Your lot is the Burden of the Whites!
But this is not a throne, but labor:
Oiled clothes, And aches and itching.
Roads and moorings
Set up descendants
Put your life on it -
And lie down in a strange land!
(White burden. R. Kipling)
When was the last time riders, dressed in chain mail and helmets gleaming in the sun, took part in a battle? Who fought in it and with whom, when was this battle, where did it take place?
It is logical to assume that such a battle should have happened a very long time ago, but in fact, only a little more than a hundred years separate us from this battle. Unbelievable but true! In 1898, in the battle of Omdurman in Sudan, the Mahdist cavalry with shields in hand, dressed in glittering helmets and chain mail, suicidal attacked the English machine guns of the Maxim system … I really feel sorry for the horses!
At the beginning of the 19th century, south of Egypt, on the lands in the upper reaches of the Nile, the state of Sudan was formed, which included principalities and tribal territories that did not reach the feudal system. Sennar and Darfur, the richest principalities in Sudan, were quite active in trade with their northern neighbor, Egypt. To the Red and Mediterranean Seas, they delivered ostrich feathers, ivory, black slaves, taken from Sudanese villages for debts, or obtained by raiding these villages. In the export share of Sennar, slaves accounted for 20% and 67% in the export of Darfur, which was located further from the coast of the Blue and White Nile and therefore its "hunting grounds" were richer.
War in Sudan. British poster of the late 19th century.
In 1820-1822. The Egyptians captured the Sudanese lands. Therefore, Sudan turned into one of the Turkish colonies, since at that time Egypt was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, although it had significant autonomy. At first, the Egyptian (aka Turkish) rule did not cause much indignation. Many fortifications saw not conquerors, but unifiers of the entire Islamic world against the European threat and voluntarily surrendered. Indeed, quite recently, General Bonaparte launched a military campaign in Egypt. But it soon became clear that the Turkish administration was also plundering Sudan, and that it didn’t leave any funds for development. So the previous irrigation system was destroyed. German traveler A. E. Brema reported that "before the Turks on the Nile island of Argo there were up to 1000 water-drawing wheels, but now their number has decreased to a quarter." At the same time, after the conquest of Sudan, the volume of the slave trade increased manifold. If earlier about ten thousand slaves a year were delivered from Sudan to Egypt, then in 1825 40 thousand of them were exported, and in 1839 - about 200 thousand. This trade did not benefit the country. Villages were depopulated, and money for living goods in Sudan did not remain all the same. In addition, through taxes and confiscations, reserves of gold and silver were quickly seized from the population of the country.
At first, the conquerors in Sudan met with little serious resistance, but later uprisings began. The disadvantaged people were not always the instigators of unrest. Local oligarchs also did not shy away from the slave trade. The main problem of Sudanese politics was the sharing of the profits from the slave trade. It was difficult to decide whether the slave trade is a monopoly of the state alone, or whether private entrepreneurs can be allowed into this business. There were also paradoxes. A number of historians called Sudanese politicians who advocated demonopolizing the slave trade “liberals”, and those who demanded to ban this business as “conservatives”. And this had its own logic, because the "liberals" tried to introduce Sudan into the economy of the capital world, seeking freedom of entrepreneurship, and the "conservatives" were pulling the country back to the old days, to the tribal way of life.
Weapons of Sudanese blacks (shield and daggers). Sketch by John Peterick.
The image of government officials as defenders of Muslims from the dominance of Europeans did not develop either. Firstly, the highest administrative positions were held not only by the "Turks", but also by the Circassians, Albanians, Levantines, Greeks and Slavs - Islamized (and not quite). Many of them at the end of the 19th century. Europeanized so much that the cultural gap with African Muslims significantly deepened. Secondly, in huge numbers, it was under the Turks that real Europeans poured into the upper reaches of the Nile: Russians, Germans, British, French, Poles, Italians.
Along with the incessant plunder of Sudan by the Turkish colonial regime, weak attempts were made to modernize it as a state. They even managed to found the Nile Shipping Company and build a railway line more than 50 km in the north of the country. Engineers, officers, doctors were invited to government service. Although there were also many seekers of easy money, outspoken adventurers. Of course, there were also people who tried to pursue a policy beneficial to Sudan.
