Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War Page 6

  Sir Reginald Wingate is remembered now in Sudan for his reforms in education. In 1902 the Gordon Memorial College was set up to educate carefully selected sons of the riverine Arabs as well as some southerners. Much of the funding came from public subscription in Britain, as the Khartoum treasury was still dependent upon parsimonious Egyptian grants. The curriculum was designed to create clerical skills to enable the students to aspire to lower-ranking civil service posts at most. There was no hint yet of training for self-government. Orthodox Islam, not Sufi rituals, was encouraged by government-selected imams. A parallel system of orthodox judges was established to settle personal and domestic disputes in sharia courts.

  In the wake of devastation caused by two decades of war, economic development was a priority. Labour shortages became acute in a population reduced to perhaps only two million inhabitants. The slave trade was outlawed again, but immediate emancipation at a time of manpower shortages would have precipitated a political upheaval. Slavery in a number of forms remained. The major British achievement was the Gezira cotton scheme that soon provided many jobs and eventually a budget surplus for Sudan. This reduced Sudanese dependence on Egyptian government grants.

  In late 1914 the British deposed the Egyptian Khedive for his dalliance with the Turks. They installed a pliant replacement, despite nationalist outrage. Some extra employment was created by the war effort, but the abrupt demobilization of the Egyptian Labour Corps in 1918 boosted existing high unemployment rates. In addition, the logistical costs of Egyptian involvement in the Great War, and the principles of selfdetermination announced by US President Woodrow Wilson, helped to inspire, in 1919, a popular revolt against British rule in Egypt. The nationalists in Cairo demanded independence for both Egypt and Sudan. Egyptian independence as a constitutional monarchy was secured in 1922, except in crucial reserved areas such as foreign affairs and defence. Sudan was explicitly excluded. But how could the tiny Sudanese educated elite be inoculated against the virus of Egyptian nationalism? The British answer, as in much of colonial Africa, was ‘Indirect Rule’. The urban educated elite was bound to grow with economic and educational progress. The British sidestepped this problem: in north and south tribal leaders would be coopted. This suited many traditional leaders in Sudan, and the British SPS officials believed they were reflecting genuine nationalist feeling; the traditional leaders often regarded educated urban Sudanese as effendi, a name given to alien bureaucrats in the Turkiya and Condominium. Ironically, one of the unintended consequences of indirect rule was to confer more authority on the traditional leaders in the Sufi orders and the remaining Ansar at the expense of modernizing secular nationalists. Thus, ‘Islamism in one country’ was boosted.

  For a while it seemed to work. During the 1919 Egyptian uprising, the urban Sudanese elite did not rise up to join their brethren in the north. Part of the reason was a splitting of opinion that would undermine Sudanese nationalism until independence: should Sudan aspire to become a solo state or merge with its big brother, Egypt? Tiny organizations began to form advocating both outcomes, but for the time being British vigilance kept their activity and publications limited to cultural assertion. Ali Abdel Latif founded a more explicitly political organization, the White Flag League. He was an unlikely man to become a prototype nationalist leader, especially to the conservative riverine leadership. For a start he was a southern Dinka; moreover, he had been born into a slave family in Egypt. But he was a Muslim with obvious leadership skills, honed at the Gordon College and the Khartoum Military School. He was cashiered from the army for insubordination, said the British; he claimed he was a victim of the extraordinary arrogance of a British officer. Demanding self-determination, not unity with Egypt, he was imprisoned for three years for his political agitation, reduced later to one year. Upon his release, he became a national hero. Egyptian support, both financial and political, encouraged him to recant his original views on Sudanese self-determination and instead advocate the Egyptian nationalist line of ‘Unity of the Nile Valley’.

  British rule relied ultimately on military force. In 1924 Latif’s imprisonment spawned anti-British demonstrations. A revolt by the Railway Battalion of the Egyptian army was suppressed by British troops. Then fifty Sudanese cadets at the Military School in Khartoum also mutinied. They surrendered without a fight, the leadership was imprisoned and the school was closed. The Governor General, Sir Lee Stack, warned of ‘drastic action’. Shortly afterwards, on 19 November 1924, he was assassinated in Cairo by an Egyptian nationalist.

