Ghosts of Empire (40 page)

During the First World War Britain became deeply concerned about the prospects of Muslim nations following the Turkish Sultan–who, as caliph in Constantinople, was the designated head of the Islamic world–in siding with the German Kaiser. This atmosphere of fear at the prospect of a religious war, a jihad, finds its most vivid expression in the John Buchan spy novel
Greenmantle
, published in 1916. Buchan describes Islam as a ‘fighting creed', represented by the mullah who ‘still stands in the
pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other'. Sir Walter Bullivant, a Foreign Office grandee, warns Richard Hannay, the hero, that ‘there is a jehad preparing. The question is, How . . . ?'
⁴⁴
Buchan's belief that this jihad would come from Turkey or the Middle East was belied by actual events. In the Middle East, under the influence of General Edmund Allenby and, to a lesser degree, T. E. Lawrence, a large body of Islamic opinion was ranged against the Turks. It was in the Sudan that a local leader heeded the call for jihad and was, for some months in 1916, an irritant to the British cause.

When Ottoman Turkey entered the war against the Allies in November 1914, the British authorities in the Sudan quickly rallied local opinion as well as influential religious leaders to their side. A curious production of the early months of 1915 was the
Sudan Loyalty Book
, a published account of all the professions of friendship and loyalty from the Sudan's Islamic leaders and local chiefs. ‘From the depths of our hearts and sentiments . . . we proclaim our loyalty and adhesion to our beloved British Government in all events,' wrote Ahmed El Mirghani, a leading Islamic cleric from Kassala, on 13 November 1914, little more than a week after Britain and France had declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Mirghani extolled the British administration as a ‘just Government that has rescued the inhabitants of the Sudan from the trials and misrule of former years'.

The circumstances in which this extraordinary book was written were unusual. On 6 November, the day after the British declaration of war on Turkey, ‘His Excellency Reginald Wingate . . . called together a number of leading chiefs in Khartoum and the vicinity and explained to them the state of affairs.' Immediately afterwards, ‘these notables met together and drew up and solemnly signed a declaration of their loyalty to Great Britain'. The
Sudan Times
then published these messages of loyalty, and finally collected them all in a book which, in the proud words of the introduction, would ‘remain as a memorial both to the wisdom and beneficence of the British administration in Sudan'. The book also bore witness to the ‘practical intelligence and the high sense of honour and duty on the part of the people of the Sudan'.
⁴⁵

These protestations of loyalty meant nothing, however, to Ali Dinar, the hereditary Sultan of Darfur, who used the opportunity of war to attack
British interests and to denounce those Sudanese who had made common cause with the British infidels. Under the terms of the Condominium Agreement of 1899 Ali Dinar had been allowed to remain independent in return for payment of an annual tribute to the Sudan government. In the middle of 1915, this recalcitrant figure was beginning to become a major irritant. The British authorities kept abreast of his movements and that year issued a damning portrait of the ruler himself. Ali Dinar was, as far as the British were concerned, ‘totally illiterate' and had ‘imbibed all his knowledge of government and his views and conduct of life from his period of detention' under the barbarous Khalifa at Omdurman in the 1890s. In this state of primitive captivity, he had ‘neither opportunity nor desire to learn anything of western civilization'. The memorandum identified three main traits of his character as personal pride, innate suspicion and fanaticism. If all this were true, it raises the question of why the British recognized him as Sultan of Darfur in the first place.
⁴⁶

Ali Dinar believed, perhaps correctly, that the British would use the pretext of war to take over his sultanate. He tried to anticipate this by writing an official letter to Wingate in December 1914 which asserted that, as a Muslim sultan, he was quite prepared to ‘fight against Christian domination' of Muslim states.
⁴⁷
An independent ruler whose authority depended on British acquiescence, Ali Dinar had been misbehaving even before the outbreak of the First World War, by refusing to allow any Europeans to enter El Fasher, Darfur's capital, or indeed the sultanate itself; all business between the Sultan and the Governor General's office in Khartoum was conducted by correspondence.
⁴⁸
As a consequence of Dinar's lack of co-operation, the outbreak of the European war made the government in Khartoum particularly suspicious.

