October 31, 2002

FOUR FEATHERS PART 3

TWO CHEERS FOR BRITISH COLONIALISM

YALE KRAMER

Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew, our nation's highest ranking political jailbird, invented an appellation, one of many, to describe that group of self-appointed social critics found among the media--journalists, writers, actors, actresses, directors, academics, and professional activists--the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism.

This unthinking anti-Americanism derived from the vestigial cliches of communism and the cold war was bad enough in the seventies. But now the flies have taken over the flypaper. You can't spit anymore without hitting one or another of the anti-American elite. They fancy themselves the gatekeepers of popular culture, and their spirit is dominated by an antagonism towards a group of overlapping concepts centering around heterosexuality and the father: masculinity, assertiveness, competitiveness, inequality between people, authority, paternalism, patriotism, and private property. If they had their wish we would all be one inoffensive shade of brown, and live in a flower-child world of socialism without private property or competition of any sort, and we would all be androgynous and without any personal claims on one another.

And, of course, anything that can be derived from this set of taboos also becomes taboo. History, for instance, since it represents the work of dead white males and is valued by the white male establishment must be devalued and disavowed.

And that is how a politically innocent novel like "Four Feathers" came to be transformed into a lesson on anti-colonialism.

"Movies are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union." This was the advice given by the Yogi Berra of Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn, when he had read the script of an ardent young writer who wanted to express his views about serious social issues in his screenplay.

Shekhar Kapur, the Indian filmmaker who directed "Four Feathers," must have been too young and far away to have heard Goldwyn's advice, because his new movie has more messages than the internet. Unfortunately the messages are neither new or true. He and his writers, Hossein Amini and Michael Schiffer, are anti-colonial, anti-authority, anti-British and multicultural--exactly the kind of cliched thinking you would expect from contemporary filmmakers (as distinct from old fashioned movie makers) who fancy themselves social critics. The trouble is that they are compelled to sacrifice not only artistic meaning, but what is worse, almost all aspects of historical truth. There is hardly a scene in this historical epic that is not a distortion of history.

Kapur has tried to shift the focus of the book--which is completely devoid of political values--from a story about individuals to a tract against British manners, morals, and politics. Incoherent about what it wants to be, it is neither artfully critical of British attitudes as was "Oh, What a Lovely War," nor is it a grand adventure tale about a flawed hero.

There is only one major character in the film who is worthy of our admiration, interest and respect: Abou Fatma, the black slave. All of the other male characters are white, British, and despicable. The young officers are callow, cruel, feckless, and stupid, except for Feversham himself, who once he gets to the Sudan becomes more or less of a basket case and pitiable. The older British characters are pompous, supercilious fools or treacherous hypocrites. There isn't one redeeming quality to be found among the white cast.

The movie suggests over and over that the war that is being pursued by the British is an immoral colonial struggle. That the Brits are trying to defeat an uprising of oppressed, exploited natives in order to maintain Britain's Empire. This is so far from the truth that some clarification is in order.

The movie takes place around the time of the fall of Khartoum in 1885. At that time all of Sudan was threatened by a warlike charismatic Muslim leader--a religious fanatic who declared himself the messiah (The Mahdi). The Mahdi's aim was to lead his army of followers on a jihad to rid the Sudan of all unbelievers and foreigners who did not believe that he was the messiah.

Contrary to the distortions of the movie, the Sudan was not part of the British empire. It was, in fact, governed fecklessly by the Egyptians. Gladstone, the British Prime Minister at that time, wanted nothing at all to do with the Sudan and sent General Charles Gordon to Khartoum for one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to organize a rescue of British, European, and Egyptian nationals who were still left in Khartoum. He was sent without an army and his mission was to lead them out and north back to Cairo. This he was unable to do because by the time he arrived in Khartoum the forces of the Mahdi had cut off all escape routes.

