by Tim Jeal
Kitchener had known for several months that the French were finally on their way; and, while still at Omdurman, he learned from the crew of a captured Mahdist gunboat, the Tawfiqia (which had originally belonged to General Gordon), that in July they had been attacked by foreigners at Fashoda, 700 miles to the south. So on 8 September, Kitchener headed south in the steamer Dal at the head of a flotilla of four gunboats towing twelve barges accommodating two Sudanese battalions, an Egyptian battery, a company of Cameron Highlanders and four Maxim guns. Three days later, Kitchener’s flotilla moored between reedy banks just north of Fashoda.
Realising that the situation was dangerous and diplomatically very delicate, the Sirdar tactfully flew the Egyptian flag rather than the Union Jack and did not press Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand, the French commanding officer, to haul down the Tricolour which was fluttering above the old regional Mahdist headquarters.13 After the great feat of crossing the continent from Brazzaville with 150 riflemen, Marchand had found on his arrival at Fashoda that he had been let down by the other two French commanders under orders to meet him on the Nile, and also by the hard-headed Menelik.
Kitchener made clear to Marchand, who was threatening to die for the honour of France, that, whatever the Frenchman might try to do, Kitchener meant to take possession of Fashoda for the government of Egypt. He advised Marchand to ‘consider the preponderance of the force at his [Kitchener’s] disposal’, and told him that unless he behaved sensibly the affair could develop into a full-blown war between their two countries.14 Since the French cabinet was just then grappling with the Dreyfus scandal and its revelation of virulent anti-Semitism in the republic’s army, the added difficulty of war with Britain was the last thing French politicians wanted. The inescapable fact was that the French navy was no match for the Royal Navy, and would be defeated even if the Russians were to come in on the side of France. So the French would never be given an opportunity to exploit the numerical superiority of their army. Nor could the French Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé – who would soon have the unenviable job of negotiating with the canny Lord Salisbury – claim that possession of the Sudan was a vital interest for his country, in the same way that Salisbury could do, as ruler of Egypt. Thanks to Kitchener’s restraint and Delcassé’s good sense, Marchand’s men pulled out of Fashoda on 11 December 1899 without a drop of blood being shed.
To mollify France, Britain substituted on all maps the name Kodok – a nearby Shilluk village – for that of Fashoda.15 So ended an incident which, had Kitchener made a false move, could have changed the course of European, as well as African history. If Marchand had led a quixotic charge on the Cameron Highlanders, and the French press had made him a martyr, there would have been no Entente Cordiale a few years later, and Britain’s enemy in the twentieth century could well have been France rather than Germany.
A romantic French view of Marchand and his mission.
By the terms of the Anglo-French Declaration signed two months after Marchand’s departure, France allowed Sudan’s border to be stretched westwards at its expense and to incorporate Darfur within Sudan – an arrangement not considered momentous at the time, but of immense importance a century later when an independent Arab government in Khartoum was able to practise ethnic cleansing with impunity against Darfur’s black Muslims because they lived within Sudan’s legal borders. Before 1898, the Sultanate of Darfur had been fully independent.
Had Livingstone lived to read about the Battle of Omdurman he would have been disgusted by the scale of the slaughter. He had hated the slave trade and had known that the Baqqara Arabs of the Sudan were inveterate slavers, but he had always made a distinction between the cruel manner in which slaves were torn from their homes and the often humane way in which they were treated by their owners. Indeed he had come to consider many Arabs his friends. Burton too would have been appalled by the use of such overwhelming force. A similar attack on Africans would have distressed him much less. Speke’s and Grant’s arrival in Buganda, and Stanley’s appeal for missionaries, were essential early links in the chain of causation that ended at Omdurman; so what would they have thought of Kitchener’s bloody completion of Britain’s acquisition of the Nile?
