Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  By the early 1880s, Egypt and more particularly the Sudan were among the most exciting places in the British Empire. Egypt itself had fallen under British influence in the 1870s, when Disraeli had bought shares in the Suez Canal, and the Egyptian government, under a hereditary ruler known as the Khedive, began to come under the informal influence of the British Consul General, who in 1882 was Evelyn Baring, a scion of the British banking family and another graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Baring was a gruff bear of a man whose nickname, inevitably, became ‘Over-Baring’ or ‘le Grand Ours’ (the Big Bear). Egyptian politics were even more complicated by the fact that the Khedive and the ruling classes in Egypt were Turkish and were, nominally at least, vassals of the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople. The land to the south of Egypt had been known to Arab traders for years as al bilad as-sudan, or the ‘Land of the Blacks’. In the eyes of the British and the Arabs alike, the history of the Sudan before the Egyptians under Turkish rulers established nominal control over the country was a tale of incoherent blood feuds and chaos. In Kitchener’s own words, ‘endless wars raged’ and the ‘blood feud was most bitter’.16

  The Egyptians’ claims on Sudan and their attempt, under British influence, to suppress slave trading had alienated many of the Sudanese tribes, who had thrived on this inhumane, if lucrative, activity. The Sudanese were also beginning to feel the weight of Egyptian rule through the ‘self-seeking and unscrupulous tax-gatherers’ who were now descending upon them from Cairo.17 To exacerbate the problem for the Egyptians, there arose, as so often is the case, a national leader of great charisma and force who, through the power of religious enthusiasm, combined the various disaffected elements in the Sudan into one movement.

  Mohammed Ahmed had been born in 1844, the son of a boat builder, and his brothers followed their father in that trade. Ahmed, however, found his vocation in religion. His father died on a journey to Khartoum while Ahmed was still a boy and, in a celebrated description by Winston Churchill, which some historians have taken as referring to Churchill himself, the boy ‘deprived of a father’s care’ developed ‘an independence and vigour of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days’. Mohammed Ahmed was certainly an independent thinker. He pursued his religious studies with great diligence and cultivated a personal reputation for austerity, often fasting for days.18 He started off as a disciple of the renowned holy sheikh Mohammed Sherif, but a dispute with his master made Ahmed strike out on his own, preaching and winning disciples to his austere brand of Islam.

  Emboldened by his initial success in attracting followers, Ahmed proclaimed himself the ‘Mahdi’ in the summer of 1881. ‘Al-Mahdi’ was an Arabic term, meaning guide or leader; and the expectation that a prophet with special powers would come to earth at the end of the world to purify mankind and bring justice is a belief not exclusive to the Islamic faith. To Victorian generals, the mystical and religious aspect of the Mahdi’s mission was especially fascinating. There was a general view that Islam held a particular attraction for the ‘native races’ of Central Africa, and the natural superstition of the native was often invoked to explain the Mahdi’s stunning successes. The Mahdi had to be a ‘descendant of the Prophet’, the ‘Ashraf’, and would share the same name as the Prophet, Mohammed ibn Abdullah, Mohammed son of Abdullah, which was the Mahdi’s full name if one includes his patronymic. Whatever the general aims of the ‘expected Mahdi’ might be, Mohammed Ahmed’s ambitions in 1881 were more specific. He aspired to ‘gain over the whole of the Sudan to his cause, then march on Egypt and overthrow the false-believing Turks’. Only after this had been accomplished would the Mahdi finally establish ‘the thousand years’ kingdom in Mecca, and convert the whole world’, according to a contemporary British account of the Mahdist uprising.19

  Among the followers the Mahdi managed to gather, there was a man called Abdullah, from the Ta’aisha Beggara tribe of the northern Sudan. Abdullah was a man of determination and force who acted as the Mahdi’s practical right-hand man; he was often described as ‘the man of the world, the practical politician, the general’, and, with the Mahdi providing the religious inspiration, the two men began to rouse the local tribes to rebellion. 20 The Mahdi himself wrote letters to all parts of the Sudan, calling upon everyone to fight for the purity of Islam, for the freedom of the soil and for ‘God’s holy prophet “the expected Mahdi”’. The Egyptian government, by now increasingly under British influence, sent two companies of infantry–about sixty men–to arrest the religious leader in an attempt to bring the revolt to an end. It was an August evening in 1881 when a steamer with the infantrymen aboard arrived at Abba, near the village where the Mahdi resided. The two companies approached the Mahdi’s village by separate routes. It was now dark, and the two units entered the village from opposite directions; in the confusion caused by the uncertainty of where the Mahdi actually was and by the darkness, the soldiers started firing at each other, and the Mahdi, with his small following, seized his opportunity and destroyed both companies of men. Some of the Egyptian soldiers managed to get back to the steamship at anchor in Abba, but its captain quickly left the scene of the debacle, and ‘those who could not swim out to the vessel were left to their fate’.21

