Читать книгу Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan - Deborah Scroggins - Страница 12

‘Sudan HAS A MAGIC that takes hold of you for better or worse,’ Emma told her interviewer in The Warlord’s Wife, a 1993 ITV television documentary about her. ‘I’ve known other people who’ve fallen under its spell. It’s not a beautiful country. It’s the people who are so charming.’ The most famous Briton to fall under the spell of the Sudan was General Charles George Gordon. In Gordon’s story lie all the seeds of the Western century in Sudan; but for his raptures and visions, the Western project in Sudan might not have had its peculiarly high-minded, moralizing tilt. Without the blindness that ultimately doomed him, his successors might have left more to show for their work. Until Emma met Karadawi, Gordon was only a name she vaguely recollected from school. But in Sudan, Gordon’s story would follow her everywhere she went.

It started with the anti-slavery movement. In the nineteenth century, five hundred years into the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas, the Christian West experienced an extraordinary change of heart. In a remarkably short period of time, much of the West came to regard the bondage of human beings not just as a vice but as a sin, a deadly sin that had to be extirpated from the earth. Quakers and other nonconformists who started the first anti-slavery campaigns in the eighteenth century managed to persuade first the better part of Britain, then Europe and the Pope, and finally the United States that African slavery, an immense and ancient institution that had brought huge wealth to Europe and its colonies, was not only wrong but evil - a crime, in fact. This, the grandfather of all Western human rights movements, took on such religious fervour that in 1807, only twenty years after it began, Britain, the richest and strongest slave power of all, outlawed the trade to its subjects. Thirty-one years later, Britain freed the last slaves in its dominions.

In Egypt at the time, the spread of Western technology and capitalism was having the opposite effect on the even older slave trade between Africa and the Near East. Egypt’s Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman sultan’s khedive or viceroy, was one of the first non-Christian rulers to employ European advisers and technology to reform his army. His innovations swiftly made him the strongest ruler in the Middle East, but he needed a steady supply of recruits. Egypt had depended since antiquity on slaves from Sudan to man its armies. (The prophet Isaiah evidently met some Nilotes in the seventh century BC, prompting him to issue his legendary prophecy of doom about their country’s future.) In 1820 Muhammad Ali decided to invade Sudan to seize slaves and create an army loyal only to himself. ‘You are aware that the end of all our effort and expense is to procure negroes,’ he wrote in 1825 to the commander of his forces in Sudan. ‘Please show zeal in carrying out this matter.’ The Egyptians - or ‘the Turks’, as the Sudanese called the invaders, since Muhammad Ali was technically a representative of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople - established a garrison at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles named Khartoum. In 1840 the Egyptians managed to penetrate the Sudd for the first time in recorded history. Over the next decades, a rabble of Egyptian, Turkish, northern Sudanese, European and Greek traders found their way to Khartoum, intent on hunting slaves with new European-made firearms.

Slavery had always been the business of Sudan. Ancient Egyptian records from the third millennium BC tell of thousands of slaves and cattle captured in the African lands to the south. Cush and Meroë were only the most famous of dozens of Sudanese kingdoms that prospered over the centuries from their role as middlemen in the slave trade between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. The Sudan’s many ethnic groups historically raided each other for captives, especially women and children. The captives were sometimes adopted into local lineages and sometimes sold or exchanged or given away in the form of tribute. There were also more complicated transactions involving rights in people. For example, a lineage might give one of its members to another as compensation for a death or for the theft of cattle. In Sudan, as in other African societies with few material possessions, people and livestock have historically been the most important forms of capital.

The Arabs who spread out across the deserts of northern Africa in the Middle Ages gave this ancient trade a new tone. They brought horses and specialized cavalry operations that gave them an advantage over the local people. They had connections with Middle Eastern markets. And they had a rationale for what they were doing. In classical Islamic thinking, the pagan black peoples to their south belong to Dar al Harb, ‘the House of War’, against whom Dar al Islam, ‘the House of Islam’, is obliged to make jihad. Muslim jurists argued that while it was immoral to enslave other Muslims, slavery was the divinely ordained punishment for unbelief. ‘It is known that in accordance with the sharia, the reason why it is allowed to own [others] is [their] unbelief,’ wrote the celebrated Timbuktu jurist Ahmad Baba in the seventeenth century. ‘Thus whoever purchases an unbeliever is permitted to own him, but not in the contrary case.’ Like Christians in the American South who insisted that slavery was a civilizing institution for barbarous Africans, many Muslims considered slavery a blessing for pagan blacks because it exposed them to Islamic civilization. The Quran exhorted Muslims to treat slaves kindly, and religious tradition held that freeing slaves who converted to Islam would weigh in the favour of slave-owners on Judgement Day.

