"Forever, Until Victory!"
Spanish and Latin American Fascists are particularly fond of their translated version of the slogan
"Fight and be Right"
- Thread starter EdT
- Start date
"Forever, Until Victory!"
Spanish and Latin American Fascists are particularly fond of their translated version of the slogan
...My acronym sense is somewhat impaired; anyone care to tell me what this means?
As Tolkiene says, it's "A Shot Heard Around the World". This was my first TL, which I did in the dim and distant past (or around 2002...). I was 17 when I wrote it- in my view, that shows. I have to admit I'm not massively fond of it and prefer "A Greater Britain" hugely, but if you're interested it can be found here.
I will be updating my website soon by the way. Promise.
maverick
Banned
We'll be looking foward to it...
Now, considering that the Third Republic stands on the brink of collapse between the crisis of 1887 and the big crisis of 1889...would this affect the election of the new German Chancellor the Kaiser makes once Bismarck is gone? a more anglophile chancellor perpaps? an able chancellor even?
Or has the butterflies affected the fate of Friedrich III and Wilhelm II as well?...
Now, considering that the Third Republic stands on the brink of collapse between the crisis of 1887 and the big crisis of 1889...would this affect the election of the new German Chancellor the Kaiser makes once Bismarck is gone? a more anglophile chancellor perpaps? an able chancellor even?
Or has the butterflies affected the fate of Friedrich III and Wilhelm II as well?...
Well admittedly Bismarck's successor, General Leo von Caprivi, was not that unable and also quite keen on good relations with the UK.
During his chancellery, Sansibar in East Africa was ceded to the UK, in return for Helgoland becoming German - this, ironically, was quite controversial in Germany and led to the formation of the Alldeutsche Verband (Pan-German League), which saw this as a betrayal of German colonial interests (among other things, the ADV demanded the abolition of the Reichstag and the democratic parties, the creation of a Greater German Empire and the creation of lebensraum in the east).
Von Caprivi was eventually toppled, partly due to the Helgoland-Sansibar pact, but also because he was seen as being, as I understand, too soft on the Social Democrats and the Catholic Zentrum, which made him suspicious to the conservatives.
During his chancellery, Sansibar in East Africa was ceded to the UK, in return for Helgoland becoming German - this, ironically, was quite controversial in Germany and led to the formation of the Alldeutsche Verband (Pan-German League), which saw this as a betrayal of German colonial interests (among other things, the ADV demanded the abolition of the Reichstag and the democratic parties, the creation of a Greater German Empire and the creation of lebensraum in the east).
Von Caprivi was eventually toppled, partly due to the Helgoland-Sansibar pact, but also because he was seen as being, as I understand, too soft on the Social Democrats and the Catholic Zentrum, which made him suspicious to the conservatives.
An upcoming part will be deal with some of these issues. Butterflies will be creeping in, although it's too late to save Friedrich sadly. Certainly a change of regime in France could cause quite big ripples, and will give Bismarck something of a headache.
The next part will be up tomorrow by the way!
I thought so too. One of these days I'll flesh it out properly.
Chapter 8
“The Dervish Empire developed no virtue except courage, a quality more admirable than rare. Like a subsidiary volcano, it was flung up by one convulsion, blazed during the period of disturbance, and was destroyed by the still more violent shock that ended the eruption.”
__________________________________________________
(Taken from ‘The Sudan: A History’ by Robert Jackman, Hicks 1980)
“The fall of Khartoum and the subsequent withdrawal of Wolseley’s column completed the Mahdi’s control over a great part of the former Egyptian Sudan, although Suakin, the far north and Equatoria were still held for the Khedive. The Mahdi disliked the former capital however, and transferred his headquarters to a village on the western bank near his old camp. Here in Omdurman were his house and his mosque.
The Mahdi and his Ansar had seen the taking of Khartoum as but one in a series of conquests throughout the Muslim world; the Mahdia had to be extended across the globe. There had already been fighting on the frontiers. The Egyptian garrisons of Kasala and Sennar, which had held out with great fortitude even after the fall of Khartoum, surrendered in July and August 1885 respectively. In the end, the Holy War was fought in three particular areas. These were the Ethiopian marches, the Egyptian frontier and in the south, where Emin Pasha, the Governor of Equatoria, still survived. The first part of the frontier war was brief. In the winter the Mahdi moved northwards, only to find that the Ansar of Dongola had been defeated by Egyptian forces[1]. The battle preceded a withdrawal of Egyptian troops from all posts south of Wadi Halfa however, and the Mahdi was sensible enough to refrain from pushing the Khedival forces any further for the time being.
