Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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and capital that had been Muhammad Ali’s strength was his successors’ weakness. Egypt’s dependence on Western money left it exposed to Western meddling, just as anti-slavery agitation was growing in Europe. If the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade ended the rather crudely capitalist form of empire that had given birth to Europe’s American colonies, it soon gave life to another and far more seductive form: empire as a moral mission, with anti-slavery as its flagship. The victorious evangelicals who had led the campaign against British colonial slavery now lobbied to put the power of the Royal Navy behind a crusade to end African slavery everywhere. Between 1820 and 1870, the Royal Navy stopped and seized nearly 1,600 ships and freed 150,000 African slaves destined for the Americas. Britain also used its navy to bully most coastal African states into signing a series of treaties banning the Atlantic slave trade. In this climate it wasn’t long before the Sudan and the Islamic slave trade gained the attention of Britain’s anti-slavery activists.
European travellers had been writing about the cruelty of the Sudan slave trade since the 1830s. In 1839 an Austrian businessman, Ignaz Pallme, made a harrowing report to an anti-slavery society about an Egyptian government slave-raiding expedition into the Nuba Mountains in Kordofan. Pallme’s account was so shocking that it inspired a Catholic missionary from the island of Malta to set up Sudan’s first modern Christian mission in Khartoum in 1848, with the explicit aim of fighting slavery. In the 1860s the British missionary explorer David Livingstone caused even more Western outrage with his revelations about the violence and cruelty of the East African slave trade. Abolitionists had maintained for years that Europe’s capitalist free-labour system was not just morally right but essential to material and technological progress. Livingstone argued passionately and with great effect that Africa’s backwardness owed a great deal to the local custom of slavery. He claimed that until African leaders had alternative means for acquiring European guns, cloth and trinkets, they would go on selling their fellow men to obtain them. He declared that the only way to save Africa was to open it up to ‘the three Cs’: Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. His readers were quick to interpret the three Cs as a call to empire.
Early on, Muhammad Ali’s grandson Khedive Ismail scented the danger that the self-proclaimed humanitarians represented to his empire. Ismail had grand ambitions to modernize all of Egypt on the Western model. He opened Cairo’s first opera, and he built the Suez Canal. To do this, he used British and French money. On his ascension, he closed the public slave market in Khartoum and banned the introduction of slaves into Egypt from the south. But reports from missionaries in Khartoum and other European observers made it clear that the ban was in name only and that the slave trade continued as virulently as ever. If Ismail shared the abolitionists’ moral indignation - and some historians think he did - the majority of Egyptians and Sudanese emphatically did not. Abolition was a Christian crusade; as a popular cause, it never really caught on in the Islamic world. As the historian Ehud R. Toledano has written, ‘Ottoman slavery and the slave trade were never seriously debated, either on the political or on the intellectual plane. It was as if one party barged in, fully armed with moral, economic, social and political arguments, imbued with a strong sense of justice, while the other timidly turned its back, refusing to engage in a dialogue, claiming that there was basically no common ground, no common language, no frame of reference through which a true discussion could take place.’ Slavery’s legitimacy, Toledano writes, ‘derived from Islamic sanction and the unshakable conviction that Islamic law was predicated on deep human concern (insaniyet) and could not possibly condone any practice that was not humane, caring, and cognizant of the suffering of the weak and poor members of society’.
Sudanese slave-owners saw Egypt’s measures to outlaw as yet another hated concession to infidels bent on undermining Islam. Practically every one of Ismail’s officials in northern Sudan was involved in the trade. Ismail himself had granted some of the big slave-trading firms in Khartoum their concessions to operate in the Upper Nile region. What steps the khedive had taken against slavery concerned only the selling of slaves. Owning them remained perfectly legal in Egypt and Sudan. Most northern Sudanese families owned at least one domestic servant. Ismail himself owned hundreds of people, as did most of his relatives and ministers. For Ismail, intent not just on keeping in the good graces of the European powers but on getting them to bankroll his even more grandiose plans to extend Egypt’s reach beyond Sudan into modern-day Ethiopia and Uganda, the tirades of Livingstone and the other anti-slavers could have been an inconvenience - had he not hit upon an idea of his own. If the abolition of the slave trade had become a legitimate moral justification in Western eyes for all sorts of takeovers and conquests, why not make it the justification for his own?
