Europe in Africa in the nineteenth century

Front matter

DAVID LIVINGSTONE.

EUROPE IN AFRICA

IN

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Mehemet Ali 9

II. Arabi Pasha 35

Chapter I. Mehemet Alt

WHILE one morning preparing to begin this sketch of Europe in Africa, my eye fell upon the column of " Situations Wanted " in a local morning paper, and I read the advertisement of a young Swiss who desired a position as valet and interpreter, concluding with the words : " No objection to Africa."

Such an announcement could not have been possible in 1822, the year when the reminiscences contained in this series of papers on the nineteenth century may be said to begin.

South Africa was then only a field for missionary labors, or the watering station for great merchantmen upon their way to India ; West Africa, East Africa, and Central Africa were known only to the Portuguese and slave traders. The Africa that borders on the Mediterranean had severed its connection with Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire, and had sunk into that state of semi-barbarism which combines the vices of civilization with those of savagery.

In 1895, Africa (a country of eleven million, nine hundred thousand square miles) is almost entirely under the so-called *' protection " of various states of Europe, or belongs lO EUROPE IN AFRICA IN THE XIXTH CENTURY.

to their spheres of influence." Only two and a half millions of miles are as yet unappropriated. For weal or for woe, Africa is now part of the European international system ; the balance of power (the political police plan of Europe) influences its destinies from the Cape to the Mediterranean.

" France since 1876 has increased her African lands eight-fold, Great Britain seven-fold ; Congo Free State, of a million of square miles, is a perfectly new creation ; both Germany and Italy have for the first time in their history taken up serious African responsibilities, and even Russia, not content with owning half-uninhabited Asia, has made some attempts to gain a foothold in Abyssinia. . . . True that at this date there are in most of the regions thus covered by proclamations only a few scattered outposts of European occupation ; still, for better or worse, these African regions, desert, littoral, or riverine, belong to Europe. . . . The map maker will be duly followed by the surveyor and engineer, and the minor details of France, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Great Britain, and Belgium in Africa will be worked out according to scale. At present the paths of explorers are simply thin lines, along which a little general knowledge of the countries and of the natives has been gained, and are mere flying survey-routes preparatory in every sense to the history-making epochs of the Continent, and its development in the succeeding century."

Darkness gathered over Egypt after the fall of the Roman Empire, and it settled down on Northern Africa in the fifteenth century about the same time that wondering Europe turned its eyes upon the Western World. But in the days of early Christianity, and subsequently in those of the Arabian philosophers and mathematicians of the Middle Ages, the influence of lands in Africa that we now despise exceeds our estimation. To Greece, Africa had given arts, letters, and a taste for household luxury ; and through Greece, as the intellectual mistress of Rome, had extended her influence over the whole civilized world. While what Christianity owes to Alexandria both before and after the Christian era, and to the North African churches westward on the shores of the Mediterranean, we are only now learning to appreciate.

In the division of the Roman Empire into East and W est, Egypt was assigned to the Byzantine emperors, under whose weak administration it soon fell into decay. In 640, eight years after the death of Mohammed, his followers overran the country. Under the Abbasides (those caliphs to whose Hne both Haroun Alraschid and Saladin belonged) Egypt recovered a little of its prosperity ; its native population, however, whether fellah or Christian, was completely under the heel of the Arab and Saracen conquerors. One of the sultans of Egypt, at the close of the twelfth century, purchased from Genghis Khan, a conqueror who had overrun all Central Asia, twelve thousand youths, whom he educated as soldiers. These boys were, for the most part, Turks, Mingrelians, or Circassians. The plan of educating slaves for soldiers was subsequently adopted by the Turkish leader Othman, when he formed his corps of Janissaries. The captives purchased by Sultan Malek Salah were all forced to become Mohammedans, they were well trained, were stalwart, handsome men, and became a splendid body of cavalry. They were called Mamelukes, from the Arabic word memalik, a slave, but after the death of their first master they began to interfere in the affairs of government. Their power and their insubordination increased. They made no scruple of assassinating the reigning sultan of Egypt, and in 1254 made their own leader Ibegh, sultan in his room. It was a Mameluke sultan who soon afterwards opposed Saint Louis in Egypt ; and the Mamelukes retained their power 263 years. The place of sultan was awarded always to some acknowledged leader, but their sultans were many ; for nearly all of them perished by assassination. The prophet Ezekiel, when Egypt was in the plenitude of her prosperity, foretold that she should be "a base kingdom," and for seven hundred years it has been true of her, as it has been of no other nation, — she has been ruled by slaves.

