The Nile by Tvedt Terje;

Author:Tvedt, Terje; [Tvedt, Terje]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited
Published: 2021-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Decisive for Egypt’s future

The British in Cairo had long been eager to occupy the region. In 1892 Lord Lugard travelled around Buganda as a representative for the private Imperial British East Africa Company.26 When he returned to London in October of that same year, he launched the campaign for British occupation with a speech to the Royal Geographical Society. Lugard wrote about the subject in his two-volume work on Uganda and in articles he published at the time. He provided many different arguments for British occupation, both religious and economic, but he also emphasized the importance of the Nile question. Well aware of the debate that occupied the elite in Cairo and the central strategists in London, for example, he said in his 1892 speech that London must conquer the region militarily and politically because it would, among other things, make it possible to telegraph information concerning unusual waterflow in Uganda to the British in Egypt, so that those who directed irrigation agriculture there could take their precautions.27

The British leaders in Egypt were discussing at that time extensive plans for the regulation of the Nile that presupposed military control of the lakes. In 1893 one of the leading water politicians in Egypt, J.C. Ross, spoke on the subject at a meeting in Great Britain. He indicated that Egypt could receive thirty times more water than the country would ever need, just by raising the water level of Lake Victoria by one metre. This was music to the ears of those who had invested in Egypt’s agriculture, to the capitalists Egypt owed money to, and to the Lancashire cotton industry. In Cairo one of Britain’s foremost water experts, William Willcocks, published plans for the lakes that same year; the year before, he had written a secret government report describing the water in these African lakes as being critical to Egypt’s future.

London and its central strategists had also, however, another motive for seizing control of the lakes. With that move, they hoped, they would gain command over the source of the White Nile and hence also over Egypt’s political will in the long run. In this context, it is therefore both significant and symptomatic that Samuel Baker – the adventurer and explorer who was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the foremost Nile experts, had said in an 1884 interview with Pall Mall Gazette a decade earlier, just two years after the British occupied Egypt: ‘The Arabs have drunk at these wells for five thousand years. Erect a fort to command the wells, and the Arabs are at your mercy.’28

If London’s position at Suez should be threatened at some point in the future, the British would have this weapon in reserve, they thought. In articles written during the 1880s arguing that Britain should take control over Sudan and the Upper Nile, and that Egypt, on account of the Nile, should include Sudan in its territory, Samuel Baker was clear on the necessity of such a plan:

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