Other targets beckoned. Having secured his western border with an alliance with the Darfuri warlord Rabih az-Zubayr[2], the Mahdi marched eastwards to raid the Abyssinian highlands in the spring of 1886. At first, the Ansar met with great success. In February, the Negus of Gojjam and his entire army were massacred at Kufit, and the following month the Mahdists pillaged the holy city of Gondar, burning every one of the great churches and making off with vast quantities of riches and slaves. The great victory was enough to force the Abyssinian Emperor Yohannes to break off his campaign against the rebellious Negus of Shoa[3], and in March he led an army of 100,000 warriors northwards to fight the Mahdiyah. The result was inconclusive. At a huge battle at Comar on March 25th, the Emperor forced the Ansar back but was wounded by a stray bullet in the process and abandoned the campaign to recover[4]. Surprised by the strength of Abyssinian resistance and unwilling to risk defeat in a second battle, the Mahdi contented himself with pillaging the province of Gojjam for a time and then withdrew back to the Sudan...”
(Taken from “Rhodes” by Steven Penning, Planer 1986)
“By 1884, the question of securing a land corridor to the vast interior of the north loomed large in Cecil Rhodes’ mind. That corridor was Bechuanaland. In a later speech, he described it as ‘the neck of the bottle’. It commanded the route to the Zambezi. ‘We must secure it’, he insisted, ‘unless we are prepared to see the whole of the north pass out of our hands’. But into whose hands? The first threat came from Germany. Bismarck, at first reluctant to encourage German colonisation, now changed his tune, and early in 1884 announced a German protectorate over Damaraland and Namaqualand, a vast territory more than 300,000 square miles in extent[5]. The ‘bottle neck’ was in danger of being corked up. Rhodes, with the support of his allies in London, had also managed to win around the High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, and as a result of firm representations in London (and a widely-reported and unashamedly histrionic speech by Randolph Churchill) a protectorate was finally declared over the region as far north as the 22nd parallel[6]...
...Two years after his assistance over Bechuanaland, Churchill was to provide Rhodes with another momentous victory. In 1886, there was much ado about the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand. Opportunity had seldom knocked at anyone’s door with such a sledge-hammer, but when Rhodes reached the Rand he was somewhat misled by the experts who told him that the reef would come to little. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said to Dr Hans Sauer, who was trying to persuade him to buy some land, ‘but I cannot calculate the power in these claims’. His friend in London demurred. ‘You must buy, damn you! If you do not, I shall negotiate for the concessions myself and gift them to you. I shall not be denied the chance to repay the debt I owe you from my time in Kimberley!’
The letter amused Rhodes greatly, but more importantly it caused him to reconsider. He contacted Dr Sauer, who had been frantically telegraphing him on the subject; thanks to Churchill’s blind instinct he secured options that would make him extremely powerful in Theronsburg[7], although not the dictator he was in Kimberley[8]. The vast income from the Rand would be instrumental in financing Rhodes’ schemes in the years to come...”
(Taken from ‘The Colossus and the King: The war between Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold’ by Thomas Gilbert, Picador 1986)
“The idea of sending an expedition to Equatoria via the Congo was by no means a new one to King Leopold, indeed by December 1886 it already had a long history. The idea had first been suggested to the King in 1884 by General Gordon, and after the fall of Khartoum and the General’s famous rescue the following year the prospect of such a project raised its head again. Lionised by the media and an adoring public, Gordon nevertheless had no particular desire to stay in Britain; Leopold was quite aware of this, and in the summer of 1885 formally renewed his offer of the Governorship of the Congo to the ‘Lion of Khartoum’[9]. Gordon dithered. His injuries had still not healed and his health was in a precarious state; the disease-ridden jungles of the Congo basin might accomplish what the Dervishes could not. Yet the chance for glory beckoned. Gordon- who at this point still had a naive view of Leopold’s purposes in the Congo State- was convinced that only firm action could suppress the area’s endemic slave trade. He was also certain that the best means of restoring Equatoria to European civilisation was to strike eastwards from the Congo and rescue Emin Pasha, whose army was still assumed to be holding out in that remote province. The General estimated that such a project would be expensive, but plausible; ‘Administration of Equatoria and the Bahr al-Ghazal might cost YM £50,000 a year at first, but YM may see the object of such expenditure realised within a few years, and with it cutting off the slave-trade in a way nothing else can do...’
In the end, Gordon compromised. Knowing that his health was not yet sufficient to conduct such an expedition himself, he asked the King for several months to prepare himself for the Congo, a period that he spent in a second pilgrimage to the holy sites of Palestine[10]. He would take up his position in Stanleyville in the winter of 1887 but in the meantime, Leopold decided to press on with Gordon’s grand scheme to add Equatoria to his Empire. The King had another pawn to play; the other titan of African exploration, Henry Stanley...”
