First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (38 page)

The British front was nearly a mile in length, and all along it the Lee-Metfords and Maxims took a savage toll of the Arabs.
Many of the Ansar and Dervish leaders lay dead in the sand, surrounded by their bodyguards and warriors.
Field batteries ranged artillery fire up and down the Arab ranks.
With the Sirdar in the center, the entire Anglo-Egyptian line began to move forward against what was left of the Mahdist army.
Shiekh Yakub and his bodyguards made a defiant stand under their Black Flag, refusing to give up their ground, and were killed where they stood.
The remnants of Abdullahi’s other divisions began to dissolve, fleeing into the desert.
Thousands straggled toward Omdurman, where survivors of the 21st Lancers harried the flanks of the fugitive column.
One group of some four hundred Arab horsemen formed up and charged the British brigade on the far left of the line, only to be shot down to a man before they reached the khaki-clad infantry.

Kitchener pressed his attack until the Ansar and Dervishes were driven into the desert, left in a state of chaos and confusion, and no longer a threat to his army.
At 11:30 AM, the Sirdar turned to his staff and announced that the enemy had been given “a good dusting.” He then gave orders that the march to Omdurman be resumed.
The “Cease Fire” sounded up and down the line, rifles brought to the slope, and columns of march reformed.

As they departed the field, the British left behind nearly twenty thousand Arab dead, with another five thousand trailing behind under guard as prisoners.
The Arab wounded totaled more than twenty-two thousand.
British and Egyptian losses, in contrast, were forty-eight dead and less than four hundred wounded.
Abdullahi had escaped, but his power was broken, his eventual capture a mere formality—at least, that was what Kitchener and his officers believed.

The Sirdar and his staff rode into Omdurman with their troops in the late afternoon.
The rumor had been spread by the Khalifa that should the city be taken the British would massacre all the inhabitants as revenge for the murder of Gordon, but when this proved to be false there was a tremendous celebration in the streets.
British troops were scouring the city, hoping to find Abdullahi, only to learn that as the Arab army was collapsing under the weight of Kitchener’s final assault, the Khalifa had fled into the city, spent two hours in prayer at the Mahdi’s tomb, and then just as Kitchener was entering the city by the north, Abdullahi mounted a donkey, took a Greek nun with him as a hostage, and fled out the southern gate.
There he joined thirty thousand refugees, the remnants of his army, who were trudging their way south toward El Obeid.

Kitchener’s troops did find Rudolf Karl von Slatin, the Austrian officer who had been a prisoner of the Mahdi and the Khalifa for fifteen years, along with Karl Neufeld, a German trader who had been held captive for twelve.
Kitchener himself paid a visit to the Mahdi’s tomb, which had been badly damaged when the British gunboats had shelled the city’s arsenal, and initiated what was probably the most disturbing incident of his entire career.
Arriving at the tomb, he ordered Muhammed Ahmed’s body removed, its head cut off, and its remains thrown into the Nile.
What he intended to do with the skull is unknown, although rumors later had it that he either intended to turn it into a drinking cup or send it to the Royal College of Surgeons as a curiosity.
In any event, once word of this incident reached the public the outcry was fierce—even Queen Victoria expressed outrage at the desecration, remarking that it “savoured too much of the Middle Ages.” Chastened, Kitchener then sent the skull to Cairo, where Evelyn Baring took possession of it and had it buried according to Moslem custom in a cemetery at Wadi Halfa.

In the meantime, Kitchener and his troops occupied Khartoum, now falling into ruin, and there found a handful of reminders of General Gordon.
Though his body was never found, a funeral service for Gordon was held on September 4 with full military honors.
As gunboats on the Nile fired a salute and three cheers were raised, first for the Queen, then for the Khedive, the British and Egyptian flags were once again unfurled above the Governor’s Palace.
Kitchener, who had long admired Gordon and had taken the news of Khartoum’s fall fourteen years earlier very hard, was so moved by the ceremony that he was unable to give the order to dismiss the troops on parade, and had one of his subordinates issue the command.
In the days to come he would be seen spending long hours in solitary contemplation walking in the courtyard where Gordon had met his death.
When Queen Victoria received Kitchener’s report of the funeral service, she confided to her diary with some satisfaction, “Surely he is avenged.”

