Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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the rebellion was at an end.
The British press covered each step of this campaign, naturally giving their man all the credit. ‘Major Gordon Captures Soochow on December 5’ was the headline in The Times on 22 January 1864. In this age of heroics, what the reading public liked best of all were stories in which the British showed through some personal act of bravery how superior they were to all other peoples. The newspapers were full of tales about how ‘Chinese Gordon’ walked up and down the battlefield, smoking a cigar and holding a walking stick, indifferent to the bullets whizzing around him. When one of his men fled, he was said to have chased the man down, spun him around, and forced him to shoot using Gordon’s own shoulder as a gun rest. When the civil war ended, Gordon wanted to stay on in China. He wrote to his sister that it was better to be a British officer abroad than at home. ‘In England we are nondescripts, but in China we hold a good position.’ But he had promised his mother he would come home, and after refusing all sorts of honours and offers of money, he left China at the end of 1864.
Back in England he was bored, especially when the War Office gave him the wearying task of constructing some new forts along the Thames at Gravesend. His eccentric piety irritated his more orthodox countrymen. He was endlessly patient and generous with Gravesend’s young street urchins, for whom he set up a school paid for out of his own pocket. But he scorned what he called the ‘hollow emptiness’ of his own class. He spurned invitations to dinners and soirees in London, preferring to stay at home with his Bible. In 1872 the Prime Minister of Egypt asked him to recommend someone to replace Sir Samuel Baker as pasha of the newly minted Egyptian province of Equatoria. Gordon had had a hankering to visit Africa since childhood. He recommended himself.
When Khedive Ismail offered him the job, Gordon took his orders to eradicate slavery as a Christian call. To show Ismail that he did not worship ‘gold and silver idols’, he refused the generous salary that Baker had gratefully pocketed, instead asking for a stipend of only £2,000. ‘I am like Moses who despised the riches of Egypt,’ he wrote his sister proudly. At first he seems to have thought he would be able to overwhelm Sudan’s slave-traders by sheer force of character. ‘About the slavery question,’ he wrote confidently not long after arriving in 1874, ‘I shall have no trouble at all.’ The first time he ever got on a camel, he rode so hard that he reached his destination 250 miles away three days before the fastest caravan could have done. He rode into a slave-trader’s camp ahead of his men, hoping to awe the trader with his courage.
What effect his theatrics had on the Sudanese is not clear. Gordon spoke only a bit of pidgin Arabic and never seems to have tried to learn more. He could not read or write Arabic at all. As the historian Douglas Johnson has written, ‘He was largely ignorant of the customs of the Sudanese and had to rely on “reading the faces” of his Egyptian subordinates and Sudanese subjects to judge their characters.’ In Equatoria he relied on a handpicked staff that included Americans, Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans and Austrians. When these Western colleagues one by one died or were sent home with malaria, Gordon became even more isolated, shutting himself up to commune with his Bible. The Book of Isaiah was his special favourite.
Proceeding to the junction of the White Nile and the Sobat, he soon discovered that slavery was far more entrenched than he had realized. In the first month after Gordon established a garrison that could intercept boats, he caught a caravan of 300 slaves. In the months to come, he liberated hundreds more from riverboats, often finding the slaves hidden under piles of wood or ivory. At first his determined efforts seemed to bear fruit. Gordon closed down a zariba on the Bahr el-Zeraf. After imprisoning its leading slaver, a northern Sudanese named Nasir Ali, for two weeks, Gordon ordered him to open a new station aimed at interdicting slaves in a spot called Nor Deng on the Sobat River. ‘He is not worse than the others,’ Gordon wrote by way of explanation. Nasir Ali did as he was told, naming after himself the zariba from which the town of Nasir took its name. But the more Gordon learned about slavery in Sudan, the more he began to wonder whether he was doing any good.