(Taken from “A History of East Africa” by Felix Dornburger, Star 1949)
“On 7th December 1887 Stanley’s column finally broke out of the Ituri rainforest[11]. Their journey to Lake Albert had been disastrous. The Europeans had had to endure starvation, dysentery and malaria in the thick Congolese jungles, all the while being attacked by local tribesmen who took them for Arab slavers. From the beginning, the expedition had been the most ambitious and worst-organised of Stanley’s whole career; now, the entire meaning of the expedition was about to be rendered pointless. One month after the expedition arrived above Lake Albert, a ragged figure wearing the remains of an Egyptian uniform stumbled into Stanley’s camp. The man, delirious with fever, gave the column the news that they had all been dreading; Emin Pasha had been killed two months before when the Dervishes overran his camp at Tunguru, on the north shore of the lake[12]. The entire region to the north of Lake Albert was in the hands of the Mahdists; only a few scattered survivors had escaped the massacre, most of whom were fleeing either to Buganda or to the coast.
The awful news placed Stanley on the horns of a dilemma. The death of the Pasha meant that his expedition’s objective now was simply survival. But which way to return to civilisation? A renewed trek through the jungle back to the expedition’s base at Yambuyo would surely finish off the disease-ridden and exhausted members of his expedition, but the alternative was to either to risk attack from the Mahdists in proceeding eastwards into Buganda, or to strike out into the unexplored country around Lake Gordon[13]. After some deliberation, Stanley decided that the former course of action was the best. In early March 1888 the column began the long journey to Mengo, the Bugandan capital. Their progress took two months, and when the starving, tattered band staggered into the town that summer, Stanley was not amongst them. The great explorer had become crippled by dysentery a few weeks after the group broke camp, and on April 4th he finally expired. He was buried in a shallow grave near Mubende; a stone inscribed with the words ‘Bula Matari’ (‘Breaker of rocks’ in Kikongo) was placed to mark the spot[14]...”
(Taken from ‘The Equatorian wars, 1884-1899’ by Arnold Stephens, Garnholm 1978)
“Even as the sorry remains of Stanley’s expedition staggered into Mengo, religious tensions in Buganda were reaching boiling point. King Mwanga’s vacillation between the repression of Christians and Muslims and their conciliation began to tend towards the former in the spring and summer of 1888, but by this time the ‘readers’ had become strong enough to resist. Had external events not intervened, civil war in Buganda would have been inevitable[15]. As it was though, the threat to Mwanga would come from a quite different source.
The previous autumn, a Sudanese army had moved up the Nile and massacred Emin Pasha’s beleaguered band of soldiers. Now, hearing of the troubles in the Bugandan Kingdom, the Mahdi’s lieutenant Abdullah Ibn-Mohammed[16] was preparing to lead an army of the Ansar southwards from Lake Albert to spread the word of the Mahdiyya and defend the interests of his co-religionists. In June, a column of Mahdists marched south from Tunguru into Buganda. There was virtually no resistance. The Prime Minister and his men faced the Sudanese outside the capital and were slaughtered; at this, Protestant, Catholic and Pagan alike fled the city, leaving the Mahdists and their Bugandan co-religionists in charge of the apparatus of state. The new regime quickly consolidated its power. The few prominent non-Muslims who had not fled were executed; a compliant son of King Mwanga converted to Islam and was quickly installed on the throne, and for a few months Buganda was governed along through the strict Sharia law of the Mahddiya.
The Islamic interlude in Buganda caused consternation in Europe, and marked the beginnings of the Anglo-French race for the Sudan. However, it did not last for long. In September, the Mahdists moved northwest towards the Kingdom of Bunyoro, where the Christians had fled after the deposition of Mwanga. Here though they suffered a serious setback. The Marquis Christian de Bonchamps, a French adventurer who had acted as Stanley’s second in command on his expedition the year before[17], had used the time he had been given to drill the Bugandan Christians into a reasonably coherent fighting force; this, combined with the deployment of the Maxim gun that Stanley’s expedition had carried all the way from Leopoldville ensured that the Sudanese were routed, Abdullah Ibn-Mohammed himself being killed in the carnage. The Christians returned to Mengo, forced the Muslims to flee amidst much bloodshed, and restored King Mwanga to the throne, much to his own surprise. By the end of the year, Buganda was theoretically at peace again; however the delicate balance of power between the competing religious groups had been shattered and increasingly the Protestant and Catholic factions at court found themselves at each other’s throats[18]...”
__________________________________________________
[1] The Mahdi’s illness and death in the summer of 1885 has been butterflied away; this is a major change, as his successor the Khalifa faced a considerable amount of resistance to his rule in the early days of his reign, and spent most of his time putting down internal dissent.
[2] OTL, az-Zubayr travelled eastwards to meet the Mahdi but heard of a plot to kill him and gave up his attempts at diplomacy; ITTL the Mahdi’s greater prestige means that he changes his mind, and eventually becomes a titular vassal of Omdurman.
[3] This was Menelik, who OTL became Emperor on Yohannes’ death.
[4] Things panned out very differently in OTL, where the Mahdists invaded Abyssinia in 1889 and were heavily defeated by Yohannes at Gallabat, although he was killed in the battle. ITTL the Emperor survives, with major consequences for Abyssinian history.
