Africa. In Roman times, it meant North Africa, and in particular the area around modern-day Tunisia: to be more precise, the Phoenician city of Carthage. Egypt was not “Africa” but rather an ancient kingdom, stretching back into prehistory, long before the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander’s conquest and the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Sassanid Persians, the arrival of the Muslim Arabs, the Kurds, and the Ottoman Turks. The Vandals had a kingdom in Africa, in the west, near Spain; the Berbers roamed the sands of the Sahara. What lay beyond the desert, up the Nile, and into the interior was largely a mystery except to a few minor Roman expeditions. As the European explorations began in the nineteenth century, Africa was known as the “Dark Continent”—not because of the race of the people who lived below the Sahara and beyond the reaches of even the peoples of Upper Egypt but because it was essentially unknown to all but its inhabitants: terra incognita.
And so it remained for centuries after the fall of the Western Empire. Until Muhammed arose in the old Roman province of Arabia Petraea, the Arabs were of little geopolitical or cultural consequence: the Western world revolved around the Roman mare nostrum: the Mediterranean Sea, its way of life, and its way of war.
During the Age of Exploration, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Portuguese and Dutch traders put in at safe harbors along the west coast of Africa, then rounded the Cape of Good Hope, founded ports and colonies along the east coast, and from there set sail to India and beyond. In 1497, five years after Columbus’s first voyage to the New World in the west, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama set off round the Cape to prove that a shorter route to India lay, in fact, to the east, and not toward the “Indies,” which Columbus (an Italian in the service of the Spanish crown) had discovered. To this day, Portuguese is an official language in several African countries, on both coasts, exactly where we might expect to find it in da Gama’s wake: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and the island country of São Tomé and Príncipe (all along the west coast, the closest lands, nautically, to Brazil), and Mozambique, on the east African coast.
The interior, however, lay unpenetrated by the West (or as today we might say, the “white man”). Until the mid-nineteenth century, there was no reason to send expeditions up the Nile or into the heart of the continent. For the ancient Egyptians, whose principal cities lay in the fertile plain of the Nile upriver from present-day Cairo or the Macedonian-founded Alexandria, downriver on the Mediterranean coast,1 the interior of the African continent was of little interest. It was enough that the Nile, the sacred river, continued in its annual cycles of flood and remission that crops might grow and civilization might flourish. Once the Europeans had established trading posts along the coasts, however, it was only a matter of time before explorers would push inward. The Arab slave traders were active as early as the seventh century and became especially industrious after their conquest of Egypt around 641 A.D. With the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Vandals gone, there was no Western power to oppose Muslim expansion along the North African coast, and the birth of the international Islamic slave trade soon followed.
At the southern tip of the continent, the Dutch Boers (farmers) followed in the wake of the Dutch East India Company in the mid-seventeenth century and began settling what later became known as the Cape Colony, which eventually came under British rule. Moving inland beginning about 1834, the Boers became voortrekkers, setting out by foot and covered wagon to establish their own colonies of Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State, which combined with the Cape Colony in 1910 to form the union of South Africa—but only after the bloody Second Boer War between the British and the Afrikaaners between 1899 and 1902.2
The “Scramble for Africa,” however, was well underway by the mid-nineteenth century, led largely by the British, who via the Royal Geographical Society sent explorers Sir Richard Francis Burton3 and John Hanning Speke on an expedition up the Nile in order to discover its headwaters. In 1858, they did just that; with the discovery (from a European perspective) of Lake Victoria, the source of the life-giving Nile was finally established. The British, however, were not alone: founding colonies in Africa as well were the French, the Germans,4 the Italians, and the Belgians. Leading the Belgian expedition to the Congo on behalf of King Leopold II5 was the Welshman Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who as a younger man had fought for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh. Stanley had in 1871 also famously discovered Dr. David Livingstone, the Scottish-born missionary who had also been searching for the source of the Nile, in the village of Ujiji in what is now Tanzania while leading an expedition sponsored by the New York Herald, for whom he was a correspondent.
With Europeans engaging with Africa on all sides, there was bound to be trouble, and there was. Seeking new territory for their large farms, the Boers had pressed northward, defeating the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838, killing some three thousand warriors while suffering no—zero—deaths themselves (and only three wounded); they viewed their astounding victory as ordained by God.
The two most significant battles in nineteenth-century Africa between the Europeans and the natives, however, involved the British. By January 1879, the British were desirous of adding additional territory in South Africa, which meant expansion into Zululand. Accordingly, the high commissioner for Southern Africa, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, acting on his own initiative but in accordance with what he knew to be the Crown’s wishes, had ginned up a crisis by delivering an ultimatum to the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, that the Zulus should disband their army and lay down their arms.
The Zulus were the foremost fighting force in Africa at the time, the Spartans of their day and somewhat akin to the Sioux in America. Although not members of a standing professional army, Zulu warriors began their martial training as early as age six, and were subject to being called into active service between the ages of 19 and 40, at which age they were allowed to marry but still remained in the reserves. (Zulu warriors as old as 70 sometimes took the field in times of need.) For the British to challenge them so directly was not only an affront to their manhood but also an act of extraordinary foolhardiness. It spoke of the condescension the Europeans had for the indigenous armies they encountered during the colonial period, and their inability to credit native fighting forces with command of tactics that had worked well for the Europeans themselves earlier in their military development.
In their confrontations with the Zulus—as with the Americans’ experience with the warrior nations of the Plains Indians—an attitude the Greeks would recognize as hubris often took hold. In both instances, the Anglo-Americans underestimated the ability of the locals to quickly adopt the weaponry and tactics of their enemies, however imperfectly.6 The horse, for example, was not native to the Americas, but the Indians quickly became outstanding riders, to such an extent that the Americans had to catch up to them in horsemanship, if not in marksmanship. In Africa, the British (as they had been doing during the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812) employed their forces as they would have against a European enemy, confident that the same formations and weaponry that had served them so well against Montcalm and Bonaparte would work equally well against red Indians and black Africans.
