Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Ali Dinar, for his part, played the role of pantomime villain to perfection. His florid style, or rather that of his secretaries, so highly praised in Arabic literature, when translated into English seemed bombastic and almost comical: ‘You Christians are infidels and dogs . . . You have accepted death . . . you shall taste at our hands the bitter cup of death . . . Sorrow and annihilation shall befall you, and your souls shall be cast into fire and Hell.’51 Despite some low-key warnings from the French, who were worried about British involvement in Darfur threatening their position in neighbouring Chad, the military campaign against the Sultan was swift and conclusive. The campaign showed how skilful the British were at playing the propaganda war, as their proclamations incited the people of Darfur against their despotic ruler, whom the British had installed in the first place. The Governor General, in his proclamations, also skilfully adopted the florid rhetoric of classical Arabic prose: ‘Verily you know’, he declared to the natives of Darfur, ‘that Ali Dinar has killed your chiefs, plundered your property and sold your women and children . . . you should therefore forsake him . . . and surrender yourselves to my victorious troops whom I have sent to punish that unjust and tyrannical person . . . When you surrender you will be given the “Amen” of God and his Prophet, and you will be saved . . . from the humiliation of servitude to Ali Dinar.’52

  The campaign against the Sultan was led by Colonel P. W. Kelly, who commanded a small force recruited from the Egyptian army. This force crossed the Darfur frontier on 20 March 1916 and managed to pin down the Sultan’s army in El Fasher by blocking the main road east which led to the Sudan itself. On 23 May, Kelly’s force successfully occupied El Fasher, after a small battle on the 21st in which 1,000 soldiers, out of a force of between 2,000 and 3,000, of the Sultan’s army were killed or ‘incapacitated’. As in other colonial skirmishes and battles, the casualties were utterly one-sided; three British officers were wounded, three men were killed, a further two men died of their wounds, and eighteen were wounded.53 As late as the middle of May, immediately before the decisive battle, Ali Dinar –now utterly deluded–threatened the Governor General personally with a bitter death: ‘it is my earnest hope to kill you in the worst possible manner, to let you taste torture and to hang your head and the heads of your troops in the public market as an example’.54

  As usual, there was a wide gulf between the Sultan’s high-flown rhetoric and his capacity to realize his threats on the ground. His tune changed markedly after the defeat on 21 May; now he was suing for peace and blaming everything and everybody for his own rash actions: ‘I beg to submit to Your Excellency that all the disputes and dissensions which took place between you and myself were simply the result of intrigues and of the cunning policy of the . . . notables of Darfur.’ It was they who had ‘induced me and cheated me, by their advice and talk, not to listen to your wise counsels and admonitions’. Like many unsuccessful generals, before and since, the Sultan blamed the cunning and treachery of his followers who ‘promised to fight and die before surrendering’, but who ‘on the arrival of the Egyptian and British troops’ all ‘forsook’ him. Ali Dinar was now willing to give up his sultanate for ‘peace with His Excellency the Governor-General’, to ‘keep my own family and property’. It was a pathetic attempt to save his own skin after the inflated boasting and pompous, blood-curdling rhetoric of only two weeks before.55

  Ali Dinar now fled with some of his immediate relatives and about 2,000 of his men. It seems that he still harboured hopes for some kind of guerrilla campaign against the British, despite his earlier protestation that he only wanted peace. As his situation grew more desperate during the summer of 1916, Dinar’s men began to surrender and desert their leader. Mass defections had occurred by the beginning of November, as hunger now afflicted the Sultan’s isolated followers. As troops commanded by Major Hubert Huddleston encircled the Sultan, men, women and children flocked to the British troops and it was reported that, by 5 November, 200 men and 300 women had surrendered with 6,000 head of cattle, 70 horses and 300 camels. The list of prisoners included two sisters of the Sultan and several of his children. The end for Ali Dinar was bloody: on the 6th he was surprised in an ambush with about fifty of his remaining followers. There was some shooting and the Sultan’s body was found about a mile from the camp, where the ambush had taken place, with a bullet through his head.56 Like the Khalifa, the last Sultan of Darfur had learned a harsh lesson in the folly of opposing British rule.