Shocked, I believe. When Petherick had failed Speke, the Arab, Mohammed Wad-el-Mek, had not; indeed Speke had felt that unless Wad-el-Mek had met him at Faloro, he and Grant would never have reached Gondokoro alive. Though Speke had never shared Burton’s fondness for Arabs, he had not shunned them either. Of the five great Nile explorers only Baker might have applauded the scale of Kitchener’s victory if he had lived to see it. Stanley, who had written in strong terms about the wickedness of individual slave traders, and had regretted not having a Maxim with him when he had met a large party of slavers on the Upper Congo in 1883, was alive but did not applaud the manner in which Mahdism had been brought to an end. But then he had always maintained that Gordon had invited his own death.
THIRTY-THREE
Equatoria and the Tragedy of Southern Sudan
There can be no denying that the nationality of Burton, Speke, Grant, Baker and Stanley was one of the most significant factors determining the brief colonial ‘ownership’ of Sudan, Uganda and Kenya. This matters because the future of these countries would be profoundly affected by their having fallen into the colonial portfolio of a single ‘great power’. Had Sudan been annexed by France say, and Uganda by Britain (as of course happened) then the precise location of the boundary between the two countries would have been matters for international arbitration rather than the diktat of a single nation, and in that case – with a differently drawn boundary – the tragic twentieth-century war in southern Sudan might never have happened. Nor might the north/south divide in Uganda have come into existence to cause so much bloodshed and misery in that country.
It is never easy to pick the first significant event in a long chain of consequences that end in tragedy many decades later. In the case of southern Sudan, one might argue that the first was when John Speke mentioned Lake Albert to Samuel Baker and handed him the future fame that would lead to his employment by Khedive Ismail as his new Governor-General in the Sudan. But a more convincing first event is when Baker raised the Egyptian flag at Gondokoro in 1871, declaring himself the founder of Equatoria – his name for Egypt’s most southerly province. Soon Sir Samuel was claiming for the khedive, and for Equatoria, the land of the Bari and the Dinka, and territory as far south as Lake Albert and the kingdom of Bunyoro, with the Bahr el-Ghazal and Acholiland thrown in. In due course Equatoria would extend as far north as Malakal on the White Nile, a place which has rightly been said ‘to hang between two worlds’. In its market northern Arabs mingle with Africans: Nuer, Dinka and Shilluk. To the south stretch the swamps, the plains, the religions and languages of Africa.1
In the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century the inhabitants of Equatoria usually went naked, both men and women, and the males carried bows with feathered arrows and rubbed their bodies with grease and ashes. One group of Dinka, encountered by Samuel Baker, also ‘stained their hair red by a plaster of ashes and cows’ urine … Of all the unearthly looking devils I ever saw,’ remarked Sir Samuel, who was no ethnographer, ‘these devils beat them hollow.’2 Indeed, Equatoria was an entirely African territory in which the northern Arabs were considered invaders and exploiters. In the early 1870s, during his push south to Bunyoro and his subsequent return, Baker made determined efforts to drive the Arab slave traders away from the upper Nile. After Baker went home in 1873, General Gordon and Emin Pasha (as Governor-General of the Sudan and Governor of Equatoria respectively) consolidated and extended the borders of Equatoria, while continuing Baker’s onslaughts against the slavers.3 Under these governors, conditions in Equatoria improved steadily, so much so that Professor Robert Collins, the great historian of the Sudan, believes that the smaller tribes were saved from extinction at this time.4
But in 1889, after Henry Stanley had evacuated Emin Pasha in the wake of the Mahdist
s’ southward drive, the Pasha’s second-in-command, Selim Bey, stayed on at Lake Albert with several hundred Sudanese soldiers.5 Instead of protecting the people of the region, his men began a regime of cattle theft, abduction and rape. Meanwhile, further north, the Bari and the Azande fought the Mahdists in what for them was merely the latest misfortune in a long sequence.6 Only after Omdurman, did the British enter the Bahr el-Ghazal region of Equatoria to try to end the anarchy. They conquered with a mixture of persuasion and force, but it would be the late 1920s before anything resembling peace had been established in this ravaged and mistrustful region.7
Captain Henry Kelly, Royal Engineers.
