Frank Lupton

Frank Lupton

Frank Miller Lupton Bey (born 1854 in Ilford, Essex , now Redbridge , London ; died May 8, 1888 in Khartoum ) was a British civil servant in the Egyptian Sudan . At the beginning of the Mahdi uprising , he was governor ( mudir ) of Bahr-al-Gazal province .

Life

Contemporary map of the provinces of Bahr al-Ghazal and Equatoria on the eve of the Mahdist invasion

Lupton grew up in his native Ilford as the son of a local trader. In 1878 he became an officer in the British Merchant Navy . During a stay in Khartoum in 1879 he was hired by Charles Gordon , the governor general ( hikimdar ) of the Egyptian province of Sudan , as an administrative officer and should replace Emin Bey as governor of the province of Equatoria . Because of the Sudd he needed for his trip across the Nile from Khartoum to Lado, the provincial capital of Equatoria, for almost two years. Emin Bey refused to replace him and instead appointed Lupton in December 1880 as his deputy ( mamur ) and district governor ( nazir ) of Latuka. From July 1881 Lupton stayed in Khartoum, where he was appointed by the new Governor General of Sudan, Rauf Pascha , to succeed Romolo Gessi as Governor of the province of Bahr-al-Gazal . He took up his new office in December 1881. There he was confronted with uprisings of various Dinka tribes, which had risen in the name of Muhammad Ahmad ( Mahdi uprising ). In 1883 Muhammad Ahmad Karam Allah sent to Bahr-al-Ghazal to conquer the province. Left on his own, Lupton surrendered on April 28, 1884. To save his life, he converted to Islam while in captivity. He was allowed to live as a slave with his family in al-Ubayyid , where he met the prisoners Josef Ohrwalder and later Rudolf Slatin . When Muhammad Ahmad, the leader of the Mahdi uprising, went to Omdurman to support the siege of Khartoum with his hordes , all European prisoners, including Lupton and his family, had to accompany him. Once there, Lupton was put in chains. In September 1885 he was freed from his chains and released from slavery on the intervention of Rudolf Slatin with Abdallahi ibn Muhammad , successor to Muhammad Ahmad, but was only allowed to move freely within Khartoum. Lupton and his family from then on lived in extreme poverty. As a result of malnutrition, his health deteriorated and he died emaciated on May 8, 1888 of meningitis .

literature

• E. Macro: Frank Miller Lupton . In: Sudan Notes & Records, Vol. XXVIII (28), 1947, pp. 50-61. JSTOR 41716507
• Richard Hill : Lupton, Frank Miller . In: A Biographical Dictionary of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951, p. 218.