JA'AFAR PASHA MAZHAR - A WORTHY GOVERNOR-GENERAL - 1865-1871

Ja'afar Mazhar could lay claim to have been the most enlightened Turkish Governor-General of the Sudan in the Egyptian military occupation 1820 - until the fall of Khartoum to the Mahdist forces in January 1885. Unusually, but in company with Abdel Latif Pasha Abdallah (1850-52), his military experience derived from service in the Egyptian navy in the years 1830-47 before appointment successively to a number of provincial governorships, including that of the island of Thasos (off Kavalla, birthplace of Mohammed Ali Pasha) in 1863, and of Qena, Upper Egypt, a year later.

The death of the ruthless Musa Pasha Hamdi, Governor-General 1862-65, after a successful defence of the Sudan from the Abyssinian threat of the Emperor Theodore H in 1862, followed shortly after a mutiny of Sudanese troops of the Kassala garrison in November 1864. Skilfully contained by the intervention of Sayyid el Hassan Mohammed Osman el Mirghani, the terms for a truce were broken by the province governor, Ibrahim Bey Adham el Mahallawi, in reporting the event to Khartoum, leading to instructions from Cairo for capital punishment to be visited on the mutineer leaders. At this point, February 1865, Musa Hamdi was dying, yet news of his decease did not seemingly reach Cairo until May. It was to take a further six months and a further mutiny in Kassala before a new governor-general reached Khartoum.

In marked contrast to his earlier decisive reaction to Theodore's threat of invasion in 1862 by again appointing a governor-general, Viceroy Ismail Pasha Ibrahim initially in June 1865 planned a succession to Musa Hamdi of three general-governors: Ja'afar Pasha Sadiq now aged 60, to be general-governor of Taka (Kassala) province with Suakin and Massawa; Selim Pasha Sa'ib el Jazairli, of Blue Nile and eastern White Nile territories. and Ja'afar Mazhar, of Kordofan, Dongola and Berber and the western White Nile. Selim Pasha's distaste for Sudan service prompted his early withdrawal, leaving the two Ja'afars in disharmony and the plan in ruins within a fortnight. The Viceroy swiftly appointed Ja'afar Sadiq aged 60 as Hikimdar with Ja'afar Mazhar, six years younger, as his deputy on 19 June and himself quit Egypt for eight weeks. Unbeknown to him or to his Sudan lieutenants, a second mutiny had broken out at Kassala, news of which only reached Cairo on 20 August shortly after Ja'afar Mazhar's departure to finalise the acquisition of Suakin and Massawa. The latter task was countermanded in order to enable Ja'afar Mazhar personally to command a regiment of reinforcements from Suakin to Kassala where the second mutiny had been bloodily crushed by 10 September. It fell to him in November 1865 to conduct courts-martial of the serving mutineers and to report on the background to the mutinies.

Thereafter instead of proceeding to his original task, Ja'afar Mazhar was ordered to remain in Taka to clamp down on the insurrectionist Beja. When summoned to Khartoum in March 1866, it was to find himself appointed Hikimdar in the place of Ja'afar Sadek and charged with a major overhaul of the machinery of government. Ja'afar Mazhar's energy and competence had impressed his Viceroy. Ja'afar was confronted with a demoralised army, an exchequer in deficit and a country suffering from disease and famine. Musa Hamdi had now been dead for a year.

The Kassala and other mutinies of 1865 had exposed the internal threat to security. The Viceroy accepted the need for drastic economies, and sanctioned the reduction of the regular troops from 10,000 to 7,000 and of the irregulars from 7,000 to 4,000. Most important, the pay of regular troops would be assumed by Cairo, leaving the irregulars only for the account of Khartoum, so that budgeted annual military costs fell to œ76,000 in 1867 against œ367,000 three years previously. Civil expenditure economies were likewise sought by Ja'afar Mazhar and, if necessarily impossible on a comparable scale, yet approached twenty per cent, and those of the hakimdaria itself of a third. On the revenue side, the Viceroy ordered the mitigation of Musa Hamdi's excessive tax burdens. Had the new Governor-General been left free to pursue a financial policy of prudence and moderation, and to direct investment into the development areas of economic potential, notably Taka and Sennar, the Sudan might have emerged a contented if not a prosperous dependent province of Egypt.

Ja'afar Pasha's accomplishments extended to the intellectual and the cultural. A devout well-educated Moslem, he encouraged the spread of literary Arabic and approved the appointment of the Sudanese Sheikh el Amin Mohammed el Darir as president of the Islamic Professors of the Sudan. Primary schools were started in Khartoum, Berber and Dongola and Koranic khalwas in all provinces. Civil law and civil courts were introduced on the Egyptian model. To augment the limited numbers of Egyptian doctors, the first medical assistants were trained and hospitals were eventually founded in nearly every province. In the principal towns at least, permanent municipal building projects for offices, residences, mosques and forts built in limestone were initiated to replace the traditional mud and wattles. A dromedary postal service was started to connect Khartoum and Berber with the weekly steamer service between Suakin and Suez, while by 1870 the telegraph line commenced in 1863 between Cairo and Khartoum reached Khartoum North.