With the arrival of the Turco-Egyptians and their firearms in the nineteenth century, Muslim tribes such as the cattle-herding Baggara moved south in search of pagans to raid. They traded the slaves they captured for goods with small-scale travelling merchants called jallaba. The jallaba transported the slaves to Khartoum, Egypt and other markets. For the northern Sudanese, the primary effect of the Turco-Egyptian invasion was the ruinous taxation that the new rulers exacted. For the Nilotic and other peoples who lived in the meandering wetlands of the south, the coming of the Turuk was a catastrophe that they call ‘the time when the world was spoiled’. Until the coming of firearms, the Dinka, the Nuer, the Anuak, the Shilluk and the many other peoples of the south had lived in their boggy homeland for more than five thousand years on a mixture of cattle-herding, fishing and grain cultivation. Of the cattle-herders, only the Shilluk, who lived closest to the Arabized tribes of the north, were organized under a king, or reth. The Dinka and the Nuer mostly lived in stateless societies based on the bonds of kinship. Their lineages were loosely grouped into clans, which were even more loosely grouped into tribes. Lineages and clans, and more rarely tribes, united and divided on the basis of shifting patterns of alliances and feuds. Left alone, the Nilotes had flourished under this headless form of social organization. Now it left them horribly vulnerable to the manipulation of better-equipped and organized outsiders.

Accompanied by bands of armed men, European and Arab traders from Khartoum set up fortified stations they called zaribas along the rivers of the south. From within the zaribas, the traders concocted alliances with stronger groups, offering to lend the southerners weapons and men to attack the grass and mud villages of their enemies. In return, the traders received half the booty. At first they used the captured people and cattle mainly to barter for ivory, but eventually the slave trade proved more lucrative than the ivory trade. The zariba trade opened up new avenues for the jallaba from northern Sudan, many of whom set up their own companies and zariba networks. The Turco-Egyptian officials sometimes competed with the traders to capture slaves for the Egyptian army. Other times they worked together with them to line their pockets in a predatory and increasingly profitable commerce that soon made Khartoum’s slave market one of the biggest in the world.

But the Western technology and capital that had been Muhammad Ali’s strength was his successors’ weakness. Egypt’s dependence on Western money left it exposed to Western meddling, just as anti-slavery agitation was growing in Europe. If the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade ended the rather crudely capitalist form of empire that had given birth to Europe’s American colonies, it soon gave life to another and far more seductive form: empire as a moral mission, with anti-slavery as its flagship. The victorious evangelicals who had led the campaign against British colonial slavery now lobbied to put the power of the Royal Navy behind a crusade to end African slavery everywhere. Between 1820 and 1870, the Royal Navy stopped and seized nearly 1,600 ships and freed 150,000 African slaves destined for the Americas. Britain also used its navy to bully most coastal African states into signing a series of treaties banning the Atlantic slave trade. In this climate it wasn’t long before the Sudan and the Islamic slave trade gained the attention of Britain’s anti-slavery activists.

European travellers had been writing about the cruelty of the Sudan slave trade since the 1830s. In 1839 an Austrian businessman, Ignaz Pallme, made a harrowing report to an anti-slavery society about an Egyptian government slave-raiding expedition into the Nuba Mountains in Kordofan. Pallme’s account was so shocking that it inspired a Catholic missionary from the island of Malta to set up Sudan’s first modern Christian mission in Khartoum in 1848, with the explicit aim of fighting slavery. In the 1860s the British missionary explorer David Livingstone caused even more Western outrage with his revelations about the violence and cruelty of the East African slave trade. Abolitionists had maintained for years that Europe’s capitalist free-labour system was not just morally right but essential to material and technological progress. Livingstone argued passionately and with great effect that Africa’s backwardness owed a great deal to the local custom of slavery. He claimed that until African leaders had alternative means for acquiring European guns, cloth and trinkets, they would go on selling their fellow men to obtain them. He declared that the only way to save Africa was to open it up to ‘the three Cs’: Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. His readers were quick to interpret the three Cs as a call to empire.

Early on, Muhammad Ali’s grandson Khedive Ismail scented the danger that the self-proclaimed humanitarians represented to his empire. Ismail had grand ambitions to modernize all of Egypt on the Western model. He opened Cairo’s first opera, and he built the Suez Canal. To do this, he used British and French money. On his ascension, he closed the public slave market in Khartoum and banned the introduction of slaves into Egypt from the south. But reports from missionaries in Khartoum and other European observers made it clear that the ban was in name only and that the slave trade continued as virulently as ever. If Ismail shared the abolitionists’ moral indignation - and some historians think he did - the majority of Egyptians and Sudanese emphatically did not. Abolition was a Christian crusade; as a popular cause, it never really caught on in the Islamic world. As the historian Ehud R. Toledano has written, ‘Ottoman slavery and the slave trade were never seriously debated, either on the political or on the intellectual plane. It was as if one party barged in, fully armed with moral, economic, social and political arguments, imbued with a strong sense of justice, while the other timidly turned its back, refusing to engage in a dialogue, claiming that there was basically no common ground, no common language, no frame of reference through which a true discussion could take place.’ Slavery’s legitimacy, Toledano writes, ‘derived from Islamic sanction and the unshakable conviction that Islamic law was predicated on deep human concern (insaniyet) and could not possibly condone any practice that was not humane, caring, and cognizant of the suffering of the weak and poor members of society’.

