THE SUDAN: Trumpets Sounding

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I was riding a handy, sure-footed grey Arab polo pony. We wheeled and began to gallop . . . Bright flags appeared as if by magic, and I saw arriving from nowhere Emirs on horseback . . . The Dervishes appeared to be ten or twelve deep at the thickest, a great grey mass gleaming with steel. They seemed to be wild with excitement, dancing about on their feet, shaking their spears up and down . . . I found myself surrounded. I fired . . . Three or four men from my troop were missing . . . Trumpets were sounded . . . Two squadrons were dismounted and in a few minutes their fire . . . compelled the Dervishes to retreat . . .

Thus Winston Churchill, a dashing young subaltern in the 21st Lancers, describes the Battle of Omdurman, one of those minor actions which made the British Empire great in the days of Queen Victoria. For 80 years, Egyptian armies had spread fire and confusion among the ancient kingdoms of Kordofan, Darfur and Nubia, immediately south of Egypt, part of a vast area south of the Sahara desert called by the Arabs Bilad-as-Sudan, meaning Country of the Blacks. When the British army occupied Egypt (1882), an attempt was made to bring order also to these vassal states, but for a score of years a local religious leader, the Mahdi, with thousands of fanatical followers called Dervishes, resisted the British. At Omdurman (1898) the 60,000 Mahdist spearmen were whipped. A year later the British made a treaty with Egypt, cutting Egypt in for a half share in the management of the Sudan. For all its name, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (an area one-third the size of the U.S.) was a solid segment of the British Empire.

Self v. Good. It was a turning point in the saga of the empire, which, after a few disputed additions, was to grow only smaller. Already in London young Churchill, on the threshold of a brilliant parliamentary career, was immersed in discussions about colonialism and "the issue of whether peoples have a right to self-government or only to good government." The Sudan got "good" government. For centuries Arab slave traders from the north had raided the Negro villages of the south, sold their captives on eastern markets. The British put down the slave trade. The dancing Dervishes became respectable Sudanese, and the British educated them.

The time came, after World War II, when the educated Sudanese decided to make the shift from "good" to "self" government. Anticipating a bitter struggle, the Sudanese independents sought the support of the Egyptians. They overestimated British resistance to their aims.

A little more than two years ago, without a struggle of any kind, the British agreed to withdraw from the Sudan as soon as an independent provisional government could "Sudanize" the administration and write its own constitution. Last November, 57 years after Sandhurst-trained Winston Churchill charged into the Battle of Omdurman, the regimental band of the Roy al Leicestershires played God Save the Queen and the last British soldier left the Sudan.