How Europe viewed the Mahdi revolt

In Europe at this time, and especially in England, there was a 
general disposition to regard the Mahdist state as an implacable 
evil--as evil as ever Lenin's Bolshevism was regarded in the 
nineteen-twenties or Hitler's Nazism or Mussolini's Fascism in the 
nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties. Mahdism, of course, was a far 
less serious affair, and it hardly affected the general current of 
events outside the Sudan. Yet the hostility towards it in Europe ran 
very deep. It was not only a question of Victorian power and 
self-righteousness smarting from a sense of unavenged defeat: it was 
felt that the Christian faith itself was defied by these murderous 
fanatics in the Sudan, and the Anti-Slavery Society in England lost 
no opportunity of spreading every fresh report of the Khalifa's 
brutalities. This was the atmosphere of war, when all things tend to 
be exaggerated and touched by propaganda. It was scarcely possible 
for any man, particularly if he was a public figure, to take a 
detached view, or to argue a case for the Arabs; to have done that 
would have meant being branded not as a liberal, not as a realist, 
but as a traitor. As in time of war communications failed, a heavy 
fog of censorship prevented the impartial facts from penetrating to 
either side, and ignorance was a wonderful breeding-ground for 
imagination. It is true that men like Slatin and Ohrwalder tried to 
give correct accounts of their experiences when they eventually 
escaped from the Sudan, but as prisoners-of-war they were hardly 
likely to have discovered virtues in their gaolers or to have known 
all that was going on. When they came to write their books the memory 
of their own sufferings was very vivid in their minds. Even such 
authorities as Wingate were inevitably affected by these feelings, 
and in subsequent years works of fiction like A. E. W. Mason's Four 
Feathers continued to spread the notion that Mahdism was all savagery 
and unrestrained barbarism. This propaganda was very strong and has 
not even yet been mitigated to any great extent by the researches of 
European scholars who in recent years have had access to the Mahdist 
archives for the first time. One might find a parallel in the fact 
that, in our own times, some years had to elapse after the last two. 
world wars before the British could bring themselves to dunk of the 
Germans simply as Germans and not as Huns or Nazis.

That the Mahdists were, by our standards, incredibly primitive, 
cruel, obsessed and ignorant is impossible to deny. Yet it must be 
admitted that the Khalifa did succeed in erecting a much more 
coherent state than his Christian contemporaries would allow. If this 
state had been governed entirely by greed, by inhumanity and by crude 
emotions it would not have continued as long as it did. There were 
factional rivalries at Omdurman and manoeuvrings for power such as 
occur in any dictatorial regime, but the bulk of the people were not 
crying out for liberation as the Europeans like to imagine they were. 
Towards the end of the Khalifa's reign there was no exodus of 
refugees from the Sudan; the general run of the people had a bearable 
existence which was certainly no worse than life had been under the 
Egyptians. Had the Europeans not intervened the Sudanese would almost 
certainly have continued to accept the Khalifa's rule.

Even as early as 1887, two years after the fall of Khartoum, the 
Khalifa could count himself reasonably secure. The Egyptian garrisons 
at Kassala and Sennar had been starved out and obliterated: on the 
Red Sea the British still had a tenuous hold on the port of Suakin, 
but all the rest of the Sudanese coast almost as far as Massawa had 
fallen to Osman Digna; and in the north Nejumi with an army of some 
ten thousand men was penetrating into Egypt in the neighbourhood of 
Wadi Haifa. The Khalifa now controlled an empire greater even than 
the Mahdi's; it was half the size of Europe. He dispatched a letter 
to Queen Victoria in England, summoning her to Omdurman, where she 
was to offer her submission and become a Moslem.

'Know that God is mighty and great,' he wrote, and he went on to 
remind the Queen of the fate that had overtaken Hicks, Gordon, and 
the other British generals in the Sudan: '... Thy soldiers thought 
only of retreat from the Sudan with discomfiture and defeat, whereof 
they have had more than enough ... Thus hast thou erred in many ways, 
and art suffering great loss, wherefrom there is no refuge for thee 
save by turning to God the King, and entering among the people of 
Islam and the followers of the Mahdi, grace be upon him. If thou wilt 
do thus, and yield all the matter to us, then shall thou achieve thy 
desire of perfect felicity and true repose, which is salvation before 
God in the blissful and enduring Dwelling, the like of which eye has 
not seen, nor ear heard, or heart of man conceived. But if thou wilt 
not turn from thy blindness and self-will, continue to war against 
the hosts of God thyself, with all thy armies and warlike equipment. 
So shall thou behold the end of thy work. Thou shall be crushed by 
the power of God and his might, or be afflicted by the death of many 
of thy people, who have entered on war with the people of God, by 
reason of thy Satanic presumption.'

Similar messages were sent to the Sultan of Turkey and the Khedive of 
Egypt.

The four Arab envoys bearing these letters presented themselves at 
the Anglo-Egyptian lines at Wadi Haifa and were sent on to Cairo 
where they were received by the Khedive. After some delay the 
documents were handed back to them with the verbal message that none 
of the three monarchs deigned to make a reply, and they returned to 
the Sudan.

The Khalifa's pretensions may have been absurd, and yet through these 
years Britain, Turkey and Egypt showed no signs of wishing to invade 
the Sudan again. There was even a very real fear in Cairo that the 
Mahdists might yet overrun the Delta, and by the summer of 1888 
Nejumi, in fact, had advanced sixty miles into Egyptian territory. 
Nor was this all. The Khalifa was preparing to advance southwards as 
well. He had already subdued the Shilluk and the Dinka tribes above 
Khartoum and had overrun the Bahr-el-Ghazal province. Emin, the last 
of Gordon's governors to hold out, had retreated up the White Nile 
almost as far as Lake Albert, and in June 1888 the Khalifa decided to 
crush him. The Bordein and two other steamers with a line of barges 
in tow and a force of four thousand Arabs on board was dispatched 
from Khartoum with orders to ascend the rapids as far as Dufilé, and 
then continue to Buganda at the headquarters of the river. The last 
phase of the Moslem re-conquest of the Nile had begun.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 11/09/2001

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