THE HATED BAGGARA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2373, 24 August 1899, Page 56

THE HATED BAGGARA.

(Cornhill Magazine.) The black's hatred for the Baggara is extraordinary, but is not to be wondered at when one mows the circumstances. The Baggara has been the black's bogey from his birth ; his village has always been exposed to raids from Baggara slave-catching parties. He himself has in all probability been carried off when a child by one of these parties, his father most likely killed, his mother carried off with him and sold as a slave ,his heme given to the flames. Every atrocity imaginable has been piled up by these pests of the Soudan. Small wonder then that the black man hates the Baggara with an unquenchable hatred. To give two instances of Baggara methodf. In the beginning of the year 1896 the English general from Cairo was inspecting the frontier force at Wadi Haifa. The troops were engaged in a field-day, when news came that a party of dervishes had attacked and put to the sword the village of Addendan, some 20 miles north of Haifa. The Camel Corps at once started to try and cut off the raiders in the desert on their return juorney, but with little chance of success, as the news was more than 24 hours old. After going some 50 miles a patrol got on to their tracks, and found there the body of a black girl some ten years of age, her feet cut to ribbons by the rocks and stones over which she had been driven, her back flayed by the stripes of her merciless captors. She had been beaten along until could move no more, and then left to die in the desert* Within a few weeks of this a dervish patrol came down to within a mile of Sarras one evening. Two little boys were going out from the village to their father, who was tending his sakieh. They met this patrol and greeted the leader. He replied •ith a spear-thrust, and his companions finished the work he had liegun. The poor wee bodies were found by the troops a short time afterwards beheaded and disembowelled. The following incident shows the untamble ferocity of the Baggara : — Soon after the occupation of the Dongola province a Camel Corps patrol went out from Debba to the wells of Kofrait. These wells are very deep, and a long r6pe is requisite in order to obtair water. Close to the wells the patrol discovered the dead body of a Baggara warrior alongside his slaughtered horse. The man, a fugitive from Dongola and tortured with thirst, had arrived at the wells. Finding no means of obtaining water, and accepting his fate, he had deliberately killed his horse, broken his saddle, cut his bridle to pieces, buried his weapons, and then calmly laid himself down to die, satisfied that nothing of his would fall into his enemy's hands. The principal leader in most of the fron-^ tier raids w.is one O.sman Azrak by name, v.j.o iuusnvarcU nict a \\ til-merited death

at Omdurman. He was the ogre of the frontier, and enjoyed an almost supernatural reputation, combined with an uncanny habit of being killed and coming to life again. The inhabitants of Beris, which oasis he raided, described him to the officer commanding the Camel Corps as a giant eight feet high and with one eye in the middle of his forehead. . . . The~ best Arabs we came across on the Bayuda feide were undoubtedly the Hassania tribe, whose headquarters were Gakdul, although, strange to say, they' had the reputation of being the worst of any robbers of the Bayuda desert, whose hand was against every man, whether Turk or dervish ; but we always found them to be most dependable, and first-rate guides. Our usual guide in the Gakdul country was a merry little fellow called Zeki, very unlike the taciturn Arabs one generally met. He had been one of the two Arabs who had helped Slatin Pasha to escape from Omdurman, and he told me that he was afterwards seized, taken in chains before the Khalifa, and charged with this heinous offence. Zeki put on an air of extreme simplicity ; pretended to be more than half a fool; said he might have been given a dollar for getting some stranger a camel, but that he had forgotten; that he was a poor man, and a dollar was a dollar, and so on. The Khalifa was completely imposed upon by these ingenious tactics, said "This man is an idiot," and let him go.