24.Novembre1899 recolonizzazione del Sudan.

Mahdi Uprising 1882-1885

Of the causes which led to the reconquest of the Sudan � the natural desire of the Egyptian government to recover lost territory, the equally natural desire in Great Britain to "avenge" the death of Gordon were among them � the most weighty was the necessity of securing for Egypt the control of the Upper Nile, Egypt being wholly dependent on the waters of the river for its prosperity. That control would have been lost had a European power other than Great Britain obtained possession of any part of the Nile valley; and at the time the Sudan was reconquered (1896-98) France was endeavouring to establish her authority on the river between Khartum and Gondokoro, as the Marchand expedition from the Congo to Fashoda demonstrated. The Nile constituted, in the words of Lord Cromer, the true justification of the policy of re-occupation, and made the Sudan a priceless possession for Egypt.

In 1869 the Suez Canal had opened and quickly became Britain's economic lifeline to India and the Far East. To defend this waterway, Britain sought a greater role in Egyptian affairs. In 1873 the British government therefore supported a program whereby an Anglo-French debt commission assumed responsibility for managing Egypt's fiscal affairs. This commission eventually forced Khedive Ismail to abdicate in favor of his more politically acceptable son, Tawfiq (1877-92).

In the 1850s, the legal systems in Egypt and Sudan was revised, introducing a commercial code and a criminal code administered in secular courts. The change reduced the prestige of the qadis (Islamic judges) whose sharia courts were confined to dealing with matters of personal status. Even in this area, the courts lacked credibility in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims because they conducted hearings according to the Ottoman Empire's Hanafi school of law rather than the stricter Maliki school traditional in the area. The Turkiyah also encouraged a religious orthodoxy favored in the Ottoman Empire. The government undertook a mosque-building program and staffed religious schools and courts with teachers and judges trained at Cairo's Al Azhar University. The government favored the Khatmiyyah, a traditional religious order, because its leaders preached cooperation with the regime. But Sudanese Muslims condemned the official orthodoxy as decadent because it had rejected many popular beliefs and practices.

The Mahdist movement, which was utterly to overthrow Egyptian rule, derived its strength from two different causes: the oppression under which the people suffered, and the measures taken to prevent the Baggara (cattle-owning Arabs) from slave trading. Venality and the extortion of the tax-gatherer flourished anew after the departure of Gordon, while the feebleness of his successors inspired in the Baggara a contempt for the authority which prohibited them pursuing their most lucrative traffic. When Mahommed Ahmed, a Dongolese, proclaimed himself the long-lookcd-for Mahdi (guide) of Islam, he found most of his original followers among the grossly superstitious villagers of Kordofan, to whom he preached universal equality and a community of goods, while denouncing the Turks as unworthy Moslems on whom God would execute judgment.

The Baggara perceived in this Mahdi one who could be used to shake off Egyptian rule, and their adhesion to him first gave importance to his "mission." Mahommed Ahmed became at once the leader and the agent of the Baggara. He married the daughters of their sheikhs and found in Abdullah, a member of the Taaisha section of the tribe, his chief supporter. The first armed conflict between the Egyptian troops and the Mahdi's followers occurred in August 1881. In June 1882 the Mahdi gained his first considerable success. The capture of El Obeid on 17 January 1883 and the annihilation in the November of an army of over 10,000 men commanded by Hicks Pasha (Colonel William Hicks, formerly of the Bombay army), made the Mahdi undisputed master of Kordofan and Sennar. The next month, December 1883, saw the surrender of Slatin in Darfur, while in February 1884 Osman Digna, his amir in the Red Sea regions, inflicted a crushing defeat on some 4,000 Egyptians at El Teh near Suakin. In April following Lupton Bey, governor of Bahr-el-Ghazal, whose troops and officials had embraced the Mahdist cause, surrendered and was sent captive to Omdurman, where he died on the 8th of May 1888.

On learning of the disaster to Hicks Pasha's army, the British government (Great Britain having been since 1882 in military occupation of Egypt) insisted that the Egyptian government should evacuate such parts of the Sudan as they still held, and General Gordon was despatched, with Lieut.-Colonel Donald H. Stewart, to Khartum to arrange the withdrawal of the Egyptian civil and military population. Gordon's instructions, based largely on his own suggestions, were not wholly consistent; they contemplated vaguely the establishment of some form of stable government on the surrende, and among the documents with which he was furnished was a firman creating him governor-general of the Sudan.

General Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a soldier who had success in dealing with the Chinese and so was of renown for his abilities, was sent to lead the Egyptian forces against the Sudanese dervishes. The British had ignored the training of the Egyptian forces andwhile the Gladstone administration made a symbolic gesture of sending a leader of somerenown and experience against third world forces, General Gordon was left to his own devices. Since he was leading an army that was largely untrained and pressed into service against a motivated religious movement, Gordon, despite his extraordinary personal efforts, was doomed. His repeated requests for resupply and reinforcements were ignored.