The ranks of the Mamelukes were recruited, not from their own families, — for the Mamelukes had extraordinarily few descendants, — but by boys bought as slaves in Circassia, or made prisoners of war, and educated to be soldiers. In 15 17 Sultan Selim I., the conqueror of Syria, elated by his triumphs, resolved to possess himself of Egypt. He attacked the Mamelukes, and laid siege to Cairo. When his conquest was completed, he left in Egypt a Turkish pasha as its governor, but allowed its twenty-four provinces to be still governed by Mameluke Beys.-^

The Turks ruled Egypt, nominally, for two hundred and twenty years ; but the power and wealth of the Mamelukes gave them in all things the direction of affairs ; the Turkish pasha simply did their bidding. They continually assassinated their leaders, among them a man named Ali Bey, who had ruled Egypt with unlimited power from 1766 to 1773.

In the year 1769, a year signalized by the birth of Napoleon, WeUington, and Castlereagh, a man httle their inferior in talent or in statesmanship was born at Cavalla, a town in Albania, the ancient Macedonia. His name was Mehemet Ali. He was of the Ottoman race, and therefore, although poor, was noble by heredity. Not that the Ottoman is ever of pure Turkish blood, and we know not the race of Mehemet All's mpther. His father and a guardian uncle both died when he was in early boyhood ; and the orphan was cared for by the Turkish governor of Cavalla, who brought him up with his own son. The educational attainments of these boys did not, however, extend to the arts of reading and writing, which Mehemet Ali painfully endeavored to acquire when forty-five years old.

But education by no means consists in a knowledge of the three Rs. Mehemet profoundly studied men, and the ways by which he might bend them to his will ; he also formed the acquaintance of a French merchant, a native of Marseilles, who opened his eyes to the extent and the advantages of European civilization. Mehemet AH is said never to have forsaken a friend, even when that friend had treated

iThe title of Bey is now given to Egyptian colonels, but in the days of the power of the Mamelukes it was bestowed on governors. The Mamelukes considered themselves the aristocracy of Egypt, whether they were chiefs or simply soldiers.

ME HE MET ALT, him with treachery; and his gratitude was great to the foreigner who had enlarged his mind's horizon. When he held power and fortune in his hands, he endeavored to shower benefits upon this Frenchman's family.

It is a little remarkable that while Mehemet's sympathies and his policy throughout his reign were French, his first step in Hfe was directed to the furtherance of EngHsh interests in Egypt, and the destruction of the remnant of the French army deserted by Napoleon.

Selim III., the Turkish sultan who had looked on with indifference when the French invaded Egypt, and attempted the destruction of the Mamelukes, was at last, by Enghsh influence, stirred into action. He raised an army to assist the English to drive out the French. The Albanian contingent, three thousand strong, was commanded by the son of the governor of Cavalla, who chose his old comrade Mehemet (then dealing in tobacco) as his second in command. After a brief experience of the hardships of war in Egypt the young general returned home to Cavalla, and Mehemet Ali took command of the contingent.

General Bonaparte when he quitted his Egyptian army (composed largely of the troops who had fought under him in his first campaign in Italy) left the brave Alsatian General Kleber in command. Kl^ber was assassinated shortly after by a Mohammedan fanatic, and General Abdullah Menou, who succeeded him, proved utterly incompetent. The discouragement of the troops under his command had been increased when a large force of English landed at Aboukir, reinforced by a considerable body of Turkish troops, of which the Albanian contingent formed part. The whole of the French army and its generals surrendered to the English and Turks, during the summer of 1801, shortly before a general peace was signed at Amiens.