[5] OTL, this became first German South-West Africa, and then eventually Namibia.
[6] This is much as OTL.
[7] Theronsburg is what Johannesburg is named ITTL.
[8] Rhodes did not capitalise on the South African Gold Rush anything like as much as he could have done OTL- it was one of his few commercial mistakes. ITTL Churchill is around to nag him into changing his mind. The overall effect is to make Rhodes even richer than OTL, if such a thing were possible.
[9] OTL and ITTL, Leopold offered Gordon this in 1883; he accepted, but then was ordered to the Sudan before he could take up the post.
[10] Gordon was an obsessive Christian, and had visited Palestine in 1883.
[11] Stanley’s expedition occurred OTL as well; its objective was to rescue the Equatorian governor Emin Pasha and his men.
[12] Emin Pasha’s men were still holding out at this point OTL, and rescued Stanley’s expedition before returning to civilisation via German East Africa. ITTL the Mahdists have paid them more attention and wiped them out entirely.
[13] OTL’s Lake Edward; ITTL Stanley doesn’t explore it and so it’s named slightly later and in different circumstances.
[14] Stanley lived OTL, and travelled by the southern route instead of trying to make for Buganda.
[15] And indeed occurred OTL. ITTL however other factors are there to come into play.
[16] This is the man who succeeded the Mahdi in OTL; here he’s a loyal subordinate of the man.
[17] The Marquis did not go on Stanley’s expedition OTL, but was involved in both the Stairs and Marchand expeditions; most of these efforts were recruited from within the same pool of people however, and his presence in Buganda at this point is a simple butterfly.
[18] These events are rather different to OTL, but the end result of Mwanga’s restoration and the destruction of the Muslim faction is similar. The pagans are far weaker ITTL however, and the presence of Bonchamps makes things extremely different.
“The Dervish Empire developed no virtue except courage, a quality more admirable than rare. Like a subsidiary volcano, it was flung up by one convulsion, blazed during the period of disturbance, and was destroyed by the still more violent shock that ended the eruption.”
__________________________________________________
(Taken from ‘The Sudan: A History’ by Robert Jackman, Hicks 1980)
“The fall of Khartoum and the subsequent withdrawal of Wolseley’s column completed the Mahdi’s control over a great part of the former Egyptian Sudan, although Suakin, the far north and Equatoria were still held for the Khedive. The Mahdi disliked the former capital however, and transferred his headquarters to a village on the western bank near his old camp. Here in Omdurman were his house and his mosque.
The Mahdi and his Ansar had seen the taking of Khartoum as but one in a series of conquests throughout the Muslim world; the Mahdia had to be extended across the globe. There had already been fighting on the frontiers. The Egyptian garrisons of Kasala and Sennar, which had held out with great fortitude even after the fall of Khartoum, surrendered in July and August 1885 respectively. In the end, the Holy War was fought in three particular areas. These were the Ethiopian marches, the Egyptian frontier and in the south, where Emin Pasha, the Governor of Equatoria, still survived. The first part of the frontier war was brief. In the winter the Mahdi moved northwards, only to find that the Ansar of Dongola had been defeated by Egyptian forces[1]. The battle preceded a withdrawal of Egyptian troops from all posts south of Wadi Halfa however, and the Mahdi was sensible enough to refrain from pushing the Khedival forces any further for the time being.
Other targets beckoned. Having secured his western border with an alliance with the Darfuri warlord Rabih az-Zubayr[2], the Mahdi marched eastwards to raid the Abyssinian highlands in the spring of 1886. At first, the Ansar met with great success. In February, the Negus of Gojjam and his entire army were massacred at Kufit, and the following month the Mahdists pillaged the holy city of Gondar, burning every one of the great churches and making off with vast quantities of riches and slaves. The great victory was enough to force the Abyssinian Emperor Yohannes to break off his campaign against the rebellious Negus of Shoa[3], and in March he led an army of 100,000 warriors northwards to fight the Mahdiyah. The result was inconclusive. At a huge battle at Comar on March 25th, the Emperor forced the Ansar back but was wounded by a stray bullet in the process and abandoned the campaign to recover[4]. Surprised by the strength of Abyssinian resistance and unwilling to risk defeat in a second battle, the Mahdi contented himself with pillaging the province of Gojjam for a time and then withdrew back to the Sudan...”
(Taken from “Rhodes” by Steven Penning, Planer 1986)
“By 1884, the question of securing a land corridor to the vast interior of the north loomed large in Cecil Rhodes’ mind. That corridor was Bechuanaland. In a later speech, he described it as ‘the neck of the bottle’. It commanded the route to the Zambezi. ‘We must secure it’, he insisted, ‘unless we are prepared to see the whole of the north pass out of our hands’. But into whose hands? The first threat came from Germany. Bismarck, at first reluctant to encourage German colonisation, now changed his tune, and early in 1884 announced a German protectorate over Damaraland and Namaqualand, a vast territory more than 300,000 square miles in extent[5]. The ‘bottle neck’ was in danger of being corked up. Rhodes, with the support of his allies in London, had also managed to win around the High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, and as a result of firm representations in London (and a widely-reported and unashamedly histrionic speech by Randolph Churchill) a protectorate was finally declared over the region as far north as the 22nd parallel[6]...