Gordon reached Khartum on the 18th of February 1884 and at first his mission, which had aroused great enthusiasm in England, promised success. To smooth the way for the retreat of the Egyptian garrisons and civilians he issued proclamations announcing that the suppression of the slave trade was abandoned, that the Mahdi was sultan of Kordofan, and that the Sudan was independent of Egypt. He enabled some thousands of refugees to make their escape to Aswan and collected at Khartum troops from some of the outlying stations.

By this time the situation had altered for the worse and Mahdism was gaining strength among tribes in the Nile valley at first hostile to its propaganda. As the only means of preserving authority at Khartum (and thus securing the peaceful withdrawal of the garrison) Gordon repeatedly telegraphed to Cairo asking that Zobeir Pasha might be sent to him, his intention being to hand over to Zobeir the government of the country. Zobeir, a Sudanese Arab, was probably the one man who could have withstood successfully the Mahdi. Owing to Zobeir's notoriety as a slave-raider Gordon's request was refused. All hope of a peaceful retreat of the Egyptians was thus rendered impossible.

The Mahdist movement now swept northward and on the 20th of May Berber was captured by the dervishes and Khartum isolated. From this time the energies of Gordon were devoted to the defence of that town. After months of delay due to the vacillation of the British government a relief expedition was sent up the Nile under the command of Lord Wolseley. It started too late to achieve its object, and on the 25th of January 1885 Khartum was captured by the Mahdi and Gordon killed.

Colonel Stewart, Frank Power (British consul at Khartum) and M. Herbin (French consul), who (accompanied by nineteen Greeks) had been sent down the Nile by Gordon in the previous September to give news to the relief force, had been decoyed ashore and murdered (Sept. 18, 1884). The fall of Khartum was followed by the withdrawal of the British expedition, Dongola being evacuated in June 1885. In the same month Kassala capitulated, but just as the Mahdi had practically completed the destruction of the Egyptian power, he died, in this same month of June 1885. He was at once succeeded by the khalifa Abdullah, whose rule continued until 1898, when his army was completely overthrown by an Anglo-Egyptian force under Sir H. (afterwards Lord) Kitchener.

The Mahdi had been regarded by his adherents as the only true commander of the faithful, endowed with divine power to conquer the whole world. He had at first styled his followers dervishes (i.e. religious mendicants) and given them the jibba as their characteristic garment or uniform. Later on he commanded the faithful to call themselves ansar (helpers), a reference to the part they were to play in his career of conquest, and at the time of his death he was planning an invasion of Egypt.

He had liberated the Sudanese from the extortions of the Egyptians, but the people soon found that the Mahdi's rule was even more oppressive than had been that of their former masters, and after the Mahdi's death the situation of the peasantry in particular grew rapidly worse, neither life nor property being safe. Abdullah set himself steadily to crush all opposition to his own power.

Mahommed Ahmed had, In accordance with the traditions which required the Mahdi to have four khalifas (lieutenants), nominated, besides Abdullah, Ali wad Helu, a sheikh of the Dogheim and Kenana Arabs, and Mahommed esh Sherif, his son-in-law, as khalifas. (The other khalifaship was vacant having been declined by the sheikh es Senussi. Wad Helu and Shcrif were stripped of their power and gradually all chiefs and amirs not of the Baggara tribe were got rid of except Osman Digna, whose sphere of operations was on the Red Sea coast. Abdullah's rule was a pure military despotism which brought the country to a state of almost complete agricultural and commercial ruin. He was also almost constantly in conflict either with the Shilluks, Nuers and other tribes of the south; with the peoples of Darfur, where at one time an anti-Mahdi gained a great following; with the Abyssinians; with the Kabbabish and other Arab tribes.

In the country under his dominion the khalifa's government was carried on after the manner of other Mahommedan states, but pilgrimages to the Mahdi's tomb at Omdurman were substituted for pilgrimages to Mecca. The arsenal and dockyard and the printing-press at Khartum were kept busy (the workmen being Egyptians who had escaped massacre). Otherwise Khartum was deserted, the khalifa making, Omdurman his capital and compelling disaffected tribes to dwell in it so as to be under better control. While Omdurman grew to a huge size the populatioa of the country generally dwindled enormously from constant warfare and the ravages of disease, small-pox being endemic. The fanaticism with which the Mahdi had inspired his followers remained almost unbroken to the end. Mahdism as a vital force in the old Egyptian Sudan ceased, however, with the Anglo-Egyptian victory at Omdurman.