It then remained for the Mamelukes to get rid of the Turks and English. This they did by inducing the former to join them, and attacking the English in Alexandria, when a large body of British troops was forced to surrender, and four hundred severed heads of EngHsh soldiers are said to have dangled from the city walls. Egypt was then left at the mercy of its own factions. Four years of anarchy succeeded the expulsion of the French, during which the country was overrun by Mamelukes, Circassians, Albanians, Bedouins, Delhis (the Bashi-bazouks of the period), and Mograbins, all armed, all bent on plundering the native population.

It would be little interesting to enter into an account of the ups and downs of fortune among these various armed bands of mutineers and robbers. In 1805 the Porte, forced to side with one party or one chief, took the side of its own Albanian troops, and made Mehemet AH, their commander, its Egyptian viceroy, exacting, however, as the price of this distinction, that he should make an expedition against the Wahabees in Arabia.

The Wahabees were a sect of reforming Mohammedans, followers of Abd el Wahab, which means Servant of the Bountiful. The Arabs have always held the Ottoman Turks to be lax and corrupt Mohammedans. Abd el Wahab, born in the heart of the Negid, in 1691, thought that the religion taught by the Prophet had degenerated into mere idolatry, with its invocations of saints, and pilgrimages to shrines. He objected also to the use of tobacco, hashish, and intoxicating drinks, especially tobacco ; also to the wearing of silk and gold. He was, in short, a protesting Mussulman, and he hated Turks as cordially as anti-Papists in Queen Elizabeth's time hated the Spaniards. He died in 1787, and was succeeded by his son, the Sheikh Mohammed, who, without taking the title of Mahdi, claimed a divine mission. He taught, as the Prophet Mohammed had taught, the existence of one God, the maker of heaven and earth, the rewarder of the good, the punisher of the evil ; but he, rejected the legends contained in the Koran, especially those concerning the Prophet, whom he considered only as a man beloved of God. This protestantism he forced upon orthodox Mohammedans, by the same means that the Prophet

MEHEMET ALT.

had employed to force his doctrines on idolaters ; " conversion or death " being the sole alternatives.

The Wahabees soon became dominant in Southern Arabia. It is said that their military leader, Abdul Aziz, could bring into the field one hundred and twenty thousand armed men. Their soldiers were all cavalry. They spread from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, reached several parts of Asiatic Turkey, and plundered and defiled the shrine of Hussein, the martyred son of Ali, the most highly venerated saint among the Persians, before any measures were taken by the Porte to put a stop to their devastations and conversions.

In 1 80 1 an expedition was sent against them from Bagdad, but their success in opposing it emboldened them to attack Mecca, where they put the Sherif Ghalib to flight, and seized upon the holy city. They destroyed many of its religious monuments, and carried off immense treasures. Emboldened by such success, they attacked caravans of pilgrims, got possession of the Mahmel, a splendid chest in which the Sultan sent yearly offerings to the shrines of the Prophet, gained possession of Medina, and dictated terms to the Porte, on which alone they would permit pilgrims to visit the holy places.

By this time Abdul Aziz had been murdered by a Persian, and his son Saood II. was the Wahabite leader. He governed like one of the early caliphs, keeping up war on all sides with all who would not submit to him ; but especially he fought the Turks. He had a negro general named Hark, who carried his arms across the Euphrates, and threatened Damascus. At this point England interfered, for Wahabee pirates had begun to interrupt her trade with India by infesting the Persian Gulf, and in 1809 a considerable force was sent from Bombay to protect the imaun of Muscat. Pressure was then brought by the English to bear upon the Sultan, and its result was the stipulation made with the new Pasha of Egypt, that he should undertake the punishment and extirpation of the Wahabees.