  Darfur was annexed in 1916 and incorporated into the regular government of the Sudan. It was made into a province with its own governor, who was subordinate to the Governor General in Khartoum. The problem of dealing with Islamic fanaticism would remain a difficult one for the British administrators, and it was fear of Islamic subversion which led to the next, fateful step in the Sudan’s history. The 1920s saw a resurgence of nationalism in Egypt and the Sudan, which was almost always couched in Islamic religious terms. A letter to Saad Zaghloul, the Prime Minister of Egypt, in July 1924, spoke of the English as the ‘rulers’, and of the Egyptians and Sudanese as the ‘subjects’, adding, ‘God knows we do not want them for they are not of our religion and are unbelievers and their tyranny in the Sudan is not hidden.’57 In the Sudan itself, there occurred a mutiny at the Khartoum Military School, where cadets refused to go on parade in August 1924 and took up arms instead. A cordon of British troops confined the armed cadets to the school area before any real harm could be done. In the view of the Sirdar’s private secretary, this incident ‘must definitely put an end to the present system of providing native officers for Arab and Sudanese units’. British officers were needed to keep the volatile native troops in check. More specifically to the mutiny, the ‘arrival of another British Battalion and aeroplanes’ would have its ‘fullest value in its stabilising effect on the civil opinion’.

  The mutiny in Khartoum, small though it was, was yet another symptom of the crisis which gripped the British Empire in the 1920s. After the First World War, nationalist movements had sprung up, or had been strengthened, in Iraq, India, Egypt and Palestine. In the Arab world, it was immediately recognized that militant Islam was the principal threat to British authority. In the Sudan, there had always existed two distinct cultures: the northern part of the country was Islamic and Arab, while the southern was more African. The threat that subversion from the Islamic north would undermine the loyalty of the southern region, coupled with the fact that the ‘Southern provinces had never produced anything but a loss’, led to the formulation of what later became known as the ‘Southern Policy’. The man who was most closely associated with this policy was Harold MacMichael, who had graduated from Cambridge in 1904, with a first in Classics and a Blue in the esoteric sport of fencing.58 He had entered the Sudan Political Service in 1905 and had spent all his career there. MacMichael, known as ‘MacMic’ to his friends and ‘horrible Harold’ to his detractors, was yet another driven servant of the state, a type with which the history of the British Empire seems to abound. ‘He never tired of work, and while his colleagues slept in the long siesta of a Sudan afternoon, MacMic worked, read, reread, minuted, and responded to the files of government, mastering their contents, remembering their trivialities.’ His personal coldness was legendary and it was, perhaps, compounded by his close connection with the very highest circles in the British Empire. His mother had been the Honourable Sophia Caroline Curzon, the elder sister of George Nathaniel Curzon, who served as viceroy of India and foreign secretary, only narrowly failing in achieving his ambition of becoming prime minister. MacMichael, though then a fairly junior member of the SPS, corresponded regularly with his famous uncle about foreign affairs. Contact with Curzon ‘placed him in a unique position among the members of the Sudan Political Service’, and no doubt added to his aloofness and his sense of superiority.59 Like nearly all his peers in the service, MacMichael was no democrat. Far from being harbingers of liberal pluralism, the servants of empire were naturally at home with the idea of human i
nequality, with notions of hierarchy and status. In the context of Africa, MacMichael, in his 1935 book The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, had written: ‘Men are not equal in any practical, obvious sense, and the fact is so patent to the African that to deny it by word or deed is merely proof of wrongheadedness. A sense of homage is natural to him. It is a good and sensible instinct, and it must be given scope.’60

