Engaging the Mahdists

Gladstone’s Government consolidated victory at Tel-el-Kebir by establishing a temporary military occupation of Egypt (both to protect the Suez Canal and to preserve internal order in Egypt). Given the minimal size of the army of occupation, the arrangement worked conveniently within Egypt but difficulties soon arose when Egypt, on behalf of the Porte, sought to crush the rebellion launched by Mohammad Ahmed – the Mahdi, or ‘Expected One’, in the Sudan. Egypt employed a retired British officer, Lieutenant-General William Hicks, to lead an army of 11,000 men against the Mahdists, an offensive that ended in spectacular failure on the plain of Shaykan, near El Obeid (5 November 1883), where his army was annihilated with only a few hundred survivors. As the rebels threatened further towns, including Khartoum, Gladstone’s cabinet wanted to evacuate the remaining Egyptian garrisons from the Sudan. Confronting a popular outcry fanned by the influential Pall Mall Gazette, it responded by sending Major-General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon (18 January 1884) up the Nile to ‘consider and report’ on the situation. In eastern Sudan, however, where the British wished to retain the Red Sea ports round Suakin (both for their commercial value and to prevent them becoming outlets for the slave trade), the Beja tribes (including the Hadendowa, Amarar, Bisharin and others) under Osman Digna commanded the trade route to Berber and besieged the garrisons of Sinkat and Tokar. The Mahdists destroyed another Egyptian relief force under Major-General Valentine Baker at El Teb (4 February 1884) and overwhelmed the garrison of Sinkat four days later as it tried to march to the coast. The slaughter of Egyptian soldiers and civilians from Sinkat, with the capture of their women and children, aroused fervent demands for intervention, not least from Queen Victoria. Gladstone, according to his private secretary, reluctantly agreed to send a British relief force to Tokar; ‘It is’, added Edward Hamilton, ‘in a small way a response to the unreasonable cries of public feeling.’ C H A P T E R F I V E