Mehemet Ali, however, dared not undertake an expedition beyond the bounds of his own PashaUc, leaving such a force as the Mamelukes behind. He summoned all their Beys to the citadel at Cairo, to witness the investiture of his son, Toussein Bey, with the command of the forces to be led into Arabia. Four hundred and seventy Mamelukes obeyed his summons. As they were leaving his presence, where they had been graciously received, and, mounted and armed, were passing through a narrow passage to an outer court, fire was opened on them with cannon. Every man was killed but one. He leaped his horse over the parapet, and when his body was searched for shortly after, the mangled carcass of his horse was found, but no trace of the man who had owned him. Here is Mehemet All's own account of the matter, when he frequently in conversations with Lesseps alluded to the massacre. " He said he saw nothing of what took place, but was so near that sounds from the court reached him. He laughed at Horace Vernet's picture, in which he is represented as tranquilly looking on. ^ So far from being tranquil,' he said, ' I was in the utmost anxiety ; I was not sure of my troops ; the Mamelukes had many friends among them, and if they could have forced'-the gates of the enclosure, or if Emin Bey, who blindfolded his horse with his turban, and forced it to leap the parapet, had been followed, I might have been lost. I had horses at the postern of the citadel ready to fly for my life in case of failure.' In fact," said M. de Lesseps, " he contracted on that day a little nervous cough which he never lost."

Mehemet Ali is also reported to have said, what is unquestionably the truth : " Had I not destroyed them, they would have destroyed me."

More than one of the Europeans who had served under Mehemet Ali said, long after his death, to Mr. Senior : " Mehemet Ali employed cruelty, but only as a means to an end. He was naturally kind-hearted, and the object of his reign was to make Egypt great and powerful."

A few days after the massacre, an old woman, closely veiled, presented herself before him. She said she came to ask his clemency for Emin Bey. The Pasha assured her that so brave a man might count on his protection, when, throwing back her veil, she disclosed the features of Emin Bey himself.

A general massacre of Mamelukes took place, however, throughout Egypt. Some escaped to the north and joined the Wahabees ; some escaped south, and found refuge in the Soudan. Toussein Pasha was despatched to Arabia ; but his success was not as great as his father had anticipated. The Arabs defeated him in 181 2. But Medina and Mecca fell into his hands in consequence of the treachery of Ghalib, the Sherif of Mecca. The keys of the holy cities were then solemnly delivered to the Sultan at Constantinople, and received with great rejoicing.

In 1 81 3 Mehemet AU himself came to Arabia and remained eighteen months in Medina. The Wahabees, however, were by no means subdued. Toussein again fought them after the departure of his father, and concluded a treaty of peace with them, which was disavowed by the Sultan. Toussein soon after died of the plague, and his father was almost heart-broken under the bereavement. He sent another son, however, who was subsequently well known through all the world as Ibrahim Pasha, to complete the subjugation of the heretic Wahabees. These were already distracted by disputes among their leaders, and at last submitted to the nominal sovereignty of the Sultan. They occupy a broad belt of land running from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and from time to time, when we read of troubles in Yemen, the meaning of the telegram is that there is an outbreak among the remnant of the Wahabees.

After 1818 Mehemet AH, finding himself securely in possession of his Pashalic, set himself to improve and civiHze his people.

He had in all seventy-two children, but only ten lived to grow up, and he was deeply attached to them. The mortality in harems among the children of slave mothers, who are c always confided to the care (?) of the legitimate wives, is appaUing.

His sons were Ismail, Ibrahim, Toussein, Said, Hussein, Abdallah, Hahm, and Mehemet Ali. Of three of these — Hussein, Abdallah, and Mehemet Ali — history knows nothing. Ismail was barbarously assassinated in the Soudan. Ibrahim proved himself one of the great men of the nineteenth century, succeeded his father, and reigned little more than two months. " If Ibrahim Pasha had lived," said those Europeans and Europeanly educated Egyptians who talked to Mr. Senior in 1855, about the troubles in Egypt, " the country would have been very different from what it is now." Ibrahim, by the Turkish law of succession, was succeeded by his nephew. Abbas Pasha, the son of Toussein. Abbas was followed by his uncle Said ; Said, by the first Khedive, Ismail, the son of Ibrahim Pasha ; and, the law of succession having been changed, his successor was his son Tewfik, and Tewfik's son. Abbas II., is the present Khedive.

The sons of Mehemet, and most of his grandsons, were sent to Europe for their education. They returned, speaking French like Frenchmen, with advanced ideas as to the material improvement of their country, and as to religion less Mohammedans than philosophes.