...Two years after his assistance over Bechuanaland, Churchill was to provide Rhodes with another momentous victory. In 1886, there was much ado about the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand. Opportunity had seldom knocked at anyone’s door with such a sledge-hammer, but when Rhodes reached the Rand he was somewhat misled by the experts who told him that the reef would come to little. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said to Dr Hans Sauer, who was trying to persuade him to buy some land, ‘but I cannot calculate the power in these claims’. His friend in London demurred. ‘You must buy, damn you! If you do not, I shall negotiate for the concessions myself and gift them to you. I shall not be denied the chance to repay the debt I owe you from my time in Kimberley!’
The letter amused Rhodes greatly, but more importantly it caused him to reconsider. He contacted Dr Sauer, who had been frantically telegraphing him on the subject; thanks to Churchill’s blind instinct he secured options that would make him extremely powerful in Theronsburg[7], although not the dictator he was in Kimberley[8]. The vast income from the Rand would be instrumental in financing Rhodes’ schemes in the years to come...”
(Taken from ‘The Colossus and the King: The war between Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold’ by Thomas Gilbert, Picador 1986)
“The idea of sending an expedition to Equatoria via the Congo was by no means a new one to King Leopold, indeed by December 1886 it already had a long history. The idea had first been suggested to the King in 1884 by General Gordon, and after the fall of Khartoum and the General’s famous rescue the following year the prospect of such a project raised its head again. Lionised by the media and an adoring public, Gordon nevertheless had no particular desire to stay in Britain; Leopold was quite aware of this, and in the summer of 1885 formally renewed his offer of the Governorship of the Congo to the ‘Lion of Khartoum’[9]. Gordon dithered. His injuries had still not healed and his health was in a precarious state; the disease-ridden jungles of the Congo basin might accomplish what the Dervishes could not. Yet the chance for glory beckoned. Gordon- who at this point still had a naive view of Leopold’s purposes in the Congo State- was convinced that only firm action could suppress the area’s endemic slave trade. He was also certain that the best means of restoring Equatoria to European civilisation was to strike eastwards from the Congo and rescue Emin Pasha, whose army was still assumed to be holding out in that remote province. The General estimated that such a project would be expensive, but plausible; ‘Administration of Equatoria and the Bahr al-Ghazal might cost YM £50,000 a year at first, but YM may see the object of such expenditure realised within a few years, and with it cutting off the slave-trade in a way nothing else can do...’
In the end, Gordon compromised. Knowing that his health was not yet sufficient to conduct such an expedition himself, he asked the King for several months to prepare himself for the Congo, a period that he spent in a second pilgrimage to the holy sites of Palestine[10]. He would take up his position in Stanleyville in the winter of 1887 but in the meantime, Leopold decided to press on with Gordon’s grand scheme to add Equatoria to his Empire. The King had another pawn to play; the other titan of African exploration, Henry Stanley...”
(Taken from “A History of East Africa” by Felix Dornburger, Star 1949)
“On 7th December 1887 Stanley’s column finally broke out of the Ituri rainforest[11]. Their journey to Lake Albert had been disastrous. The Europeans had had to endure starvation, dysentery and malaria in the thick Congolese jungles, all the while being attacked by local tribesmen who took them for Arab slavers. From the beginning, the expedition had been the most ambitious and worst-organised of Stanley’s whole career; now, the entire meaning of the expedition was about to be rendered pointless. One month after the expedition arrived above Lake Albert, a ragged figure wearing the remains of an Egyptian uniform stumbled into Stanley’s camp. The man, delirious with fever, gave the column the news that they had all been dreading; Emin Pasha had been killed two months before when the Dervishes overran his camp at Tunguru, on the north shore of the lake[12]. The entire region to the north of Lake Albert was in the hands of the Mahdists; only a few scattered survivors had escaped the massacre, most of whom were fleeing either to Buganda or to the coast.
The awful news placed Stanley on the horns of a dilemma. The death of the Pasha meant that his expedition’s objective now was simply survival. But which way to return to civilisation? A renewed trek through the jungle back to the expedition’s base at Yambuyo would surely finish off the disease-ridden and exhausted members of his expedition, but the alternative was to either to risk attack from the Mahdists in proceeding eastwards into Buganda, or to strike out into the unexplored country around Lake Gordon[13]. After some deliberation, Stanley decided that the former course of action was the best. In early March 1888 the column began the long journey to Mengo, the Bugandan capital. Their progress took two months, and when the starving, tattered band staggered into the town that summer, Stanley was not amongst them. The great explorer had become crippled by dysentery a few weeks after the group broke camp, and on April 4th he finally expired. He was buried in a shallow grave near Mubende; a stone inscribed with the words ‘Bula Matari’ (‘Breaker of rocks’ in Kikongo) was placed to mark the spot[14]...”
