Three Empires on the Nile by Dominic Green

Author:Dominic Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

“IT IS NOT my finding out, it is G-d’s revelation.” Gordon had tried to escape his destiny, but the Lord had summoned him to the Sudan. That night, as his express train hurtled across Europe to Marseilles, his mind spun with schemes. The next morning, when Lord Granville rose for breakfast in his Mayfair mansion, he found eight telegrams from Gordon waiting for him. Two called on the tribes of eastern Sudan to meet him at Berber to negotiate a withdrawal. Two announced him as governor-general, with powers to evacuate the Sudan. One restored the Sultanate of Darfur as a buffer between British Egypt and the abandoned Sudan, and another ordered the recruitment of Sudanese troops into the Egyptian army. Even before he had reached Cairo, Gordon was making policy in the field. And if the ministers did not grasp the implications of their orders to Gordon, W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette did.44

“At Last!” cried the Gazette. “The whole Egyptian question has been revolutionized in one hour. At yesterday’s informal meeting of the Ministers at the War office there was taken one of those decisive steps that make or mar the destinies of Empires. Henceforth, we have full and undivided responsibility for affairs in the Sudan.” And that meant Egypt, too. “Whether the public realises it or not, the dispatch of General Gordon to the Sudan, exercising practically unlimited powers not as Governor-General of the khedive, but as the accredited representative of the British Government, must entail, as a natural and inevitable corollary, the assumption sooner or later of a similar responsibility, as direct and as unlimited, for the affairs of Egypt.”45

Alarmed, Granville asked Hartington, “We were very proud of ourselves yesterday. Are you sure we did not commit a gigantic folly?” If the garrisons really were a British responsibility, the only way to save them would be to send troops to Berber, not Gordon to Khartoum. If the garrisons were not a British responsibility, and the aim was to negotiate with the Mahdi, then the best emissary would have been a Turkish or Egyptian Muslim, not a Christian from Britain, whose actions carried an inevitable whiff of annexation. And if a reconnaissance was required, then the reliable Stewart, who had recently toured northern Sudan, would have been a better choice.

Gordon was a cult figure, his name a panacea for the government’s problems. At the next cabinet, Gladstone and his ministers unanimously endorsed his dispatch. “Gordon’s mission—a mission to report,” Gladstone noted in his diary.46

Now on the Mediterranean aboard the SS Tanjore, Gordon shot off another memo. He would “restore” Sudanese independence by dividing the country among local “sultans,” letting them decide for themselves whether to ally with the Mahdi or remain independent. To make this rule by division workable, the cunning slaver Zubair Rahmat must be kept out of the Sudan, preferably at Cyprus, or he “would in no time eat up all the petty Sultans and consolidate a vast state.” Gordon was reheating old ideas: Both

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