Mehemet Ali's rule in Egypt was that of a stern, hard man. He was determined to be obeyed. Notwithstanding severe exactions of forced labor on his public works, his sway was favorable to the fellaheen. He might oppress them, himself, but he protected them from the more galling exactions of their own sheikhs and the tax-gatherers. The great object of his reign, as I have said, was to make Egypt rich and powerful, though he often mistook the means, as better instructed sovereigns have frequently done. "He adopted," said one of his own officers, " the measures (often erroneous) which he sincerely thought the best, without scruple, without pity, without remorse, but he was not selfish." And Lesseps, who knew him well, and whose father for many years had been French Consul General in Egypt, thus described him : —

"Mehemet Ali's establishments were too great, not for the objects at which he aimed, but for the strength of the nation. He was a man of genius and of strong, unrelenting will. He proposed to himself to raise Egypt into a great country. For this purpose he stimulated his people to eiforts that were exhausting, but they produced their effect. He made the country secure within, and formidable without. He gave to it improved agriculture and industry. He educated his sons and his grandsons to follow his footsteps. When I returned last year [1854] to Egypt after seventeen years' absence, I was astonished at its progress. Egypt had passed from barbarism to civilization. . . . As a man of creative and administrative genius, I put Mehemet Ali very high ; indeed, I am not sure that I do not put him higher than Napoleon himself, if we take into account their comparative advantages. Napoleon belonged to the most highly civilized nation on the Continent, and received the best education that nation could give. The storms of the Revolution had thrown to the surface the men most eminent for talents and for knowledge, and thus gave him the best assistants. He organized France, improved its laws, restored its finances, and created the centralized system of administration, which, partly for good, and partly for evil, still subsists. But he had excellent materials, the civilization of ten centuries to work on, and excellent instruments to work with. Mehemet Ali had to create everything. He had almost to create himself."

Such is the judgment of one great man upon another. It may be interesting to see the parallel drawn by Renan between Mehemet Ali and King Herod.

" Herod was a splendid Arab, intelligent, skilful, brave, strong of body, inured to fatigue, and much given to women. Mehemet Ali in our own day gives us perfectly his measure and his limit. Capable of everything, even of baseness, when the thing in hand was to reach an object he had at heart (in Herod's case always some object of his own ambition). He had a true sentiment of greatness, but he was completely out of tune with the country he was to govern. . . . Herod saw the world as it is, and being of a coarse nature, he loved it. ReHgion, philosophy, patriotism, had no meaning for him ; he was in short a fine animal — a lion, whom one admires for his massive throat and his thick mane, without expecting any moral sense from him."

This is a fine passage, but it is not just to Mehemet Ali, who was morally far in advance of King Herod, as Renan depicts that monarch in his History of the People of Israel.

Mehemet Ali disciplined his army. He surrounded himself with Christians. He sent many hundreds of young men to be brought up in Europe. He executed public works of inestimable value to his adopted country. He established schools in all the towns and villages, and institutions for the higher education of officers, although knowledge was so unpopular among his subjects that instances were known of mothers blinding their children to save them from being forced to receive instruction.

Mehemet had, however, no interest in what we now call Egyptology. The monuments of Egypt's past greatness were nothing to him. A story has been circulated which ascribes to his grandson, Abbas Pasha, a design for utilizing the Great Pyramid, but we have the authority of M. de Lesseps for saying that the real Vandal was Mehemet Ali himself.

The great scheme of the Barrage, which was started in Mehemet' s time, and remains to be completed in our own day, nearly cost us the Great Pyramid.

"Mehemet Ali sent for me one day," says Lesseps, "and said, 'This Barrage threatens to be expensive. I think we can diminish the cost by using the Pyramid for our quarry. Ascertain for me what would be the expense of transporting the stones of the Great Pyramid from Gizeh to the point of the Delta.' 'Oh! ' said I to myself, 'this is the scheme of somebody who is to be entrusted with the affair, and intends to sell half the stones.' I made a very conscientious report on the expense of removing the Pyramid, and also on that of quarrying the stones in Toora, the finest quarries in the world. Happily it turned out that the latter experiment was by far the less expensive. But if I had not been there, or if he had gone to work without consulting me, which, however, would not have been easy, the Pyramid would have been pulled down. The people who proposed it

MERE MET ALL cared nothing for expense; it was for them merely an expedient for plunder."