More than anything, Gladstone and his government wanted to extricate themselves from the Sudan without sending forces to rescue Khartoum. The problem was that English public opinion was strongly opposed to letting Khartoum fall to the Mahdi with the possible loss of thousands of lives.

Contrary to the distortions of the movie, British intentions were not to exploit and oppress the natives of the Sudan but to rescue those threatened by them. Gladstone temporized for months but was finally forced to send a rescue expedition which, when it eventually arrived, was about a week too late. There was no one left to rescue and the head of General Gordon had already been separated from his body and brought to the Mahdi. Having no further mission in the Sudan, the rescue forces removed to Cairo in the north.

Contrary to the distortions of the movie there was no British Army that was defeated in any battle in the Sudan--ever. The rescue forces encountered the Mahdi's army on one or two occasions on their way to Khartoum and sustained about 100 casualties, but there was never even a remote possiblity of serious British loss. The movie, however, depicts with relish the near total destruction of the vaunted British tactical Square. Kapur lovingly shows the English redcoats falling apart and panicking before the power of the Mahdi's army.

Six months after the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon, the Mahdi himself died of typhus. But before he died he hand picked his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi. For ten years, the people he ruled over in Sudan found little else but war and famine in their lives. Relations with neighboring cultures remained tense throughout the Khalifa's rule, largely because of his commitment to using the jihad to extend the Mahdi's version of Islam throughout the world. He believed, naively, that he could spread his dogma throughout Egypt, Turkey and Europe. He sent letters to Queen Victoria in 1887 and again in 1889. One of them reads in part:

If you will believe and testify that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is the apostle of Allah... and become subject to my rule, I will receive you and give you tidings of prosperity and safety from the torments of the fire. You will be secure and content. What is for me will be for you; what is against me will be against you. A love in Allah will arise between us, and He will pardon you all the sins you have committed in the time of your unbelief. . . . But if you refuse ... then know that you are in great error...For the men of the Mahdi are men of iron. Allah gave them a nature to love death. He made it sweeter for them than cool water to the thirsty. Hence are they terrible to the unbelievers...They care not for the life of this world, the transient...but they look instead for eternal bliss and dainty living to be allotted to them in the world to come....

One would give much to see the expression on the Queen's face when she read these words.

In 1889 the Khalifa ordered an invasion of Egypt that ended in the defeat of one of his armies and signalled a wake-up call to the Egyptians and their protectors, the British. In 1896 the British government authorized Horatio Herbert Kitchener to launch a campaign to reconquer Sudan for the Egyptians. It took almost two years to train and transport a large army 1600 miles south to Omdurman, where the Khalifa had decided to make his stand.

On September 2, 1898, the Khalifa committed his 52,000-man army to a frontal assault against the Anglo-Egyptian force, consisting of 8,000 British troops and 17,000 well-trained Egypitians who were massed on the plain outside Omdurman. The outcome was never in doubt, largely because of superior British firepower. During the five-hour battle, about 11,000 Mahdists died. AngloEgyptian losses amounted to 48 dead and fewer than 400 wounded.

Many in Sudan welcomed the downfall of his regime. For twenty years it had been a fragmented theocratic kleptocracy whose main industries were religious conversion, plunder, and slave trading. Sudan's economy had been all but destroyed during this time and the population had declined by approximately one-half because of famine, disease, persecution, and warfare. Moreover, none of the country's traditional institutions remained intact. Tribes had been divided in their attitudes toward Mahdism, religious brotherhoods had been weakened, and religious leaders had vanished.

In January 1899, an Anglo-Egyptian agreement restored Egyptian rule in Sudan but as part of a joint authority, and Britain assumed responsibility for governing the territory on behalf of the khedive.

After restoring order and the government's authority, the British dedicated themselves to creating a modern government. Five thousand men were set to work rebuilding Khartoum, new streets were laid out, 7,000 trees were planted and government buildings were built. More than a hundred thousand pounds was subscribed by the British public to build what is now the University of Khartoum. Among other important changes jurists adopted penal and criminal procedural codes similar to those in force in British India, commissions established land tenure rules, and the rate of taxation was fixed for the first time in Sudan's history.

