The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (16 page)

This stubborn self-reliance proved to be his undoing, and that of those trapped alongside him in Khartoum. After allowing twenty-five
hundred sick men, along with women and children, to escape to the Egyptian capital of Cairo, he hunkered down in the walled city with the remaining healthy male British citizens, refusing to let them leave. As the Mahdi neared Khartoum, he wrote to Gordon—as he had to Queen Victoria—asking him to convert to Islam. The ensuing back-and-forth between them sounds a lot like the one between Franklin
Graham and President Bashir. Gordon refused to convert to Islam. So the Mahdi sent him a tattered jibba, or smock; Muslim prayer beads; a straw skullcap; and a turban: a believer’s humble attire. Gordon bristled at the Mahdi’s arrogance and challenged his theology, accusing him of being a false savior. The Quran, Gordon wrote angrily, expressly forbids the killing of fellow believers, which
the Mahdi was clearly doing. “I am ready for you,” he told the Mahdi. “I have men here with me who will cut off your breath.”
⁴

The Mahdi laid siege to Khartoum for 320 days, slowly starving its citizens, who waited in vain for British reinforcements to arrive. Finally, on January 25, 1885—a month before the colonial powers would meet at the Berlin Conference to divvy up Africa—the Mahdi’s army
overtook the city and its famished populace. Gordon was beheaded, it is said, on the marble steps of the British imperial palace. At the Mahdi’s orders, his head was wedged in between two tree branches, and passersby were admonished to throw stones at it. Islam had defeated the British Empire in Africa.

The Mahdi died of typhus six months later, but his regime, the Mah-diyya, governed Sudan for
thirteen years, from 1885 to 1898, when the British returned to avenge Gordon’s death with the state-of-the-art muscle of the Maxim machine gun. They easily defeated the remnants of the Mahdi’s army. One Sunday soon afterward, Sir Reginald Wingate, an intelligence officer who had helped Western clergy escape the Mahdi’s
clutches during the siege, held a Church of England memorial service in Khartoum
to honor the new Christian martyr, Gordon. Wingate also destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb, an act of revenge that met with approval at home. As
The Times
of London noted, “Any tenderness to such a memorial of savagery would be misplaced.”
⁵

As Wingate saw it, Sudan’s future depended on obliterating even the memory of Islamic rebellion. So he ordered that the rest of the Mahdi’s bones be thrown into the
Nile. This was more than an act of humiliation and defilement; it was an attempt to make sure that the Mahdi could not be resurrected on Judgment Day.
⁶
He also gave the Mahdi’s skull to his commander, Lord Kitchener, to be used as a drinking cup or an inkstand. Queen Victoria caught wind of the desecration, and declaring it “too much like the Middle Ages,”
⁷
she ordered the skull quietly buried
in a Muslim cemetery. To this day, no one is quite sure where the Mahdi’s skull lies. It is believed to be in an unmarked grave in Wadi Halfa, in northern Sudan.
⁸

But Gordon’s reputation as a martyr for Christ and empire could not be buried. Admiring poems and press accounts, and evangelical fervor in London, stirred poor and middle-class Christians to support mission hospitals and schools—the
principal tools of evangelism—in the face of “fanatical” Islam.
⁹
Of Gordon, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote,

Warrior of God, man’s friend, not here below
But somewhere dead, far in the waste Sudan
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man.
¹⁰

In the aftermath of Gordon’s death, the British etched a line across the map of Sudan along the tenth parallel.
The line, and the policies underlying it, would lead to nearly four decades of civil war in Sudan, and contribute to millions of deaths. As Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban, coauthor of the
Historical Dictionary of Sudan
, said in regard to this historic division, “Trace a modern conflict to its source, and there lies the British Empire.”

Following the Mahdi’s defeat, to impress their imperial stamp upon
the city, the British remapped the Muslim city of Khartoum in the pattern of their flag (as it still is today). Wingate and his superiors, many of them veterans of the battle against the Mahdi, and who had seen the impact of anti-imperial Islamic rebellion firsthand, were now serving in Her Majesty’s
Sudan Service. They did not want to rule Sudan, and now had to figure out a way to do so. Due
to their plunder of the Land of the Blacks, the Ottomans had cobbled together the two very different worlds of the Arab, Islamic north and the black, “pagan” south. The British now governed Sudan alongside the Egyptians as part of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. At the same time, the north was still regularly subject to small-scale Islamic uprisings, which the British put down brutally and quietly.

