End of the Darfur campaign

The British official chronology of the war states that on 31 December 1916 the campaign of the Sudan Government’s troops in Darfur, which had begun on 1 March, came to an end. No battle was fought that day. The date rather formally closes the period of hostilities. The last serious clash had taken place almost two months earlier, on 6 November, when Major Hubert Huddleston’s detachment caught up with Sultan Ali Dinar’s camp near Jebel Juba and the Sultan was killed. After that there was only the clearing of the country of the remnants of his followers. Other dates for the end of operations are also found. The British “Fasher” clasp to the Khedive’s Sudan Medal covered, according to descriptions of the decoration, the fighting from 1 September to 23 November 1916.

After the Sultan’s death

Accounts of the fate of Ali Dinar’s family differ. According to the British aviation historian Andrew Roe, his wounded son Muhammad Fadl lay beside the Sultan’s body, and nearby two other sons, Husayn and Sayf al-Din, were waiting to surrender. Other studies write that two of his sons were killed together with the Sultan. What is certain is that after Ali Dinar’s death no one took over the leadership from him. Several hundred of his men, including members of his family, had already surrendered earlier at Kulme.

The country did not calm down at once. The British official history of operations in Egypt (MacMunn and Falls) compares the situation in Darfur to the aftermath of wars in medieval Europe: for a time bands of masterless armed men roamed the country, plundering the defenceless. They were gradually rounded up and broken up. The whole of Darfur was now quiet, except for a remote corner in the north-west. Darfur was also covered from the north by the French, who in neighbouring Wadai, conquered a few years earlier, were holding back the infiltration of followers of the Senussi.

The balance of the campaign

The expedition was small. Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Kelly led into Darfur some 2,000 soldiers of the Egyptian Army, including Sudanese battalions, the Camel Corps and machine-gun sections with British crews, supported by a few aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps. They fought only one major battle, at Beringia on 22 May, and the next day occupied the capital of the sultanate, El Fasher. Their own losses were negligible. According to some studies, the cost of the expedition, about half a million pounds, was borne by the Egyptian treasury.

MacMunn and Falls warned, however, against measuring the threat by the ease with which it had been averted. In 1915 Ali Dinar had declared for Turkey and kept in touch with the Senussi, who at the end of 1915 attacked Egypt from the west. According to the official history, it is not hard to stamp out a spark running along a fuse to a powder keg, but it must be done quickly and firmly. The authors recalled that the Germans and Turks had planned to provoke outbreaks not only in Darfur but also in Kordofan, in Upper Egypt, in the Fayum and around Alexandria, and that their consequences could have been disastrous.

A new province of the Sudan

Darfur, which under Ali Dinar had been almost independent since 1898, now became an ordinary province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. According to the official history, it added about a million inhabitants to it. Sources give different dates for the formal annexation. Many of them name 1 January 1917, the day after the end of the campaign, but some historians give later dates, even November 1917. The first governor of the province was Kelly, who held office in the throne room of the Sultan’s palace in El Fasher until he left for the Palestine front in May 1917. The Governor-General of the Sudan, General Sir Reginald Wingate, who had sent the expedition, became British High Commissioner in Egypt at the beginning of 1917.

The borders of the new province were not yet finally settled. To the west lay the sultanate of the Masalit, a former vassal of Ali Dinar, which kept its separate existence for several more years. Its border with French Wadai was settled only after the war.