Exchange on Churchill/Sudan

Gary:
>I lay down to have a rest and for some reason
>not known to me I dreamed of  Winston
>Churchill's funeral with the cranes dipping as
>the coffin passed up  the Thames.  I got up and
>turned on the list and there was your piece on
>the Mahdi by Winston Churchill no less.

Yeah, I came home tonight with my knapsack loaded with books on the 
Mahdi revolt, including Churchill's. I play to put together a very 
ambitious culture/politics review revolving around the movie 
"Khartoum" that starred Charlton Heston as Colonel "China" Gordon and 
Sir Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi.

The British got their asses kicked by the Mahdists, who had put 
together an army consisting of northern Sudanese Dervishes and 
eastern Sudanese "Fuzzy-Wuzzy's", who were the subject of one of 
Kipling's best known poems.

There are some very interesting questions raised by this earlier 
encounter between "modernity" and "barbarism". For example, Gordon 
got the nickname "China" because he had put down the Taiping 
rebellion, another atavistic outburst to use Andy Austin's felicitous 
term. He was also a well-known opponent of slavery and turned the war 
against the Mahdists into a moral crusade against slavery, in the 
same manner that the British elite aided the campaign against King 
Leopold in neighboring Congo. Basically, the British made war on Arab 
and North African slave-traders because this facilitated their own 
imperial goals. Free trade and colonialism went hand in hand. 
Imperial Great Britain's two main foreign policy goals in the region, 
according to one of the scholars I will be relying on, was to 
eliminate slavery and build the Suez Canal.

Despite the crusade against slavery, the Sudanese people rose up as a 
whole. Although I am not prepared to explain the complexity of this 
until after I have done some reading, it appears related to the 
nature of African precapitalist slavery, which was less exploitative 
than chattel slavery. For example, one of the Mahdists originally 
tried to raise a "slave army", according to one of the scholars. Stop 
and think about that for a second. What kind of slave would you put a 
rifle into the hands of? The same kind of institution existed in 
Ethiopia, by the way. An aristocrat would go out hunting and his 
slave would carry his rifle for him.

Closely related to this is the question of British anti-slavery 
itself, which is the object of scrutiny in Jack Gratus's "The Great 
White Lie", a MR book. Gratus notes that:

"Writing from the Berlin Conference in 1885 when West Africa was 
being divided up between the European Powers, the British Ambassador 
told the Foreign Secretary that England, 'by her successful efforts 
to stop the export of slaves beyond the seas, has been the chief 
benefactress of the natives', and accordingly with Portugal, the 
other Power which had old settlements in Africa, she should 
'endeavour to effect an arrangement in the interests of all.'"

That arrangement was called imperialism.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 10/15/2001

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