By early 1916, after an exchange of increasingly hostile messages, the Sultan had declared the inevitable jihad against Britain and had announced his intention of invading the Sudan, to the east of Darfur, with a large ‘army of believers'. This act of folly sealed his fate; a small field force was prepared finally to end the threat of this troublesome figure from a feudal age. The British were contemptuous of Ali Dinar's ignorance and stupidity and believed that ‘enemy intrigue' had been the principal factor in his disobedience. In the Sudan, at any rate, it seemed that Buchan's nightmare
of a ‘Turco-German Jehad' had been realized.
⁴⁹
Turkish encouragement of jihad within the frontiers of the British Empire was no idle illusion. None other than Enver Pasha, Commander in Chief of the Ottoman army, had written to Ali Dinar personally as early as February 1915, claiming that the aim of the British and French was ‘to extinguish the light of Islam'. Enver Pasha praised Ali Dinar for being ‘renowned for [his] religious zeal', and urged him to join ‘the Great Jihad' which the ‘Emir of the Faithful and the Khalifa of the Prophet', the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, had proclaimed.
⁵⁰

Ali Dinar, for his part, played the role of pantomime villain to perfection. His florid style, or rather that of his secretaries, so highly praised in Arabic literature, when translated into English seemed bombastic and almost comical: ‘You Christians are infidels and dogs . . . You have accepted death . . . you shall taste at our hands the bitter cup of death . . . Sorrow and annihilation shall befall you, and your souls shall be cast into fire and Hell.'
⁵¹
Despite some low-key warnings from the French, who were worried about British involvement in Darfur threatening their position in neighbouring Chad, the military campaign against the Sultan was swift and conclusive. The campaign showed how skilful the British were at playing the propaganda war, as their proclamations incited the people of Darfur against their despotic ruler, whom the British had installed in the first place. The Governor General, in his proclamations, also skilfully adopted the florid rhetoric of classical Arabic prose: ‘Verily you know', he declared to the natives of Darfur, ‘that Ali Dinar has killed your chiefs, plundered your property and sold your women and children . . . you should therefore forsake him . . . and surrender yourselves to my victorious troops whom I have sent to punish that unjust and tyrannical person . . . When you surrender you will be given the “Amen” of God and his Prophet, and you will be saved . . . from the humiliation of servitude to Ali Dinar.'
⁵²

The campaign against the Sultan was led by Colonel P. W. Kelly, who commanded a small force recruited from the Egyptian army. This force crossed the Darfur frontier on 20 March 1916 and managed to pin down the Sultan's army in El Fasher by blocking the main road east which led to the Sudan itself. On 23 May, Kelly's force successfully occupied El Fasher,
after a small battle on the 21st in which 1,000 soldiers, out of a force of between 2,000 and 3,000, of the Sultan's army were killed or ‘incapacitated'. As in other colonial skirmishes and battles, the casualties were utterly one-sided; three British officers were wounded, three men were killed, a further two men died of their wounds, and eighteen were wounded.
⁵³
As late as the middle of May, immediately before the decisive battle, Ali Dinar –now utterly deluded–threatened the Governor General personally with a bitter death: ‘it is my earnest hope to kill you in the worst possible manner, to let you taste torture and to hang your head and the heads of your troops in the public market as an example'.
⁵⁴

As usual, there was a wide gulf between the Sultan's high-flown rhetoric and his capacity to realize his threats on the ground. His tune changed markedly after the defeat on 21 May; now he was suing for peace and blaming everything and everybody for his own rash actions: ‘I beg to submit to Your Excellency that all the disputes and dissensions which took place between you and myself were simply the result of intrigues and of the cunning policy of the . . . notables of Darfur.' It was they who had ‘induced me and cheated me, by their advice and talk, not to listen to your wise counsels and admonitions'. Like many unsuccessful generals, before and since, the Sultan blamed the cunning and treachery of his followers who ‘promised to fight and die before surrendering', but who ‘on the arrival of the Egyptian and British troops' all ‘forsook' him. Ali Dinar was now willing to give up his sultanate for ‘peace with His Excellency the Governor-General', to ‘keep my own family and property'. It was a pathetic attempt to save his own skin after the inflated boasting and pompous, blood-curdling rhetoric of only two weeks before.
⁵⁵

