Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

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Map of the Kingdom of Egypt with the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan before World War II Kingdom of Egypt Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Sarra triangle (ceded to Italy in 1934)




Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was the name for Sudan including South Sudan from 1899 to 1956 . Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was a condominium of Great Britain and Egypt during this period . Since the head of state of Egypt was placed under British "protection" from 1914 to 1922 , the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was de facto a colony in the British Empire until the independence of the Kingdom of Egypt .

administration

The condominium was administered by a British governor general . He was supported by a legislative and an executive council . The 13 provinces into which Sudan was divided up to 1919 were entrusted exclusively to British governors. Each province was divided into districts headed by Egyptian officers controlled by English inspectors.

Under British rule, the capital Khartoum was expanded according to plan, the Gordon Memorial College was set up (mainly to train local officials) and, above all, the cultivation of cotton, which was a very important import item for the British textile industry, was intensified. The largest cultivation area was the Jazira plain between the White and Blue Nile south of Khartoum. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan did not have its own flag, but the flags of Great Britain and Egypt were used.

history

Map of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan with Egypt from 1912
Faruq (I.), tenth Egyptian ruler of Sudan, was established in 1951 for King of Egypt and Sudan proclaimed
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1955

In 1821 Sudan came under the rule of Egypt ( Turkish-Egyptian Sudan ). Until 1934, a triangular piece of desert, called Ma'tan as-Sarra , with a remote oasis in what is now Libya, belonged to the administrative area. It was then handed over to the Italians.

The Mahdi uprising began in Sudan in 1881 and culminated in 1885 with the conquest of Khartoum . Egypt itself was occupied by Great Britain in 1882. In 1898, Anglo-Egyptian troops under the sirdar of the Egyptian army, Horatio Herbert Kitchener , were able to recapture the Sudanese Nile region from the rebellious Mahdists. The land was not returned to Egypt, but constituted in 1899 as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium with Lord Kitchener as the first governor general. In fact, Sudan was a British colony. Egypt continued to claim Sudan for itself, but was only a junior partner in the condominium . British officials controlled the administration of Sudan, and Egyptian officials were at most middle management.

In 1898/99 the Faschoda crisis broke out between Great Britain and France because the two powers could not agree on their property claims in Sudan. France, which had already been exiled by Great Britain on the Lower Nile (in Egypt) in 1882, claimed at least the Bahr al-Ghazal region on the Upper Nile as compensation . In the end, France had to withdraw from Faschoda , and the Sudan Treaty , signed in 1899, defines the border between French and Egyptian-British territories, giving Sudan its current western border. In 1910 the previously Belgian Lado enclave became part of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

After Kitchener became Chief of Staff to Lord Roberts in the Boer War in December 1899 , Francis Reginald Wingate took over the role of Governor General. Wingate worked from 1899 to 1916 to overcome the economic aftermath of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan. Under Wingate's friend, the Austrian officer, explorer and former Egyptian governor of Darfur , Rudolf Slatin , became inspector general.

Darfur initially remained outside the real sphere of influence of the Anglo-Egyptian administration. Only after the Sultan of Darfur had joined the Holy War of the Ottoman Sultan, the call for revolt by the Egyptian viceroy Abbas Hilmi II , who had been deposed by the British, and the Central Powers, Darfur was occupied by Anglo-Egyptian troops in May 1916 affiliated to Sudan. In the same month, a poorly prepared incursion by Ethiopian troops under Iyasu V , who had also joined the Central Powers, failed on the eastern border . During the Second World War, Sudan was attacked again from the east, and Italian troops briefly occupied Kassala , Gallabat , Kurmuk and Qeisan in 1940 . In addition to Anglo-Egyptian troops, the Sudan Defense Force set up by the British also played a part in their expulsion in 1941 .

The Egyptian-British relationship, however, was not free of tension. After a smoldering anti-British uprising since 1919, Egypt was able to shake off the British protectorate in 1922 and became a kingdom . The British Governor General Lee Stack was murdered in Cairo during the Sudan crisis in 1924 as an opportunity to effectively abolish the condominium and expel the Egyptian troops from Sudan. It was only with the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 , which legitimized the British troop presence in the Suez Canal zone and in Sudan, that the Anglo-Egyptian administration was restored in Sudan. When resistance against the British increased in both Egypt and Sudan after the Second World War, Egypt's King Faruq endeavored to join Sudan directly (" Unity of the Nile Valley ") by proclaiming himself as King of Egypt and Sudan tried to put at the head of the resistance and terminated the condominium in 1951. Instead, the British relied on local Sudanese leaders who wanted Sudan's independence from Egypt. After the fall of Faruq in Egypt, the new Egyptian and British governments concluded an agreement on the independence of Sudan within three years in 1953. In 1953, for example, the first parliamentary elections in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan were held. Egypt's hopes that the independent Sudan would then voluntarily unite with Egypt were not fulfilled in view of the change in direction of the originally unionist forces in 1955 (election victory and split of the National Union Party, which had propagated the “unity of the Nile Valley”).

See also

literature