161. Exciting adventure, crushing misery: two sides of Empire

An episode in two parts.

The first is an adventure story, the extraordinary march across Africa of a small detachment of French troops led by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand. He occupied the abandoned Egyptian fort on the Nile at Fashoda. There he was met not by the planned supporting columns of Frenchmen, but by General Kitchener with a massively bigger force. In fact, the two men didn’t fight, but met and were perfectly courteous with each other. It was up to the politicians in London and Paris to sort out the Fashoda incident. Given how precarious the French position was, inevitably it was resolved in favour of the intransigent British Prime Minister, who emerged with a British monopoly on access to the Nile in Sudan. Poor Marchand had to march away again having achieved very little, except to establish himself as a model for little boys to admire.

The second part is about the other side of the coin of imperial Britain. That was the unbearable, crushing poverty in which a huge proportion of the population lived. Charles Booth, arguably the first Social scientist, established in his remarkable research that 30% of the population of London were living below the poverty line, and that line was a lot lower than it is today. Grandeur was the outward-looking face of Empire; behind the scenes, things were a lot uglier.

Fashoda was just one critical incident for Britain in Africa. The next would be in South Africa. And the Empire would be looking for the men to fill the ranks of its army among just those poor, crushed by their misery and undermined by disease.

Illustration: Jean-Baptiste Marchand on the cover of French magazine celebrating his march across Africa. © Paris - Musée de l'Armée, Dist. RMN - Grand Palais / Pascal Segrette 06-506187 / 2001.72.2

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.