One of the guests at the splendiferous 1869 celebrations of the opening of the Suez Canal was the British explorer Sir Samuel Baker. ‘Baker of the Nile’, as he was called, had won fame a few years earlier when he and his wife attempted to traverse the Nile and discover its source. (They did not manage to clear up the entire mystery, but they did reach the other side of the Sudd.) Baker had written disapprovingly of how the slave trade disrupted and brutalized life on the route he travelled in the Upper Nile region along the Sobat River. The Prince and Princess of Wales read his book and were properly horrified; they were also titillated by the (truthful) rumours that Baker himself had bought his Hungarian wife at a Turkish slave auction. They invited the Bakers to travel with their party to the festivities at Suez. ‘It is almost needless to add that, upon arrival in Egypt, the Prince of Wales, who represented at heart the principles of Great Britain, took the warmest interest in the suppression of the slave trade,’ Baker later wrote.
Khedive Ismail felt the heat. At a fancy dress ball, he took Baker aside and made him a proposal. In return for a salary of ten thousand pounds and the title of pasha, he asked Baker to go back to Upper Nile in charge of a military force that would officially annex Upper Nile to Egypt and suppress the slave-raiding Baker had condemned. (Since Egypt up to then had never established formal claim to southern Sudan, its officials in Khartoum had always been able to maintain they had no authority over what went on in the hinterland.) Baker accepted with alacrity. Within a year’s time, he and Lady Baker were once more headed up the Nile, this time in fifty-nine boats with 1,600 people under his command. For the next two years, the Bakers and their men struggled up the choked passages of the Nile, battling the slave-traders and their local allies and raising the Ottoman flag over rivers filled with splashing and grunting hippopotamuses. Baker named the province he staked out for Egypt ‘Equatoria.’
In terms of actually ridding Upper Nile of slavery, Baker’s expedition was ineffectual at best. He had brought along stores to feed his European party for four years, but he expected his Sudanese and Egyptian soldiers to live off the land. Some accused him of making matters worse by allowing his men to raid southern villages for grain. The notion that one man in command of a small flotilla could single-handedly extinguish a trade that had been millennia in the making absurdly underestimated its tenacity. In fact, as the khedive must have known, the plan was so unrealistic as to reassure any Sudanese slavers who had feared he actually intended to put them out of business. But in terms of appeasing British anti-slavery sentiment, it worked like a charm. Hiring an Englishman and giving him the Herculean task of stopping Sudan’s slave trade assuaged Britain’s vanity as well as its moral indignation. With the empire reaching its zenith under Queen Victoria, the British public had no trouble believing that a lone Englishman or two could take on any number of barbarian gorgons. The picture of British officers, seemingly armed with little more than moral superiority, curing entire peoples of their savage customs was a staple of the British penny press. When Baker’s contract ended, Ismail cast about for a replacement. He found an Englishman who had already won national celebrity in one of these imperial set pieces. His name was Colonel Charles George Gordon, and his appointment set in motion all that was to come.
As a young British officer, Gordon had been a bit of a misfit, a loner who disliked the army’s rules and regulations and who was given to extravagant religious musings. People who met him commented on his unusually pale blue eyes and his fine, almost feminine features. Then, at the age of thirty-one, he revealed the knack for bending foreigners to his will that was to make him the stuff of British schoolboy fantasies. Posted to China in 1860, he was unexpectedly given charge of a Chinese army defending the Manchu dynasty against the Taiping rebels, a confused quasi-Christian group espousing agricultural reform. Gordon reorganized and trained his ‘Ever