THE SUDAN.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 24 September 1924, Page 8

THE SUDAN.

WHY BRITAIN REMAINS

SOME CHEQUERED. HISTORY

GREAT WORKS IN HAND

Where the watch fires of the Alahdi Gnee burnea great electric standards have scattered the darkness of these recent summer nights, blazing to keep the dam-building engineers at work after sunset (writes a correspondent to the Manchester Guardian). For at Makwar, outside Sennar (which lies 180 miles south of Khartoum on the Blue Nile), the tremendous waterworks which are to do for their part of the Sudan something of what Assuan has done for Egypt, are being swiftly carried, through to completion., Only, a generation ago the valley of the Upper Nile was a paradise for slavers and a purgatory for natives. In the last 25 years, while a clean sweep has been made of most of the ancient ills which preyed upon the Sudan, the province has kept out of the news. Now it has returned again, and we are witnessing, as its future is discussed, familiar reactions of opinion. Die-hard Imperialists protest that we must stand no nonsense from these Egyptian agitators; let them make a mess of Cairo —that will be bad enough—but spare Khartoum. Die-hard pacifists declare that wfe already waste too inueh money and interfere too freely with other people’s liberty; it is time that we folded our arms and left the deserts behind us. Between these confident extremists is a large body of opinion undecided because it is not quite clear what the Sudan is, what we have done there, and what we may expect to do in the future.' These three points are, therefore, worth clearing up. COTTON AND CANNIBALS.

Kipling gave a short and vivid definition of what the Sudan is when he. wrote a story about a young Englishman who started eotton-growing in his district and was supplied with cannibal labour. The Sudan, that is, includes within its wide territories the most violent contrasts pf culture. In the. north the Pharaohs and the pashas of ancient and Turkish Egypt have left their mark; while the south has not altogether forgotten the witch-doctors. One can see how simply this has come about by remembering * that where the Sudan begins the Mediterranean is not so very far away, and that it ends almost on the threshold of - Central Africa and. the Great Lakes. Such unity as it possesses is drawn, of course, from the Nile. The Sudan and Egypt form between them a wedge thrust between the mountains, the desert, and the sea' and covering the valley of the Nile. Of the depth of .this wedge the Sudan makes uo about two-thirds. For Egypt from Alexandria to Haifa is roughly 650. miles, in length, and the Sudan from Haifa to the Uganda border is roughly 1300 miles. The frontiers of this southern and large part of the Nile Valley are not yet accurately delimited. The line with Egypt, for instance, loses itself along parallel 22 degrees in the imperfectly explored wilderness of the Libyan desert. MILLION SQUARE MILES. Within its million square miles of soil relatively fertile, of mountain, swamp and desert seethes a bewildering stir-about ol peoples. “Wave after wave of immigration and invasion from the earliest times, of Arab slavetraders and wandering tribesmen from the east and of black races from the south and west, have left- a population wonderfully mixed. In the towns (of which Omdurman with 60,000 inhabitants and Khartoum with 40,000 are the chief) a few Europeans and Egyptians may. be found. But there are not more than .50,000 foreigners in the 4,000,000 people. In the north are nomadic Hamites and Arabs, in the centre Arabs, Nubian mountaineers, and negroids, and in the south, towards the Belgian Congo, Uganda, and Kenya, pure negroes. Arabic and innumerable dialects (a. group of related languages of which 18 distinct varieties are known is _ current among the Nubians alone) jostle one another in a babel of tongues. Mohammedanism flourishes, > besides varying shades of paganism, ’ which probably account for A majority of the population, and which, until recently at least, took on at their gloomiest the filthy darkness of cannibalism.

THE YOKE OF EGYPT. Foi* modern purposes this- chequered land entered history, when the adventurer Alehemet Ali, having "amputated” Egypt from the trunk of the Ottoman Empire, and being eager for slaves, recruits, and gold, embarked a century ago on the conquest of the Sudan. At his death Egyptian rule reached as far south.as Fashoda, and the "Khartoumers” (the organised Arab slaving companies) were thus given a conveniently advanced base. In vain the Khedives passed edicts against slavery. Through the ’sixties and ’seventies the ghastly business went on. How ghastly it was may be discovered by the curious who care to consult such reliable witnesses as Baker, Gordon, Junker, and Slatin. Through the mid-Victorian age the Sudanese were "a people scattered and peeled, a nation meted out and trodden under foot.” Their situation was changed without being improved when a middle-aged Berberine tribesman assumed the traditional Sunni title of the Mahdi and declared a holy war. What happened then is still remembered. Within 20 years the free-lance Englishman Hicks Pasha had been defeated, Gordon had been slain, the Mahdi had died in his bed, and Kitchener had established our "right of conquest” under the Keneri hills at Omdurman. WHY BRITAIN CONQUERED. Our object in thus conquering the Sudan was threefold. We wished to safeguard the integrity and the water supply of Egypt, and we feared that the dervishes, encouraged by their own successes and hv that of their neighbours the Abyssinians at Adowa, would be a menace unlessi they were attacked. Secondly, we—and in this we had all civilised opinion behind us—were- determined that the slave trade must stop. Lastly, our prestige had suffered a very galling blow when Khartoum fell; we wanted, in fact, to get a bit of our own back. For fhese three reasons we sanctioned the sending of an Anglo-Egyptian army of conquest. Towards the expenses of the expedition the Cairene Government contributed over a million and a half Egyptian pounds, and the British Government gave just over three-quarters of a mil--1 ion. Such is the nature of the Sudan and the explanation of our presence there. AVhat we have done and what we are likely to do remain to be discussed.