The White Nile by Alan Moorehead

Author:Alan Moorehead [Moorehead, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

. . . thanks to Gordon Pasha’s eminent talent for organization, thanks to his three years of really superhuman exertions and labours in a climate which very few have hitherto been able to withstand, thanks to his energy which no hindrances were able to damp. . . . Only one who has had any direct dealings with Negroes . . . can form a true estimate of what Gordon Pasha has accomplished here.

Thus it went all the way down the river, past the Fola Falls to Gondokoro, and on through the Sudd and the desert to Khartoum and the Egyptian border. East of the Nile to the Red Sea, and west to Darfur, another network of outposts and trading routes was spreading out, and everywhere the new governors were making it possible for the inhabitants to live without war. Gordon was probably justified in writing, as he did later on, ‘No man could lift his hand or foot in the land of the Sudan without me.’ The country was being better governed than it had ever been before.

And yet, in the midst of all this success, strange evolutions were taking place in Gordon’s mind, and they were soon to make it impossible for him to continue. There was something in his nature that impelled him to find disillusionment and failure at the heart of all his best achievements. With him, every arrival is another departure, his reach forever exceeds his grasp, and nothing in this world can fulfil his hunger for perfection. He seems to have no inner peace within himself as Livingstone had, and his endless self-questionings can be put at rest only when he is surrounded by difficulties and hardships. A sense of guilt envelops him. ‘Nothing shocks me,’ he cries, ‘but myself.’ And so, all at once, his enthusiasm evaporates, he detests the object he has been so desperately striving for, he sees another point of view and rushes away into the most bewildering complications and contradictions. This happened to him now in the Sudan.

It is clear from Gordon’s letters and journals that about this time he began to hate his own Egyptian soldiers. They were ruthless with the Negroes, just as ruthless as the Arabs were, and in using them Gordon felt he was bringing, not progress, but perfect misery to the Upper Nile. ‘Baker,’ Blunt wrote, ‘had been brutal to these poor blacks; Gordon’s heart went out to them.’ And yet he had to ‘pacify’ the blacks somehow or they would make slave and cattle raids on one another; and at any rate he could argue that his methods were more humane than those of the Egyptian governor-general who had preceded him.

The time was to come, of course, when Gordon was to give his life for these same Egyptian soldiers, but now in 1879, after five years in the Sudan, he was discovering that many things about the country were more complicated than he had imagined. The Arab slave dealers, for example, were not quite so heinous as they had been made out to be.

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