His personal courtesy won the cooperation of tribal chiefs alienated by Musa Hamdi. Sheikh Ahmed Bey Awad el Karim Abu Sin remained mudir of Khartoum and in 1869 Sheikh Hussein Khalifa of the Ababda became mudir of Berber. The Hadendoa Sheikh Ibrahim Musa, the Beni Amer Sheikh Hamid Musa and the Shukriya Sheikh Ali Awad el Karim, younger brother of Ahmed, were to be honoured in Cairo by the Viceroy in 1867. Ja'afar was regarded by the people as personally incorrupt and Richard Hill recorded: "there still lingers a story that he left Khartoum (in 1871) owing large sums to various creditors, an evident proof in Sudan eyes of his refusal to live by graft."

The first year of Ja'afar's governor-generalship was marked similarly by energetic activity on the political front. He consolidated the provincial structure he inherited from his predecessors, including the White Nile province of Deinab, soon to be renamed Fashoda. Sennar was merged with Fazughli. The indolence of the governor White Nile in countering razzias mounted by Sennar merchants against the Dinka and Shilluk, the victims being auctioned at Deinab, was visited by firm retribution - the governor and military commander sentenced to hard labour in Fazughli and the victims released and repatriated or recruited. Slave-raiding suffered a major set-back. The Shilluk reth misread the action for weakness and merited his deposition. More significant in the long- term however was the attack by the Darfur Hamar on Kordofan and the suspected collusion between the Darfur Sultan and Emperor Theodore II of Abyssinia, who continued to harbour predatory ambitions on the eastern Sudan until his suicide at Magdala. Aware of the Viceroy Ismail's long-term ambitions to occupy Darfur, Ja'afar Mazhar was responsible for dispatching an intelligence mission, ostensibly cementing good relations to the Sultan, in El Fasher. Finally, in January 1867, he had ordered the occupation of Kuflt on the route from Massawa to Kassala.

When at the end of that first year Ja'afar Mazhar left for Cairo in April 1867 on leave, he was unaware that his proactive initiatives towards the establishment of better government in the Sudan were to be dashed by the aggrandisement plans of his Viceroy. His leave was interrupted in July 1867 with an extraterritorial mission to reconnoitre and secure for Egypt the support of the Danakil and Somali tribes of the southern littoral of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden as far as Berbera and, to pre-empt any British intent, to plant the Egyptian flag at principal vantage points. To his disappointment this new speculatively Egyptian territory was to be the concern, at least temporarily, not of Ja'afar Mazhar but of a separate general-governorate.

Throughout the next eight months Ja'afar Pasha's presence was retained in Cairo while the new Khedive planned financial and military dispositions - some current, some future - for a plurality of expensive projects: firmans granting to his personal family hereditary succession to the viceroyalty and to himself the title of Khedive; escalating expenditure regarding the completion and opening of the Suez Canal; and territorial acquisitions on the Abyssinian border, the Red Sea littoral, Equatoria, Bahr el Ghazal and Darfur. All would overshadow the remaining years of Ja'afar Mazhar's Sudan service and, when he was finally permitted to return to Khartoum in May 1868, it was only after acceding to the termination of the Egyptian subvention to the Sudan of over œ 1 5 0,000 and its substitution by an annual Sudan contribution to the Cairo treasury exceeding œ200,000. Once again the Sudan was in the economic thrall of its conquerors, a spring- board for further territorial aggrandisement.

A swingeing increase in the level of taxation in the Sudan had now to be levied, undoing the previous patient efforts of the Governor-General to reconcile the Sudanese to the previous record of exploitation and brutality of their masters. From Europeans, traders and travellers alike, he was to suffer unfair blame for the consequent imposition of an uplift in revenues of some two-thirds and even the accusation of corruption. By contrast the chronicler of the Tarikh el Sudan would eulogise his period of rule.

