Start of the war with the Sultan of Darfur

The British official chronology of the war, published by the Committee of Imperial Defence, gives under the date 1 March 1916 the beginning of hostilities between the government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the Sultan of Darfur, Ali Dinar. None of the sources we have been able to consult, however, points to any specific event on that day. General Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan and Sirdar, that is commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Army, wrote in his report only that “at the beginning of March 1916” he personally visited En Nahud near the border and then ordered his troops to cross the Darfur frontier. They crossed it only in the second half of the month. The date of 1 March thus marks the end of Khartoum’s patience rather than the first shot.

A sultan by Kitchener’s grace

Darfur, lying west of the Sudanese province of Kordofan, was one of the old kingdoms stretching across the middle of Africa. In 1874 Egypt conquered it and joined it to its Sudan, but after the Mahdist uprising the country passed out of its control. Ali Dinar, a descendant of the old sultans, served the Mahdist Khalifa. On the eve of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 he left his army with a few thousand men, fled to El Fasher and restored the rule of the sultans there. In 1899, with the consent of the then Sirdar, Herbert Kitchener, he took over the government of Darfur as a sultan recognising the suzerainty of the Sudan. From 1901 he paid it a small annual tribute, and the intermediary between him and Khartoum was the Austrian Inspector-General of the Sudan, Baron Rudolf von Slatin. Relations had been deteriorating for years, however, mainly because of an unresolved dispute over Darfur’s western border and suzerainty over the border lands in the west, on the side of the old kingdom of Wadai, occupied by the French before the war. Ali Dinar also admitted no European to his capital.

On the side of the Sultan in Constantinople

News of Britain’s war with the Ottoman Empire changed the Sultan’s attitude. According to Wingate’s report, Ali Dinar openly defied the government for the first time, stopped paying tribute, and in April 1915 formally renounced his allegiance to the Sudan and declared for its enemies. He kept in touch with them through the Senussi order, whose influence reached across the Sahara as far as Darfur. The British official history of the operations in Egypt adds that the Sultan proclaimed a jihad against the British government, and that his entourage was stirred up by the propaganda of the Ottoman mission with the Senussi. The same history judges that Ali Dinar was not hostile by nature, but had surrounded himself with fanatics who fed him false news. As long as he did not attack, he was left alone.

The situation changed at the end of 1915, when Wingate came to the conclusion that the Sultan was preparing a raid on the Sudan simultaneously with the Senussi attack on Egypt. In December a detachment of the Camel Corps was sent to En Nahud, an important trading centre in western Kordofan. It was to protect the town and warn the Sultan against his announced expedition against the Rizeigat, a tribe of southern Darfur loyal to the government. Ali Dinar responded by reinforcing his posts at the wells of Jebel el Hilla, just across the border. The British official history sees this as part of a wider plan: in the same week of February in which the Senussi forces set out from the Siwa oasis against the oases of the Western Desert, the Sultan concentrated his forces on the Sudanese border. It notes, however, that this strategic design did not originate with Ali Dinar himself or with the Senussi leader, and links it with the German and Turkish plans to tie down as many British troops as possible in Egypt.

Wingate’s decision

At En Nahud, about 145 kilometres from the Darfur border, Wingate assembled a force of all arms numbering about 2,000 men: Sudanese, Arab and Egyptian battalions of the Egyptian Army under British officers, with mountain artillery and machine guns. They were commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Kelly of the 3rd Hussars, seconded to the Egyptian Army. As Wingate wrote, the Sultan’s letters and other news from Darfur that arrived during the concentration confirmed his hostile intentions. After his visit to En Nahud the Governor ordered Kelly to cross the border and occupy the wells at Umm Shanga and Jebel el Hilla, the first permanent sources of water west of En Nahud, on the road to El Fasher. According to Wingate this was to protect the inhabitants of the borderland and open the way for further operations. The enemy was not underestimated. The Sultan’s standing army, made up of slave soldiers, numbered according to Wingate about 10,000 men, most of them armed with firearms, and the Governor warned that even the slightest victory over the government troops would bring crowds of volunteers to Ali Dinar’s banners, drawn by religious zeal and the hope of plunder.

Kelly’s troops entered Darfur in the second half of March. The campaign, conducted over hundreds of kilometres of waterless savannah, brought the capture of El Fasher in May and the death of the Sultan himself in November. Darfur, almost independent for over a dozen years, then became an ordinary province of the Sudan.