes, supporting his household through political journalism. In 1866, following the death of his sickly elder brother, he entered Parliament as Viscount Cranborne, a self-styled “illiberal Tory.”
Cranborne lowered himself into politics like a fastidious plumber entering a blocked drain, more from duty than desire. A political dynasty, the Cecils had served Britain for centuries. Lord Burghley, their founder, had been first minister to Elizabeth I, and his son Robert Cecil had performed the same service for James I. For the next two centuries, Cecils of varied intellect and competence had filled official positions, frequently with more loyalty than talent. Born at the end of an age of entitlement, Cranborne served in the era of a bloodless liberal revolution, in which electoral reform broadened the voting public. As secretary of state for India in Lord Derby’s government, Cranborne resigned in protest against the Reform Act of 1867. Upon the death of his father in 1868, he escaped to the House of Lords as the third marquess of Salisbury. He would be the terminus of the line of ancient privilege, the last peer to serve as prime minister without abandoning his rank.
Tall and wide, weighing in at eighteen stone according to the scales on which the Prince of Wales weighed all his male guests at Sandringham, Salisbury had sad walrus eyes, a beard like the hedge marking an Englishman’s private garden, a massive skull topped by a white cathedral dome of baldness, and a pained expression in which the sorrows of his early life were overlain by the sorrows of the waning of the aristocratic age.
“The classes that represent civilisation,” Salisbury believed, “the holders of accumulated capital and accumulated thought, have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them, nor stake in the commonwealth to protect them.”2
Salisbury detested populism, distrusted democracy, and despised atheism. He prized high principles, High Toryism, and High Anglicanism, and a sense of justice equal parts Whig and biblical. His domestic politics rested on the cusp between Tory libertarianism and its paternalistic ancestor, aristocratic diffidence. It was not the government’s task to meddle with the economy or to regulate its subjects’ access to alcohol or gambling. Yet even as he regretted the lost age of entitlement and privacy, he felt compelled by noblesse oblige and religious conscience to develop the reforms that dismembered the old world. It was Salisbury, not Gladstone, who established democratic county councils, extended free and compulsory education to all children, and forced employers to compensate injured workers. He did this not because he believed in mass democracy, but because he believed in the patrician’s responsibility to care for the plebeian.
Wary of compliments, suspicious of praise, distrustful of civil servants, casual in dress to the point of shabbiness, happier in his private laboratory than on the hustings, Salisbury remained aloof from what Garnet Wolseley called the “dirty, dunghill sort of democratic wave” that washed through British politics in Gladstone’s wake. Yet he thrice became prime minister. In a deferential age, Salisbury’s distance from ordinary Britons, his enormous private wealth, and his blunt insistence on honesty in public life all recommended him to the horde of untrustworthy voters as a disinterested leader.3
As with many other Victorian misfits, the empire had been the making of him. He did his best to return the favor. In 1874, Salisbury returned to the India Office under Disraeli. At first, Salisbury suspected Disraeli as a Jewish parvenu: alluding to Dickens’s Oliver Twist, he called Disraeli an “Artless Dodger.” But soon their agreement over Britain’s imperial destiny overrode Salisbury’s distaste for Disraeli’s populist maneuvers. In 1878, as Disraeli’s foreign secretary, Salisbury negotiated the Treaty of Berlin, resolving the Russo-Turkish war in Britain’s favor and creating a British blueprint for the resolution of the Eastern Question. After sheltering in the House of Lords for a further four years following Disraeli’s death, in 1885 Salisbury, now fifty-five years old, descended to do his duty in the dunghill of the Commons as prime minister. Balancing his domestic duties with his true speciality, he doubled as foreign secretary.4
Characteristically, Salisbury’s foreign policy rested on a single, clear idea: the principle that would become known as “splendid isolation.” As Britain had the largest empire, the motives of the Great Powers could not be trusted. The inherited entanglement of the Concert of Europe offered Britain’s Lilliputian rivals the chance to gang up on the British Gulliver, pinning him down with multilateral treaties. To divide, rule, and prosper, Britain should resolve disputes bilaterally. The decline of Britain’s competitive edge made this more urgent than ever.5
By the 1880s, Britain sensed the loss of its industrial advantage. Exports of British technology had allowed its European competitors to develop potent industrial bases, notably in France and Germany. The rivals identified as the keys to Britain’s power its empire, the source of raw materials and captive markets, and its navy, the controller of the sea routes. In Germany, Bismarck introduced a protectionism tinged with patriotic chauvinism and, like King Leopold II of Belgium, went looking for colonies in Africa. The French responded in kind.