  Military reform now became imperative. The Egyptian army was repatriated from Sudan, sometimes under the barrels of British machine guns. The troops boarded their trains quietly. Sudanese officers were not so quiescent. They were torn between their formal oath of allegiance to Egyptian King Fuad and the respect many of them felt for their superior British officers. Units of the XIth Sudanese Battalion marched through the streets of Khartoum on 27 November. When they refused to disperse, British troops opened fire on their comrades. The Sudanese fought back. Over thirty people were killed, including fifteen British soldiers. Three Sudanese mutineers were later executed.

  The British had operated on a divide-and-rule principle in Sudan, assisted by the Rubik’s Cube of contending religious, political and tribal diversity. The development of central political movements that could challenge imperial rule was suppressed or subverted. Yet, paradoxically, the British now set about fashioning what became a central pillar of national identity for the next ninety years – the Sudanese army. Initially, of course, it was intended as an implement of imperial fiat.

  Forging a Sudanese army

  The Sudanese Defence Force (SDF) was established in 1925 as a response to the turmoil of the previous year. Until then Sudanese served in separate infantry battalions of the Egyptian army under British and Egyptian officers. These were described as Arab or Sudanese battalions. The Egyptians were recruited through annual conscription, but Sudanese units comprised long-serving volunteers. Now the ejected Egyptians were replaced by Sudanese junior commissioned officers and NCOs. A new cadre of officers was trained in Omdurman, most of them northern Arab Muslims. The command and control still rested upon the shoulders of British officers; 140 Britons were transferred from the Egyptian army. The initial strength of the SDF was around 4,500 to 5,000 volunteers, although it expanded rapidly during the Second World War.

  As a precaution, the British always kept a battalion of their own troops in the capital. With the disbandment of the old Sudanese battalions, which were designated by numbers, the new approach tried to develop a regional loyalty, not unlike the traditional British regimental structure based on county affiliations. Now the regional order of battle was:

  Equatorial Corps in the south

  Eastern Arab Corps

  Western Arab Corps

  Sudanese Camel Corps

  The Shendi Horse

  They were supported by specialized branches such as artillery, engineers, armoured car and machine-gun units, as well as the standard medical, signals and transport services. Although English was the language of command, Turco-Egyptian rank structures for officers and men survived. A major, for example, was still called Bimbashi. The SDF’s primary initial role was internal security, to support the police and provide garrisons that could fly the flag around the vast country. In the late 1930s, facing threats from the Italians, a Sudanese Frontier Force was established. Also, special irregular units were created later: for example, Gideon Force led by Orde Wingate.

  Orde Wingate spent the years 1928 to 1933 in the SDF. His relative, General Sir Reginald Wingate, recommended him, thus cutting across the regulation that British officers had to have held a commission for five years and that a British officer serving in the SDF had to sponsor him. Connections were always important in the British military system. Captain Wingate was promoted to Bimbashi (major) and posted to the Eastern Arab Corps to patrol the border with Eritrea. He was based in the Dinder area, a mixture of desert scrubland
and thick thorny forests, split by river beds and small streams. It was largely unmapped and unexplored. This is where the future general did the groundwork for his guerrilla theories, by fighting the shifta bandits poaching or slaving from Ethiopia. Wingate took part in the regular joint SDF operations with the Royal Air Force, flying Fairey 111 Fs of 47 (Bomber) Squadron, not least against another Mahdist uprising in 1928. He took the opportunity to risk his first flight in one of the Fairey biplanes, travelling from Kassala to Khartoum. Wingate enjoyed the sight of hundreds of elephants below him, but he was violently sick – over the pilot. He never liked flying and often had premonitions of death, not least in an aircraft.

