The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (56 page)

MAHDI REVOLT

Death toll:
5.5 million

Rank:
21

Type:
messianic uprising

Broad dividing line:
Mahdists (“dervishes”) vs. everyone else

Time frame:
1881–98

Location:
Sudan

Major state participant:
Mahdiyah (the domain of the Mahdi)

Minor state participants:
Ethiopia, Britain, Darfur, Egypt

Who usually gets the most blame:
the Mahdi and Khalifah

Economic factors:
slaves, debt

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Why have so many holy men had absolutely no problem with slavery?
*

The Root of All Evil

In 1879, the government of Egypt lurched unsteadily toward bankruptcy because of the usual combination of senseless wars and a profligate ruler. Concerned about the security of the Suez Canal, the British and French jointly jumped in to straighten out Egypt’s finances. Soon afterward, nationalists inside the Egyptian army rebelled against these foreign bean-counters. Because the French couldn’t get there in time, the uprising was put down exclusively by British troops. This turned an international protectorate into a British colony, which had massive diplomatic reverberations that will have to wait until the next chapter (see “Congo Free State”).
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For this chapter, all you need to know is that the British were suddenly in charge of Egypt. They only wanted their loans paid back and the canal kept safe, so they tried to keep a low profile and quietly supervise the native government behind the scenes. Unfortunately, the Egyptian government already annoyed Arab traditionalists in so many ways. Cairo was corrupt and decadent. The inhabitants openly drank alcohol and played music. The upper class studied Western languages, science, and medicine at their schools. Now Egypt was under the thumb of European overlords. The last straw came when Cairo—under British prompting—tried to abolish the slave trade, which was the economic mainstay of the upriver Arabs in the Egyptian province of Sudan. The Sudanese rebelled in 1881.

The Guide

Sudan rallied around Muhammad Ahmed, a wandering holy man who had been defying the authorities for years. Born and raised along the upriver Nile, he preferred the study of Islam to the family business of carpentry. As a teenager, he followed the dervishes—Sufi mystics. Over time, he joined the entourages of several of the Sudan’s holiest men until he decided that he was holier than all of them put together. He split off and began to gather disciples himself. He soon hinted—and eventually declared—that he was the Mahdi, the “Guided One,” a messianic title. The Muslim calendar was coming up on the turn of a century (1882/1883 CE = 1300 After the Hegira), and apocalyptic worries permeated society.

At first the Egyptian authorities in the provincial capital of Khartoum tried to buy him off, but when Muhammad Ahmed proved dead serious and unbribable, they sent soldiers to bring him in. Two companies of Egyptian troops raced each other all night along different routes to be the first to capture the Mahdi and claim the reward. Near dawn, they arrived at their destination simultaneously from opposite directions and ended up accidentally shooting at each other until the Mahdi’s army appeared and slaughtered them both.
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The next force—4,000 men under Yusef Pasha—was so poorly disciplined and so confident that they could beat the savages that they didn’t even post sentries. The Mahdists attacked in the night and wiped out this well-equipped army to the last man using little more than spears and swords.

A better Egyptian force of 8,000 men under Hicks Pasha, a British mercenary and convert to Islam, attacked Mahdist territory from Khartoum, but after they aimlessly chased the enemy across the open desert for several weeks, the rebels cut the Egyptian supply line. Soon, the column stumbled, straggled, and disintegrated with heat and thirst, until the dervishes sprang an ambush and slaughtered them all. Hicks’s head was taken to the Mahdi, and his body was left behind to be speared over and over by the triumphant dervishes.
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Running low on soldiers, the Egyptian government gave up and sent Charles Gordon, the British mercenary who had helped put down the Taipings in China (see “Taiping Rebellion”), to Khartoum in February 1884 with orders to evacuate all of the Europeans and Egyptians in the city—7,000 soldiers and 27,000 civilians. Once he got there, he decided it would be cruel to abandon the outlying Egyptian garrisons to the mercy of the dervishes, so he settled down to wait for those garrisons to withdraw to Khartoum. In May, while he was still waiting, the Mahdists sealed off the city. Gordon was trapped.

When the British public learned of Gordon’s heroic predicament, they insisted that their government rush out and rescue him. In October an expeditionary force of 10,000 under Lord Garnet Wolseley was thrown together in Cairo and sent eight hundred miles to Khartoum and into the heart of the rebellion.

Dispatches sent back to Britain thrilled newspaper readers as the column approached, but then the day came when Wolseley reached his destination, only to find dervishes on the walls of Khartoum. Two days earlier, January 25, 1885, with British relief imminent, the Mahdi had ordered a do-or-die assault on Khartoum. The city fell, followed by a general rape and massacre of the trapped population. The women were distributed among the harems of the privileged Mahdists. Gordon’s severed head was presented to the Mahdi, although he hadn’t asked for it.