Such tactical derision was not only unfounded, it was often fatal. On January 22, 1879, a British army numbering about 1,800 men pressing into the Zulu Kingdom under the command of Maj. Gen. Lord Chelmsford7 was effectively annihilated at Isandlwana by Zulu impi under Ntshingwayo kaMahole Khoza, King Cetshwayo’s half-brother. It was the most decisive defeat ever suffered by the British Army in its colonial wars. Taken by surprise, the British lost more than 1,300 men killed in action—and this despite their overwhelming superiority in firepower, which included Martini-Henry rifles (then state of the art), two seven-pounder cannons, and a battery of Hale rockets.
But, as the British learned, modern weaponry was useless if it could not be deployed, and at the Battle of Isandlwana8 there was no time. The irony was that this was a fight Chelmsford had sought. Confident as his well-trained troops marched into Zululand, Chelmsford had split his force of some 2,500—the same tactical mistake Custer had made at the Little Bighorn, and for much the same reason: he thought the Africans would flee, and wanted to trap them. Lacking adequate intelligence as to the whereabouts of the Zulu army, which numbered upward of 15,000 to 20,000 fighting men, and heedless of the need to establish a defensive perimeter in open country, Chelmsford made his laager at Isandlwana, a plain under the deceptive shelter of a small hillock about one hundred miles northwest of present-day Durban. Then he made another fatal mistake: he took more than half his men away from camp to hunt for the main Zulu army—and the remaining column at Isandlwana discovered too late that the Zulus had instead found them.9
It was all over quickly—not so much a last stand as a rout. Although the British attempted to form their traditional defensive positions by establishing firing lines, they were continually on the back foot throughout the four-hour battle. As it happened, there was a solar eclipse that day, around 2:30 in the afternoon; when the sun reappeared, the fight was essentially over. The British tried to form firing squares, but in the smoke and the darkness, it was no use. Down to their last rounds, the British—including in particular one big Irishman,10 according to Zulu accounts—fought with bayonets, with primordial ferocity, until they went down. But it was no use. Back-to-back they battled but the numbers were against them. They were like the Romans at Cannae, crushed from all sides in an ever-tightening perimeter, fighting in the end with only teeth and fingernails against the black warriors, who pressed in like the Carthaginians, until there were no British left. Armed with shield and assegais, the Zulus executed perfectly their former king Shaka’s11 famous “horns of the bison” strategy, enveloping the British with the horns while the chest attacked head-on. Few African tribes could withstand it and, on this day, neither could the British.
And there the story might have ended, but for two complementary things. One, a small contingent of British soldiers had been left behind at a former farm known as Rorke’s Drift, resentful at not being able to take part in the action; and two, there was still a sizable force of Zulu warriors who had been held in reserve at Isandlwana and who were just itching for a share of glory themselves. As Neil Thornton writes in his meticulous account of the battle, Rorke’s Drift: A New Perspective (2016), “Both the British at the mission station and the Zulu reserve had, for circumstances out of their control, missed their much-craved chance to do battle at iSandlwana. Ultimately, they would lock horns at Rorke’s Drift.” And thus enter into the pages of military history.
Rorke’s Drift was situated at a prime crossing point by the river border and had quickly been identified as an ideal location from where the column could spring into action. The drift owed its name to Jim Rorke, an Irish trader who had purchased the land in 1849. On this piece of land, he had built his home and accompanying storehouse. Overlooking his abode was the Shiyane Hill, and just half a mile distant was the Buffalo (uMzinyathi) River, beyond which lay Zululand. Traders would visit Rorke before crossing into Zululand, and he became an established and popular figure among the Zulus across the border, who referred to his property as ‘KwaJimu’ (‘Jim’s Place’).
Rorke died in 1875, aged forty-eight, and was buried a little way behind the storehouse by the Shiyane Hill. Shortly after his death, his wife sold the land. In January 1878, Rorke’s Drift was purchased by Otto Witt on behalf of the Church of Sweden.12 Witt and his family used Rorke’s residence as their own and converted the storehouse into a chapel. That same year, talks took place between the Swedish government and the British regarding Rorke’s Drift … it was agreed that Witt would rent out the mission station to the British government. The house would be used as a hospital and the chapel would revert back to its original use as a storehouse to hold supplies.
With Rorke’s Drift as a base, the British under Chelmsford were able to launch their unprovoked invasion of Zululand. The remaining garrison chafed at not seeing action. The surgeon James Henry Reynolds was detailed to remain with the hospital. As he noted later, his feelings were that of “disappointment when Lord Chelmsford marched away with his army and left me with about 100 other men to sit still and bite the bullet of inactivity at Rorke’s Drift. There was no fighting for us, no doctoring for me; the army moved away to gain glory and we sat down in what Lord Halsbury would call a sort of base, to envy the other chaps their chances!”
But when Chelmsford’s battalions were vaporized at Isandlwana, Rorke’s Drift lay helpless and nearly defenseless; soon enough—a matter of hours—the men at the station would see all the action they could ever have desired. Until then, unaware of the disaster, they wrote letters, played cards, and generally whiled away the time.
The depiction of the battle in the movie Zulu is about as accurate as any motion picture that is not actually a documentary is ever likely to get. The 150 or so British and colonial troops, plus a handful of civilians, really did stave off an attack of somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 impis. They really were led by a pair of junior officers, the military men John Chard (Stanley Baker in the movie) of the Royal Engineers, and the aristocratic Gonville Bromhead (Michael Caine), a scion of a military family whose great-grandfather had fought with Wolfe at Quebec, whose grandfather had fought against the Americans during the Revolutionary War, and whose father had served under Wellington at Waterloo. Both Chard and Bromhead were later awarded Britain’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross, along with nine of their men, at Rorke’s Drift.
Trapped in a small but fortified kraal, with a main structure and some outbuildings surrounded by a wall, the British were in a similar position to that of the Foreign Legion at Camarón. Unlike the French, however, the British did not have to contend with fire from within their compound, which gave them some control over their position; they could thus direct their fusillades in whichever direction the attacks came. The Zulus, however, had captured a sizable cache of weapons from Chelmsford’s brigade, and while they were not expert in firearms, some of their snipers were able to worry the British from their positions beyond the enclosure in the high ground near Shiyane Hill—the Oscarberg, in Swedish—until the British riflemen were able to neutralize them.
