Chapter Five

      ‘Sudan HAS A MAGIC that takes hold of you for better or worse,’ Emma told her interviewer in The Warlord’s Wife, a 1993 ITV television documentary about her. ‘I’ve known other people who’ve fallen under its spell. It’s not a beautiful country. It’s the people who are so charming.’ The most famous Briton to fall under the spell of the Sudan was General Charles George Gordon. In Gordon’s story lie all the seeds of the Western century in Sudan; but for his raptures and visions, the Western project in Sudan might not have had its peculiarly high-minded, moralizing tilt. Without the blindness that ultimately doomed him, his successors might have left more to show for their work. Until Emma met Karadawi, Gordon was only a name she vaguely recollected from school. But in Sudan, Gordon’s story would follow her everywhere she went.

      It started with the anti-slavery movement. In the nineteenth century, five hundred years into the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas, the Christian West experienced an extraordinary change of heart. In a remarkably short period of time, much of the West came to regard the bondage of human beings not just as a vice but as a sin, a deadly sin that had to be extirpated from the earth. Quakers and other nonconformists who started the first anti-slavery campaigns in the eighteenth century managed to persuade first the better part of Britain, then Europe and the Pope, and finally the United States that African slavery, an immense and ancient institution that had brought huge wealth to Europe and its colonies, was not only wrong but evil - a crime, in fact. This, the grandfather of all Western human rights movements, took on such religious fervour that in 1807, only twenty years after it began, Britain, the richest and strongest slave power of all, outlawed the trade to its subjects. Thirty-one years later, Britain freed the last slaves in its dominions.

      In Egypt at the time, the spread of Western technology and capitalism was having the opposite effect on the even older slave trade between Africa and the Near East. Egypt’s Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman sultan’s khedive or viceroy, was one of the first non-Christian rulers to employ European advisers and technology to reform his army. His innovations swiftly made him the strongest ruler in the Middle East, but he needed a steady supply of recruits. Egypt had depended since antiquity on slaves from Sudan to man its armies. (The prophet Isaiah evidently met some Nilotes in the seventh century BC, prompting him to issue his legendary prophecy of doom about their country’s future.) In 1820 Muhammad Ali decided to invade Sudan to seize slaves and create an army loyal only to himself. ‘You are aware that the end of all our effort and expense is to procure negroes,’ he wrote in 1825 to the commander of his forces in Sudan. ‘Please show zeal in carrying out this matter.’ The Egyptians - or ‘the Turks’, as the Sudanese called the invaders, since Muhammad Ali was technically a representative of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople - established a garrison at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles named Khartoum. In 1840 the Egyptians managed to penetrate the Sudd for the first time in recorded history. Over the next decades, a rabble of Egyptian, Turkish, northern Sudanese, European and Greek traders found their way to Khartoum, intent on hunting slaves with new European-made firearms.

      Slavery had always been the business of Sudan. Ancient Egyptian records from the third millennium BC tell of thousands of slaves and cattle captured in the African lands to the south. Cush and Meroë were only the most famous of dozens of Sudanese kingdoms that prospered over the centuries from their role as middlemen in the slave trade between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. The Sudan’s many ethnic groups historically raided each other for captives, especially women and children. The captives were sometimes adopted into local lineages and sometimes sold or exchanged or given away in the form of tribute. There were also more complicated transactions involving rights in people. For example, a lineage might give one of its members to another as compensation for a death or for the theft of cattle. In Sudan, as in other African societies with few material possessions, people and livestock have historically been the most important forms of capital.

      The Arabs who spread out across the deserts of northern Africa in the Middle Ages gave this ancient trade a new tone. They brought horses and specialized cavalry operations that gave them an advantage over the local people. They had connections with Middle Eastern markets. And they had a rationale for what they were doing. In classical Islamic thinking, the pagan black peoples to their south belong to Dar al Harb, ‘the House of War’, against whom Dar al Islam, ‘the House of Islam’, is obliged to make jihad. Muslim jurists argued that while it was immoral to enslave other Muslims, slavery was the divinely ordained punishment for unbelief. ‘It is known that in accordance with the sharia, the reason why it is allowed to own [others] is [their] unbelief,’ wrote the celebrated Timbuktu jurist Ahmad Baba in the seventeenth century. ‘Thus whoever purchases an unbeliever is permitted to own him, but not in the contrary case.’ Like Christians in the American South who insisted that slavery was a civilizing institution for barbarous Africans, many Muslims considered slavery a blessing for pagan blacks because it exposed them to Islamic civilization. The Quran exhorted Muslims to treat slaves kindly, and religious tradition held that freeing slaves who converted to Islam would weigh in the favour of slave-owners on Judgement Day.

      With the arrival of the Turco-Egyptians and their firearms in the nineteenth century, Muslim tribes such as the cattle-herding Baggara moved south in search of pagans to raid. They traded the slaves they captured for goods with small-scale travelling merchants called jallaba. The jallaba transported the slaves to Khartoum, Egypt and other markets. For the northern Sudanese, the primary effect of the Turco-Egyptian invasion was the ruinous taxation that the new rulers exacted. For the Nilotic and other peoples who lived in the meandering wetlands of the south, the coming of the Turuk was a catastrophe that they call ‘the time when the world was spoiled’. Until the coming of firearms, the Dinka, the Nuer, the Anuak, the Shilluk and the many other peoples of the south had lived in their boggy homeland for more than five thousand years on a mixture of cattle-herding, fishing and grain cultivation. Of the cattle-herders, only the Shilluk, who lived closest to the Arabized tribes of the north, were organized under a king, or reth. The Dinka and the Nuer mostly lived in stateless societies based on the bonds of kinship. Their lineages were loosely grouped into clans, which were even more loosely grouped into tribes. Lineages and clans, and more rarely tribes, united and divided on the basis of shifting patterns of alliances and feuds. Left alone, the Nilotes had flourished under this headless form of social organization. Now it left them horribly vulnerable to the manipulation of better-equipped and organized outsiders.

      Accompanied by bands of armed men, European and Arab traders from Khartoum set up fortified stations they called zaribas along the rivers of the south. From within the zaribas, the traders concocted alliances with stronger groups, offering to lend the southerners weapons and men to attack the grass and mud villages of their enemies. In return, the traders received half the booty. At first they used the captured people and cattle mainly to barter for ivory, but eventually the slave trade proved more lucrative than the ivory trade. The zariba trade opened up new avenues for the jallaba from northern Sudan, many of whom set up their own companies and zariba networks. The Turco-Egyptian officials sometimes competed with the traders to capture slaves for the Egyptian army. Other times they worked together with them to line their pockets in a predatory and increasingly profitable commerce that soon made Khartoum’s slave market one of the biggest in the world.