Male figure on stool
(Utongwe). Western Tanzania.

Wood, height: 78.5 cm.

Bareiss Family collection.

 

 

There is next to no art from the Tongwe, a small group which live in the eastern area of Lake Tanganyika, except for this object. The carving on this figure bears stylistic similarities to the Jiji of the north. The male figure here beautifully expresses the qualities of dignity and leadership. The elaborate coiffure and facial features of this figure exhibit strong Tabwa influence, along with the convention of the human figure standing on a stool, which signifies rank and status. This figure, based on its attributes, likely represents a chief.

 

 

Mahdism

 

Like Rabah, the mahdi and his khalife were Sudanese. Mohammed-Ahmed, a native of Dongola, belonged to a Nuba family. He proclaimed himself mahdi in 1881, after having defeated Rachid-Bey, governor of Fashoda, in the mountains of southern Kurdufan, where his family had come from and where he had established his residence. In 1882, he won a new victory over an important Egyptian column, and then seized all of Kurdufan, whose capital, EI-Obeid, fell to his power in February, 1883. He drove into ambush the army of Hicks-Pasha, 10,000 men strong, which was entirely massacred in Chekan (Kurdufan), 4 November 1883. Slatin-Pasha, governor of Darfur, and Lupton-Bey, governor of Bahr-el-Ghazal, capitulated in 1884. Alone, Emin Pasha in Equatoria (Upper Nile) and Mustafa-Bey in Dongola continued to hold out; Berber and the Sennar were in the hands of the “Dervishes”, as the partisans of the mahdi were called. On 15 January 1885, the latter seized Omdurman, a suburb of Khartoum, and on 26 January he entered the citadel of Khartoum as conqueror and put Gordon Pasha to death. From then on he was the actual master of four-fifths of what, five years before, had been Egyptian Sudan. Shortly afterwards he died of typhoid fever in Omdurman.

 

As for Abdullah, he belonged to a Baggara tribe (cow-herders) of Darfur, who were a cross between Arabs and Negroes. He was bound by friendship to the mahdi, whose principal advisor he became and who, at the moment of dying, designated him as his khalife, that is to say, his representative and successor (1885). Abdullah immediately set aside the relatives and compatriots of the mahdi, Nuba of Dongola and Kurdufan, and surrounded himself with Darfur people, several thousands of whom he brought to Omdurman. He organised a powerful army, which he sent against Abyssinia; the city of Gondar was taken and pillaged by the bands of the khalife and the negus John was killed (1888). In 1892, the troops of Abdullah established themselves in Equatoria, which Emin-Pasha had abandoned in 1889. Shortly afterwards, however, the ephemeral power of the “Dervishes” began to decline: in 1896, the Anglo-Egyptian troops reoccupied Dongola and, in 1897, Berber; on 10 July 1898, Captain Marchand, later General, seized Fashoda; the Sirdar Kitchener took Omdurman the following September 2, and in 1899, Abdullah, in refuge in Kurdufan, was defeated and killed by Colonel Wingate.