A part of Kitchener’s solitary walks were no doubt devoted to a set of orders he had been given before departing Cairo, but was not permitted to open until he had taken Khartoum.
Upon reading them, he discovered that he had been ordered to take his army further up the Nile into the Sudan to a small mud-fort called Fashoda, once held by the Eygptians but now occupied by a column of French soldiers who had marched out of the Congo.
Once there, Kitchener was to remove the French and place the fort and the surrounding territory firmly under Anglo-Egyptian control.

Setting out from Khartoum in a small flotilla of riverboats on September 10, Kitchener reached Fashoda eight days later, and through a remarkable demonstration of tact and diplomacy, persuaded the French commander to leave the fort.
It took two months for the details of the two officers’ agreement to be settled by their respective governments, but on December 11, the French departed.
Kitchener took his time returning to Khartoum, securing the Nile along the way by building small forts and leaving Egyptian garrisons to man them.

When he arrived in Khartoum at the beginning of March, he discovered that a grateful nation, by an act of Parliament, had awarded him the sum of £30,000, and that he had been elevated to an earl—styling himself “Kitchener of Khartoum,” he would be known throughout the Empire as simply “K of K.” At the same time he had also been given the authority to rebuild the Sudanese capital.
Seven thousand new trees were planted as five thousand workmen began repairing the buildings damaged during the siege or allowed to fall into ruin during the
Mahdyyah
.
Kitchener also raised a £120,000 public subscription for the establishment of Gordon College in Khartoum.
To further commemorate the General, a statue of Gordon mounted on a camel was eventually placed in the square in front of the Governor’s Palace.

But there was still one piece of unfinished business: the Khalifa.
For more than a year Abdullahi had wandered in the dry hills of the central Sudan, among the Baggara, the tribe from which the Khalifa had come.
British and Egyptian agents searched for him, but it wasn’t until October 1899 that definitive reports of a camp near Jebel Gedir were received.
An oasis more than four hundred miles south of Khartoum, Jebel Gedir was hardly a likely focal point for a new Islamic uprising, while the Khaifa had fewer than ten thousand followers who remained loyal.
It is even arguable that Abdullahi himself had given up the cause of the Mahdi.
Yet there was still a cause for concern among the British and Egyptians: Jebel Gedir lay just south of Abbas Island, where the Mahdi had been born and where he had begun his
jihad
.
There remained strong undercurrents of pro-Mahdist sentiment in the region, and that alone was reason enough for Kitchener to choose to settle the issue with the Khalifa once and for all.

Sending eight thousand men up the Nile to the village of Kaka, where they began their overland trek to Jebel Gedir, Kitchener gave command of the force to Colonel Sir Francis Reginald Wingate, who had served as an aide to Field Marshal Wolseley on the Gordon Relief Expedition, spoke fluent Arabic, and was by all accounts an expert on Egypt, the Sudan and the Middle East.
Moving swiftly, Wingate took part of his force westward and on November 21 overtook an Arab caravan carrying grain for the Khalifa.
Two days later the Khalifa’s camp was discovered near a well at Um Diwaykarat.
Wingate brought up the whole of his force and Abdullahi was trapped.
With the route to the north cut off by the British, the Nile to the east, the desert to the west and impassible scrub and brush to the south, a battle was inevitable.

It was Omdurman all over again, though on a far smaller scale.
As the Arabs attacked in the early morning light, the crashing British rifle volleys and chattering machine guns chewed into the ranks of the charging enemy.
It was over within an hour: a thousand Arab dead lay on the field, while nearly ten thousand more were taken prisoner, including the Khalifa’s son, his designated successor.
As the morning light grew brighter, an amazing sight greeted the British officers examining the battlefield.
Wingate told the tale with simple dignity:

Only a few hundred yards from our original position on the rising ground, a large number of the enemy were seen lying dead, huddled together in a comparatively small space; on examination these proved to be the bodies of the Khalifa Abdullahi, the Khalifa Ali Wad Helu, Ahmed-el-Fedil, the Khalifa’s two brothers, Sennousi Ahmed and Hamed Muhammed, the Mahdi’s son, Es-Sadek, and a number of other well-known leaders.