Within a month of the reconquest of Sudan, missionaries from the Church of England, which had established a fund in the memory of their martyr Charles Gordon for the “Christianization of the Sudan,” appealed for permission to evangelize among Muslims. Some hoped to restore Christianity to the Nubian kingdoms, where the royal eunuch of Acts had once made his home. The colonial authorities were
lukewarm at best—some, downright hostile—to the missionaries’ aims. One colonial agent sought to warn off a Pentecostal group from Canada by telling them that if they wanted to work in Sudan, they had better be ready to be served up as a “missionary mayonnaise.”
¹¹

Given the fervor at home for the re-Christianization of Sudan, however, the British felt obliged to point the missionaries somewhere.
“I have no objection to giving missionaries a fair field amongst the black pagan populations in the equatorial regions,” wrote Lord Cromer, who, as the high commissioner of Egypt, oversaw the immense expanse of Sudan. “But to let them loose at present amongst the fanatical Muslims of Sudan would, in my opinion, be little short of insane.”
¹²

In order to avoid another large-scale confrontation
with Islam, Sir Reginald Wingate, the British officer who flung the Mahdi’s bones into the Nile, and his superiors decided to draw a line across the entire nation of Sudan. The boundary would reinforce the preexisting divide between the Muslim north and the southern Land of the Blacks, and it would begin in the impenetrable bog—the
sudd—
which marked the end of Sudan’s sere north, and had (along
with the vociferous tsetse) kept Islam from penetrating farther south for centuries. (The
sudd
belonged to the swampland that the ambitious German evangelist Karl Kumm and his unlucky expedition were forced to traverse.) As the British saw it, while traveling in steamships south along the White Nile, where the sandy riverbank grew dark with loam, Islam ended, and true Africa began.
¹³
This line
was the tenth parallel.

No one knows exactly why the British chose this line. The tenth parallel was a strategic military divide along which they had defeated the French in a battle for Africa in 1898, just after destroying the Mahdi’s army. It marked the geographic shift between the north’s sandy soil, called
goz
, and the south’s seasonal mush, called
gardud
, as well as the two different worlds
that thrived atop each. It was also a good round number, and that was how colonial adminstrators sometimes made decisions.

In 1905, Reginald Wingate—now the forty-four-year-old governor-general of Sudan, who kept his mustache tips tightly waxed (and tucked a pith helmet under his arm)—declared it illegal for Christian missionaries to evangelize among Muslims to the north of the tenth parallel,
and eventually Muslim traders could not travel to the south of it. He and his higher-ups could not allow for another Islamic rebellion, and nothing, they feared, would provoke violence more rapidly than missionaries trying to convert Muslims. The 1905
Regulations and Conditions Under Which Missionary Work Is Permitted in the Sudan
reads, “1. No Mission station is allowed to be formed North of
the 10th parallel of Latitude in any part or district of Sudan which is recognized by the Government as Moslem.”

Among the multitude of missionaries who opposed this ban was the Reverend Llewellyn Henry Gwynne, a priest of the Church in Wales who became the Anglican bishop of Khartoum. Moved by Gordon’s martyrdom, he had come to Khartoum in 1899 to work for the Church Missionary Society as a
tough and athletic young priest
¹⁴
ready to lead Christianity’s advance against Islam. But the 1905 ban essentially forbade him from doing his work. As he saw it, the ban threatened the future of Christianity in Africa. Gwynne, only in his forties, found himself a prisoner of his bishopric, located across the White Nile from the colonial government, reduced to playing football with British troops
and attending teas with the officers’ wives.

