The Scramble For Africa
The scramble for Africa south of the Sahara did not start in North Africa. The Maghrib had been an important part of the Mediterranean world for 3,000 years until the French came and changed everything. After the Napoleonic Wars, France could no longer try to take over Europe. By invading Algeria, the new government under Charles X attempted to revive the empire in 1830.
Arabs and Berbers joined together to fight the French, with ‘Abd al-Qadir (Abd el Kader) in charge. In 1807, he was born into a wealthy family in western Algeria. He went to school in Medina and then led the Sufi brotherhoods in a war against the French Christians when he returned to Algeria.
It took him fifteen years of nonstop fighting before he gave up. 100,000 French soldiers from the Armée d’Afrique under General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud had destroyed Algeria. The war ended France’s hopes of becoming an empire, but it did train French officers called officiers soudanais. These officers later took over large parts of the Sahel and Savanna in western Sudan when the British were in control of the Nile Valley.
In 1863–1879, Isma’il ibn Ibrahim Pasha (1830–1895) was khedive of Egypt until he was removed from power in 1879. He changed British interests in Africa. The Suez Canal opening in 1869 was a sign of his plan to modernize Egypt through public works projects and personal castles. It cut the long trip around Africa down to a quick trip next to it.
Exaggerated cotton earnings during the American Civil War allowed people to spend a lot of money. This gave the government the money it needed for imperial adventures in Ethiopia and the Sudan. Isma’il sent two armed expeditions to Ethiopia in 1875 and 1876, but disaster wiped them out. This proved that he was bankrupt, and the Italians took over Massawa, Ethiopia’s Red Sea port. Europe wasn’t going to give up on its investments in Egypt, whether they were in cotton, railroads, or the canal.
The Caisse de la Dette Publique, Isma’il’s British and French advisors, forced him to restructure his debt in 1876. By 1878, he couldn’t do that without giving up some of his dictatorial powers. When Isma’il refused, the government in 1879 sent him into exile, and European financial experts ran it. In September 1881, Colonel Ahmad Urabi (‘Arabi) Pasha and his Egyptian officers led an army that took back control of the government for Egypt. Liberal nationalists, Muslim conservatives, and the big owners all backed the army.
After riots against Europeans in Alexandria on July 11, 1882, the British navy attacked. Urabi said he would take over the Suez Canal on July 19. On August 16, a British expeditionary force under the command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley arrived at Suez. On September 13, they destroyed the Egyptian army at Tall al-Kabir, which sped up the “Scramble” for Africa.
The British didn’t want to take over Egypt, but they had to in order to protect Suez. They couldn’t leave the protection of foreign investments and their citizens to the defeated Egyptian nationalists. Instead, they had to put a government in Cairo in charge of that.
The khediviate would stay in place, but the British would stay because their consul general, Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), told them to. They would clean up the government, protect the fallahin (peasants), make sure there was enough money for European bondholders, and build public works for the Egyptians.
His plan to rebuild Egypt so that Cairo would be safe and secure and the Suez Canal would be stable depended on British troops being at the canal and British officials becoming more permanent in the Egyptian government by 1889. Egypt lost its freedom to Great Britain in 1882. In 1885, Egypt lost its kingdom in Sudan to Muhammad Ahmad ‘Abd Allah. In 1881, ‘Abd Allah called himself the expected Mahdi and promised to clean up the country’s religion and government after the Turkish rulers from Egypt had abused their power.
His message brought together different ethnic groups in Sudan to form the Ansar (followers), who systematically destroyed every punishment mission sent against them. After taking over Egypt, the British were also in charge of protecting their empire in the Sudan against the Mahdists, who wanted to end the same kind of oppression that the British used to defend taking over Egypt.
To fix this problem, the British government sent Charles George “Chinese” Gordon to Khartoum with unclear instructions that stopped being useful when the Ansar attacked the city. Gordon set up a strong defense, but on January 26, 1885, when a British relief force was coming, the Mahdi told his Ansar to attack the city.