From the moment they learned of Chelmsford’s defeat from a couple of survivors who had staggered back into camp, the defenders at Rorke’s Drift—the 2/24th Regiment of Foot, made up of English, Welsh, and Irish soldiers—knew the Zulus were en route: their prayers for action were soon to be granted, but not quite in the way—and with the degree of intensity—they expected. The delay in the Zulu army’s arrival provided an opportunity for those colonials and civilians who wanted to leave to do so. Most did. The stragglers from Isandlwana had warned of an immense Zulu army heading their way and advised immediate retreat. But after some debate, the British soldiers decided to stay and not withdraw to the nearby British station at Helpmekaar, about ten miles away.
This was the moment of truth—to flee, retreat, regroup, or to stand and fight? Consider Chard’s and Bromhead’s position: the main force under Chelmsford had just been wiped out. An impi army was on its way, with God knows what armaments captured from the British. Against which stood a hundred and a half men, in the middle of Africa, cut off from any possible immediate assistance. Although flight was theoretically possible, a slow-moving column in open country, laden with sick and wounded (there were about 35 men in the camp hospital), would be easy pickings for the fleet Zulu army. The station, such as it was, offered the best possible defense. And then there were those pesky notions of duty, honor, and country.
One of the signal characteristics at Rorke’s Drift was the low rank of both the commanding officers (both were mere lieutenants; the younger Chard slightly outranked Bromhead). There were no senior officers present: Rorke’s Drift was not a prestigious assignment—the real action was with Chelmsford, a favorite of Queen Victoria—and in any case Chard was an engineer, there to look after the cable ferries (called “ponts”) over the Buffalo River as the British planned their invasion of Zululand from neighboring Natal. Bromhead, then 33 years old and already going deaf, seemed not a patch on his heroic forebears. One of his commanders called him “hopeless,” and upon arrival at Rorke’s Drift he had had almost no command experience. Familially, he had a lot to live up to, and few expectations that he could—perhaps least of all from himself. But courage and heroism manifest themselves in the strangest places and sometimes among the least likely of men. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, masculinity in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.13
Capt. William Penn Symons,14 a Cornishman, served with Chelmsford and left an account of both Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, the latter based on his interviews with the survivors. Of Rorke’s Drift, he wrote in his diary:
At 3 p.m. on the 22nd January [the same day as Isandlwana, in its aftermath], Lt. Bromhead received the startling news from two fugitives that the Generals’ Camp was taken, and that the Zulus were on the way to attack his post.… The above warning gave the Officer at Rorke’s Drift a short hour for preparation. It was badly needed as nothing had been done to prepare the place for defence.… The tents of the Company were pitched outside a farmhouse or rather houses, as there were two; one was used as a store, the other as a base Hospital and they were forty yards apart.…
The tents were struck and the house loopholed15 and occupied. They then managed to pile a few biscuit boxes and mealie sacks as a part of parapet towards the garden on one side, and along the other facing the hill, which completely commanded the houses and enclosures. They drew up three wagons and filled up the gaps with more boxes and sacks of grain. These “lines” connected the two houses and formed what we will call “the yard.” It was a broken and imperfect barricade at the best; on the garden side nowhere more than 3 ft high towards the hill they raised it in places to 4 and 4 ½ ft high.
As Grant had demonstrated, first as a junior officer in the Mexican War and later as commander of the Union forces during the American Civil War, logistics were crucial to the outcome of any conflict. The tip of the spear is naturally the focus of depictions of battle, but the effectiveness of the general lies in his skillful use of materiel and terrain. The French at Camarón, although they ultimately lost, had a wall, a hacienda, and some outbuildings from which to construct a defense; the British at Rorke’s Drift had something even more defensible. They also had weapons and plenty of ammunition. But, as things turned out, it was the erection of an interior “mealie wall”—feed sacks of maize piled one atop the other like sandbags in a flood—that proved decisive in the defense of the compound.
Despite the Zulus’ “buffalo” tactics, the Africans were never able to break what amounted to the center of the British lines. In front of and behind the mealie wall, they were able to stay organized and fire in three-rank volleys,16 thus keeping up a continuous fusillade against the oncoming Zulus, who were defenseless against such a withering barrage. Although the Zulus were eventually able to overrun the hospital17—as with the hacienda at Camarón, not all its rooms communicated with one another, which meant the sick and wounded men had to break through the walls and run a gantlet to get to the safety of the British lines—they were unable to break the British position, no matter how brave the assault. By pulling back his forces behind the mealie wall, Chard was able to keep his defense intact; indeed, the tighter their formation necessarily became, the more lethal the British were.
Rorke’s Drift was that oddity, an afternoon, evening, and even night battle. Generally, in Africa, nobody wanted to fight after noon. Since most battles were waged during the summer and early fall, it often got too hot (January in South Africa, below the equator, is summer), and the position of the sun was often crucial, either to the attack or the defense. At Rorke’s Drift, the heat of the day was intensified by the close-quarters nature of the battle; shots fired often at point-blank range; thrusting bayonets versus stabbing assegais.18 Combat at its most elemental, exactly the way it was at the time of the Greeks and Romans.
And so the two sides fought on, the British maintaining as much order as possible and delivering volley after volley from the mealie wall (the functional equivalent of the rebuilt Phocian wall that partially protected the Spartans at Thermopylae), the Zulus coming in waves, fearless in the teeth of the white man’s weapons, confident that their tactics, which had always worked in the past, would work again, and shouting their war cry: Usutu!
Dusk arrived, darkness fell. It didn’t matter. The hospital’s thatched roof caught fire; the two sides fought on by firelight. At close quarters, the Africans were unafraid to grab for the British rifles by the bayonet, heedless of the pain; had the soldier just reloaded, the warriors were blown apart, point blank. And still they came.
The last of them left just before dawn. The number composing the [final] attack were estimated at 3,000. Many of the bodies by their shields and other distinctive marks, such as plumes, head gear, rings etc., etc., were identified as belonging to one of the King’s chief and favourite regiments and one which bore a great reputation.