  During his years in the SDF Wingate developed his theories of small independent strike forces, sometimes operating with air support. Despite his anti-social reputation later in his career, and his usually well-hidden bouts of depression, Wingate was well-respected in the SDF, not least for his polo skills, though he was warned once by his CO not to discuss politics, especially Marxism, in the Officers’ Mess. Before Sudan, Wingate was in danger of being booted out of the army, but independent command in a wild country was the making of him. Wingate and T. E. Lawrence are often compared: both men pushed themselves physically beyond normal endurance; both were effectively misfits in their own societies and came to champion ‘others’ as a chosen people. Lawrence became obsessive about the Bedouin and Wingate risked his career helping the Zionists in Palestine. They probably never met, but Wingate was later scathing about Lawrence, calling him a charlatan, though their very divergent views of Arabs and Jews may have had something to do with that hostility. Wingate was to return to Sudan during the 1939-45 war, which would test the Sudanese military reforms of the inter-war years. 1

  The military reforms were partly based upon encouraging local identity for the various corps. But the central political process from Khartoum tended to support ethnic rather than regional leadership, which was not always the same thing. The tribal structures in the north were often distinct. It was much more difficult in the south. The most populous tribes were the Nuer and Dinka who tended to avoid formal chief or kingship structures and instead relied more on spiritual leaders or prophets. Frustrated British district commissioners sometimes had to invent chieftains or back nonentities with little following, or even hunt for elusive ‘lost tribes’. Education slowly developed in English in the southern missionary schools. In the north, primary schools were expanded, often with more emphasis on orthodox Islamic teaching, with rote learning of the Koran, rather than secular education. Secular nationalists in Khartoum accused the British of a concerted policy of separating north and south via separate language and educational policies. It was more accidental drift and pragmatic adaption to local circumstances rather than devious intent, however. British officials worked with the grain in the areas they administered with little more in mind than to preserve the status quo. ‘Disturbances’ in the south were often met with punitive raids, especially against the Nuer, who would vanish into the Sudd or across the Ethiopian border.

  Rising economic prosperity in the north also helped to dampen discontent. Government-funded major projects such as the Sennar Dam increased the area of irrigated land. The Gezira scheme, originally set up in 1913, added to the incomes of tenant famers. Just south of Khartoum, it was one of the biggest irrigation schemes in the world. The cotton was actually managed by a private company, the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, but government kept a benevolent eye on prices and wages. Sudan enjoyed ten boom years courtesy of King Cotton, but the 1929 crash hit the singlecrop economy very badly. And effective labour unions were still more than a decade away.

  Gradually, in the senior echelons of the Sudan civil service, it was understood that ‘native administration’ in south and north could not rely upon just enough education to produce clerks and accountants to populate the lower rungs of government. In the south conditions remained backward – the Foreign Office suddenly discovered in 1936 that not a single government school existed. The quality of Christian schools varied enormously. Often, the squabbles between Catholic and Protestants began to match the sectarian schisms in the north, where educational standards improved rapidly in the 1930s. Teacher training colleges, schools of law, engineering, medicine and agriculture were introduced. Even the Gordon Memorial College was reformed, although it was not renamed as Khartoum University until 1951.

  Improved education inevitably meant bigger educated elites. In 1938 a Graduates’ Congress was formed. By the early 1940s embryonic political parties had been forged. The rising nationalism was spurred by some Sudanese opposition to the country’s involvement in what they dubbed a British war in 1939. They wanted emancipation from the British – ‘Sudan for the Sudanese’ – but still could not decide whether union with Egypt was the answer or, conversely, a return to a different foreign domination. Secular and sectarian rivalry still tore at the heart of Sudanese nationalism. The orthodox fought the more mystical branches, while the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, one of the largest Sufi orders in the Middle East, argued with secular modernisers. Egyptian union or not was the key debate, but other issues such as a theocratic or socialist state were passionately dissected. In 1943 the British set up an Advisory Council to incorporate the limited and polite demands of the moderate urban intelligentsia. But the British were unlikely to make any major concessions until after the Second World War.

