The Mahdi and Africa

The story of the Mahdi of Sudan is generally related from the British point of view, though it was more an African event. The Mahdi’s uprising was the latest in a series of Islamic rebellions and wars which began in the eighteenth century. It also had a profound effect on the rest of North and East Africa, destroying the Egyptian Empire, provoking Ethiopia into a new unification, which allowed it to successfully resist the Mahdists, the Egyptians, and the Italians; it brought British forces forward from the East African coast as far as Uganda for fear that some European power would seize the sources of the Nile and block the river’s flow. Eventually (but only after several humiliating defeats) the Mahdist state was overthrown by a British invasion (led by Kitchener and participated in by Churchill); this also produced a difficult confrontation at Fashoda between the British conquerors and a French expedition – sparking a European crisis. The author sets the Mahdist war in the wider context of Africa and Islam, and in the context of the development of African states, but also with a glance forward to the present day, where the most important development in Africa is the extensive Islamic uprising, which is replicating that of the nineteenth century.