Our loss was 13 killed and 10 wounded; three of the latter died soon after of their wounds. Of the enemy we buried 370 and after a few days found over 100 more skeletons lying here and there in the long grass and bush between Rorke’s Drift and the spot where they recrossed the Buffalo River … five out of six of the bodies found were those of old men, many of them quite wizened, and all spare and thin … we repeat that it was a fight at odds of one white man to twenty black savages and more, frenzied with success and slaughter [at Isandlwana]. Each individual soldier did his work and duty well. Ay, and right well.19
This was especially true of the men in the hospital, who were cut off from the main force behind the mealie wall. Many of them went down fighting; Bromhead himself risked his life several times over, running ammunition into the beleaguered building and ferrying the sick and wounded to safety.
As dawn broke on January 23, everyone braced for what he assumed would be the final assault, one in which they would all surely be overrun. Instead, they discovered that the Zulus had vanished. A few of the wounded African warriors played dead until the British approached them; then they attacked. After a struggle, they were put down.
About seven in the morning, the Zulus appeared once more, on a ridge line to the southwest of the compound. The men returned to arms and stations, but ammunition was now running low. They were instructed to make every shot count, and not to fire until the attackers came within 50 yards. Writes Thornton:
The men waited silently for the enemy to come on, but they stayed by the hills around 1,000 yards away, ever growing in numbers as more and more warriors joined them. The garrison remained in a state of suspense. Although some Zulus moved a little closer to the defenders, the majority kept their distance. After an hour, another large body of men was spotted heading towards Rorke’s Drift. A shout from a look-out on the storehouse roof alerted the garrison that there were thousands more black men closing in, and it was assumed this was the main Zulu impi coming to finish them off. However, this was not the case. The Zulus on the hill gradually retired out of sight.20
Chelmsford arrived later that morning, January 23, to briefly assess the situation. He left almost immediately to attend to other matters, but the next day requested that the following spare, characteristically unemotional message be delivered to the troops: “I wish to tell them how highly I think of their conduct. It was admirable, no troops could have been steadier or more collected especially during the night of constant alarms, the 22nd, and although their conduct might be equaled, it could not be surpassed.”21
Stiff upper lips, indeed. Partly on the strength of Rorke’s Drift, Chelmsford was promoted to lieutenant general in 1882; the heroic last stand had wiped away the stain of Isandlwana, rendering the larger and more important battle a footnote to the secondary conflict. He went on to become a full general and ended up as the Gold Stick in Waiting, one of the personal bodyguards of the British monarch on ceremonial occasions.
The shower of Victoria Crosses made the men of the Drift national heroes. Chard received a personal audience with Queen Victoria; he died of cancer in 1897, a full colonel. Bromhead had lived up to the valor of his famous forbears; he missed the audience with the queen, as he was fishing in Ireland and did not receive the invitation in time. He served overseas, in Gibraltar, India, and Burma, and died in India of typhoid fever in 1891 with the rank of major.
Neither could have expected that, just six years later, the most famous last stand in British history, superseding even theirs, would take place up north, down the Nile, in the Sudanese city of Khartoum.
The death struggles at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift had been matters of state, not faith. The British, in the throes of their last desire for empire, had supplanted the Dutch Boers in South Africa and were expanding into Zulu territory for queen and country. For their part, the Zulus had no territorial aims, but were defending their traditional homeland against European incursion. The original black residents of what is today South Africa were not Zulus but Hottentots,22 a nomadic people unable to put up much of a defense against the European invaders. There was nothing akin to the American sense of Manifest Destiny on the part of the British, just a fight for glory and honor.
A few years later, however, things had changed. Under the stewardship of William Gladstone, then in his second stint as prime minister, the British had become ever more concerned about African slavery, which had been abolished throughout the Empire in 1833 but which was still flourishing in Arab-controlled areas23 where Islam met sub-Saharan black Africa. Into this cultural vortex had arrived one of the most remarkable men in British history, the enigmatic, deeply religious, mercurial, chain-smoking, heavy drinking, idiosyncratically Christian zealot, latently suicidal, and very probably chastely homosexual, Charles George “Chinese” Gordon.24 During his first stint as governor of the Sudan in the 1870s, Gordon had worked vigorously to suppress the slave trade, making plenty of enemies along the way. Among them was one Zobeir Pasha, an Afro-Arab who controlled the flourishing trade in black slaves in that part of Equatoria. When Zobeir’s son, Suleiman, was arrested for slaving, Gordon ordered his execution. He meant business.
And then came the Mahdi.
Since the death of Muhammad in 632, Islam had been riven by a succession crisis, which is the origin of the present-day Sunni/Shiite split. The Sunnis believe that Abu Bakr, a friend of Muhammad, was his rightful heir, while the Shiites hold that only a direct lineal descendant of the “Prophet” should lead the emergent religion. Both sides, however—in a borrowing from both Jewish and Christian eschatology—believe that there would come a savior or redeemer to usher the Believers into the promised land of eternal justice under Allah.
Muslims held that, in the last days, this Mahdi would come together with Jesus (Issa)25 to save the world from the Al-Masih ad-Dajjal, the anti-Messiah or Antichrist, who had to be defeated before the Day of Judgment. As in Judaism and Christianity, many false redeemers have arisen over the centuries and the millennia; that the world has not yet ended may be taken as proof of delusion or mendacity. Among the prominent false messiahs in Islam was one Muhammad Ahmad, a Nubian Muslim from Aba Island in the White Nile,26 south of Khartoum, whose family, boat-builders along the river, could trace its lineage directly back to the Prophet. Anointing himself as the Mahdi, the Expected One, the Sufi mystic roared out of the Sudanese desert on June 29, 1881, proclaiming his Madhiyya and announcing his jihad to make the way smooth for the Second Coming of Jesus, and thus the beginning of the End Times. He demanded acknowledgment by all Muslims of his mission; high on his list of Unbelievers were the louche Ottoman Turk rulers of Egypt in Cairo, some of whose forces were holed up in Khartoum.