Tragedy for Equatoria moved much closer when Britain allocated half the 800-mile wide and 500-mile deep territory to Uganda and the other half to Sudan. That it might have been better to preserve its unique identity as a potential nation in its own right was something the British government did not seriously consider. In 1913 Britain’s Governor-General of the Sudan, General Sir Reginald Wingate, appointed a boundary commission to determine where Sudan ended and Uganda began. The commission was led by Captain Harry H. Kelly, an officer in the Royal Engineers, who also happened to be the heavyweight boxing champion of the British Army. Uganda was represented by Captain H. M. Tufnell, who had helped to overawe the tribes of southern Equatoria and was not reluctant to order the commission’s fifty black soldiers to fire fusillades whenever the surveying party was opposed by hostile villagers. Kelly deplored using force and, unlike Tufnell, who wanted to go on leave, was worried that if they made hurried decisions they might split tribes unnecessarily. Though not an anthropologist, Kelly could see that the Raajok and Obbo people were ‘as truly Acholi as anyone else’. Indeed the Langi, Acholi and Obbo had much in common from their shared Luo heritage. He noted in his diary that he meant to stay on for ten extra days in order ‘to come to a definite conclusion based on knowledge and not on supposition’ about the hill-dwelling Acholi.8 But despite his best efforts, the Madi would be split by his commission, and the northern Acholi would also be separated from the rest of their tribe. Yet Kelly, as his diary shows, was admirably patient in carrying out his task, even after several of his men had been killed by tribesmen.9 In truth, the problem did not lie with the men on the spot but with the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, and with decision-makers at the highest level in Britain.
An artificial solution to the problem of what to do with ‘the savages’ of Equatoria had been found by senior officials and was to be acted upon without further ado. So Uganda was going to get an influx of Nilotic people, with whom the southern Bantu, such as the all-important people of Buganda (the Baganda), would feel that they had nothing in common. Similarly, the Arabs of northern Sudan would be unable to relate to the southern tribes, whose culture they already derided and whom they had long raided and enslaved. An almost incalculable amount of suffering would spring from Britain’s decision to dispose of Equatoria so casually. Of course, the harm could have been mitigated if British civil servants in Khartoum had then designed policies aimed at creating understanding between Arabs and Africans within Sudan. In truth, their master plan would do the opposite, merely exacerbating feelings of alienation and hostility.
Ironically, the Sudan Political Service, Britain’s executive in the Sudan, was the most highly educated ruling èlite in the history of empire. Sudan has memorably been said to have been ‘a land of Blacks ruled by Blues’. Indeed, one in four of its officials over fifty years had won a Blue for sporting prowess at Oxford or Cambridge, and ten per cent had gained a first-class degree at one or other of those universities. Never more than 125 strong at any given time, they ruled effectively (at least in the north), abolishing slavery, and promoting agriculture, public health and education in Africa’s largest colony.10 Most of these intelligent young men were Arabic speakers who found the northerners, whom they met on a daily basis in Khartoum, eager for education and economic development. But the southern Sudanese appeared in a very different light, striking the most senior civil servant in the country as relics from ‘the Serbonian bog into which they had drifted, or been pushed … [guaranteeing that] all the lowest racial elements surviving north of the equator’ were to be found in southern Sudan.11
Sir Harold MacMichael, who wrote those words, was the top civil servant in the Sudan. With his Cambridge first in classics, his fencing Blue and his titled mother, he loved social life in Khartoum, and postponed a visit to ‘the Serbonian bog’ for seven years after his appointment. Eventually in 1927 he took the plunge, and his few days down south shocked him to the core. Depending upon whether it was the wet season or the dry, the whole southern region was either a gigantic swamp, or an endless mud-baked plain. The Nilotic peoples who lived in this hot and treeless wilderness – the Dinka, Nuer and the Annuak – were tall, physically graceful, proud, and absolutely determined to preserve their way of life in their remote and inaccessible habitat. MacMichael, from behind the anti-mosquito wire-netting which protected the passenger deck of his comfortable steamer, feared that it would be impossible to persuade such people to embrace ‘civilisation’ as the northern Arabs appeared to wish to do. In Equatoria there was no ‘native administration’ to build on, and little chance of initiating a system of agricultural exports that would pay for the region’s development. He therefore refused to commit his administration to the expense of building roads and improving water access. Such a project ought to have been his number one priority, but instead a policy of benign (in reality malign) neglect was dreamed up. It would insultingly be known as ‘care and maintenance’.12 Nor was ‘Macmic’, as MacMichael was affectionately known, going to send any of his gilded young Arabists from the Sudan Political Service to sweat, and possibly be speared to death, in the mosquito-infested south.