Sudanese slave-owners saw Egypt’s measures to outlaw as yet another hated concession to infidels bent on undermining Islam. Practically every one of Ismail’s officials in northern Sudan was involved in the trade. Ismail himself had granted some of the big slave-trading firms in Khartoum their concessions to operate in the Upper Nile region. What steps the khedive had taken against slavery concerned only the selling of slaves. Owning them remained perfectly legal in Egypt and Sudan. Most northern Sudanese families owned at least one domestic servant. Ismail himself owned hundreds of people, as did most of his relatives and ministers. For Ismail, intent not just on keeping in the good graces of the European powers but on getting them to bankroll his even more grandiose plans to extend Egypt’s reach beyond Sudan into modern-day Ethiopia and Uganda, the tirades of Livingstone and the other anti-slavers could have been an inconvenience - had he not hit upon an idea of his own. If the abolition of the slave trade had become a legitimate moral justification in Western eyes for all sorts of takeovers and conquests, why not make it the justification for his own?

One of the guests at the splendiferous 1869 celebrations of the opening of the Suez Canal was the British explorer Sir Samuel Baker. ‘Baker of the Nile’, as he was called, had won fame a few years earlier when he and his wife attempted to traverse the Nile and discover its source. (They did not manage to clear up the entire mystery, but they did reach the other side of the Sudd.) Baker had written disapprovingly of how the slave trade disrupted and brutalized life on the route he travelled in the Upper Nile region along the Sobat River. The Prince and Princess of Wales read his book and were properly horrified; they were also titillated by the (truthful) rumours that Baker himself had bought his Hungarian wife at a Turkish slave auction. They invited the Bakers to travel with their party to the festivities at Suez. ‘It is almost needless to add that, upon arrival in Egypt, the Prince of Wales, who represented at heart the principles of Great Britain, took the warmest interest in the suppression of the slave trade,’ Baker later wrote.

Khedive Ismail felt the heat. At a fancy dress ball, he took Baker aside and made him a proposal. In return for a salary of ten thousand pounds and the title of pasha, he asked Baker to go back to Upper Nile in charge of a military force that would officially annex Upper Nile to Egypt and suppress the slave-raiding Baker had condemned. (Since Egypt up to then had never established formal claim to southern Sudan, its officials in Khartoum had always been able to maintain they had no authority over what went on in the hinterland.) Baker accepted with alacrity. Within a year’s time, he and Lady Baker were once more headed up the Nile, this time in fifty-nine boats with 1,600 people under his command. For the next two years, the Bakers and their men struggled up the choked passages of the Nile, battling the slave-traders and their local allies and raising the Ottoman flag over rivers filled with splashing and grunting hippopotamuses. Baker named the province he staked out for Egypt ‘Equatoria.’

In terms of actually ridding Upper Nile of slavery, Baker’s expedition was ineffectual at best. He had brought along stores to feed his European party for four years, but he expected his Sudanese and Egyptian soldiers to live off the land. Some accused him of making matters worse by allowing his men to raid southern villages for grain. The notion that one man in command of a small flotilla could single-handedly extinguish a trade that had been millennia in the making absurdly underestimated its tenacity. In fact, as the khedive must have known, the plan was so unrealistic as to reassure any Sudanese slavers who had feared he actually intended to put them out of business. But in terms of appeasing British anti-slavery sentiment, it worked like a charm. Hiring an Englishman and giving him the Herculean task of stopping Sudan’s slave trade assuaged Britain’s vanity as well as its moral indignation. With the empire reaching its zenith under Queen Victoria, the British public had no trouble believing that a lone Englishman or two could take on any number of barbarian gorgons. The picture of British officers, seemingly armed with little more than moral superiority, curing entire peoples of their savage customs was a staple of the British penny press. When Baker’s contract ended, Ismail cast about for a replacement. He found an Englishman who had already won national celebrity in one of these imperial set pieces. His name was Colonel Charles George Gordon, and his appointment set in motion all that was to come.

As a young British officer, Gordon had been a bit of a misfit, a loner who disliked the army’s rules and regulations and who was given to extravagant religious musings. People who met him commented on his unusually pale blue eyes and his fine, almost feminine features. Then, at the age of thirty-one, he revealed the knack for bending foreigners to his will that was to make him the stuff of British schoolboy fantasies. Posted to China in 1860, he was unexpectedly given charge of a Chinese army defending the Manchu dynasty against the Taiping rebels, a confused quasi-Christian group espousing agricultural reform. Gordon reorganized and trained his ‘Ever Victorious Army’, and under his command it retook the cities the Taipings had captured until the rebellion was at an end.

The British press covered each step of this campaign, naturally giving their man all the credit. ‘Major Gordon Captures Soochow on December 5’ was the headline in The Times on 22 January 1864. In this age of heroics, what the reading public liked best of all were stories in which the British showed through some personal act of bravery how superior they were to all other peoples. The newspapers were full of tales about how ‘Chinese Gordon’ walked up and down the battlefield, smoking a cigar and holding a walking stick, indifferent to the bullets whizzing around him. When one of his men fled, he was said to have chased the man down, spun him around, and forced him to shoot using Gordon’s own shoulder as a gun rest. When the civil war ended, Gordon wanted to stay on in China. He wrote to his sister that it was better to be a British officer abroad than at home. ‘In England we are nondescripts, but in China we hold a good position.’ But he had promised his mother he would come home, and after refusing all sorts of honours and offers of money, he left China at the end of 1864.