The slaves Gordon released from the riverboats were often reluctant to leave his garrison. They seemed as fearful of being killed by the neighboring Shilluk people as of being kept and sold as slaves to the Arabs. Some years earlier the Anti-Slavery Society in London, the oldest and biggest of the Western abolitionist groups, had pressed the khedive to create a river police to intercept slave-trading boats. But the river police simply inducted most of the slaves they caught into the Egyptian army, leading the Sudanese merchants to regard their seizures as a barely veiled form of taxation. The slave-hunters who melted away from the rivers when Gordon and his men started patrolling did not disappear. Instead they created new overland routes for the trade, marching their captives across deserts without food or water. The traffic was no longer visible to the European consuls and missionaries in Khartoum, but the slaves were suffering more grievously than ever. Gordon, who before coming out to Sudan had been a rather uncritical admirer of the Anti-Slavery Society, began to have doubts. ‘Up to the present, the slave is worse off through your efforts,’ he wrote the Anti-Slavery Society. ‘I am sure a poor child walking through the burning plains would say, “Oh I do wish those gentlemen had left us alone to come down by boat.”’
Slaves did all the work in Sudan that domestics and labourers did in Britain. Gordon himself estimated that two-thirds of the population of Sudan were slaves and that abolition would cost the country two-thirds of its revenue. Sudan’s Arabized tribes had a higher standard of living than its African peoples, and most blacks, Gordon came to believe, ‘would give their all to be enslaved in a good Cairo house’. (This view was widespread among slave-holders; whether the slaves themselves agreed is less certain.) Though Muslims would not marry their daughters to non-Muslims, Islamic law gave masters the right to use their slaves sexually, and the children of such unions were born free. Some of Sudan’s most celebrated sultans and slave-raiders were born of slave mothers. Even the African peoples who suffered the most from the slave trade were used to it. They knew nothing of money and wage labour; slavery was the only form of employment outside the family and clan they knew. To obtain servants, Gordon himself had to break down and pay four pounds of durra, the local grain, for two Shilluk boys aged nine and twelve.
Gordon knew that his Egyptian or Sudanese mudirs, or sub-governors, saw nothing wrong with slavery at all. ‘Has the khedive or the Pashas ever moved a little finger against the slave-trade except under coercion from without?’ Gordon wrote. ‘Is it not true that the moment this coercion ceases the slave-trade recommences? It is engrained in the bones of the people.’ Time and again he had to discipline his officers for seizing for themselves the slaves he was trying to liberate and even selling the men under their command into slavery. Gordon and his men looked at the same wretched boatload of African slaves and saw very different things. Gordon saw robbery and murder; the Egyptians and Sudanese, he felt, saw a way of life they accepted as inevitable and perhaps the chance to make a bit of money. ‘When the trees hear my voice and obey me, then will the tribes liberate their slaves!’ he wrote. And those were the slaves Gordon could recognize as slaves, for as he soon learned, his subordinates often took advantage of his ignorance to carry on the trade right under his nose. Claiming that the Africans in their care were their own wives and children, they used his caravans to transport slaves from the south and west to Khartoum. ‘The Khedive writes me quite harshly to stop this slave-trade, and you see his mudirs help it on,’ he angrily wrote his sister in 1874.
He was bitterly frustrated, not only with the khedive and his failure to put down the trade, but also with the abolitionists in London, who seemed to assume that it was so easy to put Sudan to rights. When the khedive complained that he was spending too much money, he resigned, then relented in 1877 when Ismail offered to make him governor-general over the entire country. The title theoretically gave him absolute authority over the whole of Sudan, a million square miles extending from the Libyan Desert to the equatorial rain forest. But it could not change the petty, venal reality of the Egyptian occupation, and soon Gordon was in despair again. No matter what he did, he could not escape the fact that exploitation was Egypt’s reason for being in Sudan. His officials took bribes and connived with the slave-traders because they saw nothing wrong in it and because they were paid little else anyway. (The £2,000 to which Gordon had been so proud to reduce his salary was still many times more than any Egyptian or Sudanese official made.)