The World полностью

As fanatical Ansaris defeated British and Egyptian troops, the British press demanded: ‘Send Gordon!’ Gladstone reluctantly appointed the righteous maverick Gordon to evacuate Sudan, only for the general to follow his own divine mission. When the Ansaris closed in, Gordon continued to hold Khartoum with 7,000 Sudanese. ‘I feel so very much inclined to wish it His will might be my release,’ he told his sister. ‘Earth’s joys grow very dim, its glories have faded.’ As the publicity-seeking martyr flaunted his courage, a public outcry forced Gladstone to send an expedition under Wolseley. ‘Better a bullet to the brain,’ wrote Gordon, ‘than to flicker out unheeded.’ The doomed Gordon chain-smoked, beat his servants with a cane and ranted, ‘Go, tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear!’

On 26 January 1885, the Mahdi stormed Khartoum, butchering Gordon’s troops. Gordon himself was speared on his veranda; his head was cut off and taken to the Mahdi, who hung it from a tree in Omdurman: ‘his blue eyes half-opened’, noted a European prisoner. The British admired this display of Christian heroism and demanded revenge; Gladstone was swept from office (GOM now said to mean Gordon’s Own Murderer). The Mahdi ruled Sudan, making slavery a government monopoly, assisted by Arab slave masters who enslaved hundreds of thousands. On his death the khalifa (successor) Abdullahi, served by fifteen enslaved boys and 400 concubines, took command, treating Darfur and Equatoria as hunting reserves for slaves. Keen to expand his empire, in 1888 the khalifa invaded Ethiopia, slaughtering or enslaving thousands then sacking the capital Gondar. Emperor Yohannes counter-attacked into Sudan. In March 1889 at Gallabat – a neglected moment, perhaps because it was an encounter between Africans, but one of the biggest battles ever fought on the continent – 150,000 Ethiopians chastened 80,000 Sudanese, who tore victory out of defeat by killing Yohannes IV, the last monarch to be killed in battle, sending his head back to dangle next to Gordon on that grisly tree in Omdurman.

This battle, in which as many as 30,000 were killed, was just one sector in the carve-up that would be unleashed in part by the ambition of one king.

BUTCHER LEOPOLD, HANGMAN PETERS AND MAD CAPTAIN VOULET: AFRICAN CONQUESTS

Angular and awkward, long-nosed and bushy-bearded, Leopold II of Belgium was an oddball manipulator who had always craved an empire. Son of Victoria’s uncle Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and a daughter of Louis Philippe, the young duke of Brabant was embarrassed by being ‘king of a small country and small-minded people’, but claimed that ‘When men are great, however narrow the frontiers within which they live, they always find the means to do great things.’ He tried to buy Crete, Cuba, Fiji, Sarawak, Philippines, Vietnam and parts of Texas and China. Inspired by Ismail the Magnificent, he thought Egypt ‘a gold mine and we must spare no effort in our attempt to develop it’, then suggested, ‘One could purchase a small kingdom in Abyssinia.’ His father married the boy to a Habsburg archduchess, Marie Henriette, who was obsessed with horses: it was a marriage ‘between a stable boy and a nun’, joked Pauline Metternich, ‘and by nun I mean the duke of Brabant’. After his accession in 1865, Leopold declared that his ambition was to make Belgium ‘strong, prosperous, [and] therefore have colonies of her own’.

As soon as he heard of Stanley’s trans-African journey, he announced, ‘I’d like to see Stanley.’ He charmed Stanley, the journalist who fancied himself a warlord. Setting up his Comité d’Études du Haut-Congo, its name designed to sound philanthropic, the king hired Stanley, who understood that the ‘clever’ king, ‘under the guise of an international Association, wants to make a Belgian dependency of the Congo basin’. In Africa, Stanley started to found Belgian ‘stations’, the most important being Leopoldville (Kinsasha), beating a French explorer Comte Savorgnan de Brazza in the race to claim territory. ‘I don’t want to miss,’ said Leopold, ‘a share of this magnificent African cake.’

In 1882, he set up the Association Internationale du Congo to front his acquisitions, which he called ‘Free States’, claiming swathes of ‘central Africa abandoned by Egypt where slave trading continues. To allow these to be administered by a new State would be the best way to get at the root of the trouble and eradicate it.’