  This initial success brought the Mahdi great prestige, and people in Sudan began to wonder if he was indeed the ‘expected guide’, the genuine Mahdi who would inaugurate a reign of peace and justice. The self-styled Mahdi now began to assume the airs and confidence of a man bent on a divinely inspired mission. He appointed his four successors, or khalifas, in accordance with the precedent set by the Prophet Mohammed himself, and, unsurprisingly, the chief of these khalifas was Abdullah. It was against this backdrop of religious enthusiasm and insurrection that the famous mission of General Gordon was conceived. In November 1883 the Mahdi’s troops had achieved a victory even more dramatic than that at Abba, annihilating a force of 10,000 Egyptian soldiers commanded by Major General William Hicks. Hicks’s men had been attacked in a savage onslaught, which only 300 of the 10,000 men survived. In keeping with Sudanese custom, the heads of Hicks and his leading officers were presented to the Mahdi and his followers.22 It was then decided by Gladstone’s government in London to evacuate the Egyptian garrison in Khartoum, an operation that Gordon was dispatched to oversee; he arrived on 18 February 1884.

  Charles Gordon is one of those historical figures of whom many people are dimly aware. This is partly because the role of Gordon was successfully played by Charlton Heston in the 1966 film Khartoum, in which Gordon meets his end on the steps of the palace at Khartoum, surrounded by spear-wielding dervishes. Despite being the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster, Gordon’s life was even more spectacular than any work of creative fiction could depict. Born in 1833, he was fifty-one when the final act of his eventful life unfolded. Like Kitchener and many others in the Sudan story, Gordon had been educated at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, from which he had been recruited into the Royal Engineers. Requiring a knowledge of mathematics and engineering, this corps compensated for its lack of social prestige by attracting a particularly determined type of officer. Gordon was, however, even more unusual. He was a mystic, a Christian fundamentalist, who became convinced that the Garden of Eden was located in the Seychelles. His religious fervour embraced death as the ‘gateway to eternal life’. He despised money, luxury and modern living, and when he left England for the last time in 1884 he sensed that he would never return, exclaiming passionately, ‘I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner parties and miseries.’23

  The circumstances which pitched the Mahdi against General Gordon were out of the ordinary, and both men, as was remarked at the time, were of a remarkably similar type. They were religious fanatics who each believed he was performing God’s will, though the sincerity of the Mahdi’s protestations has been doubted. The Mahdi preached asceticism and worldly renunciation, though the number of wives and concubines he took–some p
ut the figure as high as 110–undermined his claims to rigorous abstinence. 24 Gordon, on the other hand, was a genuine ascetic. He was friends with the greatest imperialist capitalist of the age, Cecil Rhodes, and told Rhodes, at a breakfast in South Africa, that in China, where he had served with distinction in the 1860s, he had been offered a ‘whole room-full of silver’. He had refused the gift and, in recounting the story to Rhodes, asked, ‘What would you have done?’ ‘Why’, said Rhodes incredulously, ‘taken it of course! What is the earthly use of having ideas if you haven’t got the money to carry them out?’25

  Gordon immediately tried to rally the garrison in Khartoum, which grew increasingly nervous as the Mahdi’s men arrived to besiege the town. Ever rigid in his sense of duty and honour, the General ‘considered that he was personally pledged to effect the evacuation of Khartoum by the garrison and civil servants’. Nothing would now induce him to leave until its inhabitants had been rescued.26 He also formed an ‘unshaken determination never to surrender the town to the rebels’. The inhabitants of the city now numbered only about 14,000 out of the original 34,000, since Gordon had immediately on arrival in Khartoum started sending people away.27 While the siege lasted, the British public, updated by newspaper reports, became increasingly concerned about the impending crisis. As Lord Randolph Churchill told the House of Commons on 16 March 1884, the General was in a dangerous situation, being ‘surrounded by hostile tribes and cut off from communications with Cairo and London’.28 The siege continued, with conditions in Khartoum becoming more and more desperate. The garrison suffered from ‘want of food’, and by December ‘all the donkeys, dogs, cats, rats etc. had been eaten’.29 The slow response from the Gladstone government to the crisis in which Gordon found himself is well known. The Prime Minister was as stubborn as Gordon and seems to have taken a perverse pride in not heeding the popular demand that he immediately send a force to save Gordon.