(Taken from ‘The Equatorian wars, 1884-1899’ by Arnold Stephens, Garnholm 1978)
“Even as the sorry remains of Stanley’s expedition staggered into Mengo, religious tensions in Buganda were reaching boiling point. King Mwanga’s vacillation between the repression of Christians and Muslims and their conciliation began to tend towards the former in the spring and summer of 1888, but by this time the ‘readers’ had become strong enough to resist. Had external events not intervened, civil war in Buganda would have been inevitable[15]. As it was though, the threat to Mwanga would come from a quite different source.
The previous autumn, a Sudanese army had moved up the Nile and massacred Emin Pasha’s beleaguered band of soldiers. Now, hearing of the troubles in the Bugandan Kingdom, the Mahdi’s lieutenant Abdullah Ibn-Mohammed[16] was preparing to lead an army of the Ansar southwards from Lake Albert to spread the word of the Mahdiyya and defend the interests of his co-religionists. In June, a column of Mahdists marched south from Tunguru into Buganda. There was virtually no resistance. The Prime Minister and his men faced the Sudanese outside the capital and were slaughtered; at this, Protestant, Catholic and Pagan alike fled the city, leaving the Mahdists and their Bugandan co-religionists in charge of the apparatus of state. The new regime quickly consolidated its power. The few prominent non-Muslims who had not fled were executed; a compliant son of King Mwanga converted to Islam and was quickly installed on the throne, and for a few months Buganda was governed along through the strict Sharia law of the Mahddiya.
The Islamic interlude in Buganda caused consternation in Europe, and marked the beginnings of the Anglo-French race for the Sudan. However, it did not last for long. In September, the Mahdists moved northwest towards the Kingdom of Bunyoro, where the Christians had fled after the deposition of Mwanga. Here though they suffered a serious setback. The Marquis Christian de Bonchamps, a French adventurer who had acted as Stanley’s second in command on his expedition the year before[17], had used the time he had been given to drill the Bugandan Christians into a reasonably coherent fighting force; this, combined with the deployment of the Maxim gun that Stanley’s expedition had carried all the way from Leopoldville ensured that the Sudanese were routed, Abdullah Ibn-Mohammed himself being killed in the carnage. The Christians returned to Mengo, forced the Muslims to flee amidst much bloodshed, and restored King Mwanga to the throne, much to his own surprise. By the end of the year, Buganda was theoretically at peace again; however the delicate balance of power between the competing religious groups had been shattered and increasingly the Protestant and Catholic factions at court found themselves at each other’s throats[18]...”
__________________________________________________
[1] The Mahdi’s illness and death in the summer of 1885 has been butterflied away; this is a major change, as his successor the Khalifa faced a considerable amount of resistance to his rule in the early days of his reign, and spent most of his time putting down internal dissent.
[2] OTL, az-Zubayr travelled eastwards to meet the Mahdi but heard of a plot to kill him and gave up his attempts at diplomacy; ITTL the Mahdi’s greater prestige means that he changes his mind, and eventually becomes a titular vassal of Omdurman.
[3] This was Menelik, who OTL became Emperor on Yohannes’ death.
[4] Things panned out very differently in OTL, where the Mahdists invaded Abyssinia in 1889 and were heavily defeated by Yohannes at Gallabat, although he was killed in the battle. ITTL the Emperor survives, with major consequences for Abyssinian history.
[5] OTL, this became first German South-West Africa, and then eventually Namibia.
[6] This is much as OTL.
[7] Theronsburg is what Johannesburg is named ITTL.
[8] Rhodes did not capitalise on the South African Gold Rush anything like as much as he could have done OTL- it was one of his few commercial mistakes. ITTL Churchill is around to nag him into changing his mind. The overall effect is to make Rhodes even richer than OTL, if such a thing were possible.
[9] OTL and ITTL, Leopold offered Gordon this in 1883; he accepted, but then was ordered to the Sudan before he could take up the post.
[10] Gordon was an obsessive Christian, and had visited Palestine in 1883.
[11] Stanley’s expedition occurred OTL as well; its objective was to rescue the Equatorian governor Emin Pasha and his men.
[12] Emin Pasha’s men were still holding out at this point OTL, and rescued Stanley’s expedition before returning to civilisation via German East Africa. ITTL the Mahdists have paid them more attention and wiped them out entirely.
[13] OTL’s Lake Edward; ITTL Stanley doesn’t explore it and so it’s named slightly later and in different circumstances.
[14] Stanley lived OTL, and travelled by the southern route instead of trying to make for Buganda.
[15] And indeed occurred OTL. ITTL however other factors are there to come into play.
[16] This is the man who succeeded the Mahdi in OTL; here he’s a loyal subordinate of the man.