Back in England he was bored, especially when the War Office gave him the wearying task of constructing some new forts along the Thames at Gravesend. His eccentric piety irritated his more orthodox countrymen. He was endlessly patient and generous with Gravesend’s young street urchins, for whom he set up a school paid for out of his own pocket. But he scorned what he called the ‘hollow emptiness’ of his own class. He spurned invitations to dinners and soirees in London, preferring to stay at home with his Bible. In 1872 the Prime Minister of Egypt asked him to recommend someone to replace Sir Samuel Baker as pasha of the newly minted Egyptian province of Equatoria. Gordon had had a hankering to visit Africa since childhood. He recommended himself.

When Khedive Ismail offered him the job, Gordon took his orders to eradicate slavery as a Christian call. To show Ismail that he did not worship ‘gold and silver idols’, he refused the generous salary that Baker had gratefully pocketed, instead asking for a stipend of only £2,000. ‘I am like Moses who despised the riches of Egypt,’ he wrote his sister proudly. At first he seems to have thought he would be able to overwhelm Sudan’s slave-traders by sheer force of character. ‘About the slavery question,’ he wrote confidently not long after arriving in 1874, ‘I shall have no trouble at all.’ The first time he ever got on a camel, he rode so hard that he reached his destination 250 miles away three days before the fastest caravan could have done. He rode into a slave-trader’s camp ahead of his men, hoping to awe the trader with his courage.

What effect his theatrics had on the Sudanese is not clear. Gordon spoke only a bit of pidgin Arabic and never seems to have tried to learn more. He could not read or write Arabic at all. As the historian Douglas Johnson has written, ‘He was largely ignorant of the customs of the Sudanese and had to rely on “reading the faces” of his Egyptian subordinates and Sudanese subjects to judge their characters.’ In Equatoria he relied on a handpicked staff that included Americans, Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans and Austrians. When these Western colleagues one by one died or were sent home with malaria, Gordon became even more isolated, shutting himself up to commune with his Bible. The Book of Isaiah was his special favourite.

Proceeding to the junction of the White Nile and the Sobat, he soon discovered that slavery was far more entrenched than he had realized. In the first month after Gordon established a garrison that could intercept boats, he caught a caravan of 300 slaves. In the months to come, he liberated hundreds more from riverboats, often finding the slaves hidden under piles of wood or ivory. At first his determined efforts seemed to bear fruit. Gordon closed down a zariba on the Bahr el-Zeraf. After imprisoning its leading slaver, a northern Sudanese named Nasir Ali, for two weeks, Gordon ordered him to open a new station aimed at interdicting slaves in a spot called Nor Deng on the Sobat River. ‘He is not worse than the others,’ Gordon wrote by way of explanation. Nasir Ali did as he was told, naming after himself the zariba from which the town of Nasir took its name. But the more Gordon learned about slavery in Sudan, the more he began to wonder whether he was doing any good.

The slaves Gordon released from the riverboats were often reluctant to leave his garrison. They seemed as fearful of being killed by the neighboring Shilluk people as of being kept and sold as slaves to the Arabs. Some years earlier the Anti-Slavery Society in London, the oldest and biggest of the Western abolitionist groups, had pressed the khedive to create a river police to intercept slave-trading boats. But the river police simply inducted most of the slaves they caught into the Egyptian army, leading the Sudanese merchants to regard their seizures as a barely veiled form of taxation. The slave-hunters who melted away from the rivers when Gordon and his men started patrolling did not disappear. Instead they created new overland routes for the trade, marching their captives across deserts without food or water. The traffic was no longer visible to the European consuls and missionaries in Khartoum, but the slaves were suffering more grievously than ever. Gordon, who before coming out to Sudan had been a rather uncritical admirer of the Anti-Slavery Society, began to have doubts. ‘Up to the present, the slave is worse off through your efforts,’ he wrote the Anti-Slavery Society. ‘I am sure a poor child walking through the burning plains would say, “Oh I do wish those gentlemen had left us alone to come down by boat.”’

Slaves did all the work in Sudan that domestics and labourers did in Britain. Gordon himself estimated that two-thirds of the population of Sudan were slaves and that abolition would cost the country two-thirds of its revenue. Sudan’s Arabized tribes had a higher standard of living than its African peoples, and most blacks, Gordon came to believe, ‘would give their all to be enslaved in a good Cairo house’. (This view was widespread among slave-holders; whether the slaves themselves agreed is less certain.) Though Muslims would not marry their daughters to non-Muslims, Islamic law gave masters the right to use their slaves sexually, and the children of such unions were born free. Some of Sudan’s most celebrated sultans and slave-raiders were born of slave mothers. Even the African peoples who suffered the most from the slave trade were used to it. They knew nothing of money and wage labour; slavery was the only form of employment outside the family and clan they knew. To obtain servants, Gordon himself had to break down and pay four pounds of durra, the local grain, for two Shilluk boys aged nine and twelve.