The British didn’t much care what happened to the indigenous natives of the Sudan, but they did very much attend to the threat to the Egyptian Turkish garrison there, which was controlled by their fiscally bankrupt and wholly dependent ally, the Khedive of Egypt. There was only one man with the moral, political, and military authority to evacuate the Turks, and that was Gordon Pasha27—a man assured of the rightness of his ways and utterly unafraid of death.
Gordon was on the verge of accepting a commission from Leopold, king of the Belgians, to administer the Congo Free State,28 Leopold’s personal satrapy in central Africa, when Gladstone’s government offered him his old gubernatorial post in the Sudan. His mission was carefully circumscribed: evacuate the beleaguered Egyptian force in Khartoum. That was all. Not to defend the city, which stood just south of the intersection of the White and Blue Niles. Not to defeat the Mahdists. Just get the troops out and back to Cairo. Surely, the hero of the Taiping Rebellion,29 “Chinese” Gordon, whose command of the Ever Victorious Army had been instrumental in finally putting down the rebellion, could do that.
With some reluctance—and after a two-week visit to Ireland, where the appalling conditions among the Irish peasant farmers there provoked him to write a six-page memo to Gladstone urging much-needed reforms30—Gordon took the job. With Lt. Col. J. D. H. Stewart as his adjutant—Gladstone’s personal check on the headstrong Gordon’s famous willfulness—he set out for Egypt in January 1884.
Who was Gordon? One of the most complex and complicated figures of the high Victorian era, he was at the same time a product, even an avatar, of his era. A hero in his lifetime, he was soon enough a figure of derision among the Bloomsbury Group31 that sprang to life during and after the First World War. In his quartet of character studies, Eminent Victorians (1918), the Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey left a dyspeptic but indelible portrait of Gordon:
During the year 1883 a solitary English gentleman was to be seen, wandering, with a thick book under his arm, in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. His unassuming figure, short and slight, with its half-gliding, half-tripping motion, gave him a boyish aspect, which contrasted, oddly, but not unpleasantly, with the touch of grey on his hair and whiskers. There was the same contrast—enigmatic and attractive—between the sunburnt brick-red complexion—the hue of the seasoned traveller—and the large blue eyes, with their look of almost childish sincerity. To the friendly inquirer, he would explain, in a low, soft, and very distinct voice, that he was engaged in elucidating four questions—the site of the Crucifixion, the line of division between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, the identification of Gideon, and the position of the Garden of Eden. He was also, he would add, most anxious to discover the spot where the Ark first touched ground, after the subsidence of the Flood: he believed, indeed, that he had solved that problem, as a reference to some passages in the book which he was carrying would show.
This singular person was General Gordon, and his book was the Holy Bible.… For month after month, for an entire year, the General lingered by the banks of the Jordan. But then the enchantment was suddenly broken. Once more adventure claimed him; he plunged into the whirl of high affairs; his fate was mingled with the frenzies of Empire and the doom of peoples. And it was not in peace and rest, but in ruin and horror, that he reached his end.…
What other nation on the face of the earth could have produced Mr. Gladstone and Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington and General Gordon? Alike in their emphasis and their lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and their conventionality, in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these four figures seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English spirit.
To Strachey, Gordon was a near-suicidal fanatic, exactly the kind of Briton that Britain was well rid of in the aftermath of the carnage of the Great War. To other eminent if fictional Victorians, he was a national hero. As every Sherlockian knows, the world’s first consulting detective had only two images in 221B Baker Street32: an unframed picture of the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin renown, which stood atop a pile of Dr. Watson’s books, and a “newly framed” portrait of Gordon, which hung on the wall of the famous sitting room.33
History, until perhaps recently, has come down on the side of hero. Gordon’s active role in the abolition of black slavery by the Muslim Arabs in the Sudan cannot be disputed, nor can the fact that he gave his life, on Christian principles, for the Muslim Egyptians under his command at Khartoum. The stiff-necked Gordon was a man who, once returned to Khartoum, not only refused to evacuate the garrison as ordered but instead dug his stubborn heels into the desert sands, organized a spirited defense of the city—Gordon, like Chard, was a Royal Engineer—and stayed long past the opportunity for him to bequeath the city to the Mahdi’s vengeful mercies. He died with the people he loved, a martyr to his faith and his cause, determined to show the pagan whose God was stronger, even though it cost him his life.
As with Zulu, the battle of wills between Gordon and the Mahdi was vividly dramatized in the 1966 film Khartoum, which features a restrained and understated portrayal of Gordon by Charlton Heston and a scenery-chewing impersonation of Muhammad Ahmad by Laurence Olivier, in full white-toothed blackface.34 The son of a Scottish officer, Gordon was born in the military town of Woolwich35 and grew up on various duty stations36 until the family landed back in a flat in Woolwich a stone’s throw from the famous military academy there; upon entering the school as a teenager, Gordon was ticketed for a commission in the Royal Artillery. But a couple of schoolboy pranks set him back six months, forcing him into the Royal Engineers instead.
Something else happened to Gordon during his school years, something never fully explained. It occurred while at school at Taunton, a boarding school in Somerset, where he excelled at map-making. He later wrote to a friend, “I remember a deep bitterness there, never can forget it, though I was only ten or twelve years old. Humanly speaking, it changed my life.… I never had a sorrow like it in all my life, therefore I love children very much.… I wished I was a eunuch at fourteen.” As Robert Hardy noted in his BBC documentary film Gordon of Khartoum (1982), “Most have assumed that he had some sort of homosexual experience that scarred his soul. Whatever it was, it seems to have led to a repression of sexual desires for the rest of his life.”
In his estimable biography The Road to Khartoum (1978), Charles Chenevix Trench addressed the issue of Gordon’s homosexuality, or at least his tendency toward it: “It is possible that Gordon’s nature was homo- rather than hetero-sexual; who can know this about a man who never mentioned the subject and died more than a century ago? That he was a practicing sodomite is, however, extremely improbable. The modern view of homosexuality as no more morally reprehensible than left-handedness is not one which he would have entertained: he would have been appalled by ‘the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah,’ and had he ever succumbed to this temptation, would have been tortured by a guilt of which there is nothing in his voluminous correspondence.”