  The natural corollary of human inequality was the building up of a machinery of government in which the native chiefs ‘should play an important part’. 61 This was at the heart of the idea of ‘indirect rule’, through which local chiefs, the ‘natural leaders’, were given power over their subjects by British overlords. Harold MacMichael had no real affinity with the pagan south of the country, being, like so many other imperial servants, a keen student of Arabic and Islamic culture. As civil secretary, the effective deputy to the Governor General, he issued a statement on ‘Southern Policy’ in 1930, in which he declared that the administration of the south was to be developed along ‘African’ rather than ‘Arab’ lines, and that the future of the southern Sudan might ‘ultimately lie with the countries of British East Africa’, like Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya, rather than with the Middle East.62 This ‘Southern Policy’ has been well documented, but what is less understood is the exact background to its adoption in 1930. In a paper entitled ‘Spread of the Arabic Language in the Southern Sudan’ dating from June 1929, Lord Lloyd, the Resident in Cairo, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, the Labour Party’s Arthur Henderson, stating that the ‘pagan blacks’ in the south of the Sudan were ‘in a very early stage of civilisation, differing in every respect from the more sophisticated Arab tribes of the north’. Among the tribes of the south, the Dinka, Lord Lloyd continued, ‘show us pre-historic man at home in the twentieth century, as uncontaminated by outside influence as any race that can be found in the world today’. He used the imagery of the noble savage; the Dinka were ‘flourishing, virile, pastoral and in the early Iron Age’. A confirmed Conservative imperialist, Lloyd reported that MacMichael had argued ‘very forcibly that the encouragement of Arabic in the South would serve to promote the spread of Islam’, leading perhaps to Islamic fanaticism. ‘Islam, though on a higher plane than their present pagan beliefs’, was nevertheless in MacMichael’s opinion a ‘stationary and therefore retrograde faith’. The general conclusion reached was that Arabic as a general language should disappear from the southern provinces, except in those places where it had become the vernacular. MacMichael was then quoted as referring to the ‘wide gulf’ between the north, where the slave trade was extremely profitable, and the south, where memories of ‘slave raids are vivid’.63

  Once the ‘Southern Policy’ had been announced in 1930, officials lost no time in defending it. Sir Stewart Symes, the Governor General, spoke in 1935 of ‘the distinction between the peoples of the northern and southern Sudan’ as being ‘real and fundamental’. The people of the south were ‘for the most part primitive and pagan’ and needed a ‘simple education system’, in furtherance of which Christian missions would be encouraged and ‘northern subversive influences’ excluded.64 By the early 1930s, governors of southern provinces would now be empowered to eject ‘immigrant undesirables from the North’ who could be a ‘possible source of propaganda’ in the ‘primitive’ south. Under the Passports and Permits Ordinance of 1922, some southern governors were already empowered to expel from their provinces ‘individual natives of the Northern Sudan whose continued presence [was considered] undesirable from an administrative point of view’.65 MacMichael’s ‘Southern Policy’ merely made more explicit the fear of militant Islam corrupting the still largely pagan south and subverting British rule there. The policy was viewed sceptically by northern Sudanese politicians who believed that the ‘Southern Policy’ was a deliberate attempt to divide the Sudan for the purposes of establishing imperial authority more easily over its peoples.

  13

  North and South

  The Second World War had very little effect on the Sudan. By the early 1940s the ‘Southern Policy’ had become so entrenched that it seemed likely that ‘in the fullness of time’ the country would be divided, with the north becoming an ‘independent Arab state’ and the south perhaps being joined to the British East African network of states, such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika.1 Certainly, there was a steady confidence in the British mission in the Sudan, and no one thought that independence would happen so soon. The British Civil Secretary, in effect the Governor General’s right-hand man, was now Douglas Newbold, a cerebral man who was a popular workaholic. Newbold was lauded as a man of liberal disposition who once confided to a friend that he did not ‘hate or despise Dagoes’ and that ‘colour’ did not ‘worry him at all’. He boasted of his advanced views, suggesting that ‘as far as general appearance goes the average nonwhite is, I think, better looking than the average white, and usually more friendly’. His professed liberalism did not, however, stretch to matters of the internal government of the Sudan. Comparing Gilbert Murray, a well-known Greek scholar and humanitarian of the day, to Winston Churchill who, in the 1930s, had moved to the right of the Conservative Party, Newbold remarked, ‘What would Gilbert Murray do if he were Governor of Kassala [in the northern Sudan]? I’d rather have Winston Churchill–he would hang murderers and collect his taxes.’2

