Hell of a place the Sudan, all rock and sand and thorn….Charley Gordon had governed it in the ‘70s and spent most of the time pouring over Scriptures and chasing slavers…Mad as a cut snake he was…It was the mention of Gordon’s name more than my own that brought the sweat out on my brow…Well, soldiering under Joe Wolseley [Lord Viscount Wolseley, British hero of the Sepoy Rebellion and other imperial misadventures] was bad enough but at least he was sane. Gordon? I’d just as soon go to war with the town drunk.
-Flashman and the Tiger, George MacDonald Fraser
Narrator- Enter the Sudan. A million square miles of desert and scrub. It was here out of the vast, hot African nowhere that a man of the Nile, a man of vision, and mystery and vanity rose up..He called himself the Mahdi, the Expected One…..Gladstone- You don’t bore me, Gordon. You’re illogical and insubordinate. I know if I send you to Khartoum, you’ll play tricks, you’ll exceed your orders...and in the name of some mystical necessity apparent only to yourself, you’ll do your ingenious best to involve this government up to the hatband. Gordon- But you’re in a very poor patch, and you have no one to turn to but me. Gladstone- This must be understood. No British troops will come up the Nile. I will not assume a responsibilty to police the world. If you can help the Sudan, your country will be grateful. If you can’t, my country will understand. Gordon- I’ll go. Gladstone- Well Gordon, God go with you, and I don’t envy God.
-Khartoum, the movie. Charlton Heston as General Gordon, Ralph Richardson as Prime Minister Gladstone
In a fit of absence of mind. That’s how British historian J R Seeley described in 1883 his nation’s acquisition of an empire that contained half the peoples of the globe. A year later Britain with Gordon’s conivance was to start down the path that in 1898 added one of the final jewels to that crown, a territory that upon independence in 1956 would be the continent’s largest country, “a vast, hot African nowhere”.
To say as Flashy did that a town drunk might have made better choices than did Gordon in Sudan is no understatement. In the movie, his bearer Khaleel- played by the Senegal-born Johnny Sekka, who had Christianized his name from Lamine, Amin, in order to get his British movie roles upgraded from khawaja’s houseboy to gentleman’s gentleman- knew how to fix Gordon his favorite B&Ss, brandy and sodas, even when under siege first the soda and then the spirits gave out, which maybe in truth would have put him about on par today with Omdurman’s biggest merissa lush.
What was founded as Gordon Memorial College is now the University of Khartoum. I met with the university’s Dean for the library, a proud graduate of Michigan State, and although we never got around to comparing Gordon’s last stand on the steps of the National Palace just next door to that of another proud Spartan, Leonidas at Thermopylae, we did both bemoan the sorry state of the main reading room. And as asked by its author Robert Kramer, I did turn over to the stacks a copy of his recently published Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman During the Mahdiyya 1885-1898. I bet Gordon would have enjoyed reading it if he’d lived a few more years, just to see how it all turned out.