The wonderful progress � political, economical, and social � which Egypt had made during British occupation, together with the revelation in so strong a light of the character of the Khalifa's despotism in the Sudan and the miserable condition of his misgoverned people, stirred public opinion in Great Britain, and brought the question of the recovery of the Sudan into prominence.

A change of ministry took place in 1895, and Lord Salisbury's Cabinet, which had consistently assailed the Egyptian policy of the old, was not unwilling to consider whether the flourishing condition of Egyptian finance, the prosperity of the country and the settled state of its affairs, with a capable and proved little army ready to hand, did not warrant an attempt being made to recover gradually the Sudan provinces abandoned by Egypt in 1885 on the advice of Mr Gladstone's Government. Such being the condition of public and official sentiment, the crushing defeat of the Italians by the Abyssinians at the battle of Adowa on 1st March 1896, and the critical state of Kassala � held by Italy at British suggestion, and now closely invested by the dervishes�made it not only desirable but necessary to take immediate action.

On 14 March 1896 Major-General Sir H. Kitchener, who succeeded Sir Francis Grenfell as Sirdar of the Egyptian army in 1892, received orders to reoccupy Akasheh, 50 miles south of Sarras, and to carry the railway on from Sarras. The railway reconstruction, under Lieutenant E.P. Girouard, RE., pushed southward; and a telegraph line followed the advance. At the commencement of the campaign the Egyptian army, including reserves, consisted of 16 battalions of infantry, of which 6 were Sudanese, 10 squadrons of cavalry, 5 batteries of artillery, 3 companies of garrison artillery, and 8 companies of camel corps, and it possessed 13 gunboats for river work.

By the end of June the railway was advanced beyond Akasheh, and headquarters were at Kosheh, 10 miles farther south. Cholera and fever were busy both with the North Staffordshire Begiment at Gemai, whither they had been moved on its approach, and with the Egyptian troops at the front, and carried off many officers and men. The railway reached Kosheh early in August; the cholera disappeared, and stores were collected and arrangements steadily made for a farther advance. Dongola was bombarded by the gunboats and captured by the army on 23 September 1896. The dervish Dongola army practically ceased to exist, and the principal sheiks came in and submitted to the Sirdar. The Dongola campaign was over, and the province recovered to Egypt.

The railway up the right bank of the Nile was continued to Kermah, in order to evade the difficulties of the 3rd Cataract; but the Sirdar had conceived the bold project of cutting off the great angle of the Nile from Wadi Haifa to Abu Hamed, involving nearly 600 miles of navigation and including the Fourth Cataract, by Tae Sudan constructing a railway across the Nubian desert, and so bringing his base at Wadi Haifa within a few hours of his force. The railway reached Abu Hamed on the 4th November, and was pushed rapidly forward along the right bank of the Nile towards Berber.

The dervish army reached Nakheila on 20 March 1896, and entrenched themselves there. After several reconnaissances, in which fighting took place with Mahmud's outposts, it was ascertained from prisoners that their army was short of provisions and that great leakage was going on. Kitchener, therefore, did not hurry. Mahmud's camp, after an hour's bombardment on the morning of 08 April, was stormed with complete success. Mahmud and several hundred dervishes were captured, 40 emirs and 3000 Arabs killed, and many more wounded; the rest escaped to Gedaref. The Sirdar's casualties were 80 killed and 472 wounded. Preparations were now made for the attack on the Khalifa's force at Omdurman.

On the 1st September the army bivouacked at Egeiga, on the west bank of the Nile, within 4 miles of Omdurman. Here, on the morning of the 2nd September, the Khalifa's army, 40,000 strong, attacked, but was repulsed with slaughter. Kitchener then moved out and marched towards Omdurman, when he was again twice fiercely attacked on the right flank and rear. The 21st Lancers gallantly charged a body of 2000 dervishes which was unexpectedly met, and drove them westward, the Lancers losing a fifth of their number in killed and wounded. The Khalifa was now in full retreat, and the Sirdar, sending his cavalry in pursuit, marched into Omdurman. The dervish loss was over 10,000 killed, as many wounded, and 5000 prisoners. The British and Egyptian casualties together were under 500. The Khalifa's black flag was captured and sent home to the Queen. The power of modern armies had been demonstrated.

The reconquest of Dongola and the Sudan provinces during the three years from March 1896 to December 1898, considering the enormous extent and difficulties of the country, was achieved at an unprecedentedly small cost, while the main item of expenditure�the railway�remains a permanent benefit to the country. The railway, delayed by the construction of the big bridge over the Atbara, was opened to the Blue Nile opposite Khartum, 187 miles from the Atbara, at the end of 1899.