“Colonies are for rich countries one of the most lucrative methods of investing capital,” explained Jules Ferry, the architect of France’s expanding empire. “France, which is glutted with capital and which has exported considerable quantities, has an interest in looking at this side of the colonial question.”
This excited the ambitions of Italy, which as a new state desired the appurtenances of an older one, and of Portugal, an old state that already possessed a slumbering empire. Africa, with its combination of limitless raw materials, badly armed natives, and undefined spheres of influence, became the focus of the European charge for colonies or, as the new term had it, “Imperialism.”6
In 1884, the Concert convened for its last significant performance, the Conference of Berlin. In the abused names of Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization, the European powers divided Africa into zones of interest. After several months of elaborate horse-trading, on February 26, 1885, the General Act of Berlin drew the starting lines of what would be known as the “Scramble for Africa,” the race into the hinterland from the patchwork of ports and colonies that now lined the coasts of the continent.
Britain claimed the basin of the River Nile. France claimed the Chad River basin in the west. Germany claimed colonies on Africa’s west and east coasts that overlooked Britain’s longer India Route, via the Cape. Britain and Germany recognized Belgium’s great diplomatic virtue—that it was not France—and granted King Leopold II a million square miles in the Congo. Further, thinner slices of the colonial pie went to Portugal, for having reached Africa first, and to Italy, for getting there last.
By regulating the Scramble, the conference, and especially Gladstone and Bismarck, aimed to prevent its volatile blend of greed and status from blowing back into Europe. In this they succeeded, but at a cost passed to the Africans, whose representatives had not been invited to Berlin. Gladstone’s last major contribution to international affairs laid the path for the greatest imperial expropriations in recorded history.
“The other powers are beginning a career of colonial aggrandisement,” warned Lord Rosebery, a leading young Liberal who subscribed to “forward” policy. “We formerly did not have in our foreign affairs to trouble ourselves much with colonial questions, because we had a monopoly of colonies. That monopoly has ceased.”
In contrast to the programs of the new empires, Britain already possessed a global empire, and largely by accident. Britain had established white dominions in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand with little oppositi
on from the European powers. Until the Indian Mutiny of 1857, London had delegated the running of India to the East India Company, which had ruled India as a private business. The Mutiny had obliged Britain to formalize its rule in India, but elsewhere, Britain continued to prefer informal influence and the persuasive powers of the Royal Navy. Colonies were expensive to run. In a peaceful system of Free Trade, the possession of colonies offered little advantage over the cheaper, indirect method: a “protectorate” supervised by some helpful local tyrant.
The two great exceptions were at either end of Africa. The Cape Colony and Egypt sat astride the best and second-best sea routes to India. Yet even in Egypt, Disraeli, Gladstone, and Salisbury all preferred informal control to annexing a key Ottoman province. Nevertheless, the rise of competing empires forced Britain, the unwitting leader of the charge, to follow its competitors into Africa.7
When Salisbury left the Foreign Office in 1880, Africa hardly figured in policy calculation. By his return in 1886, the Dark Continent had become the stage for a European struggle for resources and prestige. Like Gladstone before him, Salisbury’s priority was to keep the peace in Europe, but without surrendering to the French. In 1887, Salisbury still distrusted Egypt as an “inconvenient” blend of European rivalries and domestic enthusiasm.
“I heartily wish we had never gone into Egypt,” he admitted. “Had we not done so, we could snap our fingers at all the world. But the national, or acquisitional feeling has been aroused; it has tasted the fleshpots and it will not let them go.” As for the Sudan, he resisted the “lunatics” who believed that “by some magic wave of the diplomatic wand, the Sudan can be turned into a second India.” Annexation for its own sake or to avenge Gordon was Jingo cant, and Jingoism was the “bastard brother” of patriotism.