Gordon knew that his Egyptian or Sudanese mudirs, or sub-governors, saw nothing wrong with slavery at all. ‘Has the khedive or the Pashas ever moved a little finger against the slave-trade except under coercion from without?’ Gordon wrote. ‘Is it not true that the moment this coercion ceases the slave-trade recommences? It is engrained in the bones of the people.’ Time and again he had to discipline his officers for seizing for themselves the slaves he was trying to liberate and even selling the men under their command into slavery. Gordon and his men looked at the same wretched boatload of African slaves and saw very different things. Gordon saw robbery and murder; the Egyptians and Sudanese, he felt, saw a way of life they accepted as inevitable and perhaps the chance to make a bit of money. ‘When the trees hear my voice and obey me, then will the tribes liberate their slaves!’ he wrote. And those were the slaves Gordon could recognize as slaves, for as he soon learned, his subordinates often took advantage of his ignorance to carry on the trade right under his nose. Claiming that the Africans in their care were their own wives and children, they used his caravans to transport slaves from the south and west to Khartoum. ‘The Khedive writes me quite harshly to stop this slave-trade, and you see his mudirs help it on,’ he angrily wrote his sister in 1874.

He was bitterly frustrated, not only with the khedive and his failure to put down the trade, but also with the abolitionists in London, who seemed to assume that it was so easy to put Sudan to rights. When the khedive complained that he was spending too much money, he resigned, then relented in 1877 when Ismail offered to make him governor-general over the entire country. The title theoretically gave him absolute authority over the whole of Sudan, a million square miles extending from the Libyan Desert to the equatorial rain forest. But it could not change the petty, venal reality of the Egyptian occupation, and soon Gordon was in despair again. No matter what he did, he could not escape the fact that exploitation was Egypt’s reason for being in Sudan. His officials took bribes and connived with the slave-traders because they saw nothing wrong in it and because they were paid little else anyway. (The £2,000 to which Gordon had been so proud to reduce his salary was still many times more than any Egyptian or Sudanese official made.)

As governor-general, Gordon forbade his officials to use the hippohide whip to collect taxes. The Sudanese regarded the new policy as weakness and stopped paying taxes. He replaced the Egyptian officials he considered most corrupt with Europeans and Americans. Carl Christian Giegler, the German who had been in charge of constructing a telegraph system, was made deputy governor-general. Rudolf Slatin, a twenty-one-year-old Austrian officer, was named governor of southern Darfur, a region the size of England. Dr Mohammed Emin, an enigmatic Austrian doctor, became governor of Equatoria. If the new pashas knew as little as Gordon himself about what was going on around them, they were at least conversant with his Western vision of good government. But no amount of fantasizing could conceal the fact that Sudan still had no transport, no reliable postal service, no police and virtually no administration - just the governor-general and his handful of pashas dashing about on camel-back offering on-the-spot justice and harassing the slave caravans that kept chugging across the desert.

The British correspondents who wrote about Chinese Gordon in Sudan saw none of this. For them, as for their readers, the Sudan was not so much a real place as a magic mirror that reflected back a heroic picture of themselves and their culture. In this sentimental mirror, Gordon was ‘the world’s greatest living expert on the Sudan’. Through his hypnotic hold over the ‘native mind’, the reporters wrote, he had brought ‘peace and orderly government’ to an area the size of Western Europe. Gordon himself was not immune to such illusions. As governor-general, he could still write of his grandiose plans to stamp out Sudan’s slave trade. ‘Consider the effect of harsh measures among an essentially Musselman population, carried out brusquely by a Nazarene - measures which touch the pocket of everyone. Who that had not the Almighty with him would dare do it? I will do it.’ But he was pessimistic about the prospects for ending slavery itself. The Anti-Slavery Society published an article criticizing him for buying slaves to use as soldiers. Gordon roared that they failed to see the weakness of his position. ‘People think you have only to say the word and slavery will cease… I need troops - how am I to get them but thus? If I do not buy these slaves, unless I liberate them thus, they will remain slaves, while when they are soldiers, they are free from that reproach… I need the purchased slaves to put down the slave-dealers.’ The same year Gordon was writing to his sister, ‘When you get the ink out of the ink-stained blotting paper, then slave-holding will cease in these lands.’

He launched a violent campaign against the slave-dealers and their leader, Suleiman, the son of Zubayr Pasha, a notorious slaver and the former governor of Bahr el-Ghazal province. His Italian lieutenant defeated Suleiman and had him executed. Riding hard through Kordofan and Darfur, sleeping out on a Sudanese rope bed, Gordon captured hundreds of slave-dealers and thousands of slaves. But he knew that many more caravans had got away. At Shakka in southern Darfur, his camels had to pick their way through the skulls of dead slaves. In a fury, Gordon ordered the locals to pile hundreds of skulls up as a memento to the crimes of the slave-dealers; they obeyed his orders with impassive hostility. He stripped and flogged the slave-dealers he caught, then let them go. ‘I cannot shoot them all!’ he cried out to his diary.

What to do with the slaves he had liberated was an even more devilish problem. Released in the middle of Darfur, they would only be captured again or perish of hunger and thirst. ‘Poor creatures! I am sorry I cannot take them back to their own countries, but it is impossible to do so.’ He tried distributing them among his own men as ‘wives’ and servants. Fights broke out among them about how to divide up the slaves. When he tried to inject some realism into his correspondence with Britain, he succeeded only in alienating his humanitarian fans. ‘An escaped slave is like an escaped sheep, the property of those who find him or her,’ he wrote the Anti-Slavery Society angrily, after its activists sermonized that returning runaway slaves to their owners ‘entails complicity with slave-owning’. ‘One must consider what is best for the individual, not what may seem best to the judgement of Europe. It is the slave who suffers, not Europe.’ But Europe did suffer when its good intentions were thwarted, and Gordon was at heart a European who cared more than he liked to admit about the judgement of Europe.

The Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey later wrote in a celebrated essay about Gordon, ‘Ambition was, in reality, the essential motive in his life—ambition, neither for wealth or titles, but for fame and influence, for the swaying of multitudes, and for that kind of enlarged and intensified existence “where breath breathes most - even in the mouths of men”.’ Perhaps. Or perhaps he was simply sick at heart. ‘I declare that if I could stop this traffic I would willingly be shot this night; and yet strive as I can I can scarcely see any hope for it,’ he wrote on his way back from Darfur. After four years as governor-general, he came to the conclusion that ‘I could not govern the country to satisfy myself.’ He wrote to his sister that he was ‘longing with great desire for death’. At the end of 1879, he resigned again, and this time a new khedive accepted his resignation.

In Britain and Europe, the conviction was gaining ground that the only way to extinguish African slavery was to bring the continent under direct European control. Like Khedive Ismail, Belgium’s King Leopold saw in the public zeal for anti-slavery an opportunity to carve out a private African empire for himself. When Gordon returned to England in 1880, King Leopold invited him to Brussels to try to enlist him in the venture. What Leopold really wanted from the Congo was ivory (and later rubber), and he would get it at a vast human cost to the people he claimed to want to help. But his humanitarian rhetoric duped Gordon, as it did most of Europe. Gordon wrote to a friend that the Belgian king ‘wished merely to help a wretched people, suppress slavery and promote Christianity—all under an international flag’. In 1884, after a year or so of biblical researches in Palestine, he was on the verge of resigning his commission with the War Office to accept Leopold’s offer. Then all of a sudden Britain, which had occupied Egypt in 1882 to put down a nationalist rebellion, learned that Egypt’s southern empire had risen up against ‘its government’ under the leadership of a mysterious Muslim holy man who called himself ‘the Mahdi’ or ‘the Expected One’. They asked Gordon to go back.

In the four years since Gordon had left Sudan, Mohammed Ahmed, a smiling Arab boat builder’s son, had rallied almost the whole of northern Sudan behind him in rebellion against ‘the Turks’. Mohammed Ahmed told his followers that the Prophet Muhammad had appeared to him three times in dreams to say that he was the man who, according to some Muslim traditions, was expected to rise up and vanquish Islam’s foes. He had the marks of a prophet: a mole on his left cheek and a gap between his front teeth. People listened. For years no Sudanese had dared to engage the Turco-Egyptians with their fearsome Remington rifles and cannons. But when ‘the Turks’ tried to cut down the Mahdi at his home on Aba Island, his enraged followers rushed at the soldiers and killed them with their lances and spears. This defeat of the seemingly invincible Egyptian army convinced many pious Muslims that God was on the Mahdi’s side. In 1881 the Mahdi wrote to Gordon’s replacement in Sudan as well to all his mudirs, warning that ‘whosoever doubts my mission does not believe in God or his prophets, and whosoever is at enmity with me is an unbeliever, and whosoever fights against me will be forsaken and unconsoled in both worlds’.

The Mahdi promised those who flocked to hear his preaching that if they would give up the godless ways of ‘the Turks’ - the clothes, the alcohol - he would throw out the foreigners and liberate Egypt, Mecca and Constantinople. One of his first converts was Abdullahi al-Tashi, from the cattle-herding and slave-trading Baggara tribes of southern Kordofan and Darfur province. The jallaba among the Mahdi’s own tribe, the Danagla, and the neighbouring Jaalin joined his Ansar movement by the thousands. Dressed in patched white smocks symbolizing their virtuous poverty, the Ansar defeated Egyptian forces sent to quell them in 1881 and 1882. In 1883 the Mahdi’s army captured the town of El Obeid in Kordofan, marching the European nuns and priests from the Catholic mission in the nearby Nuba Mountains to the Mahdi’s camp for imprisonment.

To European observers, the Mahdi’s rule seemed cruel and primitive, but he was wildly popular in the Sudan. Gordon and the other British officials who blamed Egyptian misrule for the rebellion underestimated the religious appeal of the Mahdi’s pledge to throw out the unbelievers. Life was and is so hard in Sudan that sometimes it seems as if the Sudanese prefer to think about death and the supernatural - as if the language of dreams and visions is the country’s only common tongue. The Mahdi preached of heavenly delights awaiting those who took part in his jihad. He also maintained a rough discipline among his troops. When his men captured towns, they were required to place their plunder in a communal treasury. Beautiful women were the only indulgence the Mahdi allowed himself and his men; there were terrible punishments in his camp for drinking or smoking. In this as in all else, he claimed to follow the model of the prophet Muhammad.