At a short distance behind them lay their dead horses, and, from the few men still alive—among whom was the Emir Yunis Eddekin—we learnt that the Khalifa, having failed in his attempt to reach the rising ground where we had forestalled him, had then endeavoured to make a turning movement, which had been crushed under our fire.
Seeing his followers retiring, he made an ineffectual attempt to rally them, but recognizing that the day was lost, he had called on his emirs to dismount from their horses, and seating himself on his “furwa” or sheepskin—as is the custom of Arab chiefs who disdain surrender—he had placed the Khalifa Ali Wad Helu on his right and Ahmed Fedil on his left, whilst the remaining emirs seated themselves round him, their bodyguard in line some twenty paces to their front, and in this position they had unflinchingly met their death.
They were given a fitting burial, under our supervision, by the surviving members of their own tribesmen.

It was the end of the
Mahdyyah
.

Kitchener added a postscript to Wingate’s report, saying, “The country has at last been finally relieved of the military tyranny which started in a movement of wild religious fanaticism upwards of 19 years ago.
Mahdism is now a thing of the past, and I hope that a brighter era has now opened for the Sudan.” As prophecies and predictions go, this was both prescient and naive.

Certainly the Sudan would prosper under British rule.
Once the last remnants of the
Mahdyyah
were swept away the slave trade quickly withered and died, while railroads brought permanent connections to the outside world for the entire country; the Sudan would no longer be dependent solely on the Nile.
Culturally the country would remain divided between the Arab, Moslem north and the African, Christian south, but as long as the British retained power, there was little friction between the two—the British simply did not tolerate it.
When independence came to the Sudan in 1956, to all appearances the country, its administration, finances, industry, and agriculture were all in fine shape—the transition from colonial rule to home rule was smooth and uncomplicated.

As often happens, however, appearances were deceiving.
As the Anglo-Egyptian co-dominium wound down, two political parties had emerged in the Sudan.
One was the National Unionist Party (NUP), which had as its central policy a demand for a union of the Sudan and Egypt.
The other was the Umma Party, backed by Sayed Sir Abdur-Rahman al-Mahdi, the Mahdi’s grandson, which wanted no links with Egypt, but rather demanded complete independence.
In December 1953, in the first elections held in the Sudan in preparation for the introduction of home rule, the NUP won a resounding victory, securing a majority in the House of Representatives with al-Aihari becoming the Sudan’s first Prime Minister.
The replacement of colonial officials and bureaucrats with their Sudanese counterparts proceeded smoothly, and British and Egyptian troops left the country for the last time on January 1, 1956.

Yet, less than two years later, on November 17, 1958, General Ibrahim Abboud toppled the Government of al-Aihari in a bloodless army coup.
Suspending democratic institutions indefinitely, General Abboud ruled through a thirteen-member army junta until October 1964, when a popular uprising among the Sudanese drove Abboud and his junta from power.
For the next five years, the Sudan once again functioned as a working, if somewhat troubled, democracy.

It was during this period, though, that a new set of troubles began to emerge, as rebellion broke out in the southern Sudan as a consequence of what was felt to be oppression of the black southern Christians by the northern Arab Moslems.
The rebels were led by Major-General Joseph Lagu, who continued with his rebellion even when the civilian government fell to another military coup in May 1969 and installed Colonel Jaafar al-Numieri as the new head of state.
Open warfare broke out between the north and south that same year, and the fighting continued until March 1972 when a peaceful settlement was reached between the government and the rebels.

The ghost of the Mahdi still haunted the Sudan, however, as in July 1976, al-Numieri, who now styled himself President, was almost removed from power in an attempted coup led by former finance minister Hussein al-Hindi and former prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, the Mahdi’s great-grandson.
More than two thousand heavily armed civilians were carefully smuggled into Khartoum and Omdurman, where, once the signal to act was given, they caused widespread destruction among both civilian and military targets.
The Sudanese army remained loyal to Numieri, however, and gradually crushed the coup.
The reprisals were swift and severe: several hundred suspects were summarily imprisoned, while ninety-eight were executed for their part in the plot.
Al-Hindi and al-Mahdi returned to exile.