Gordon was beheaded, making him an instant English martyr. This made his fellow officers, the British people, and British lawmakers vow to get revenge for his death and the way the brutal Sudanese made Britain look like a weak power. In the “Scramble” for the Upper Nile, Gordon became the reason why Sudan had to be taken back. The Mahdi’s victory didn’t last long.
He passed away on June 22, 1885, but his replacement, Khalifa ‘Abd Allahi Muhammad Turshain, built on his work to make the Mahdist state independent. In June 1889, four years later, Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, reluctantly agreed with his proconsul in Cairo that Egypt would need a more stable British presence to secure Suez in order to rebuild and take control of the Nile waters.
This choice set off the “Scramble” in northeast Africa, which had effects that went far beyond the Nile area. After that, Lord Salisbury worked hard at diplomacy in Europe to stop any rivals who were trying to take over African land and put the Nile flow at risk. In 1890, Salisbury signed the Anglo-German (Heligoland) treaty, which gave Germany control of a small but important island in the North Sea in exchange for German rights to Lake Victoria.
In 1891, he signed the Anglo-Italian deal, which said that Britain would not stop Italy from trying to take over Ethiopia as long as Italy promised not to mess with the Blue Nile. Britain thought the waters around the Nile, Cairo, and Suez were safe until January 20, 1893, when the new khedive, Abbas II, tried to show his freedom. A show of British military power quickly stopped him.
Victor Prompt, a famous French hydrologist, gave a talk at the Egyptian Institute in Paris on the same day. This speech made France want to compete with Britain for control of the Nile and, eventually, Cairo and Suez. Along the rivers in the Congo area, the French moved up to Fashoda, where the Upper Nile meets the plains of Ethiopia.
From the Atlantic to the Red Sea, the idea of a French kingdom was too good to pass up. At the start of the “Scramble” for northeast Africa, Britain supported Italy’s plans to become an empire as a possible partner in the Mediterranean and to stop France from making plans to take over Ethiopia. Emperor Menelik was very good at getting what he wanted from each side. He got weapons from the French to protect Ethiopia against the Italians and stayed neutral with the British when they wouldn’t agree to his ridiculous claims to the Nile below his mountains.
On March 1, 1896, Menelik gathered 100,000 men at the village of Adua. Seventy of them were armed with firearms, and 46 pieces of artillery and 20,000 spearmen were also there. The Ethiopians defeated the Italian expeditionary force that was moving through steep slopes under the command of General Oreste Baratieri. The Ethiopians lost 17,000 people who were killed or hurt. The Italians lost 7,000 people who were killed, hurt, or taken, as well as their dream of building an empire in Africa. It was June 25, 1896, four months after that, that Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand left France for Africa and Fashoda.
Menelik was keeping an eye on three other French teams that were getting ready to march to the Nile in Addis Ababa. The “Race to Fashoda” ended the “scramble” for Africa that began when Khedive Isma’il was removed from power in 1879. However, after thirty years, a naval show in the harbor of Alexandria could no longer win control of the Nile for Suez and the kingdom.
To keep the French out of the waters of the Nile, the British government cleared a railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. When the railroad wasn’t built on time, they also gave the go-ahead for a military expedition from Uganda that never made it to Fashoda. To solve the problem for good, General H. H. Kitchener was sent up the Nile to beat the Khalifa and meet the French at Fashoda.
His 25,000-man Anglo-Egyptian army beat the Khalifa’s 70,000-man Ansar army on the fields of Karari outside of Omdurman on September 2, 1898. Kitchener had finished getting payback for Gordon’s death in 1885, which made Queen Victoria and the people of Britain happy.
On September 19, Kitchener and his fleet met Captain Marchand and his 125 Sénégalese soldiers, who were fighting at Fashoda. This made Lord Salisbury happy and kept the Nile and Suez Seas safe. Marchand went against what the French government told him to do after the “scramble” for the Nile, if not all of Africa.
Also Read: Cairo’s history
