Beja people
Nation | Active
1500 CE to 2057 CE
The Beja people are an ethnic group found mostly in Sudan, but also in parts of Eritrea, and Egypt.
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Sudan's new ruler also authorizes the burning of lists of pedigrees and books on law and theology because of their links to the old order.
The Mahdiyyah is known as the first genuine Sudanese nationalist government.
The Mahdi maintains that his movement is not a religious order that can be accepted or rejected at will but rather a universal regime that challenges man to join or to be destroyed.
The Mahdi also persuades his followers that loyalty to him is essential to true Islamic belief.
Moreover, service in the jihad replaces the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, as a duty incumbent on the faithful.
Amsgiving becomes the tax paid to the state.
The Mahdi justified his policies by claiming he has received instructions from God in visions.
The Mahdi now lays siege to Al-Obeid and starves it into submission.
The thirty thousand-man Ansar army then defeats an eight thousand-man Egyptian relief force at Sheikan.
Next, the Mahdi captures Darfur and imprisons Rudolf Slatin, an Austrian in the khedive's service, who will later become the first Egyptian-appointed governor of Darfur Province.
To avoid being drawn into a costly intervention, the British government orders an Egyptian withdrawal from Sudan.
Gordon, who has been reappointed governor-general, arranges to supervise the evacuation of Egyptian troops and officials and all foreigners from Sudan.
However, after reaching Khartoum in February 1884, Gordon realizes that he cannot extricate the garrisons.
As a result, he calls for reinforcements from Egypt to relieve Khartoum and recommends that alZubayr, an old enemy whom he recognizes as an excellent military commander, succeed him so disaffected Sudanese can have a leader other than the Mahdi to whom they can rally.
London rejects this plan, but Gordon argues that Sudan is essential to Egypt's security and that allowing an Ansar victory will invite the movement to spread elsewhere.
A "flying column" sent from Wadi Halfa on the Egyptian frontier bogs down at Abu Tulayh (commonly called Abu Klea), where the Hadendowa Beja break the British line.
An advance unit sent by river arrives at Khartoum on January 28, 1885, only to learn that two days earlier the Ansar had slaughtered the garrison, killed Gordon, and delivered his head to the Mahdi's tent.
Kassala and Sinnar fall soon after, and by late 1885 the Ansar have moved into the southern region.
In all Sudan, only Sawakin, reinforced by Indian army troops, and Wadi Halfa remain in Anglo-Egyptian hands.
At the time, Sudanese authorities dismiss him as a religious fanatic.
After denouncing tax collectors, the Mahdi and his followers, known as the Ansar, flede to Kordofan to avoid arrest.
Once there, he gains a large number of recruits, especially among the Baqqara, and the support or neutrality of all religious orders except the pro-Egyptian Khatrniyyah.
Merchants and Arab tribes who had depended on the slave trade, along with the Hadendowa Beja, rally to the Mahdi's cause.
...the Mahdi had started to raise an army in Darfur and in Kordofan following his retreat there in 1881.
The Mahdists are joined also by the Hadendoa Beja, who have been rallied to the Mahdi by an Ansār captain in east of Sudan in 1883, Osman Digna.
The Mahdi's forces have grown spectacularly, and by 1883 British sources placed their size at two hundred thousand, although that is almost certainly an overestimate.
Early in 1883, the Ansār, armed only with spears and swords, overwhelm a four thousand-man Egyptian force not far from Al Ubayyid ("El Obeid"), and seize their rifles and ammunition.
The Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha, has decided that the only solution to the growing rebellion is a fight, and against the advice of his British advisors, has started to raise an army of his own.
He hires a number of European officers to lead his force, placing them under the command of William "Billy" Hicks, a retired Colonel who has had experience in India and Abyssinia.
Hicks' force is composed mostly of Egyptian soldiers who had been imprisoned after fighting in the Urabi Revolt.
Released for service in Sudan, they accordingly show little inclination to fight.
They initially stay near Khartoum and meet small portions of the Mahdist forces on April 29, near the fort of Kawa, on the Nile, beating them off without too much trouble.
Similar skirmishes follow over the next few weeks.
Later in the summer, they heard that the Mahdi himself is besieging El Obeid, a small town set up by the Egyptians some years earlier and now the capital of the Kordofan.
The Egyptian officials decide to capture him, and, despite Hicks' reluctance, plan an expedition from their current location at Duem on the Nile to El Obeid, about two hundred miles away.
The Kordofan expedition, made up of about eight thousand Egyptian regulars, one thousand bashi-bazouk cavalry, one hundred tribal irregulars, and two thousand camp followers, carries supplies for fifty days on an immense baggage train consisting of five thousand camels.
The army also carries some ten mountain guns, four Krupp field guns, and six Nordenfeldt machine guns.
By the time the expedition started, El Obeid had fallen, but the operation is maintained to relieve Slatin Bey, the Governor of Darfur.
The force is, in the words of Winston Churchill, "perhaps the worst army that has ever marched to war"—unpaid, untrained, undisciplined and whose soldiers had more in common with their enemies than with their officers.
Either by mistake or by design, their guides lead them astray, and they soon find themselves surrounded.
The regulars' morale plummets and they start to desert en masse.
After marching for some time, they are set upon by the entire Mahdist army on November 3.
The Egyptian forces quickly form into a defensive square.