There were signs and portents in the Mahdi’s favour. In 1882 the appearance of a comet had foretold that the town of El Obeid would fall to the Mahdi. Eleven months later the Egyptian government sent 10,000 men under the command of a British officer, Colonel William Hicks, to recapture the town. The Ansar annihilated Hicks and his men and seized their guns, machine guns and rifles. ‘Nothing could have exceeded the savage grandeur of the Mahdi’s triumphal entry into El Obeid after the battle,’ wrote Rudolf Slatin, the young Austrian whom Gordon had appointed governor of southern Darfur. ‘As he passed along, the people threw themselves at him and literally worshipped him.’ Slatin was abandoned by his men and forced to surrender to the Mahdi and to convert to Islam. Gordon’s other Austrian appointee, Dr Emin or Emin Bey, hung on in Equatoria but was increasingly isolated. The Mahdi was ready to march upon Khartoum.

The uprising in Sudan presented Britain’s Liberal government with a conundrum familiar to modern Western governments. The London government wanted not so much to do anything about this African catastrophe as to be seen to do something about it. Prime Minister William Gladstone freely admitted that he cared nothing for Egypt’s southern possessions. Gladstone had a sneaking sympathy for the Mahdi as a nationalist. ‘Yes, those people are struggling to be free and they are rightly struggling to be free!’ he told the House of Commons when urged to action. But within his own Liberal Party anti-slavery sentiment was strong, and there was a worry that the Mahdi was a front for Sudan’s slave-traders. Forced to take a stand, the government came out in favour of evacuating all the Egyptian garrisons south of Wadi Halfa. But that was more easily said than done. Thousands of Egyptians as well as a few hundred Europeans were scattered throughout the country in distant, isolated stations. How were they to reach Egypt without falling into the hands of the Mahdi, as Hicks and the European missionaries had already done. The British establishment was agreed that it was not worth spending British lives or treasure to save the Sudan. At the same time, Britain did not want to injure its sense of propriety by allowing people, most especially white Europeans under its de facto protection, to fall into harm.

In the midst of this debate, the influential Pall Mall Gazette came up with its own solution. Why not send Gordon, the hero, to extricate the Egyptian garrisons? ‘We cannot send a regiment to Khartoum, but we can send a man who on more than one occasion has proved himself more valuable in similar circumstances than an entire army.’ Here was a painless, cost-free way out of the quagmire and one that the British public, fed for years on a diet of stories about Gordon’s near-magical abilities, enthusiastically endorsed. Even Queen Victoria took up the call. Gordon behaved as if he believed as much as anyone in his own legend. Though he had opined that it was necessary to defend Khartoum at all costs, he accepted the charge to evacuate the besieged city. On 18 January 1884 he set off for Sudan so quickly that, as Strachey later wrote, it almost seemed as if he had wanted to be back there all along. From Cairo he travelled south by train to the end of the line at Asyut. There he boarded a sailing boat. As he left Egypt, Gordon assured a huddle of well-wishers that he knew what he was doing. ‘I feel quite happy, for I say, If God is with me, who can or will be hurtful to me?’ Arriving in Khartoum on camel-back exactly one month from the day he left London, he told the crowd assembled for his opening address that he had been unhappy away from them. ‘I come without soldiers, but with God on my side to redress the evils of the Sudan. I will not fight with any weapons but justice,’ he said.

The crowd cheered, and the young correspondent for The Times travelling along with Gordon was rapturous. ‘In that distant city on the Nile where a few days before all was misery, despondency and confusion, the coming of one noble-hearted Englishman, resolute, righteous and fearless, has changed despair into hope and turned mourning into joy,’ he wrote. But without weapons Gordon could in fact do very little. To Slatin, imprisoned in the Mahdi’s camp, he seemed disastrously delusional. ‘The mere fact that Gordon had come without a force at his back proved to these people that he depended on his personal influence to carry out his task; but, to those who understood the situation, it was abundantly clear that personal influence was at this stage a drop in the ocean…. Had Gordon not been informed of the Mahdi’s proclamations, sent to all tribes after the fall of El Obeid? Was he not aware that these proclamations enjoined all the people to unite in a religious war against Government authority, and that those who disobeyed the summons and were found guilty of giving assistance to the hated Turk, were guilty of betraying the faith and as such would not only lose their money and property, but their wives and children would become slaves of the Mahdi and his followers?… How could Gordon’s personal influence avail him for an instant against the personal interests of every man, woman and child in the now abandoned Sudan?’

In Gordon’s mind, it was a point of honour that he not leave without handing over power to some sort of government, however hastily contrived. To do otherwise would be to admit that all the ‘progress’ of the last few decades was lost. Gordon knew there was no such thing as an anti-slavery party in Sudan. Everyone with any power was involved in the trade; the differences among them on the issue were a matter of degree. But when he attempted to cobble together a Sudanese coalition that might conceivably stand against the Mahdi, first by announcing that his government would not interfere with slave-owners and then by proposing that Egypt set up the notorious Sudanese slaver Zubayr Pasha as his successor, he infuriated anti-slavery opinion in Britain. ‘What is the use of his prestige if he has to do this?’ sputtered one influential London daily. Gordon claimed that Zubayr, the former governor of Bahr el-Ghazal, would at least try to curtail the slave trade (in exchange for a hefty Egyptian subsidy), whereas the Mahdi openly called for its revival. But the Anti-Slavery Society denounced his plan, calling it ‘a degradation to England and a scandal to Europe’. Better to abandon the slaves to the Mahdi than for Britain to sully its honour by consorting with known slavers. The cabinet was ready to veto Gordon’s proposals, but in a barrage of telegrams the general persisted in arguing the point. At last the Mahdi stepped in and ended the debate. On 10 March his forces swooped down on the telegraph line south of Khartoum and cut the copper wire that had been laboriously laid under the Egyptian regime. The line to the outside world went dead.