"Did Mehemet Ali learn from contact with Europeans any respect for the monuments of Egypt?" asked Mr. Senior, to whom Lesseps was relating this story. " Not in the least," was the answer. "He remained till his death, in this respect, a mere rude Turk. No man destroyed more of them. He pulled down the temples of Abydos, of Arsinoe, and many others, to build his manufactories. At last we persuaded him that this would render him unpopular in Europe, and he ordered the practice to be discontinued. But, as he cared nothing for art or for antiquity, he did not look t© the execution of his orders; he did not punish the breach of them, and the destruction went on during all his reign. Abbas Pasha was as ignorant and careless. It was not until Said Pasha's accession that it was stopped."

Meantime in the East a great crisis was approaching. Mehemet Ali, always interested in the affairs of Europe, and keenly alive to the signs of the times, watched his opportunity for acquiring Syria. His ambition seems to have been to found a great empire, which, like that of the Seleucidae, three centuries before Christ, should comprise Asia Minor and Syria, Egypt and Arabia, and stretch from the Levant to the Euphrates, from the equator to the shores of the Dardanelles. But great ambitions in the nineteenth century have not free scope as they had in the days of Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane. They are curbed by the international policy of Europe, whose keynote is the preservation of the balance of power. The Sultan was under the protection of England, and his empire was not to be weakened, lest Constantinople should become the prey of Russia, and that great rival, whose naval power England has long learned to dread, should acquire a free entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.

The mutual jealousy of France and England has led to innumerable troubles and complications in the East, and to much of the misgovernment and misery still prevailing in lands whose coasts are washed by the Mediterranean. But for this we might have had no Armenian question to puzzle diplomatists, and rouse the sympathies of Christendom, but a tolerant and progressive government in the East, willing to go hand in hand with the nations of Western Europe in paths of progress and civilization; a government favorable to communication with India, both by sea and land.

It is not probable that Mehemet Ali wished to become himself the Sultan at Constantinople. The Padishah, by right of birth, is Caliph; that is, the temporal head of the Mohammedan faith, endowed with a sort of sanctity by virtue of his office. To all this Mehemet Ali could have advanced no claim.

During the revolution in Greece, the Pasha of Cairo, as he was then called (for pashas, like bishops, take their titles from the chief cities in their jurisdiction — not from the surrounding territory), sent large bodies of Egyptian troops, well disciplined and well equipped, to aid the Sultan. They were under the command of his brave son, Ibrahim Pasha, and great was the devastation they committed in the Morea. His fleet was less successful than his land forces; it was worsted in several engagements with the Greeks, and was finally destroyed in 1827 by the allied fleets at Navarino. When the war ended, English ships transported Ibrahim Pasha and his army home.

In the recently discovered correspondence between the sovereigns of Egypt and Syria, far back in the early days of Hittite, Assyrian, and Egyptian civilization, we find frequent complaints from the Pharaohs that large bands of their peasants had escaped into Syria. The same thing happened four thousand years or so later, when some thousands of the fellaheen, 'disgusted with the endless and systematic exactions of the Egyptian government, crossed the deserts which separate Africa from Asia, and sought refuge in the territory of the Pasha of Acre." This was in

IBRAHIM PASHA.

1 83 1, when Europe was too much interested in its own revolutions to pay much attention to the affairs of the East.

Mehemet Ali, who, indeed, needed his people to complete by forced labor the great works he was carrying on in Egypt (works, it must be confessed, all calculated to improve the country, and multiply its resources), demanded his subjects back again. The Pasha of Acre declined to deport them. Whereupon Mehemet fitted out a large force against him, commanded by Ibrahim Pasha. There are no good harbors except Acre, on the coast of Palestine. Plerod had attempted to create one at Csesarea, but time has long since destroyed his works, and Acre continues to be the key of Syria. The sea must always be the base of land operations in that country, because it alone can furnish the contending parties with supplies. Napoleon said that had he taken Acre he would have changed the face of the world.