He warned Wingate that by allowing Islam a free hand north of the tenth parallel, Britain was advancing the interests of a rival religion, and an inferior one. In his opinion, the colonial authorities were making a grave mistake. “If they think that British justice and natural gifts for colonizing-civilization are of themselves going to lift up these
Sudanese, they are very much mistaken.” Without Christianity, Gwynne argued, Africa would become “a human zoo.”
¹⁵

Wingate responded, “You and I have discussed this subject ad nauseam
and I’m afraid our views remain somewhat divided.” Despite such epistolary contretemps, Wingate actually liked Bishop Gywnne. He did not, however, like the American evangelical firebrands who dominated the Christian
scene in Sudan. (The Americans were so energetic and omnipresent that
Americani
became the local word for “missionary.”)
¹⁶
,
¹⁷

In spite of pressure from the missionaries, Wingate held his line, and the northern Muslims remained mostly off-limits to Christian evangelization, up through Franklin Graham’s visit with Bashir in 2003. Barred from the north’s Muslims, the missionaries were forced to
focus their efforts on the “pagans” of the south—who were not so controversial a group. (This legacy explains why Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse and thousands of other Christian groups work largely in southern Sudan today.)

In 1909, Karl Kumm arrived in Khartoum after his punishing trek from Nigeria along the tenth parallel. When Kumm met with Wingate, he warned the governor-general about Islam’s
southward advance. He hoped to plant a mission in Sudan, and most likely asked Wingate for money to fund it. Wingate refused. Kumm’s self-promotional zeal—more American than British in tone—and his hysteria about Islam disturbed Wingate, who already feared that such sentiment would prompt more Muslim outrage and bloodshed. Wingate warned Bishop Gwynne to do everything he could to “curb the excessive
ardor” of Karl Kumm and his plans to build fifty missionary forts and bush trading posts across Africa.

Gwynne felt otherwise: when Kumm came to see him at his shiny new offices near the Gordon Memorial College on the southern bank of the White Nile and warned him about “the rising tide of Moslem progress” along the tenth parallel, the bishop told him, “Pour in and pour in quickly as many missionaries
as possible . . . A chain of Missions as close as possible to the frontier between the Arabs and the Pagans is the only hope of stemming the tide. Ten years will decide whether all the territory with its thousands yet unborn is to come under the sway of Christ or Mohammad . . . May God stir up the hearts of men to save from the deadening grasp of Islam these Sudanese put under our care by
the death of Gordon, by God himself.”
¹⁸
Gwynne took Kumm to see the statue of their common hero and martyr. Nearly thirty years after his beheading, an enormous bronze Gordon stood astride a camel—facing south toward the rest of the African continent. Standing in the glaring heat, Kumm wondered aloud why Gordon was “looking out across the vast dark realms of inner Africa,”
not facing north toward
Britain. “He is waiting, sir, for morning to dawn across the Sudan,” his local guide told him.

Two years after Sudan’s independence in 1956, Gordon’s statue, a visible symbol of empire and the Christian West, was shipped home to England, where it now sits outside a boys’ school in the southeast county of Surrey. If Gordon’s likeness were still facing south toward Bilad-as-Sudan today, he would
be gazing at a population of African Christians forty times larger than the one he left behind—one that no longer looks to the West for guidance.

This is the south that Franklin Graham and thousands of other Christian groups inherited from the British. Shortly after forbidding missionaries from evangelizing among Muslims north of the tenth parallel, the British authorities divided the territory
south of the tenth parallel into three main spheres of Christian influence—Catholic, Anglican, and American (Presbyterian)—and set the missionaries very specific boundaries within which to work. This land south of the tenth parallel was dangerous and disease-ridden,
¹⁹
and the British were only too happy to let the missionaries do the hard work of constructing an infrastructure, primarily schools
and hospitals. (Graham’s organization still runs the largest hospital in the south—the one at Lui, a village in Western Equatoria state—which the northern government has bombed.)

Mission work was little more than “subsidized soul snatching,”
²⁰
in the words of one colonial official. Although they restricted the missionaries, by requiring approval over their curricula, for instance, the British
also relied on them to extend the empire. The British were as interested as the missionaries were in stopping the spread of Islam, since they saw it as a fanatical threat to the order and existence of empire. To curb this expansion, they declared English, not Arabic, the south’s official language; made Sunday, not Friday, the official day of rest; and banned Arabic names and clothing. By the 1920s,
under the Closed Districts Ordinance, northern (that is, Muslim) traders were entirely forbidden to visit the south.