The title of Pasha was the first of the British, and with it, the post of Governor-General of the Equatorial Province of the Ottoman Empire was received in 1869 by US. Baker. However, this province was inhabited mainly not by Muslims, but by pagans, and it still had to be conquered. But after a few years, a whole group of Christian governors appeared in the semi-Arab and Arab regions. In 1877, C. J. Gordon (an Englishman and he was a participant in the Crimean War) took over as governor-general in Egyptian Sudan. He sought the appointment of Europeans to military and higher administrative positions, the British and Scots mostly, at worst Austrians, Italians, and Austrian Slavs. But certainly not the Americans or the French. He dismissed some of the former members of these nations. The United States and France had their own views on Sudan and could oppose Great Britain. Such appointments provoked talk about the "tyranny of the infidels", through the Turks, under which the African Muslims fell. Soon after the appointment of Gordon as governor-general, an uprising began, as it were, a national liberation, but there was one rather piquant detail, which we will discuss below.
In the 70s. XIX century. The Ottoman state was weakened quite strongly. Ethiopia to the Turks in 1875-1876 failed to capture. Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 demanded that the decrepit Islamic empire exert all its forces. This forced to look for allies who could dictate their terms. Turkey concluded with Great Britain in 1877 a convention against the slave trade in Sudan. Its implementation was entrusted to Gordon. It was the measures taken by him that caused the south-west of Sudan to “rebel in flames”. We said earlier that the slave trade was at the heart of the economies of these territories. Naturally, under various pretexts, the poorest strata of the population were drawn into the rebellion, but at the head was Suleiman wad al-Zubeir, the largest slave-trader oligarch. His support was made up of armed detachments, which were formed from slaves, and his own. No wonder. The slave of a powerful lord, intended for personal use, and not for further resale, received a certain social status, by the way, in Sudan, of all possible, not the worst. True, no one had any idea what would happen to the slave after his release.
At first, Suleiman wad al-Zubeir managed to win the battles, but later, by order of Gordon, the strictest economic blockade of the southwestern regions was established, and by July 1878 the uprising simply suffocated. At the mercy of the victor, nine leaders and Az-Zubayr surrendered, but all of them were shot. At the same time, Gordon was recalled from his post as governor-general and sent to Ethiopia as a special ambassador. The governor-general's place was taken by Mohammed Rauf, a Sudanese Arab.
Further events showed that the excitement of the 70s is just a flower. Slave traders who feared losing their jobs were not the only grievances in Sudan. And in the 80s the fermentation process continued. But now it also continued on religious grounds. In August 1881, the Muslim Messiah Mahdi delivered the first public sermon.
The death of General Gordon during the fall of Khartoum. Painting by J. W. Roy.
Mahdi's former name was Muhammad Ahmed. He came from a family that was supposedly one of the closest relatives of the Prophet Muhammad. However, the father and brothers Mahdi, despite their origin, earned their living by the most famous craft - building boats.
Only Mohammed Ahmed, one of the whole family, wanted to become a teacher of the law and receive an appropriate education for this. In this field, his career was quite successful, and by 1881 he had many students. Mohammed Ahmed first called himself Mahdi when he was 37 years old. After a number of travels, he settled on the island of Aba on the White Nile and from there sent letters to his followers urging them to make a pilgrimage here. A multitude of people gathered on the island of Aba, and Mahdi called them to a holy war against the infidels - jihad.
It should be noted that the ideology of the Mahdists (this is how the Europeans called the followers of the Messiah) was somewhat different from the early Islam of the Prophet Muhammad, which was explained by the current political situation. According to the classical doctrine, jihad is waged by Muslims, primarily against pagans. And Jews and Christians belong to the "people of the scripture" and therefore a compromise is acceptable with them. In Sudan, at the end of the 19th century, everything turned out a little crooked. Among the "infidels" against whom the implacable jihad was directed were not only Jews and Christians, but even Turks, since Mahdi called them "Muslims by name only." At the same time, the natural allies of the Mahdists were the pagan tribes of South Sudan, and very often the Mahdists themselves were rather tolerant of their idolatry. What kind of "jihad" is there! Everything is according to the principle: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend!"
Light cavalry of the Mahdists. Colored engraving from Niva magazine.
From the capital of Sudan Khartoum, which is located at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile, Governor General Mohammed Rauf sent a steamer with a military detachment to Abu to suppress the riot. But the operation was organized extremely ineptly and in fact the unarmed Mahdists (they had only sticks or spears) managed to defeat the sent punishers. Then a series of insurgent victories began, after each battle the insurgents tried to seize firearms. This finally brought the country into a state that was later called "the encirclement of cities by an insurrectionary village."