  Belatedly, a Gordon Relief Expedition was dispatched in August 1884, under Sir Garnet Wolseley, another powerful figure of this militaristic age. In Khartoum, Gordon was having sleepless nights and was only too aware that his ability to withstand the siege was limited. The denouement came in January 1885, when, at about 3.30 a.m. on Monday the 26th, the Mahdi’s troops made a ‘determined attack’ on the south side of the town. Khartoum fell, according to Kitchener’s account (though he was not there to witness it), because the garrison were too exhausted by their sufferings to put up a proper resistance. Once the rebels had entered the town, there was a general massacre, and the exact fate of General Gordon remains unclear. He was killed, certainly, but differing accounts of his death have been related to this day. It is likely that he died near the gate of the palace, but the dramatic accounts of his confronting the mob on the steps of the Governor’s palace may derive more from the imagination of subsequent storytellers than from what actually happened. After his death, there unfolded a macabre scene. Since none of the tribesmen knew what the General looked like, there was uncertainty about which was ‘Gordon’s body, and great confusion occurred in the Mahdi’s camp at Omdurman’ –a town on the western banks of the Nile on the other side from Khartoum. When the heads of various Europeans were presented, some were identified as Gordon’s, only for other tribesmen to deny the attribution. The General’s body itself was never found.30

  The massacre, in which 4,000 people were killed, ended at about 10 a.m. when the Mahdi ordered the slaughter to stop. Kitchener’s description of the siege is written in a characteristically dry, matter-of-fact style but, at the end of his account, he did allow himself an uncharacteristic rhetorical flourish: ‘The memorable siege of Khartoum lasted 317 days and it is not too much to say that such a noble resistance was due to the indomitable resolution and resource of one Englishman.’ Kitchener’s assessment was that the Mahdi was now in control of the whole of the Sudan, and it would be difficult for the time being to envisage a government without him: ‘The Mahdi’s personal influence is paramount in the country and unless he leaves it I hardly think the people could free themselves.’31

  The Mahdi himself, however, was soon stricken with a dangerous disease and, in June 1885, only five months after the fall of Khartoum, he failed to appear at the mosque for prayers for several days. At first, his followers thought nothing of this, for had it not been revealed that the ‘Mahdi should conquer Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem’ before his earthly mission was done?32 The rule of the Mahdi had been strict, but there is no evidence that he was particularly unpopular. He had forbidden ‘dancing and playing’, which he denounced as ‘earthly pleasures’, and anyone who was found disobeying his rules was liable to punishment by flogging and confiscation of all his property. The use of bad language was strictly forbidden, with a punishment of eighty lashes prescribed for every insulting word uttered. To the usual Islamic prohibition against alcohol, there was added an equally strong injunction against the smoking of tobacco. Thieves would be deprived of their right hands for a first offence, and of their left foot for a second.33 The Mahdi was perhaps the first Islamic fundamentalist of the modern era, as earlier fanatics, like Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab in eighteenth-century Saudi Arabia, were unmolested by the modern Western world of machine guns and organized military campaigns. On the seventh day of his illness, the Mahdi, stricken with typhus, knew that his end was near. Summoning his followers by one last effort, he named Khalifa Abdullah his successor, declaring, ‘He is of me, and I am of him; as you have obeyed me, so you should deal with him. May God have mercy upon me.’34