  The 1939-1945 conflict transformed the Sudan Defence Force. Most of the officers were still British on secondment for two years’ probationary period, with a maximum of five years, when officers were expected to return to their own regiments. The attractions in Sudan were a local one-rank promotion, independence of command, and often a more expansive lifestyle including large accommodation and servants as well as desert exploration, archaeology and sport, especially game hunting. Some of the Oxbridge men in the Sudan Political Service were also allowed to join the colours. When Italy declared war on Britain in June 1940, the SDF went on the defensive at first to prevent encroachments from Italian-occupied Abyssinia and Eritrea. The Italians seized various small border towns and villages in Sudan; the most significant was the railway junction at Kassala. In August a small irregular force of Eritrean troops raided as far north as Port Sudan.

  The first Italian campaigns in Abyssinia had been a shambles; they had been thrashed at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Bloodied in the Great War and partially modernized by Mussolini’s fascist revolution, the Italian army’s second try in 1936 was much better organized. The savagery of the war has tended to be under-estimated partly because of the legacy of perhaps the most famous, and funniest, book on journalists at war, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Most Western correspondents disliked the bombastic Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, and favoured the underdog, Emperor Haile Selassie. Poison gas was used extensively by the Italians, though the war was shrouded in as much propaganda as gas clouds. One historian claimed that 99 per cent of the photographs were faked. The barbarism on both sides was not. 2

  Waugh and others have tended to create the image that the Italians always fought badly. During the Second World War they fought very hard indeed to retain their East African empire (Africa Orientale Italiana). In Abyssinia/Ethiopia alone, fascist officers commanded a force of 250,000 Italian and local troops. After the initial incursions into Sudan, in October 1940 the British foreign secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, convened a major imperial summit in Khartoum: in attendance were British generals from the Middle East and India as well as General Jan Smuts, the South African who was deputizing for Winston Churchill. Before eliminating Italian armies in North Africa, the decision was made to tackle the fascists in the east. A threepronged attack was devised, from Sudan into Eritrea and Ethiopia and into Ethiopia and Somalia from Kenya in the south.

  Although British and Indian army troops (as well as South African and Southern Rhodesian elements) were to take part in this major offensive, manpower was short. The decision was made to beef up the Sudanese forces. The years
of training under British officers and experience with the arduous climate and terrain encouraged the top brass to use some of the best Sudanese troops to form what today would be called special forces. Then they were termed irregular units for reconnaissance and strike operations. In October 1940 three mobile machine-gun companies became part of Gazelle Force, led by Colonel Frank Messervy, an Indian Army officer who was later to become the first commander of the Pakistan Army. Elements of the Frontier Battalion were placed under the command of Major Orde Wingate, who had previously served for five years in the SDF. He called this second unit Gideon Force, after the biblical Judge Gideon who commanded a small band of Israelites that vanquished a large army. Wingate always led from the front and was undoubtedly brave, but odd personal habits – such as not bathing, eating raw onions and garlic while attending meetings, or frequently addressing visitors to his quarters while totally naked – did cause disquiet among his commanding officers. He was also an ardent Christian mystic and supporter of Zionism. Wingate had spent much of the 1930s in Palestine, where he had used highly unorthodox methods while leading his Special Night Squads of Jewish and British troops during the Arab revolt of 1936-39.

  The controversial apostle of irregular warfare arrived back in Khartoum on 6 November 1940. Wingate famously said, ‘A thousand resolute men can paralyse 10,000.’ As in Palestine, he chose resolute men as his commanders; one of the most famous was the explorer and Arabist Wilfred Thesiger. Other more conventional units of the SDF, including artillery forces, took part in the big push in January 1941. Gazelle and Gideon Forces proved very effective, not least in linking up with Ethiopian partisans who fought vigorously for their emperor. The major battles of the campaign took place in February and March 1941 around Keren on the road to the capital of Eritrea, Asmara. The Italians often fought as skilfully as elite German paratroopers and inflicted heavy casualties on experienced Indian Army troops and British Highland regiments. Eventually, however, the Italians were overwhelmed.