According to reports published in England soon after, the square holds for two days before finally collapsing.
About one-third of the Egyptian soldiers surrender and are later freed, while all the officers are killed.
Only about five hundred Egyptian troops manage to escape and make it back to Khartoum.
Neither Hicks nor any of his senior officers are among them.
Apparently only two or three Europeans survive.
After the battle, the Mahdist army makes El Obeid a center for operations.
Their success also emboldens Osman Digna, whose Hadendoa tribesmen, the so-called fuzzy-wuzzies, join the rebellion from their lands on the Red Sea coast.
Charles George Gordon, having reached Khartoum in February 1884, had at first been greeted with jubilation, as many of the tribes in the immediate area are at odds with the Mahdists.
Transportation northward was still open and the telegraph lines intact.
However, the uprising of the Beja soon after his arrival had changed things considerably, reducing communications to runners.
Considering the routes northward to be too dangerous to extricate the garrisons, Gordon has pressed for reinforcements to be sent from Cairo to help with the withdrawal.
He has also suggested that his old enemy Al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, a fine military commander, be given tacit control of the Sudan in order to provide a counter to the Ansār.
London rejects both proposals, so Gordon prepares for a fight.
Gordon had tried a small offensive to clear the road northward to Egypt in March 1884 but a number of the officers in the Egyptian force had gone over to the enemy and their forces had fled the field after firing a single salvo.
This had convinced him that he could carry out only defensive operations and he had returned to Khartoum to construct defensive works.
By April 1884, Gordon has managed to evacuate some twenty-five hundred of the foreign population that are able to make the trek northwards.
His mobile force under Colonel Stewart then returns to the city after repeated incidents where the two hundred or so Egyptian forces under his command turn and run at the slightest provocation.
This month, the Ansār reach Khartoum and Gordon is completely cut off.
Nevertheless, his defensive works, consisting mainly of mines, prove so frightening to the Ansār that they are unable to penetrate into the city.
The British Government under Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, under increasing pressure from the public to support General Charles George Gordon, had eventually ordered Lord Garnet Joseph Wolseley to relieve him.
Wolseley, already deployed in Egypt due to the attempted coup there earlier, is able to form up a large force of infantry, moving forward at an extremely slow rate.
Realizing they will take some time to arrive, Gordon presses for him to send forward a "flying column" of camel-borne troops across the Bayyudah Desert from Wadi Halfa under the command of Brigadier-General Sir Herbert Stuart.
This force is attacked by the Hadendoa Beja, or "Fuzzy Wuzzies" (so called for their elaborate hairdressing), twice, first at the Battle of Abu Klea and two days later nearer Metemma.
Twice, the British square holds and the Mahdists are repelled with heavy losses.
At Metemma, one hundred miles (one hundred and sixty kilometers) north of Khartoum, Wolseley's advance guard meets four of Gordon's steamers, sent down to provide speedy transport for the first relieving troops.
They give Wolseley a dispatch from Gordon claiming that the city is about to fall.
However, only moments later, a runner brings in a message claiming the city could hold out for a year.
Deciding to believe the latter, the force stop while they refit the steamers to hold more troops.
They finally arrive on Khartoum on January 28, 1885, to find the town had fallen during the Battle of Khartoum two days earlier.
When the Nile had receded from flood stage, Faraz Pasha had opened the river gates and let the Ansār in.
The garrison had been slaughtered, and Gordon had been killed fighting the Mahdi's warriors on the steps of the palace, hacked to pieces and beheaded, which the Mahdi forbade.
When Gordon's head was unwrapped at the Mahdi's feet, he had ordered the head transfixed between the branches of a tree "....where all who passed it could look in disdain, children could throw stones at it and the hawks of the desert could sweep and circle above."
When Wolseley's force arrive, they retreat after attempting to force their way to the center of the town on ships, being met with a hail of fire.
For example, the Khalifa rejects an offer of an alliance against the Europeans by Ethiopia's Yohannes IV, a Christian monarch.
In 1888 a sixty thousand-man Ansar army invades Ethiopia and penetrates as far as Gondar, capturing prisoners and booty.
The Khalifa's refusal to conclude peace prompts an Ethiopian attack on Qallabat in March 1889; however, after Yohannes IV falls in battle, the Ethiopians withdraw.
The same year, the Khalifa's best general invades Egypt, but British-led Egyptian troops defeat him at Tushki, a victory that ends the Ansar's reputation of invincibility.
The Belgians prevent the Mahdi's men from conquering Equatoria, and in 1893 the Italians repulse an Ansar attack at Akordat in present-day Eritrea, forcing the Ansar to withdraw from Ethiopia.
The French, in a race with the British to claim territory in Central Africa, send an expeditionary force across Southern Sudan, arriving on the Nile at Fashoda, just north of modern Malakal, in July 1898 and claiming the Upper Nile region for France.
Following defeat of the Mahdi's army, Kitchener and his Anglo-Egyptian force march south along the Nile and confront the French, provoking a major diplomatic and military crisis.
In the negotiations that follow, the French decided that considerations in Europe outweigh those in Sudan and withdraw westward, leaving Britain in control of the Upper Nile basin.
From 1898, the United Kingdom and Egypt administer all of present-day Sudan as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, but northern and southern Sudan are administered as separate provinces of the condominium.