The men chosen to ‘care’ for the south were described sardonically by the Khartoum èlite as ‘the Bog Barons’. Mainly former army officers, they treated the inhabitants of their administrative districts with a mixture of despotic arrogance and genuine affection. They took great risks in their efforts to get the Dinka and Nuer to accept the Khartoum government, and some, such as Captain V. H. Fergusson, were murdered – in his case by a Nuer who had thought, thanks to a confusion over words, that ‘Fergie’ had come to his village to castrate him. This murder, like all others, would unleash ferocious British punitive expeditions.13 But Major Mervyn J. Wheatley, who was a future mayor and MP, refused to crush the Dinka by waging war and bravely set about persuading them to make peace by making personal contact. Jack Herbert Driberg was not a soldier, but he exemplified the best qualities of the Bog Barons: disdainful of Khartoum officials, this poet, boxer and one-time music critic loved the Didinga people, fought their corner vigorously, and in 1930 published a book about them: People of the Small Arrow. Eventually he was sacked for allowing his partisanship to lead him physically to attack the Didinga’s enemies. Some barons were extremely eccentric, like the officer who dressed the crew of his private Nile steamer in jerseys embroidered with Arabic words meaning: ‘I am oppressed.’ Inevitably in their isolated situation a number of barons took African mistresses.14
For all the Bog Barons’ success in winning the trust of the indigenous peoples of the south, much more was needed if their charges were ever to participate as equal partners in an independent Sudan. Above all, a better understanding was urgently required between north and south, especially in matters of education, language and culture. Yet, from as early as 1898, Sir Reginald Wingate had encouraged British missionaries to go out to Equatoria to convert the locals and teach them English. Wingate wanted to turn southern Sudan into a Christian bulwark that would protect Uganda and Kenya from the southward spread of Islam.
In 1910, Wingate went further and sanctioned the formation of a separate Equatorial Corps manned by non-Muslim Africans for military service in the south. Within seven years all northern troops had been withdrawn from the Bahr el-Ghazal area. The teaching of English and the exclusion of Arabic
from southern schools had become official policy from as early as 1904, but, as Wingate had advised, it was to be implemented ‘without any fuss and without putting the dots on the is too prominently’. So English became the lingua franca in the south almost by stealth, only becoming official in 1930.15
It might be thought that Wingate and his successors had been secretly planning to unite southern Sudan with Uganda. But no direct evidence that this was really their intention exists. Meanness does not entirely account for low spending on education in the south. There was a genuine fear among the Bog Barons that education per se might undermine a rich traditional way of life without putting anything of value in its place. ‘It is essential,’ said a speaker at an educational conference in Juba in 1933, ‘that we who are concerned with education should keep clearly in mind that education is a preparation and training for life in a tribal community which still contains social virtues which we in our individualistic western civilization are losing or have lost.’16
It would be eleven years before the Governor-General’s council finally abandoned their Arcadian view of the south. In 1944, it was reluctantly accepted that Britain had less than twenty years (in truth a dozen) in which to prepare the country for independence. The mistakes of the past were to prove impossible to put right in the midst of a world war in which Britain was fighting for survival. But the language of the north was finally introduced into southern secondary schools in 1948 in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the southern Sudanese from being gravely disadvantaged in a country that would soon be ruled by Arabic-speakers.17