Whatever his sexual inclinations, Gordon was something of a prude. When Gordon first took up the governorship of the Sudan in 1874, he was received in state in Cairo, and a banquet was given in his honor. As Strachey notes, the banquet was “followed by a mixed ballet of soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced in a circle, beat time with their feet, and accompanied their gestures with a curious sound of clucking. At last the Austrian Consul, overcome by the exhilaration of the scene, flung himself in a frenzy among the dancers; the Governor-General [an Egyptian official, Gordon’s nominal superior in his new post], shouting with delight, seemed about to follow suit, when Gordon abruptly left the room, and the party broke up in confusion.”
After receiving his commission at Woolwich, Gordon was sent to Pembroke, in Wales, to construct fortifications along the riverbanks should they ever be needed. Naturally, this bored him—at the height of the Empire, with her navy ruling the waves, why would Britain fear invasion from the sea? While there, the man who would become intensely religious received his first Eucharist but remained unchurched. Instead, he began to delve deeply into the Bible, seeking to learn and understand its lessons for himself, and in his own way. Sent next to the Crimea, where Britain and Russia were fighting a difficult and dirty war, he saw action at Sebastopol and Balaclava while still searching for his faith and also evincing his first inclinations toward martyrdom. “I went to Crimea hoping, without having a hand in it, to be killed. I survived and lived, never fearing death but not wishing to be too closely acquainted with God, nor yet to leave Him,” he wrote in a letter to his lifelong friend, the Reverend R. H. Barnes.
Following the Crimea, Captain Gordon was posted to Bessarabia in 1856 to map the now-settled frontier between Russia and the victorious allies of France, Britain, Sardinia, and Turkey. The war had broken out in part over a dispute between the French and the Russians over which Christian denomination—Catholic or Orthodox—should have the greater rights in visiting the Holy Land, which was then under Ottoman domination. Gordon spent two years surveying, returned home, and then, with the outbreak of the Second Opium War between Britain and China, was posted to China, arriving just after the cessation of hostilities. In China he contracted a mild case of smallpox, which he survived. “I am glad to say that this disease has brought me back to my Saviour, and I trust in future to be a better Christian than I have been hitherto,” he wrote to his older sister, Augusta, his best friend and confidante, with whom he kept up a lively correspondence until his death.
In short order, the Taiping Rebellion broke out. It was led by Hong Xiuquan (Hong Siu-Tsuen, in the orthography of the time), who in 1837 had experienced a religious transformation, was converted to Christianity by an American Methodist missionary, and soon proclaimed himself the brother of Jesus Christ,37 the son of God, and started calling himself the Tien Wang, the Celestial King.38 Revolting against the corrupt and indolent Manchus and demanding industrial development, land reform, famine and flood relief, and prohibition of infanticide, the ethnic Chinese under Hong launched a bloody civil war that lasted 14 years and took the lives of some 70 million people (estimates range as high as 100 million) and resulted in the wholesale destruction of the country. There were mass executions, beheadings, crucifixions, and live burials. The rebels, led by their very capable general, Chung Wang (the “Faithful King”), seized Nanking, Suzhou (Soochow), and Hangzou (Hangchow), and threatened Shanghai and Beijing. Something had to be done.
In March 1863, at the recommendation of his superior officer, Gen. Charles Staveley, Gordon took command of the native Ever Victorious Army in defense of the Manchus. It was one man of God battling another; Gordon at first had been sympathetic to the renegade Christians, but upon arrival in China had been horrified by the atrocities committed by the rebels in the name of Jesus and was determined to put them down. He trained the forces himself, encouraged discipline with a summary execution here and there, mounted a successful defense of Shanghai, and demolished the rebels at Quinsan, routing a force ten times larger than his own while only losing two killed and five wounded. “They never got such a licking before,” he remarked.
Gordon returned to England in January 1865 and found himself a national hero: the celebrated “Chinese” Gordon. He was 32 years old and, as things turned out, leadership of the Ever Victorious Army, which was disbanded in 1864,39 would be his last official military command. The Foreign Office never saw fit to put him in charge of any of the British forces who were at that time fighting all over the world, from South Africa to New Zealand. Why is hard to say. Perhaps it was due to his status in the Engineers rather than the regular army. Perhaps it was his personal eccentricity and borderline insubordination (a quality that would eventually get him killed at Khartoum); but, as Quinsan had shown, he was personally brave, and his tactical abilities were formidable. More likely, it was simply because Gordon was utterly disinterested in capitalizing on his personal popularity; instead, he accepted a minor honor, Companion of the Bath, and spent the next six years constructing useless forts along the Thames estuary.
Or perhaps it was that his superiors had sensed what he often whispered in prayer to his special God: “May I be ground to dust if He will but glorify Himself in me.” A man like that was dangerous.
While in England, he refined his notions of religion, developing (as Hong Xiuquan had, although far less sanguinarily) his own peculiar form of Christianity, in its way as syncretic as that of the Wangs in China. His visit to the Holy Land in 1883 put the finishing touches on his faith—a belief in the impermanence of earthly things, a desire not only to be with God but to earn his passage to the hereafter.
His first stint in the Sudan had established his reputation there, and so when the Mahdist revolt got underway in earnest around the same time Gordon was peregrinating through Jerusalem, he was just the man for the job. In fact, there was no one else. Once again in his life, religions were clashing, and Gordon, the man of God, would be forced to confront Muhammad Ahmad, the man of Allah. Like Zrínyi and Suleiman at Szigetvár, neither would walk away from the confrontation.
In November 1883, the Mahdi and his Ansār (followers) had destroyed an Egyptian force under a British officer, Col. William Hicks, at El Obeid, in circumstances very similar to Isandlwana. Egyptian control of the Sudan was now limited to the settlements along the Nile, which could be protected from the river by gunboats against the desert tribesmen. But the Mahdi laid siege to Khartoum, the principal city, and armed as he was with Hicks’s guns and cannons, it seemed only a matter of time before the city fell, and along with it the trapped Egyptian garrison. In an interview with W. T. Stead,40 the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the normally reclusive Gordon41 opined on the state of affairs in the Sudan, which set off a public cry for Gladstone’s government to send Gordon back to the Sudan and do something.