[17] The Marquis did not go on Stanley’s expedition OTL, but was involved in both the Stairs and Marchand expeditions; most of these efforts were recruited from within the same pool of people however, and his presence in Buganda at this point is a simple butterfly.
[18] These events are rather different to OTL, but the end result of Mwanga’s restoration and the destruction of the Muslim faction is similar. The pagans are far weaker ITTL however, and the presence of Bonchamps makes things extremely different.
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More coolness...
I see the scramble for Eastern Africa is going to be a bit more heated ITTL...
I see the scramble for Eastern Africa is going to be a bit more heated ITTL...
maverick
Banned
So you go from Obscure late 19th century British Tory politics to Obscure late 19th century african pre-colonial conflicts...
Your vast reservoir of knowledge continues to astound me...
BTW...Why so many protectorates ITTL in what was IOTL Uganda and western Kenya? are they just taking the already existing kingdoms there adn turning them into individual protectorate?
And now for something out of topic...since you were thinking about writing a TL on K. Joseph or Kilroy Silk as an spiritual epilogue to AGB and FaBR...(or are you still writing that piece about the War of the Triple Alliance in South America after this one?)...have you ever thought about a TL in which Charles James Fox is PM? or would he be too well known for you?...
Your vast reservoir of knowledge continues to astound me...
BTW...Why so many protectorates ITTL in what was IOTL Uganda and western Kenya? are they just taking the already existing kingdoms there adn turning them into individual protectorate?
And now for something out of topic...since you were thinking about writing a TL on K. Joseph or Kilroy Silk as an spiritual epilogue to AGB and FaBR...(or are you still writing that piece about the War of the Triple Alliance in South America after this one?)...have you ever thought about a TL in which Charles James Fox is PM? or would he be too well known for you?...
I see the scramble for Eastern Africa is going to be a bit more heated ITTL...
Well, it was pretty heated OTL too! A stronger Madhist Empire has massive knock-on effects in the region, and will lead to quite a different outcome ITTL. Counter-intuitively, one result is that European penetration into the region will actually speed up; the fall of Buganda focuses everyone's attention on the strategic and trade benefits of controlling the Great Lakes.
I know, which is one of the reasons I wanted to concentrate on it. Africa will be pivotal ITTL, so there's plenty more where this came from. There will be at least four or five posts devoted to the continent, if for no other reason than I find it fascinating and things will be very different.
Yeah, the countries around the Great Lakes all existed OTL- the southernmost ones are Rwanda and Burundi with a bit of extra territory, while the others are the various Kingdoms that OTL were eventually federated by the British into Uganda. This map gives a slightly clearer idea of the various kingdoms; ITTL the region's history is rather different to OTL, so 'Uganda' as a concept does not emerge and the colonial power in the region prefers to administer the kingdoms as seperate protectorates.
I haven't decided quite what to do next after this, tbh. One option is to complete the thematic trilogy of AGB and FaBR with a third TL exploring another poltiician, and if I were to do that there are a number of candidates. Fox would actually be a fascinating choice! Another interesting option would be the Chartists.
That said, I expect I might save that project for later as there comes a point when you need a change. I'm very tempted to do a shorter TL after this one on something completely different but equally obscure. Solano Lopez is one option; I've also thought about doing something set in the ancient world or pre-colonial Africa, or possibly something in the English Civil War.
A richer cecil Rhodes? Am I smelling an uber-Rhodesia??? You sir have made this timeline amazing...
Ah yes... I can see 'the Chartist Republic of England, 1833-51' (or similar) being a very interesting story...
Very interesting TL EdT
As ever your TLs have a great quality.
There will great changes as you mentioned in the Ethiopian history, the effect of having a stronger Mahdi Empire in his western frontier and the survival of an emperor Yohannes that although alive he could not stop the mahdists to continue with their incursions could affect the italian expansion in Eritrea and in direction to Ethiopia and also we could find some kind of alliance between Menelik the ruler of Shewa and the italians if Menelik rises in rebellion against Yohannes, Menelik as ruler of Shewa had a clear rivalry with Yohannes, the relations between Yohannes and Menelik was at best pragmatic and if the position of the empeor is weak because his inefficiency in stop the mahdists and the italians, Menelik could made the final move to try to oust Yohannes from the throne, so this could mean an Ethiopian civil war between the powers of Tigray represented by Yohannes and Shewa represented by Menelik.
