Abstract
On June 18, 1885, Sir Redvers Buller supervised the withdrawal of the last remaining Egyptian Army garrison in the Sudanese Province of Dunqula. As the troops pulled out of al-‘Urdi, the province’s former capital and chief market town, they left behind a harrowing scene. In the weeks prior, thousands of Sudanese had fled to seek refuge in Egypt. In the process, they abandoned their homes and anything that they could not carry with them. Animals unfit for the long overland journey were left to starve. As the last troops left the city, the few remaining residents congregated in the market where the merchants who stayed behind to profit from the chaos were selling the contaminated sugar, putrid meat, and sick pack-animals that British military officers had ordered the commissariat to abandon.1
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Notes
James Grant, Cassell’s History of the War in the Sudan, Volume 2 (London: Cassell, 1885), 175–178.
R. T. Wilson, “Systems of Agricultural Production in Northern Sudan,” in The Agriculture of the Sudan¸ ed. G. M. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 193–213.
Peter Geiser, The Egyptian Nubian: A Study in Social Symbiosis (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1986), 26.
Peter Malcolm Holt and Martin Daly, A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the Present Day, 4th ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 30–31.
John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia, 2nd ed. (London: J. Murray, 1822), 59.
Historians have had to speculate as to the reasons that drove Muhammad ‘Ali’s desire to conquer Sudan because, as Richard Hill notes, he did not publicly discuss them. There seems to have been two motivations. The first and more immediate one was to defeat the Mamlūks. This required only the conquest of Northern Nilotic Sudan and parts of the Jazira. However, once the troops were mobilized, Muhammad ‘Ali ordered the conquest of the southern frontiers of the Funj Sultanate in a quest to acquire slaves to staff his army and gold to fund his administration. See Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 1821–1881 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 8–13.
Hassan Dafalla, The Nubian Exodus (London: C. Hurst, 1975), 21.
William Nichols, “The Sakia in Dongola Province,” Sudan Notes and Records 1 no. 1 (January 1918): 23–24.
Ahmed Al-Ashi, An Anthropological Study of a Sudanese Shaiqiya Village (Nuri), PhD Dissertation (Oxford 1971) 233–234.
El Haj Bilal Omer, The Danagla Traders of Northern Sudan: Rural Capitalism and Agricultural Development (London: Ithaca Press, 1985), 17–21.
Janet Ewald, Soldiers, Traders and Slaves: State Formation and Economic Transformation in the Greater Nile Valley, 1700–1885 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 165–169.
Geiser, The Egyptian Nubian, 21–26; C. S. Sonninin, in his report on his trip to observe trading conditions in Egypt for France’s new revolutionary government, noted that Nubian men were, in general, the preferred source of domestic servants for Egypt’s European merchant community. However, the French had been officially forbidden from employing Nubian domestic servants since one murdered the physician Du Roelle in 1706. C. S. Sonninin, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt Undertaken by Order of the Old Government of France, translated by William Combe (London: J. Debrett, 1800), 468.
Bayard Taylor, A Journey to Central Africa: Or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile, 11th ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 164.
John Gadsby, My Wanderings: Being Travels in the East 1846–47, 1850–51, 1852–23 (London: John Gadsby, 1855), 352.
Peter Malcolm Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1898: A Study of the Origins, Development and Overthrow, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 45–46.
Kim Searcy, The Formation of the Sudanese Mahdist State: Ceremony and Symbols of Authority: 1882–1898 (Boston: Brill, 2011), 24–25.
The reason for the mass appeal of al-Mahdi’s call to arms has long been the subject of scholarly debate. In 1903, Na‘um Shuqayr, an official in the Egyptian Army’s Intelligence Department, concluded that there were four main causes of the rebellion. First, General Gordon’s attempts, in the late 1870s, to end the Sudanese slave trade led to the growth of anti-government feelings in key slaving populations, including the Baqqara of Kurdufan. Second, some Sudanese sought revenge for the brutal campaigns of conquest that expanded Egypt’s Sudanese territory in the 1860s and 1870s. Third, many Sudanese wanted to free themselves from the Turko-Egyptian government’s rapacious tax collectors. Finally, there was widespread discontentment with the government’s preference for the Shayqiyya and for followers of the Khatmiyya ṣūfīṭarīqa. P. M. Holt has subsequently argued that, though all four factors listed by Shuqayr contributed to some extent in expanding the appeal of al-Mahdi, the rebel leader, the Mahdist Rebellion was fomented primarily by the government’s antislavery campaigns. On the other hand, A. B. Theobold has shown that in the early 1880s, the government abandoned its antislavery measures. Instead, Theobold has argued that al-Mahdi, as a result of his charisma, reputation for piety and religious conviction, was able to harness a number of disparate discontented groups, each with their own reason for rebelling. Janet Ewald has confirmed Theobold’s assertion for the population of Kurdufan. Ewald, through a study of the evolution of long-distance trade in the Nuba Mountains in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, has shown that the rebellion in its early stages in Kurdufan was a response to unique local conditions which led “farmers, herders and small traders” to resent “how wealthy traders and their allies used the government to aggrandize themselves.” The analysis of Theobold and Ewald suggest that the causes of the Mahdist Rebellion can only be analyzed at the regional level. See Na’um Shuqayr, Ta’rikh al-Sudan al-Qadim wa al-Hadith wa Jughrafiyatuha (Cairo: Maṭba‘at al-Ma‘arif, 1903), 315–320; Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 32–44;
A. B. Theobald,The Mahdiya: A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1881–1899 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951), 25–26; Ewald, Soldiers, Traders and Slaves, 175.
See the entries for Tanbal Hamad Tanbal and Mustafa Yawar Pasha in Richard Hill, A Biographical Dictionary of the Sudan, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1967).
Robert Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 48.
Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 176.
John Richmond, Egypt 1798–1952: Her Advance towards a Modern Identity (London: Methuen, 1977), 140.
Babikr Badri, The Memoirs of Babikr Bedri, translated by George Scott (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 51.
Henry George Lyons, “On the Nile Floods and Its Variations,” The Geographical Journal 26 no. 4 (October 1905): 403.
Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur Sudan, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63.
Richard Pankhurst and Douglas Johnson, “The Great Drought and Famine of 1888–92 in Northeast Africa,” in The Ecology of Survival; Case Studies from Northeast African History, ed. Douglas Johnson and David Anderson (Colorado: Westview Press, 1988), 47–73.
Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 192–197. Robert Kramer relays a report that stated that the Baqqara immigrants consumed the entirety of Umm Durman’s grain reserve, totaling over 500,000 ardabbs. Robert S. Kramer, Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman during the Mahdiyya, 1885– 1898 (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2010), 30.
See Rudolph Von Slatin, Fire and Sword in the Sudan: A Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes, 1879–1895, translated by F. R. Wingate (London: Edward Arnold, 1896), 452–457;
Francis Reginald Wingate, Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp 1882–1892 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Co., 1892), 284–291.
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© 2013 Steven Serels
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Serels, S. (2013). Famine and the Making of Sudan’s Northern Frontier, 1883–1896. In: Starvation and the State. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383877_2
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