  Newbold’s pragmatism, when it came to matters of administration, was matched by the other members of the Political Service who, by the 1940s, were stuck in their ways and seemed to younger men to embody the conservatism and reactionary tendencies associated with retired army officers between the wars. Graham Thomas was a young recruit to the service in the late 1940s and he remembered being distinctly out of step with the majority of his colleagues. He had been educated at a Welsh grammar school and had even been a Labour Party candidate. Sir James Robertson, a bluff Scottish rugby Blue from Oxford, who had succeeded Newbold as chief secretary, befriended the young Welsh firebrand, but was clearly puzzled by him. Thomas remembered Robertson as ‘physically a big man, with tremendous energy and a strong personality’. Robertson was surprised when Thomas refused to join the Sudan Club on the grounds that he considered it ‘repugnant to have a club based on race’.3 Sir James replied that the Egyptians, the Lebanese and the Indians all had their own clubs, so why should the British not have one?

  His other colleagues, Thomas remembered, were ‘almost totally composed of Oxbridge “blues” from upper middle class family backgrounds’, quite a few of whom had ‘joined the service before the General Strike’, which had taken place in 1926. These men had ‘no knowledge or understanding of the social changes which had taken place in Britain’.4 Even the officials back in the Foreign Office in London (Sudan, because of the unusual condominium arrangement, fell under the Foreign Secretary’s jurisdiction rather than that of the Colonial Secretary) complained of the ‘Sudan Civil Servant, who, with all his admirable qualities, has a rather limited and parochial public-school outlook’.5 As in other parts of the empire, it seemed that nothing had changed, as officials complacently believed that their lives would simply continue as they had before the war.

  Thomas’s recollections of the mood and style of Khartoum in those years after the Second World War would have been recognized by Sudan veterans of an earlier vintage. The Grand Hotel in Khartoum still put on lavish entertainment, and there was the usual endless circuit of cocktail, lunch and dinner parties, with the traditional formalities of protocol: Thomas and his wife, Ismay, were informed, when they told a middle-aged woman that they were attached to the education department, that ‘you won’t be invited to the Palace for years’. This turned out to be false, but the mood of stuffiness still very much prevailed. The Grand Hotel itself was remembered as a ‘multi-racial’ meeting place and it was there, for the New Year’s celebrations in 1951, that Prince Aly Khan and the Hollywood actress Rita Hayworth took the whole first floor to stay with their entourage.6

  Despite the occasional glamour of Khartoum, there wer
e signs that the imperial system was under strain. The ‘Southern Policy’ had resulted in neglect of large parts of the south, which were administered by a particular type of British official who enjoyed the relative freedom that the remoteness of their postings had given them. The highly individualistic nature of the administration in the Sudan is revealed by the startling fact that there were only 140 officials in the whole country, at a time when the population was 9 million.7 The sparseness of the population meant that, in the southern Sudan, immense tracts of land were ruled ‘by just a handful of men’. This feeling of openness and independence was compounded by the fact that the man who ruled ‘with paternal despotism vast and populous territories in the Southern Sudan’ would have been, under normal circumstances, ‘just another London commuter swept along with the flow of mankind, emerging from the tube to a job’.8 The delusion of grandeur entertained by district commissioners in the south of the Sudan was aggravated by their tendency to remain in the same district for years, even decades. These men, often coming from a military background, were a ‘tough, motley’ crew, and were given the nickname ‘Barons of the Bog’ by their colleagues in the Muslim northern Sudan. The unorthodox methods of these district commissioners in the south by the end of the 1930s often led to administrative chaos.9 The Bog Barons supported the ‘Southern Policy’, because it protected their power and independence from officials in the north, and many of them were believers in the system of ‘indirect rule’, of building up self-contained ethnic or tribal units in the south of the country, which could then be used as bulwarks against the encroachments of Islam and Arab culture.