Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who at length went to Egypt at the invitation of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that work which in the end cost one of the most valuable of British lives, and made the delta and valley of the Nile what they are to-day in everything but name—a British province.

In this sense Gordon was de facto an Empire-Maker. The mendacious amenities of Diplomacy may lisp out meaningless phrases about the evacuation of Egypt, but the fact is that we have re-created the land of the Pharaohs, we have brought it from bankruptcy to prosperity, we have released the fellah from the terror of the lash and the servitude of forced labour. We have raised a downtrodden peasantry to the position of self-respecting citizens, and we have turned slaves into soldiers. This was the work that Gordon began for us, although we did not employ him to do it, or recognise that he was doing it; but, having taken it over and carried it so far, it is hardly likely that even British officialdom will commit such a crime against civilisation as the surrender of the almost completed task would now be.

Gordon went south from Cairo by way of Suakin and Berber to Khartoum, taking with him the somewhat curious title of Governor of the Equator—which of course meant the Equatorial Provinces—and a very distinct conception of a Central African Dominion which the soldiers and statesmen of other generations will realise in due course, provided always that the onward march of the Anglo-Saxon is not turned aside or stopped by faint-heartedness within or disaster without.

His headquarters or capital was a place called Gondokoro, situate in the midst of a ghastly region of river, lake, and swamp, sunbaked by day, and miasma-haunted by night. He went up by steamer from Khartoum and, some two hundred miles above the city, he passed the island of Abba in the White Nile, and in one of his letters home he wrote these words which read somewhat weirdly in the lurid light of the camp-fires which seven years later closed round Khartoum:

“Last night, March 26th, we were going slowly along in the moonlight and I was thinking of you all and of the expeditions and Nubar and Co., when all of a sudden from a large bush came peals of laughter. I felt put out, but it turned out to be birds, who laughed at us from the bushes for some time in a very rude way. They are a species of stork, and seemed in capital spirits and highly amused at anybody thinking of going to Gondokoro with the hope of doing anything.”

But the laughing storks were not the only inhabitants of the Island of Abba, for, in a cave among its rocks, there was dwelling at that very moment a certain Moslem monk, or dervish, named Mohammed Achmet, who had already won some reputation for sanctity among his fellow tribesmen.

It would have been a most unwarrantable and, for Gordon, quite an impossible thing to do, and yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction, that the whole history of about a quarter of a continent would have been changed for the better, and the march of civilisation and humanity in Northern Africa would have been incalculably accelerated if the Governor-General of the Equator had stopped his boat just at that point, landed his men on the island, routed the holy man out of his cave, and either put a bullet through his head or drowned him in the Nile; for this recluse, then unknown beyond the confines of his native desert, was destined seven years later to be hailed by the Soudan tribesmen as the Mahdi—a word which to us means so much disgrace and disaster as well as hard and tardily won triumph that there is no need here to further elaborate the coincidence.

It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon’s first government. As he himself says of the wilderness: “No one can conceive the utter misery of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and night all the year round.” These are few words, but I am able to say from personal experience that to those who know what African heat and African mosquitoes are they speak very eloquently.

Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and worked and suffered, making maps, building forts, enticing traders to come to him, teaching his soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise crops instead of plundering the natives. One by one his staff died about him, but still somehow the work went on.

When he first arrived he wrote: “the only possessions Egypt has in my province are two forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at Fatiko. There are three hundred men in one and two hundred in the other. You can’t go out in safety half a mile.”