Lado enclave

Map of the Lado enclave from 1909

The Lado enclave ( French Enclave de Lado ) was a lease area of the Congo Free State that existed from 1894 to 1910 and was located on the west bank of the Upper Nile in an area that today belongs to South Sudan and Uganda . It had an area of approximately 40,000 km² and a population of approximately 250,000. The capital was Lado .

development

The original area of the Lado enclave was taken over by Samuel White Baker on behalf of the Egyptian Khedive in 1869 and then belonged to the Egyptian province of Equatoria of the Turkish-Egyptian Sudan . In 1874 Charles George Gordon succeeded Baker and moved the capital from Gondokoro to Lado . Gordon tried to pacify the area with 300 soldiers, but after the end of his mandate only Lado and a few small villages were under Egyptian administration. Emin Pasha succeeded Gordon as governor, who had the place Lado expanded into a city. During this time Lado grew to 5000 inhabitants and there was a mosque, a Koran school and a hospital.

As a result of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan, the enclave was cut off from the central government and abandoned. To prevent French expansion into Sudan, Great Britain, which had occupied Egypt in 1882, leased the abandoned territory to King Leopold II of Belgium in 1894 on behalf of Egypt . This gave the Congo Free State access to Rejaf and thus to the navigable Nile . In return, Belgium leased a strip of land in Eastern Congo, which Great Britain needed for the planned construction of the railway line from Cape Town to Cairo . At the beginning of 1896 a first Belgian army of 30,000 people reached the enclave. This army was to move on from the enclave into Sudan to conquer the Mahdi Empire. At that time it was by far the largest army that had been set up in Central Africa until then and, according to the Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck, was a "chaotic bunch" of indigenous auxiliaries, pressed Congolese and a few Belgian officers. After the passage towards Sudan, the troops mutinied, killed 10 Belgian officers and the huge army dispersed. In 1897 a much smaller but much more powerful Belgian colonial army of the Force Publique with 800 soldiers under Louis Napoléon Chaltin reached the region and was able to defeat the 2,000 Mahdists in the Battle of Rejaf . Chaltin was supposed to march on with his troops towards Khartoum , but did not have the strength and, to the annoyance of the British, began to occupy areas of Bahr al-Ghazal , which according to the treaty the British were entitled to. After British threats, the Belgians withdrew. Léon Hanolet succeeded Chaltin. In the following period there were numerous tensions between the British and Leopold II, who then had Lado expanded into a strong military base with 12 guns in 1906.

After the end of the lease, the area of the Lado enclave was incorporated into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1910 . The southern half was ceded to the British protectorate of Uganda in 1912.