Gordon and the few Europeans left in the city could have escaped. The Mahdi sent word offering Gordon safe passage if he would simply go without a fight. But he refused to abandon the Egyptian and Sudanese troops who had remained loyal to him to face the Mahdi alone. Instead he tried to act as a sort of human shield to force the British into evacuating his men. He sent messages to Cairo warning that ‘I will not leave the Sudan until everyone who wants to go down is given the chance to do so, unless a government is established that relieves me of the charge; therefore if any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down, I WILL NOT OBEY IT BUT WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN AND RUN ALL RISKS.’ Slowly and reluctantly, the British government began preparations to send a relief expedition. As the siege intensified, Gordon sat in his shuttered palace along the Nile, chain-smoking, writing in his journal and reading his Bible. Food ran low. His tribal allies betrayed him. He sent boats down the Nile warning that the city could not hold out much longer. The Mahdi captured them and killed their British commander along with all his crew. In the end, there was nothing left but the sheer spectacle of Gordon’s quixotic belief that he ought to be able to save the place. ‘I am ready to die for these poor people,’ he wrote, and yet it is not clear whether the Sudanese for whom he thought he wanted to give his life had the foggiest notion of what he was doing there. In a last angry scribble to the British government, he wrote, ‘You send me no information though you have lots of money. C.G.G.’ He died in the fighting around the palace on 26 January 1885, the day the Mahdi’s forces finally overran Khartoum.

Hearing sounds of rejoicing, Gordon’s former protégé Rudolf Slatin crawled out of his tent in the Mahdi’s camp on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. Three of the Mahdi’s slave soldiers were marching towards him at the head of a noisy crowd. One carried a bloody bundle in his hand. As the slaves approached Slatin, they stopped for a moment, smirking. Then the one holding the bundle unwrapped the bloody thing. It was Gordon’s head.

‘“Is not this the head of your uncle, the unbeliever?” he said. “What of it,” Slatin managed to reply. “A brave soldier who fell at his post. Happy is he to have fallen.”’

The expedition sent to rescue Gordon arrived two days later and was repulsed easily by the Mahdi’s troops, ‘TOO LATE!’ the headlines screamed when the news reached London. The British could have blamed Gordon for the disaster. After all, he had misread the situation. But to do so would have been to admit that the Sudan of the mirror was not the real Sudan at all. Better to blame the British government for failing to relieve Gordon sooner than to admit that Sudan’s wars and famines were more than a stage set for heroes and saviours from the West. Queen Victoria was beside herself with rage and humiliation. ‘Mr Gladstone and the government have - the Queen feels it dreadfully - Gordon’s innocent, noble heroic blood on their consciences,’ she wrote to her private secretary. The leader of the relief expedition was first ordered to ‘smash up the Mahdi’. But when the Prime Minister informed Parliament that it would cost approximately £11.5 million to overthrow the Mahdi, cooler heads prevailed. All British and Egyptian troops were withdrawn from Sudan. The country, north and south, was left to the Mahdi and, when he died of typhus six months later, to his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi.

For thirteen years, Europeans and Americans devoured a series of memoirs from prisoners like Slatin who had escaped from captivity to describe the Sudan’s descent into tribal warfare, famine and slavery. It was said that up to 5 million Sudanese died under the Mahdiya, as the Mahdist regime was known. It was not to save them that a Conservative government finally made up its mind to reconquer Sudan in 1896. The government wanted to foil French designs on the Sudd and to secure the precious waters of the Nile for Egypt. But British officers who carried out General Sir Herbert Kitchener’s plan to advance up the Nile meant to avenge Gordon. With the British army’s new Maxim guns and magazine rifles, they could be sure of achieving both objectives at far less cost than they would have in 1884.

‘Remember Gordon!’ they cried at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman as their Egyptian troops mowed down the Sudanese warriors who came at them on foot, camel and horseback in patched white gowns, banners fluttering behind them. Perhaps 10,000 Sudanese armed with spears died in the battle outside the mud-walled warren of alleys and mosques, across the Nile from the ruins of Khartoum, where the Mahdi had made his capital. The British celebrated their victory on the grounds of Gordon’s palace. Journalists warned British and American readers that Britain could not expect any material gain from the addition to the empire. It was the honour of England that had been saved. ‘The vindication of our self-respect was the great treasure we won at Khartoum and it was worth the price we paid for it,’ concluded G. W. Steevens in With Kitchener to Khartoum. ‘The poor Sudan! The wretched, dry Sudan! Count up all the gains you will, yet what a hideous irony it remains, this fight of half a generation for such emptiness… the Sudan is a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever.’

And yet - what better to remake than an empty limbo of torment? Perhaps because Sudan really had nothing Britain’s nineteenth-century capitalists wanted for themselves, the field was left open to those tempted by its hallucinations and visions, to those for whom the mirror was enough. For Rudyard Kipling, Omdurman was England’s finest hour. Three months after the battle, he wrote what became imperialism’s defining poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, urging Americans to join Britain and

Take up the White Man’s burden

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease.