The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (47 page)

Accounts of the outrages at Omdurman and Khartoum provoked a group of MPs to take the unprecedented step of opposing the payment of a £30,000 reward to Kitchener for his work in the Sudan. There were acerbic exchanges over his exhumation of the Mahdi’s bones, which he had had thrown into the Nile, after having briefly considered having the skull mounted as a cup. One Tory MP, a former officer, pooh-poohed the allegations of inhumanity, and reminded the House that ‘we are bringing into the Dark Continent Civilisation’ and it was ‘a fatal thing to get in the way of a nation that is fulfilling its destiny’. ‘Murder, rapine, whisky and – the Bible’ were the ingredients of this civilisation, retorted an Irish Nationalist, Michael Dillon, while a Liberal asserted that ‘imperialism is nothing but organised selfishness’.
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The debate, like others of its kind, may have served as a warning to commanders not to jettison the rules of civilised conduct whenever they waged the wars of civilisation, but the vote went Kitchener’s way and he got his cash.

He contributed some of it to the Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, his brainchild and a visible symbol of Britain’s civilising mission. Among the other subscribers to this institution were the machine-gun manufacturers, Vickers Son and Maxim, who had done as much as anyone to facilitate the triumph of civilisation in the Sudan.

The political future of the Sudan was sealed shortly after the capture of Khartoum; henceforward the province would be governed jointly by Britain and Egypt through a British governor-general. There remained the problem of Marchand, whose presence at Fashoda had been revealed to Kitchener by Mahdist prisoners. The commander-in-chief had been given secret orders on how to proceed if he encountered French intruders in the southern Sudan. They were to be evicted, but without the direct use of force.
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Privately, Kitchener thought that Marchand’s escapade was ‘Opera Bouffe’, not to be taken seriously, but when he met the Frenchman he treated him courteously, and, tactfully, had the Egyptian rather than the British flag hoisted over Fashoda. Faced with firmness and overwhelming force, Marchand withdrew, believing that he had upheld his own and his country’s honour.

An international row followed between Britain and France with plenty of warlike noises on both sides. Checkmated and humiliated at Fashoda, the French government accused Britain of flouting its rights in the southern Sudan and bullying its representative there. Britain rejected these charges and insisted that France possessed no claim whatsoever to any portion of the Upper Nile. The public, which was both elated by the victory at Omdurman and displeased by recent concessions in the Far East, backed the government’s unbending policy. A stand had to be made over Fashoda because Britain’s rivals would certainly interpret any compromise as evidence of irresolution and would, therefore, be encouraged to challenge British power elsewhere.

Britain’s imperial will appeared unshakeable and France stepped down. She had little choice, for her people were divided by the Dreyfus scandal and her ally, Russia, refused to become entangled in a dispute over a stretch of sand in the middle of Africa. Moreover, as the French Foreign Minister Delcassé appreciated, British naval superiority would make any war an unequal contest, with France’s overseas trade suffering damage similar to that which had been inflicted by Britain during the eighteenth century. He also had the wisdom to realise that by turning Britain into an enemy, perhaps even an ally of Germany, France’s power in Europe would be fatally undermined.

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Having emerged the winner of the struggle for the Nile, Britain and its partner, Egypt, had to confront the task of pacifying and ruling a huge and still largely unexplored region, inhabited by people who had hitherto known little or no outside government. There was also the Khalifah who, with a force of about 10,000 ansars, had fled south after Omdurman. He was finally run to earth in November 1899 and defeated at the battle of Umm Diwaykarat. Apparently having learnt nothing from Omdurman, the ansars again threw themselves into the killing zone created by rifle and machine-gun fire and were cut down in hundreds. It would not be too farfetched to see this engagement, like its forerunner at Omdurman, as a form of mass suicide by men who preferred death to submission to the new, infidel order. The Khalifah certainly possessed the means partly to redress the military imbalance, since he had carefully preserved the modern weaponry captured during the 1884–5 campaigns. Equally extraordinary was the failure of British commanders to understand the significance of what they had witnessed during the Sudan campaign. Major, later Field Marshal Lord Haig saw for himself the devastating effects of modern firepower at Omdurman and yet, as commander-in-chief on the Western Front between 1915 and 1918, he sanctioned offensives in which British troops faced the same odds as the Khalifah’s Dervishes.

There were sporadic Mahdist and pan-Islamic insurrections for nearly twenty years after Omdurman. The most threatening was in 1916 and led by Ali Dinar, the semi-autonomous Sultan of Darfur, who hoped for but did not receive Turko-German assistance. British propaganda dismissed him as insane, a diagnosis that was extended to nearly every Muslim who rejected British rule in Africa and Asia. Muhammad Abdille Hassan, who persistently resisted the British in Somaliland between 1898 and 1920, was called the ‘Mad Mullah’, and there were other ‘mad’ faquirs and mullahs on the North-West Frontier. Their excesses do not appear to have matched those of Ali Dinar who, Sir Reginald Wingate confided to an American newsman, had once forced a mother to eat her own baby.
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It is not known whether the journalist asked why the British had tolerated the presence of this monster in Darfur for the past eighteen years.

It took over thirty years to subdue the animist tribes of the southern Sudan who objected to the naturally unwelcome novelty of taxation, and refused to renounce such customs as stock rustling and inter-tribal feuds. Thirty-three punitive expeditions were needed to persuade the tribesmen of the remote Nuba Mountains to accept the new order. No newspapermen accompanied the small detachments, and so the public remained ignorant about what occurred during these campaigns, which was just as well for the authorities in Khartoum and Cairo. ‘The less attention is drawn to these matters the better,’ observed Lord Cromer after he had read a report of the summary public hangings that had followed the suppression of a small uprising in the Sudan in 1908.
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Another form of deterrent was applied in 1928 when a party of Dinka and Guer chiefs were treated to an exhibition of machine-gun and artillery fire during a visit to Khartoum.
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Impatient and exasperated officials often resorted to more forceful methods of coercion. During the 1917–18 operations in the Nuba Mountains, villages and crops were burned, and tribesmen and their families driven into the bush to die of thirst.
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At Wingate’s suggestion, aircraft had been brought from Egypt to bomb and strafe Ali Dinar’s army, and thereafter they were frequently deployed against tribes in the deep south of the Sudan. The results were horrendous; in February 1920 incendiary bombs were dropped to start bush fires and flush out Nuer warriors, and they and their herds of cattle were regularly bombed and machine-gunned.
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Casualties were often high (in one sortie against the Bahr-al-Jabal islands in January 1928, 200 tribesmen were killed), but the victims, like their counterparts in Europe during the Second World War, were not easily cowed.
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The official justification for these harsh measures was that they brought stability to remote and turbulent districts. And yet there was something profoundly incongruous and distasteful about the employment of aircraft to intimidate people whom Britain claimed she wished to regenerate. Administrators, who had been taught to believe in their country’s civilising mission and who dedicated their lives to its fulfilment, were ashamed of what was euphemistically called ‘air control’. It was suspended after 1930, although flights continued over potentially disaffected areas as a reminder of what lay in store for the insubordinate. The brief resort to air power as a means of punishment revealed, as did the episodes that followed the fall of Khartoum, the gulf which separated the lofty, humanitarian ideals of British imperialism and the methods of its agents.

8

The Greatest Blessing that Africa has Known: East and West Africa

There were two ‘scrambles’ for Africa during the 1880s and 1890s. The first was a sedate, although sometimes acrimonious, diplomatic game in which statesmen pored over maps and drew lines across them. The second was a more robust business in which individuals ventured into largely unknown hostile regions and cajoled or coerced their inhabitants into accepting new masters and new laws. This activity was confined to a handful of men whose fixity of purpose gave them the strength to endure extremes of discomfort and danger. One described Africa as ‘a training ground for young men’ with a taste for reckless adventure for, ‘once started on
safari
– i.e. the line of march in Africa, one never knows where it may lead to, nor does one very much care.’
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Of course some did; for Kitchener and his equally ambitious French counterparts, Joseph Simon Gallieni and Joseph Jacques Joffre (the conqueror of Timbuktu), the byways of Africa led to the highest commands in the First World War. Others, like Louis Hubert Lyautey, Wingate and Frederick, later Lord Lugard, stepped sideways and became senior proconsuls.

Lugard set his stamp on East and West Africa. He was a tough, lean officer with a straggling walrus moustache, which was exceptionally extravagant at a time when no self-respecting fighting man went bare-lipped in the tropics. Kitchener’s growth may have been more famous, but Lugard’s was more striking. It helped give him, and for that matter other bristly officers, a fearsome appearance, which may have been advantageous whenever he had to overawe natives. In 1887 Lugard, with three campaigns under his belt, was at a loose end. Having been diagnosed by his physician as exhausted, he immediately decided that, ‘What I needed was active hard work – rather than rest.’ Africa would provide his cure, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to offer his services to the Italian army in Eritrea, his sword was accepted by the missionary Lakes Company. During 1888 and 1889 Lugard commanded their levies in a war against slavers around the shores of Lake Nyasa.

He liked the way the Scottish missionaries ran their affairs and he learned much from them. The neat, clean mission houses and the schools with their tidy, well-dressed pupils were an ‘object lesson’ in European civilisation. White men in Africa, Lugard concluded, should always stick to a separate way of life that was an ‘assertion of superiority which commands the respect and excites the emulation of the savage’. ‘Insolent familiarity’ by blacks was never to be tolerated and would be rebuffed automatically by a ‘gentleman’. Like the British lower classes, the African instinctively recognised and respected a ‘gentleman’ and followed his lead.
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This opinion was widely shared by British officers and administrators. The gallant, public-school educated British officer, who commanded by force of character and innate self-confidence, could secure the loyalty of simpleminded black men who recognised him as a true warrior. Sporting prowess, particularly the singlehanded stalking of big game, added to the appeal of the British officer. In an intelligence report of 1906 on German East Africa a British official noted that, ‘The Germans never move off the roads, they don’t care for sport, and have no idea of the word as used by the British.’ Moreover, they hunted in a distinctly ungentlemanly manner, ordering askaris to fire volleys at elephants, rhinoceroses and buffalo.
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French colonial officers, like the British, imagined they had an interior quality which won them the hearts of natives. This was baraka, an inner spiritual charisma possessed by Muslim holy men which brought luck. The officer with baraka had, quite literally, a charmed life and appeared miraculously preserved in battle; it was General Franco’s baraka which saved his life in battles in Morocco in the 1920s and won him the loyalty of Moroccan troops.

Survival in Africa needed physical as well as moral stamina. Lugard devised his own eccentric, but, as events turned out, effective regimen for daily life in the tropics. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and drank large amounts of weak tea or water, often indifferent as to the latter’s source. For Lugard the vital organs were the stomach, spleen and liver, which he kept covered with a flannel cummerbund at all times since their chilling was the cause of ‘most of the fever, dysentery, diarrhoea and cholera’ which laid men low in Africa. A substantial breakfast, taken just after sunrise, prevented fever which could arise from the sun overheating an empty stomach. When this precaution failed and he contracted fever, Lugard took doses of quinine and buried himself under a pile of clothing to sweat it out.
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These rough and ready nostrums appear to have worked successfully.

Healthy exercise further reinforced the white man’s constitution. Lieutenant Richard Meinertzhagen, posted to the King’s African Rifles in Kenya in 1902, recommended ‘vigorous hunting’, which not only tested ‘manliness’, but developed bushcraft and marksmanship. Not everyone was so dedicated; he observed disapprovingly that while he stretched nerves and muscles ‘many of my brother officers were drinking rot-gut or running about with somebody else’s wife’. But this was to be expected in a mess which contained homosexuals and men who boasted about their native mistresses.
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Self-discipline and a stringent régime kept Lugard fit and enabled him to play a crucial part in the remaking of East and West Africa. Between 1889 and 1893, he was employed by the British Imperial East Africa Company, first to establish a military presence in its territory by building stockades and making treaties with native rulers, with whom he sometimes made pacts of blood brotherhood. Later he was a peace-keeper, suppressing slavery and intervening for the Protestants in a civil war between them and Catholic converts in Uganda.