The Caliphate

The failure to rescue Gordon brought down William Gladstone’s Liberal government in Great Britain. Meanwhile General Wolseley abandoned the Sudan to its fate and took his army home.

Most history books skip the next fifteen years because the British weren’t involved, but Sudan under the Mahdists fared badly. The dead from the Anglo-Sudanese Wars alone aren’t enough to put this event anywhere near my list, but with wars on every front, famine, and intensified slave raids, the population of the Sudan plummeted. Of the 8 million people in the Sudan before the uprising, only 2.5 million were left to be counted by the Egyptian government after the reconquest.
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Khartoum was left in ruins, overgrown with weeds, littered with bones, and looted of anything useful, while a new capital grew up across the river around the Mahdi’s compound in Omdurman, swelling to 150,000 inhabitants.

The Mahdists imposed strict Muslim law. Whippings, mutilations, and beheadings became increasingly common. The almsgiving that Islam suggested was a virtuous goal now became a mandatory tax, much of which went to maintaining the lavish lifestyle of the movement’s leaders.

The Mahdi outlawed everything alien to Arab culture—European education, industry, and medicine—even wearing a fez, which looked too Turkish. In June 1885, shortly after prohibiting Western medicine and expelling or executing all doctors, the Mahdi fell ill with typhus and died. Leadership of Mahdiyah went to his close associate, Khalifah (“Deputy”) Abdullahi.
⁵

The nomadic Baqqarah (Arabic: Cattlemen) of Kordofan, especially Abdullahi’s Taaisha clan, formed the backbone of Abdullahi’s caliphate. His claim to succession, however, was contested by kinsmen of the Mahdi who felt that one of them deserved the title, and this rivalry drove a low-grade civil war. In this era, the Sudan was still very much a tribal society. Most clans kept to themselves inside their own territories, but others pursued blood feuds with neighbors that stretched back generations; however, the only modern weapons on hand were the thousands of rifles collected from dead Egyptians that the Khalifah issued only to his friends.

Abdullahi brought the whole of Sudan under his control. He slaughtered the Kababish Arabs of Kordofan, who had rejected the Mahdi and sold camels to Gordon. He massacred the Juhaina of the Blue Nile (the eastern branch that joins the White Nile at Khartoum), hardly caring that until then they had grown most of Omdurman’s grain. A rebellion in Darfur brought Abdullahi’s wrath and two years of savage fighting to that region as well.
⁶
Slave raids into pagan territory resumed.

When the Batahin tribe of Arabs rebelled, Abdullahi ordered every male of the tribe rounded up and hauled to Omdurman for punishment. Dozens died in jail before the surviving seventy were sentenced to public execution. The rope broke after eighteen had been hanged, so Abdullahi switched to beheadings for the next couple of dozen. Finally, he ordered that the last twenty-seven have their hands and feet chopped off and be turned loose to bleed to death or beg in the marketplace.
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The Khalifah forbade the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and now insisted that pilgrimage to the Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman was the new sacred duty.

When the rains failed in 1888, the general scarcity of grain created by the massacre of the Juhaina and relentless war became a full famine. Under orders from the Khalifah, Sudanese soldiers scoured the countryside. They confiscated all of the grain they found and brought it back to the capital to be redistributed to the population according to their loyalty. As famine gripped the country, it became difficult to keep the streets of Omdurman clear of bodies.

In 1887 the Mahdists invaded the Christian empire of Ethiopia (also called Abyssinia at the time) and laid waste to its frontier provinces. When Emperor Yohannes IV of Ethiopia led his army out to stop them, a Mahdist force got behind him and took his capital at Gondar. The Sudanese raped and killed the inhabitants and burned the city.

In 1889 Yohannes found the Sudanese army in fortifications at the border town of Metema and attacked. It was the last big battle in history fought primarily with muscle power and sharp weapons. Although the Ethiopian attack began well, Yohannes was mortally wounded and carried back to camp. This took the spirit out of the Ethiopian troops and their attack fizzled out.
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As the Ethiopians prepared the emperor’s body for a funeral, his relatives began to squabble over the throne and they all hurried home to get a head start on their upcoming civil war. Taking advantage of the confusion, the Mahdists attacked out of Metema, scattering the remaining Ethiopians, who abandoned the jewel-encrusted coffin holding the emperor’s body. After finding this trophy in the empty camp, the Mahdists sent the emperor’s head back to Omdurman, where it was proudly paraded through the streets on a pole and added to the collection.
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Reconquest