As indicated in the Country Study of Ethiopia by the Library of the Congress http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/ettoc.html in the chapter "From Tewodros II to Menelik II, 1855-89":
"Yohannis was unable to exercise control over the nearly independent Shewans until six years later. From the beginning of his reign, he was confronted with the growing power of Menelik, who had proclaimed himself king of Shewa and traced his Solomonic lineage to Lebna Dengel. While Yohannis was struggling against opposing factions in the north, Menelik consolidated his power in Shewa and extended his rule over the Oromo to the south and west. He garrisoned Shewan forces among the Oromo and received military and financial support from them. Despite the acquisition of European firearms, in 1878 Menelik was compelled to submit to Yohannis and to pay tribute; in return, Yohannis recognized Menelik as negus and gave him a free hand in territories to the south of Shewa. This agreement, although only a truce in the long-standing rivalry between Tigray and Shewa, was important to Yohannis, who was preoccupied with foreign enemies and pressures. In many of Yohannis's external struggles, Menelik maintained separate relations with the emperor's enemies and continued to consolidate Shewan authority in order to strengthen his own position. In a subsequent agreement designed to ensure the succession in the line of Yohannis, one of Yohannis's younger sons was married to Zawditu, Menelik's daughter."
As ever your TLs have a great quality.
There will great changes as you mentioned in the Ethiopian history, the effect of having a stronger Mahdi Empire in his western frontier and the survival of an emperor Yohannes that although alive he could not stop the mahdists to continue with their incursions could affect the italian expansion in Eritrea and in direction to Ethiopia and also we could find some kind of alliance between Menelik the ruler of Shewa and the italians if Menelik rises in rebellion against Yohannes, Menelik as ruler of Shewa had a clear rivalry with Yohannes, the relations between Yohannes and Menelik was at best pragmatic and if the position of the empeor is weak because his inefficiency in stop the mahdists and the italians, Menelik could made the final move to try to oust Yohannes from the throne, so this could mean an Ethiopian civil war between the powers of Tigray represented by Yohannes and Shewa represented by Menelik.
As indicated in the Country Study of Ethiopia by the Library of the Congress http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/ettoc.html in the chapter "From Tewodros II to Menelik II, 1855-89":
"Yohannis was unable to exercise control over the nearly independent Shewans until six years later. From the beginning of his reign, he was confronted with the growing power of Menelik, who had proclaimed himself king of Shewa and traced his Solomonic lineage to Lebna Dengel. While Yohannis was struggling against opposing factions in the north, Menelik consolidated his power in Shewa and extended his rule over the Oromo to the south and west. He garrisoned Shewan forces among the Oromo and received military and financial support from them. Despite the acquisition of European firearms, in 1878 Menelik was compelled to submit to Yohannis and to pay tribute; in return, Yohannis recognized Menelik as negus and gave him a free hand in territories to the south of Shewa. This agreement, although only a truce in the long-standing rivalry between Tigray and Shewa, was important to Yohannis, who was preoccupied with foreign enemies and pressures. In many of Yohannis's external struggles, Menelik maintained separate relations with the emperor's enemies and continued to consolidate Shewan authority in order to strengthen his own position. In a subsequent agreement designed to ensure the succession in the line of Yohannis, one of Yohannis's younger sons was married to Zawditu, Menelik's daughter."
Glad you;re enjoying it. Sorry I haven't posted for a bit btw, have been rather busy and have had a slight case of writers block. Hopefully I should have the next part done by the end of the week- I'm then off on a much-needed holiday for two weeks so there will be a bit of an enforced break after that!
I entirely agree. Yohannes surviving will have a great impact on Abyssinian history; for a start Menelik won't be able to negotiate the deal with the Italians that conceded a large chunk of modern Eritrea. Still, he is on good terms with Rome, and would happily make temporary concessions in return for material aid. Yohannes himself is also willing to make deals if he can find an appropriate foreign benefactor who wants to forestall Italian influence in the region. Add this to a Mahdist Empire that burns brighter than OTL but is likely to fall sooner and things are going to get a bit complicated!
No problem, I understand you totally, I began some avorted TLs that at the end in the best case it was totally unfinished, in part because the real life is too much real sometimes, but you at the end finished this great work that was A greater Britain and you has begun another great TL, so I undertand a lot the great effort that means to prepare the material for TLs and continue with them in a regular basis while the real life (job, friends, another hobbys) deducts time from staying at the board.
Real life is necessary but sometimes I would prefer than day had 30 hours not 24 .
No problem, I understand you totally, I began some avorted TLs that at the end in the best case it was totally unfinished, in part because the real life is too much real sometimes, but you at the end finished this great work that was A greater Britain and you has begun another great TL, so I undertand a lot the great effort that means to prepare the material for TLs and continue with them in a regular basis while the real life (job, friends, another hobbys) deducts time from staying at the board.
Real life is necessary but sometimes I would prefer than day had 30 hours not 24 .
Well, I do feel that if I'm going to write I need to do it properly- I'm a bit of a perfectionist and don't want to be putting rubbish out there so I want to take care. Don't worry, though, A Greater Britain took me two years but I finished it eventually, the same will go for this one!
And speaking of which, I have a new post almost finished and hopefully available to post before I go on holiday. It'll be about international relations in the 1887-1888 period, focusing particularly on France, Russia and Germany although also the US election of 1888. After that, it'll be another two weeks before there's anything new I'm afraid.