  While the Mahdi was treated by the British as a figure of some importance and dignity, his successor, the Khalifa, has been portrayed in all the most lurid colours of late Victorian sensationalism, as a monster of human wickedness and depravity. In 1890 he was described in an intelligence report as a ‘tall, stout man’ whose hair was beginning to turn grey. At that date, the Khalifa would have been in his mid-forties, as he was roughly the same age as his former master, the Mahdi. The British depicted him as an ignorant, cunning savage, and tales of his sexual depravity titillated both the official classes and the wider public. It seems strange that a description of the Khalifa’s seduction techniques should find itself in a ‘General Report on the Sudan’, but the intelligence agent could not resist recounting how Abdullah employed an agent, Haj Zubeir, to find out all the ‘good looking women’, whereupon the ‘husband of the woman is strictly advised to divorce his wife who is at once brought to the Khalifa’. Once ensconced in the Khalifa’s harem, the women ‘are carefully guarded and are not permitted even to see their parents’. In this way, the report claimed, the Khalifa collected a harem of thirty-four wives, one of whom was a daughter of the Mahdi himself. It is difficult to see how these details affected the general security situation. Britain, and its puppet state Egypt, had withdrawn from the Sudan, leaving the country at the mercy of the Khalifa and his marauding army. Abdullah himself was an archetypal despot, which made hating him so much easier for the British officials. People brought into his presence were ‘obliged to enter . . . on all fours’, as no one was permitted to look at the Khalifa’s face; they had to address him as ‘Ya Sayeedi’ (O my Lord) and they were compelled to retire backwards, with their heads bent and their eyes fixed to the ground, when they left his presence.

  The Khalifa’s intelligence, in British eyes, was impressive; he was a man of force and power with whom the British of the late Victorian era could identify, but he ‘neither reads nor writes and is said to be a man of exceptional ignorance’, which was compensated for by his ‘great determination’ and his being ‘well versed in every art of fraud and deception’.35 The British response to the disaster Gordon had suffered at Khartoum was to sit and wait. Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, who for so many years effectively ran the nominally independent Egyptian government, later remarked that the Sudan had been ‘left derelict, not so much because the cargo was altogether valueless, but rather because no hands were available to effect the salvage’. He was convinced that an
y British attempt to reconquer the Sudan would only take place after about ‘twenty-five years’, in 1910 or 1911.36

  Cautious and pragmatic, Baring believed that ‘any attempt to negotiate with the Mahdist leaders’ would prove ‘barren of result’. He took the view that, while the Mahdi could inspire his followers with a genuine religious fervour, the Khalifa was a different case. It was true that the Khalifa had the ability to ‘raise large numbers of men by preaching a “jehad”’, but the ‘fanaticism inspired by Mahdiism will never have the force it possessed during the early days of Mohammed Ahmed’.37 Baring, in his clear-cut way–he was yet another product of Woolwich, but had left the army in the 1870s–believed that the Sudan ‘cannot and should not be permanently separated from Egypt’. There were powerful reasons for the reconquest of Sudan. These included the ‘stimulus of commercial interests, a desire to aid in the suppression of the Slave Trade’ and humanitarian ‘pity and commiseration for the inhabitants of the Soudan, who, without doubt, groan under the Dervish yoke’. The British government would have to pay for this campaign, as the resources of Egypt, financial and military, were ‘wholly inadequate for the accomplishment of the task’.38 It was simply a matter of timing.

  Kitchener, meanwhile, who had been an intelligence officer on the Gordon Relief Expedition which arrived in Khartoum two days late, was slowly climbing the ladder of preferment within the Egyptian army, gathering honours and titles. He had time to join the Freemasons in 1883 and kept up a lifelong involvement with the organization. In Cairo, where he was stationed before setting out to relieve Gordon, he is even believed to have fallen in love. Hermione Baker was the elder of the two daughters of Valentine Baker, a senior army officer, who lived with her mother and sister in the city’s Shepheard’s Hotel. Kitchener visited the Bakers often in Cairo in 1883 and 1884 and, it was rumoured, had been engaged to Hermione, a young lady in her late teens. But Hermione died of typhoid fever on 13 January 1885, two weeks before the fall of Khartoum, and at a time when Kitchener himself was deep in the Sudan, trying to save Gordon. Ever since this supposed love affair, there have been rumours about Kitchener’s sexuality, with a remark of a contemporary journalist being often cited–that Kitchener had ‘the failing acquired by most of the Egyptian officers, a taste for buggery’. Hermione’s younger sister, Sybil, was never in any doubt that her sister’s death was the great tragedy in Kitchener’s life.39 Kitchener destroyed most of his personal correspondence, so the depth and nature of his feelings for Hermione, as well as his other passions, homosexual or otherwise, are likely never to be known.