Ali Dinar now fled with some of his immediate relatives and about 2,000 of his men. It seems that he still harboured hopes for some kind of guerrilla campaign against the British, despite his earlier protestation that he only wanted peace. As his situation grew more desperate during the summer of 1916, Dinar's men began to surrender and desert their leader. Mass defections had occurred by the beginning of November, as hunger now afflicted the Sultan's isolated followers. As troops commanded by Major Hubert Huddleston encircled the Sultan, men, women and children flocked to the British troops and it was reported that, by 5 November,
200 men and 300 women had surrendered with 6,000 head of cattle, 70 horses and 300 camels. The list of prisoners included two sisters of the Sultan and several of his children. The end for Ali Dinar was bloody: on the 6th he was surprised in an ambush with about fifty of his remaining followers. There was some shooting and the Sultan's body was found about a mile from the camp, where the ambush had taken place, with a bullet through his head.
⁵⁶
Like the Khalifa, the last Sultan of Darfur had learned a harsh lesson in the folly of opposing British rule.

Darfur was annexed in 1916 and incorporated into the regular government of the Sudan. It was made into a province with its own governor, who was subordinate to the Governor General in Khartoum. The problem of dealing with Islamic fanaticism would remain a difficult one for the British administrators, and it was fear of Islamic subversion which led to the next, fateful step in the Sudan's history. The 1920s saw a resurgence of nationalism in Egypt and the Sudan, which was almost always couched in Islamic religious terms. A letter to Saad Zaghloul, the Prime Minister of Egypt, in July 1924, spoke of the English as the ‘rulers', and of the Egyptians and Sudanese as the ‘subjects', adding, ‘God knows we do not want them for they are not of our religion and are unbelievers and their tyranny in the Sudan is not hidden.'
⁵⁷
In the Sudan itself, there occurred a mutiny at the Khartoum Military School, where cadets refused to go on parade in August 1924 and took up arms instead. A cordon of British troops confined the armed cadets to the school area before any real harm could be done. In the view of the Sirdar's private secretary, this incident ‘must definitely put an end to the present system of providing native officers for Arab and Sudanese units'. British officers were needed to keep the volatile native troops in check. More specifically to the mutiny, the ‘arrival of another British Battalion and aeroplanes' would have its ‘fullest value in its stabilising effect on the civil opinion'.

The mutiny in Khartoum, small though it was, was yet another symptom of the crisis which gripped the British Empire in the 1920s. After the First World War, nationalist movements had sprung up, or had been strengthened, in Iraq, India, Egypt and Palestine. In the Arab world, it was immediately recognized that militant Islam was the principal threat to British authority. In the Sudan, there had always existed two distinct
cultures: the northern part of the country was Islamic and Arab, while the southern was more African. The threat that subversion from the Islamic north would undermine the loyalty of the southern region, coupled with the fact that the ‘Southern provinces had never produced anything but a loss', led to the formulation of what later became known as the ‘Southern Policy'. The man who was most closely associated with this policy was Harold MacMichael, who had graduated from Cambridge in 1904, with a first in Classics and a Blue in the esoteric sport of fencing.
⁵⁸
He had entered the Sudan Political Service in 1905 and had spent all his career there. MacMichael, known as ‘MacMic' to his friends and ‘horrible Harold' to his detractors, was yet another driven servant of the state, a type with which the history of the British Empire seems to abound. ‘He never tired of work, and while his colleagues slept in the long siesta of a Sudan afternoon, MacMic worked, read, reread, minuted, and responded to the files of government, mastering their contents, remembering their trivialities.' His personal coldness was legendary and it was, perhaps, compounded by his close connection with the very highest circles in the British Empire. His mother had been the Honourable Sophia Caroline Curzon, the elder sister of George Nathaniel Curzon, who served as viceroy of India and foreign secretary, only narrowly failing in achieving his ambition of becoming prime minister. MacMichael, though then a fairly junior member of the SPS, corresponded regularly with his famous uncle about foreign affairs. Contact with Curzon ‘placed him in a unique position among the members of the Sudan Political Service', and no doubt added to his aloofness and his sense of superiority.
⁵⁹
Like nearly all his peers in the service, MacMichael was no democrat. Far from being harbingers of liberal pluralism, the servants of empire were naturally at home with the idea of human inequality, with notions of hierarchy and status. In the context of Africa, MacMichael, in his 1935 book
The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
, had written: ‘Men are not equal in any practical, obvious sense, and the fact is so patent to the African that to deny it by word or deed is merely proof of wrongheadedness. A sense of homage is natural to him. It is a good and sensible instinct, and it must be given scope.'
⁶⁰