But when the sultan’s trickery endangered the India Route, or when Egypt became essential to Britain’s dignity in Europe, there could be no backing down. The expanded strategic demands of the Scramble for Africa confirmed this judgment. Egypt became a cornerstone of Salisbury’s African strategy. It was radical enough to oblige him to announce it indirectly—his parliamentary majority rested on the support of disaffected Liberals, and a public statement would antagonize the European powers. So he followed one of Britain’s less grand African traditions, and floated his idea in the papers.8
In the summer of 1888, Salisbury invited to the Foreign Office Harry Johnston, thirty-year-old acting consul of Britain’s Niger Coast Protectorate, and early example of the British species of imperialist. After examining Johnston on his policy in the Niger Delta, Salisbury invited him for the weekend to the Cecil seat, Hatfield House. As they strolled in the grounds after church on Sunday morning, Salisbury raised the imminent division of Africa.
“What a pity it is that no one could put the whole African question lucidly before the public,” he mused. His eye settled momentarily on Johnston. “In some newspaper article, I mean.”9
Johnson took the hint, supplying Salisbury with several drafts of an article. On August 22, 1888, the Times carried “Great Britain’s Policy in Africa,” by “An African Explorer.”
“We are forced by German, French and Portuguese ambitions to extend our direct political influence over a large part of Africa,” Johnston declared. Africa’s material bounty made it the next New World, destined to be “exploited by the white races,” but Britain risked losing its share of the market. Johnston offered two strategic options, both based upon British control of Egypt.
The first, “Niger-to-the-Nile,” connected Egypt to expanded British territories in West Africa. Though this route was the shorter, it could only achieve contiguity in the unlikely event of France agreeing to swap its West African colonies in Dahomey and Ivory Coast for British Gambia. The second proposal was grander but more practicable: to connect the key territories of Egypt and South Africa by taking control of a three-thousand-mile swath in between. Britain could push north from South Africa into the unclaimed area known as “Zambezia”; negotiate a path through German East Africa to Lake Victoria and the sources of the Nile; and link up with a second drive up the Nile Valley toward Equatoria. Johnston called this scheme “Cape-to-Cairo.” Unofficially, it became the strategic blueprint for Britain’s African empire.10
“Africa is the subject which occupies the Foreign Office more than any other,” Salisbury announced at the Guildhall in 1889.
That year, he removed from the walls of his suite in the Foreign Office the maps of Central Asia and the Balkans, the familiar backdrop of the Eastern Question. He repapered the room with new maps of Africa, and prepared to fill in the blanks.11
ACROSS THE RIVER from the ruins of Khartoum, Omdurman grew from a military camp to a new capital, its unplanned huddle of huts and alleys sprawling for six miles along the western bank of the White Nile.
Its three major roads began at the doorstep of the mosque. One ran west into the town’s desert fringe, where the Ansar rallied after Friday prayers for a ritual parade to celebrate the revolution. The second ran south to the landing stage where military raiding parties departed to hunt grain and slaves in the south and west. The third, the Darb al-Shuhada, the Road of the Martyrs, ran north into the desert in the direction of Egypt. The institutional core of the Mahdist state coalesced around the mosque and its two neighbors, the Mahdi’s tomb and the khalifa’s house: the arsenal, the slave market, the treasury and the prison. Khartoum lay empty and smashed; only its dockyard still functioned, because it had proved impossible to relocate it. All life in the Sudan now centered upon Omdurman, and all life in Omdurman now centered on the Khalifa Abdullahi.
