few years ago, I accompanied my beautiful at the British Library - which was still in the walls of the British Museum, it does not date from yesterday - and, having nothing particular to do there, I had made up his mind to go round the bibliography on an episode evoking vague memories of school textbooks: the case Fashoda. What I knew: that there battled the British colonial ambitions, directed along the axis from Cairo to Cape Town, and French, seeking to establish a cross from the Atlantic to Djibouti. I thought I knew it was going in the late nineteenth century th, but that was about all.
What I read on the subject I learned a lot about what was the conquest of Africa by Europe at that time. short summary. * * *
Principal route of the expedition Marchand, Loango to Djibouti, according to Marc MICHEL.
The Franco-English Fashoda date of autumn 1899, but the expedition had been gone for three years. The scramble for effective monitoring European colonies in Africa had it, started around 1875 and accelerating in the 1880s. Since 1893, the Colonies have an Assistant Secretary of State: the colonial empire takes shape within the administration. And without that we ever decided clearly what the goals and limitations of this policy since the fall of the Jules Ferry government on the matter of Tonkin (1885), these are subjects that are avoided. Shipments in small committee will decide in the halls of the Department of the Navy or War, later the Colonial. A "colonial party" organized, but nothing to do with a political party but rather a pressure group bringing together personalities favor colonization.
In 1893, the group began to formulate plans for a shipment Congo (on which France has operations since the voyages of Savorgnan Brazza) to the Nile in the Sudan today. This territory had been under Anglo-Egyptian control - that is controlled by Britain under the nominal sovereignty of the Sultan of Cairo - but they were expelled in 1883 by a violent uprising combining radical Islam and slavery interests (the Arabs Sudan then being the main suppliers of the slave trade by the Red Sea, the only one still thriving). The French plan was to exploit the situation to settle in the Nile upstream of the raised area (State the Mahdi), to negotiate if possible alliance with the Mahdist, and use this position to renegotiate with England the dominion of Egypt - even in the craziest version of the project, checked by dam the Nile. What was hydrologically absurd, but it had impressed the politicians: we reason about half white cards in the abstract, with big blow "as is" and "must that ". * * *
The project behind, according to the political crisis: it is full Dreyfus affair. End 1896, an infantry captain in the Navy, Merchant, manages to convince the Government to entrust the mission with very limited number of French and in his luggage, a steam gunboat kit that will be raised first tributaries AGREEMENT ON Nile - the matter will be conducted smoothly.
You actually have more than two years of hell to reach the small fort of Fashoda. In particular, the famous tributary of the Nile, we imagined aiséments broad and navigable, are invaded by the Suddha, a form of floating vegetation qiu verritables dams - it takes almost digging a channel while moving. Region was devastated by madhiste, so that the food shortage ... The small stone's throw from the Congo Basin and the Nile Basin is not so easy to cross the field.
However, the British government response: General Kitchener command the armies of the Sultan of Egypt, he was Deputy British reinforcements and he led a blitzkrieg against the Mahdist. The discovery of bullets in the French timber ship captured it confirms the presence of French people - including the proposed alliance with the rebellion was apparently misfired. A month later, in September 1898, he was to Fashoda. Tension is at its bridges between France, where the political crisis deepens, and England, which mobilizes the Navy ...
And finally, the voltage drops. The second Marchand returned to France with the report of his head, down the Nile with the English: The journey lasts only two weeks ... Presumably, this disproportion between the travel time of the expedition and this one has made politicians realize the project innanité! The bulk of the expedition returned by Djibouti, on the track of the mission which would strengthen Bonchamps but had grown tired of waiting, the border is drawn on the basis of the previous situation. Any this case, there is not much - a vague resentment that will be exploited excessively by Vichy and confirmation of French domination on the east of the current CAR. * * *
But it is an episode so characteristic of colonization: a decision without debate democratic projects based on a smoky approximate geography, well, not the slightest idea about what will territories and conquered by the magic powers of the competition between the conquest becomes an end in itself.
is this kind of operation that is twisted born territorial dominion of Europeans on almost all of Africa: 70 years of this episode is called colonization. Throughout the remainder of that period, we sought to answer the question that had not posed at the outset: what for. Let's : decolonization, it is also a waiver of an answer. * * *
Main sources used:
Marc MICHEL Mission Marchand, 1895-1899, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1972.
Roger Glenn Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered , The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in French Africa, 1893-1898 , Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1970.
I also read The Race to Fashoda : Colonialism and African Resistance , DL Lewis, but I have my doubts about the seriousness of the work. Otherwise, various texts of times, but the two titles mentioned above seems more than sufficient for those whom it may concern.
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