In the case of the Niger even this does not hold true. It is really more of a succession of long lakes and small pools than a regular river, as Mungo Park discovered in 1805 when he gave his life to find the river of which he had dreamed since he was a small boy in Scotland. this may have been responsible for the fact that the Sudanese, deprived of all waterways, were able to make such a success of their overland trade-routes and that Timbuktu, on the left bank of the upper Niger, could become such a very important center of trade, the Nizhni-Novgorod of Africa, where the north and the south and the east and the west came together to do business.
Timbuktu owes a great deal of its popularity to its queer name which sounds like the magic formula of some mysterious African witch-doctor. In the year 1353 it had been visited by the Ibn Batuta, the Marco Polo of the Arab world. Twenty years later it made its first appearance on Spanish maps as a great market for gold and salt, subtances which were of almost equal value in medieval days. When the English Major Gordon Laing reached it in the year 1826, after having crossed the Sahara from Tripoli, it was merely the ruins of its former self, having been repeatedly attacked and destroyed by Tuareg and Fellatah marauders. On his way to the coast Major Laing was murdered by the Fellatah of Senegarnbia, but from that time on, Timbuktu was no longer another mysterious Mecca or Khiva or Tibet, but became a plain, ordinary “objective” of the French forces operating in the western Sudan.
In the year 1893 it was taken by a French “army” consisting of one French naval ensign and six white men, accompanied by twelve Senegalese. The power of the desert tribes had not yet been broken, for soon afterwards they killed off most of the white invaders and almost completely destroyed a relief corps of two hundred men which was coming up from the coast to avenge the defeat of the naval contingent.
But of course it was then merely a matter of time before all of the western Sudan would be in French hands. The same held true of the region round Lake Chad in the central part of the Sudan, which was easier of access because the Benue river, a tributary of the Niger which runs due east and west, is much more navigable than the Niger itself.
Lake Chad, which lies about 700 feet high, is very shallow and rarely deeper than about twenty feet. In contrast to most other inland seas, the water is fresh and not salt. But it is growing smaller and smaller all the time and in another century it will be merely a marsh. One river loses itself in this lake. It is called the Shari and the fact that it is merely an inland river which starts a thousand miles from the sea and ends a thousand miles from the sea, yet is as long as the Rhine, will give you a better idea of the proportions of central Africa than almost anything else I can think of.
The mountainous Wadai region east of Lake Chad acts as the great divide between the Nile, the Congo and the Chad region. Politically it belongs to the French and is supposed to be an administrative part of the French Congo. It also marks the end of the French sphere of influence, for on the east of it begins the eastern Sudan, now know as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, a country which the ancients knew as the land of the White Nile.
When the English began to survey their road from the Cape to Cairo and decided that they must occupy this most valuable strategic point or run the risk of losing it to some other nation, the eastern Sudan was a desert, plain, simple and fancy. The Nile was unnavigable and there were no roads. The people, at the mercy of all the scum from the nearby deserts, were poor and wretched beyond belief. Geographically it was without any value, but politically its possibilities were enormous. In 1876, therefore, the Khedive of Egypt to entrust the administration tion of these hundreds of thousands of square miles of “nominal Egyptian territory” to that same General Gordon whom we have already met in the chapter on China, assisting the Peking government to repress the Tai-Ping rebellion. Gordon remained in the Sudan for two years and with the help of a very clever Italian assistant, one Romolo Gessi, he accomplished the one thing most needed: he broke up the last of the slave rings, shot the leaders and set more than 10,000 men and women free and allowed them to return to their homes.
As soon, however, as this stern Puritan had turned his back upon the Sudan, the old terrible conditions of misgovernment and oppression returned. The result was the outbreak of a movement for complete independence, a sort of “Sudan for the Sudanese and all the slave-trading we want.” The leader of this rebellion was a certain Mohammed Ahmed, who called himself Mahdi or leader to show the faithful the road of the true Moslem faith. The Mahdi was successful. In 1883 he conquered El Obeid in Kordofan, which is now connected with Cairo by rail and later in the same year he destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under Hicks Pasha, an English colonel in the service of the Khedive. Meanwhile, in 1882, England had assumed a protectorate over Egypt and the Mahdi now had to contend with a more dangerous enemy.