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

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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 All British and Egyptian troops were withdrawn from Sudan.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.

       Chapter Six

      IN LONDON LOVING NOTES and flowers are still placed at the base of the brooding statue of the martyr of Khartoum that stands along the Embankment. If you don’t hear much about the ‘white man’s burden’ any more, savage wars of peace and Britain and America’s duty to fill full the mouth of famine remain staple news fare. In Khartoum the great clash between Gordon and the Mahdi is remembered differently. The Mahdi’s Oxford-educated great-grandson, Sadiq el-Mahdi, is the head of the Ansar sect as well as Sudan’s largest political party. After President Nimeiri was overthrown in 1986, Sadiq, as the Sudanese call him, was elected Prime Minister. In 1987, the year Emma made her first visit to Sudan, Sadiq declared the anniversary of his great-grandfather’s victory over the British hero a national holiday. On 26 January crowds thronged Omdurman’s outdoor theatres to watch children re-enact the killing of Gordon. When the Ansar ran their spears through the Englishman - dressed in one skit in a red mini-dress over a pair of black bell-bottoms - the sky overhead burst into fireworks. Emma arrived in time for the celebrations, but she appears to have paid them no mind. To her mother, she wrote rapturously of the Sudanese men in their loose white turbans and long flowing gowns and of the hot breeze that in Khartoum smelled of exotic spices. Right away she wanted to stay.

      In his letter, Emma’s admirer Tayeb Zaroug promised that he would prepare ‘All Showak to wait for you’. Evidently he kept his word. A friend of Zaroug’s picked Emma up at the Khartoum airport and drove her to the refugee administration centre 150 miles to the east in Showak. From there, Emma wrote to her mother that the Sudanese treated her ‘like a queen’. She was given her own room with a garden in an old British guesthouse. Every morning she opened the large wooden shutters on her windows to the cloudless desert sky. At the end of the day, Tayeb and the other refugee administrators would change out of their grey safari-style uniforms and into long white jallabiyas, and she would join them for a communal meal under an acacia tree in the garden of the administration compound. She never asked for a fork and knife but used the flat, pancake-like Sudanese bread called kisra to scoop up spicy Sudanese stews just as the men did. After dinner she and Zaroug might sit outside, drinking the bootleg alcohol called aragi and looking at the stars. Most of the men had left their families at home when they moved to Showak, and in any event it is customary for men and women in Sudan to eat separately. But Emma didn’t mind being the only woman. She liked it. As a guest of the government, she was not allowed to cook, wash, iron, make her bed or go anywhere unaccompanied. Far away from judging English eyes, she felt free, free to lie in bed as long as she liked, free to show up late for appointments, free to stuff herself with food if she liked. ‘It is a very conducive lifestyle,’ she wrote to her mother.

      Showak had grown up around the railway line the British built in the 1920s to transport cotton to Port Sudan from the fertile Gezira land south of Khartoum. It was a scrubby little town of flat-roofed Arab buildings with a few acacia trees. In colonial times, British farmers had run some cotton farms near Showak. (The Anglo-Egyptian administration financed itself by running large agricultural schemes for profit.) Now the refugees from Ethiopia were the town’s main industry. UNHCR had its headquarters there, as did most of the private Western charities working in eastern Sudan. The gleaming white Land Cruisers favoured by the aid agencies nearly, but not quite, outnumbered the donkeys on the town’s sandy unpaved streets. In the government compound where Emma stayed, several dozen pins in a map on the wall showed the location of camps in the desert between the old railway line and the border with Ethiopia. The camps had names like Um Rakuba (Mother of Shelter) and Hakuma (Government) and Tawawa and Central One and Central Two.

      In the 1970s, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) had been joined by other ethnic liberation groups seeking to overthrow Ethiopia’s by then communist government. The Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) each claimed to be battling to create an Ethiopian state. In addition to the bewildering acronyms of their names, they professed an opaque mixture of Marxist, Maoist and even Albanian ideology. The only thing that really united all the fighters was the desire to oust the Amhara people, who had dominated Ethiopia first under the emperor and then under Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.

      Behind the thorn fences that surrounded every camp, the refugees were divided according to religion as well as ethnicity and political affiliation. Many of them had fled to Sudan during the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5. Others had come a decade earlier

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