But England was too experienced in colonial affairs and knew the difficulties too well to rush into any rash expeditions. For the moment she counselled the Egyptian government to withdraw its troops from the Sudan. General Gordon was once more sent to Khartum to arrange for the withdrawal of the remaining Egyptian garrisons. But no sooner had he reached Khartum than the forces of the Mahdi swept northward and left Gordon and his companions marooned in Khartum He sent urgent messages But Gordon was a Puritan mystic. Gladstone, who was then the head of the British government, was an Episcopal mystic. These two mystics, the one in London on the Thames and the other in Khartum on the Nie, did not like each other. And because they did not lilke each other, it was impossible for them to cooperate intelligently.
Gladstone sent a relief expedition, much too late, for when it was still several days away from Khartum the town was taken by the forces of the Mahdi and Gordon was murdered. That happened in January of 1885. In June of the same year the Mahdi died. His successor maintained himself as ruler of the Sudan until the year 1898 when an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener wiped his followers from the face of the desert and recaptured the entire territory as far south as Uganda, which is on the equator.
The English have done an enormous amount of good in improving the condition of the natives by giving them roads, railroads, safety, by stamping out all sorts of hideous and unnecessary forms of disease, the usual things which the white man does for the black man and for which the white man will shoot the white man in the back just as soon as he can, as the white man knows if he has had a couple of centuries of colonial experience.
The railroad southward from Alexandria and Cairo now runs as far as El Obeid in the west and Port Sudan on the Red Sea in the cast If in the years to come an enemy should suddenly destroy the Suez Canal England can still transport her troops from cast to west via this road that runs through the valley of Egypt and then recrosses the Nubian desert.
But now we have got to go back a few years and see how the Mahdi revolt was to have the most far-reaching influence upon the development of Africa in a way which had nothing at all to do with the Mahdi himself or his ambitions to become the independent ruler of the land of his fathers.
When the Mahdi uprising began, the Egyptian forces furthest towards the south were forced to find a refuge in a part of central Africa which was then practically unknown. Speke had crossed it in 1858 when he discovered Lake Victoria, the mother lake, so to speak, of the river Nile. But most of the land between Lake Albert and Lake Victoria was still terra incognita. This Egyptian force, under command of a German physician, a certain Dr Eduard Schnitzer, better known by his Turkish title of Emin Pasha, had disappeared from sight after the fall of Khartum and the world was curious to know what had become of its leader.
The job of finding him was entrusted to an American newspaper man by the name of Stanley. His name was really Rowlands, but he had adopted that of a New Orleans merchant who had been very good to him when he had first landed in America, a poor English boy who had run away from the workhouse. Stanley was already famous as an African explorer for the voyage which he had undertaken in 1871 to find Dr Livingstone. Since then England had begun to realize the importance of keeping at least a few fingers in the African pie and the London Daily Telegraph co-operated with the New York Herald in defraying the cost of the voyage This expedition, which lasted three years and which was undertaken from east to west, proved that the Lualaba which Livingstone had suspected of being part of the Congo was in reality the beginning of that river. It also showed the vastness of the territory traversed by the Congo River on its circuitous route to the sea and it brought home tales of strange native tribes, the presence of which no one so far had suspected.
It was this second voyage of Stanley’s which drew the attention of the world to the commercial possibilities of the Congo and which made it possible for Leopold of Belgium to found his Congo Free State.
When at last the fate of Emin Pasha became a subject of world wide concern, it was only natural that Stanley should be selected as the man best fitted to find him. He began his search in 1887 and the next year he found Emin in Wadelai just north of Lake Albert. Stanley tried to persuade this German, who seems to have exercised a tremendous power over the natives, to enter the service of the King of the Belgians, which would probably have meant that the great lake region of Africa would also have been added to the territory of the Congo colony. But Emin seems to have had plans of his own. As soon as he reached Zanzibar (he really was not anxious to be “saved”) he got in touch with the German authorities and it was finally decided to send him back, well provided with men and money, to try to establish a German protectorate over the high plateau between the three great lakes of Victoria, Albert and Tanganyika. Along the coast of Zanzibar the German East Africa Company had acquired large interests as early as 1885. If the lake region were added, Germany would be able to frustrate the English plans for dividing all of Africa into two parts by a broad strip of English territory running from Egypt to the Cape. But in 1892 Emin was murdered near Stanley Falls on the Congo by Arab slave-dealers who wanted to avenge some of their colleagues deservedly hung by the stern German in his younger days. Nothing therefore came of the Emin’s dream of the new Germany on the high plateau of Tanganyika. As a result, however, of his disappearance, the greater part of central Africa had now been definitely put upon the map. And that brings us to the fifth natural division of Africa, the high mountainous regions of the east.