“The Mahdi is the representative of the Prophet Mohammed, and I am his successor,” he explained. “Who, therefore, in the whole world holds so high a position as I?”12
At fifty, Abdullahi had grown sluggish in gait and grand in manner. He had replaced his sandals with soft leather socks and yellow shoes, and his old jibba with a new, patchless one in fine white cotton with a colored border. On his head was a silk skullcap from Mecca. A staff of twenty eunuchs and a dozen slave boys attended him; he preferred his body servants to be Abyssinian Christians or children because he believed they would be less likely to plot against him. When his attendants reached late puberty, they were drafted into the army, and new, young replacements selected. Mistakes were punished by flogging or chained starvation. He maintained a harem of hundreds of women, “from light brown to the deepest black,” selected from every tribe in the Sudan, with expensive pale shades of foreigner, too. When he forced the sister of the late sultan of Darfur into his harem, she threw herself into the Nile. Limited to four wives by sharia, he simply divorced the ones he tired of and married the ones he desired. The gold and silver jewelry that the Mahdi had banned and stockpiled in the treasury to finance the jihad in Egypt gradually reappeared around the necks of Abdullahi’s favorites. He developed a taste for Turkish and Egyptian dishes cooked by his homesick new wives, and grew accordingly stout, his long face disappearing in the pouches of fat that hung beneath his eyes.13
Planning a dynasty, he groomed his son Osman for the succession. When Osman married, Abdullahi relaxed the Mahdi’s ban on ostentatious festivities for an eight-day wedding feast to which he invited all Omdurman. Abdullahi attempted to provide Osman with the education he had never received, but Osman had no appetite for the madrassa, preferring “nightly orgies in his house.” Abdullahi proceeded to govern without his son’s help, relying instead on his brothers Yacub and al-Sanussi Ahmed, and an expanding network of spies. Completely illiterate, he depended on two secretaries to read his letters and note his replies. When he conferred with his chiefs, most of his orders came in the form of koranic recitation. He received supplicants from a raised divan, lolling against a sheepskin pillow. They approached with eyes lowered, their hands crossed passively across their chests, and they did not sit until he invited them. When they did they assumed the prayer position, foreheads touching the dirt floor of the khalifial palace, the firs
t two-story building in Omdurman.14
Abdullahi did not like being looked at. Even a one-eyed Syrian who unknowingly directed his blind eye toward the khalifa was told never to come near him again. The Mahdi had led a revolutionary rally at every Friday prayers, but the khalifa hid from his subjects, using his brothers as deputies. He ventured out under heavy guard only four times a year, for religious festivals, one hand holding a sword and the other a Hadendowa spear that he used as a walking stick. Fearing his subjects and allies, he ruled by making them fear him.
The Mahdi had been a scholar and the prophetic creator of a coalition, but Abdullahi was neither. Having inherited the Mahdi’s dream at its apogee, between the delirium of conquest and the creation of a perfected caliphate ruled by sharia justice, he had struggled to control his vast empire. In three years, the Mahdi had taken the Sudan back four centuries. His revolt had demolished the Turkiyya’s infrastructure along with its garrisons. The Sudan had no telegraph lines, no regular steamer services, and no postal service. Its civil servants had either fled or been murdered, its trade, agriculture, and pilgrim routes had been disrupted. The sultanates that once had divided it into manageable tracts had folded into an empire that could not administrate them. Abdullahi inherited a medieval chaos.
He responded with the medieval answer. He turned the entire Sudan into a giant sultanate, a tribal dictatorship funded by war. Although the British at Cairo and Suakin continued to allow trade between the Sudan and the exterior, trade withered and little new money entered the country. All export commerce passed through the Beit al-Mal, but as the prime source of ivory, gum, ostrich feathers, and senna were the western districts most devastated by war, famine, and disease, supplies were short. The loot from Khartoum seeped away from the Beit al-Mal, squandered by Abdullahi on his favorites, or smuggled down to Egypt by his treasurer. The Sudan’s currency declined in value: While the Mahdi’s dollar of 1885 had been seven parts silver and one part copper, by 1895, the khalifa’s dollar was two parts silver and five parts copper. The state ceased to exist as anything more than an extension of a tribal tyranny, and the Mahdi’s jihad turned into an Afro-Arab imperialism. Abdullahi’s genocidal campaigns against dissident Sudanese tribes, or his greedy rampage into Abyssinia, differed little in effect or motivation from the ghazwas of the Turkiyya.
Three Empires on the Nile Page 29