There is no evidence on his return in 1868 of the energetic personal visits to his provinces which had characterised that first year of optimism. Loyal to his Khedive, he was doubtless depressed at the defeat of his development plans, and the coming years were marked by increasing alienation. Disappointed by the creation in his absence of a distinct general-governorate of the Littoral with Suakin and Massawa, though it lasted only until Ja'afar's return to Khartoum, the governor-general now found himself the midwife, by virtue of the Shilluk corridor of the White Nile, of two military expeditions. He had himself been a protagonist of the first, aimed via the axis of the White Nile and the Bahr el Ghazal, at the seizure of the qism of the Dar Fertit. It had been inspired by the ambitions of Sheikh Mohammed el Hilali, a former dependent of the Darfur Sultan, who losing the latter's protection had originally turned to Ja'afar for succour in 1867. In 1869, the Abyssinian threat having been quashed by the British, and the Fur threat to the Sudan continuing, Ja'afar now deemed the moment propitious to pre-empt any Fur strike at the Fertit ~ by sending a military force to occupy it.

Simultaneously a larger, more ambitious and more costly expedition to occupy the equatorial region, to extend into Uganda and, at least cosmetically, to suppress the Upper Nile slave trade had been sanctioned by the Khedive under Sir Samuel Baker. The management of these two several expeditions, the former of which to Fertit was not ready to move until after the rains of 1869, was undermined by the limited availability of river transport, a factor, but only one, in the delayed departure of the Baker expedition in February 1870. Navigation barred by a falling Nile and floating vegetation, the expedition had to await the north wind of the following December. An additional casualty was the previously good relationship of Ja'afar and Baker, the former roundly but unfairly blamed for wilfully obstructing Baker's departure, although Baker insisted that they were always cordial in their private capacity. As to Hilali's expedition, it was to founder at the hands of Zubeir Rahma Mansour in 1872.

So demanding on the hakimdaria was the logistical handling and the enabling of these two expeditions that already, in August 1869, Ja'afar had written to the Khedive suggesting the hiving off of the Red Sea littoral again as a separate general-governorate. It attracted no response until April the following year when the Khedive, perhaps aggravated by Baker's complaints against Ja'afar, did indeed create a new general- governorate but its ruler was to be the enthusiastic muhafiz of Suakin, Ahmed Mumtaz Bey. The latter had impressed the Khedive with his over-optimistic scheme for larger-scale cotton cultivation which, Mumtaz claimed, would revolutionise the scale of Sudan revenue for Egypt, while Ja'afar's criticisms of what he deemed to be Mumtaz's neglect of his administrative duties, especially in tax collection, were ignored.

Ja'afar Pasha's previous career in the armed forces naturally influenced him in making internal and external security the priority. His initiatives in the civil field with communications, public buildings and education were certainly conducive to the economic infrastructure, but in the field of agricultural development at first sight at least his rule appears defective, especially by contrast with Ahmed Mumtaz. Ja'afar however not only distrusted the superficial optimism of Mumtaz's plans but had rooted misgivings regarding the viability of cotton-growing as a cash crop taking priority over dura and other food crops. He judged correctly that the assumption of the local cooperation on the part of the inhabitants was too facile, that the cost factor of supervision, transportation, disease prevention, ginning and marketing were being under-estimated. He had comparable reservations regarding Ernst Marno's proposal for an irrigation canal in the Gezira.

In all this Ja'afar alienated Khedivial support, although Ismail Pasha was sufficiently concerned by the strength of Ja'afar's criticisms of Mumtaz, to send Shahin Pasha Kinj to investigate the profitability of Mumtaz's cotton plans. By June Shahin had found emphatically in favour of the latter, backed as Mumtaz was by the Swiss muhafiz of Massawa, Werner Munzinger Bey. Only in 1873 by which time Mumtaz, promoted to the general-governorate of Khartoum, had been dismissed for alleged peculation and Munzinger had been appointed to the general-governorate of the eastern Sudan, did it become evident that their forecast profits of cotton cultivation were proving to be a chimera. In the words of Sir Duncan Cumming, district commissioner of Kassala and its historian, in 1940:

The last two years of Ja'afar's hakimdaria were thus overshadowed by the loss of Khedivial confidence and by the onerous financial burdens imposed on the Sudan as a contribution to African territorial expansion. By June 1871 Ja'afar Mazhar had had enough. Overruled by the Khedive in a dispute with Mumtaz over the emigration to Taka of Sennar tribesmen in default of their taxes, there to be welcomed by Mumtaz as cotton field labourers on the Atbara, and called to explain himself in Cairo, Ja'afar announced he would not be returning and left Khartoum in August. "The catastrophe of his recall befell the Sudan, and universal grief was shown" related the Taarikh el Sudan.

Ja'afar's career was not over nor was he disgraced. He was appointed president of the majlis el ahkam in Egypt and it was in this capacity that he was appealed to by the relatives of Mohammed Hilali whose goods had been seized following his murder by Zubeir. Ja'afar did not shrink from representing their case to the Khedive, but again encountered a deaf ear. After being made president of the Egyptian legislative assembly, he died in 1878.

Copyright: John 0. Udal, 2000