Gordon viewed the deteriorating situation in the Sudan not as a localized conflict but as a geopolitical struggle:
So you would abandon the Soudan? But the Eastern Soudan is indispensable to Egypt. It will cost you far more to retain your [hold] upon Egypt proper if you abandon your hold of the Eastern Soudan to the Mahdi or to the Turk than what it would to retain your hold upon Eastern Soudan by the aid of such material as exists in the provinces. Darfur and Kordofan must be abandoned. That I admit; but provinces lying to the east of the White Nile should be retained, and north of Senaar. The danger to be feared is not that the Mahdi will march northward through Wadi Halfa; on the contrary, it is very improbable that he will ever go so far north. The danger is altogether of a different nature. It arises from the influence which the spectacle of a conquering Mahommedan Power, established close to your frontiers, will exercise upon the population which you govern. In all the cities in Egypt it will be felt that what the Mahdi has done they may do; and, as he has driven out the intruder and the infidel, they may do the same. Nor is it only England that has to face this danger. The success of the Mahdi has already excited dangerous fermentation in Arabia and Syria. Placards have been posted in Damascus calling upon the population to rise and drive out the Turks. If the whole of the Eastern Soudan is surrendered to the Mahdi, the Arab tribes on both sides the Red Sea will take fire. In self-defence the Turks are bound to do something to cope with so formidable a danger, for it is quite possible that if nothing is done the whole of the Eastern Question may be re-opened by the triumph of the Mahdi. I see it is proposed to fortify Wadi Halfa, and prepare there to resist the Mahdi’s attack. You might as well fortify against a fever. Contagion of that kind cannot be kept out by fortifications and garrisons. But that it is real, and that it does exist, will be denied by no one cognisant with Egypt and the East. In self-defence the policy of evacuation cannot possibly be justified.
In other words, Gordon was in agreement with the public: something must be done; he could see the jihad coming. Something, however, was the last thing the liberal Gladstone wanted to do. The canniest prime minister of his day, Gladstone wanted to preserve the Empire, keep his Downing Street residence—as things turned out, he traded it with the Tory Lord Salisbury several times—and keep the Ottomans both in Cairo and in Britain’s debt. Britain had taken effective control of Egypt during the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882, largely to control access to the French-built Suez Canal, a matter of vital geostrategic importance. Under pressure, Gladstone agreed to send Gordon and his deputy, Stewart, up the Nile to evacuate the garrison and come home.
Once there—he arrived in Egypt in January 1884—Gordon was named governor-general of the Sudan. He first tried to enlist the former slaver Zobeir as an ally, but Zobeir, still mourning the death of his son, turned him down flat. Gordon and Stewart sailed up the Nile and entered Khartoum on February 18, 1884. To cheering crowds, he declared he would not evacuate the Egyptians and leave the Sudanese to their fate, but instead—ever the engineer—he would organize the city’s defenses and fight the Mahdi. Khartoum was eminently defensible, especially so long as the Nile remained open so the city could be resupplied by water. By digging a trench, he connected the White and Blue Niles to form a moat around the city, established a few forts around the perimeter, and figured he could hold out for at least a year; once the waters dropped, he would be vulnerable, but Gordon gambled that his stubborn refusal to leave would force Gladstone’s hand, and a relief column would soon enough be on its way.
So now three strong-willed men collided: Gordon, Gladstone, and the Mahdi. But as Gordon dug in, so did Gladstone42; it became a contest of wills, fought out not only in the desert sands but in Whitehall and in the court of British public opinion. Gordon did not help himself with Gladstone in his early dispatches, assuring the prime minister he could manage, so as Gordon’s tune changed and became more urgent, Gladstone was hard pressed to tell whether Gordon was serious or just being his usual dramatic and changeable self. Although the queen told her prime minister that Gordon must be saved, Gladstone was in no rush. He canvassed his cabinet at leisure; many of the ministers thought Gordon was just plain crazy, although none wanted to see him die. For a long time, nothing could be done. Nor was it.
In the meantime, the Mahdi’s Ansār, whom the British called “dervishes,” grew in strength. And once the Arabs had cut the river at Berber in May 1884 and destroyed the telegraph lines, the city was completely cut off, with the only remaining passage out for messengers north through the desert—extremely dangerous. If help did not arrive, it was only a matter of time before the city fell.
As with all sieges—Caesar would have recognized the situation immediately and probably wondered why it took the Mahdi the better part of a year to force the issue—the defenders can only hold out as long as their food and ammunition do. The food went first: by the end of 1884, there was not a live animal left in the city, including horses, donkeys, and dogs. They had all been eaten. With the civilians near starvation, Gordon opened the gates and allowed out any who wished to leave; half the population fled, leaving Gordon with about eight thousand troops armed with Remington rifles and a considerable cache of ammunition.
Like Custer, whom he resembles in some personal respects, Gordon tackled the problem of defending Khartoum with the characteristic energy, bravery, and technical skill he had always relied upon. He was also used to fighting non-Europeans, whose discipline and courage he found wanting. The problem was that at Khartoum, as Custer had been at the Little Bighorn, he was disastrously wrong. He overestimated his own moral and military resources and misjudged the ferocity of his opponent.
The rest of the story is quickly told. Gladstone had earlier succumbed to the pressure, sending the Irish-born major H. H. Kitchener to the Sudan with a small force as a sop to public opinion, but he failed to communicate any urgency. By August of 1884, however, the situation had grown dire enough for Gladstone to authorize a substantial force to Egypt under the command of Lord Wolseley, which landed in Egypt on September 9. But Stewart and other officials and civilians were killed that same month when their armored steamer, the Abbas, attempted to run the blockade, hit a rock in the river, and was beached in what had been considered friendly territory. Brought ashore, they were all murdered, and Gordon’s dispatches fell into the Mahdi’s hands. In effect, what had begun as a mission on which Gordon was to get the Egyptians out had become a mission to get Gordon out. And Gordon didn’t want to come out.
