LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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