His letters back to Augusta reflect what by now had become for him a death-before-dishonor situation. For a while, Gordon and the Mahdi exchanged letters and even gifts, but communications eventually broke off, and it became clear that the only thing that was going to settle the dispute between the Christian and the Islamic gods was going to be hot lead and bayonet steel. The fatalist Charley Gordon, who used to throw himself into the waters at Corfu without being able to swim, was about to take his biggest leap.
As Strachey notes in Eminent Victorians, “Whatever he might find in his pocket-Bible, it was not for such as he to dream out his days in devout obscurity. But, conveniently enough, he found nothing in his pocket-Bible indicating that he should. What he did find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute; that it was man’s duty to follow where God’s hand led; and, if God’s hand led towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was not only futile, it was impious to turn another way.… He was Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the Sudan. He was among his people—his own people,43 and it was to them only that he was responsible—to them, and to God. Was he to let them fall without a blow into the clutches of a sanguinary impostor? Never! He was there to prevent that.”
He held out as long as he could, having long since made his peace with his inevitable death. The only way out was feet first. By November 1884, he figured he had about six weeks. He knew Wolseley was on the way. What he didn’t know was that Wolseley was operating on a somewhat more leisurely timetable, planning to reach Khartoum by January 31, 1885. The city was being peppered by potshots from the Mahdi’s main force of jihadis across the river at Omdurman, but Gordon showed his contempt by sitting, illuminated, behind an open window at the palace. He refused to leave. If ordered to do so, he kept repeating, “I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT WILL STAY HERE, AND FALL WITH THE TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS.”
The Mahdi, knowing the end was near, sent Gordon one final missive, offering to let him depart in peace and without ransom if he would only surrender the city. Like Gordon, the Mahdi was on a mission, and Gordon was in the way:
Having seen what you have seen, how long are you going to disbelieve us? We have been told by God’s Apostle, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him, of the imminent destruction of all those in Khartoum, save those who believe and surrender; them, God will save. We do not wish you perish with those doomed to perish because we have frequently heard good of you.… In order that you should not abandon hope of God’s mercy I say to you that God has said, “Kill not thyself for God is merciful to thee.” Peace be upon you.
So now it was not simply Gordon versus the Mahdi, but deity against deity. This was a challenge Gordon relished, for either way he would win. Should the relief column arrive in time, the Mahdi would die or skedaddle; should the city fall, Gordon’s death and transfiguration would be proof of the power of his God, who could turn defeat into Gordon’s personal victory, his destiny finally fulfilled: “May I be ground to dust if He will but glorify Himself in me.” Dust it would be, then.
On the night of the twenty-fifth, the Mahdi addressed his troops, ordering them to enter the city and slay every living soul, with the exception of Gordon and a few others. Shortly after midnight on the twenty-sixth, he attacked. Roused by the tumult, the sleeping Gordon put on his uniform, armed himself with a sword and a revolver, and stepped out onto the palace’s external staircase.
Legend has it that Gordon died a Christian martyr’s death on the staircase, calmly confronting the mob before one of the dervishes shouted: “O cursed one, your hour has come!” and plunged a spear into Gordon’s breast; as he fell, he was hacked to pieces by the enraged Ansār of Allah.44 But Gordon’s bodyguard and manservant, Khalil Agha Orphali, who was battling alongside him as he fell, tells a more heroic tale: that upon stepping out onto the stairway, Gordon fired repeatedly with his revolver, was wounded in the shoulder by a hurled spear, and emptied his pistol into the mob before drawing his sword. He was wounded again, this time by a rifle round that hit him in the chest, but continued to fight, pushing the warriors back down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, he was wounded once again by a spear thrust in the side and then fell beneath the horde.45 Gordon’s long war with himself, with the army, and with God was finally over. He died the hero of his own, self-dictated last stand.
Gordon’s corpse was decapitated and his head brought in a bag to the Mahdi, who was furious that his order had been disobeyed. Two days later the advance forces of the relief column arrived. Six months later, the Mahdi died of unknown causes, possibly smallpox or typhus.46 Without their charismatic leader, the Mahdists faded as a religious, political, and military force. Although the British pulled out of the Sudan, they stoutly defended Egypt, and an attempted Mahdist invasion of Egypt in 1891 was crushed.
Thanks to Gordon’s death, which inflamed the British public, the Gladstone government fell in June 1885 and the prime ministry was traded with the conservatives once more. But by 1898, with Salisbury back in power, the time was right to avenge Gordon. Kitchener—now General Sir H. H. Kitchener—mounted a punitive expedition47 that engaged the Believers at Omdurman and annihilated a force twice his size with the latest rifles, dum-dum bullets, machine guns,48 and artillery pieces. Twelve thousand Muslims were killed, another thirteen thousand wounded; Kitchener’s casualties were forty-seven dead and three hundred and eighty-two wounded.
The Mahdi’s ornate tomb had been damaged by British guns during the battle. Kitchener ordered it pulled down. He then had the body exhumed and the bones chucked into the Nile. The Mahdi’s skull was presented to Kitchener for use as a drinking cup; Kitchener was of a mind to send it to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, but a public outcry and a stern condemnation from the queen eventually packed the skull off to be buried quietly in a local Muslim cemetery. The defeat was so decisive that there would be no further jihad for more than a hundred years, until on September 11, 2001, when the walls of the World Trade Center collapsed and the long, 1,400-year civilizational struggle between recrudescent Islam and the West commenced in earnest once again.
Osama bin Laden may not have seen himself as a new Mahdi, but his goal of restoring the caliphate and converting the world to Islam was very similar to Muhammad Ahmad’s. If the West has a Kitchener or a Gordon, or a Roland or a Zrínyi to hand, he has not as yet evidenced himself. Islam still has plenty of need for heroes, but do the heirs of Rome? As the narrator intones at the conclusion of Khartoum, “A world with no room for the Gordons is a world that will return to the sands.”