Early attempts at eliminating slavery and slave trading were baffled because these practices were so widely accepted and were the basis of so much of the economy; eventually it was decided that abolition was best accomplished gradually, and it was not until 1940 that slaving was eliminated under the British.

During the first two decades of British rule, economic development occurred only in the Nile Valley's settled areas. The British extended telegraph and rail lines to link key points in northern Sudan but services did not reach more remote areas. An irrigation dam near Sannar, completed in 1925, brought a much larger area in Al Jazirah under cultivation. Planters were able to send cotton by rail from Sannar to Port Sudan for shipment abroad. This eventually made cotton the mainstay of the country's economy and turned the region into Sudan's most densely populated area.

Perhaps Britain's most important legacy was the development of a sound government administration. At first all the senior officials were British and the minor officials were Sudanese, but gradually the Sudanese Civil Service developed a cadre of honest, hardworking young men who came to be Sudan's governmental elite in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The mainstream of political development, occurred among this educated class, those who had careers in the central administration and envisioned an eventual transfer of power from British colonial authorities to their class. And as Kipling had predicted, "In due time the demand will go up 'the Sudan fer the Sudanese' ." This happened soon after the end of World War II, and on January 1, 1956 Sudan became completely independent. Fifty years is perhaps too soon after independence for the Sudanese to acknowledge their debt to British paternalism.

The British, in 1899--seeing that Sudan was weakened, a threat to Egypt no longer, and seeing that it was economically worthless, the hell-hole of the universe, made up of little more than swamps in the south and deserts in the north--could have, should have gone home and had a cup of tea. In 1899 Sudan was a starving, primitive, fragmented country, presenting nothing but insurmountable problems. Or they could have plundered it or found some ingenious way of exploiting its hapless natives. But the British didn't do either of those things. Some crazy non-European, British sense of rightness and responsibility kicked in. Perhaps Churchill said it best in his history of the Sudan War, The River War: "What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off of the slave, to draw richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain--what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely profitable."

In the period from 1899 through 1955, the Brits abolished slavery--a practice that had gone on for hundreds of profitable years--rebuilt Khartoum, established an educational system, built railroads, a telegraph, roads, an airport, an irrigation system that reclaimed millions of acres, established a solvent economy, provided a peaceful and stable existence, established an educated class of governors, eliminated famine, and increased the population.

Now, let's see what happened after the Sudanese rid themselves of their colonial oppressors.

Two years after the Sudanese achieved independence as a parliamentary republic, General Ibrahim Abboud led a military coup that ended the parliamentary system. In the meantime the Black south, mostly Christian and traditional in religious belief, revolted against the Muslim northern government. Unable to improve the weak economy or end the southern revolt, Abboud agreed to re-establish a civilian government in 1964. This was followed by another military coup in 1969. This time a leftist government was established which banned all political parties and nationalized industries and banks. In 1973 a "peoples congress" was elected to draw up a new constitution. This done, more groups and sub groups were formed, some military, some relgious, a veritable alphabet soup of revolutionary political parties. This round of fighting for power continued for another ten years until 1983 when open war between the north and the south--between the muslims and the Blacks--broke out in an uncontainable way. Since then--for the past 19 years--the longest war in modern African history has been going on.

Since the begining of independence more than 5,000,000 people have died in various wars and revolutions. At this time there is no economy to speak of because there is no stability. The Blacks can choose between living in their own habitat which is bombed and sown with land mines constantly by the Sudanese government dominated by Muslim Arabs, or flee to the area around Khartoum as refugees subject to violence, rape, abduction, looting, and exploitative labor situations which are not much different than they were in the 19th century when slavery was dominant.

So much for independence from colonial oppressors.

The fact is that there are some forms of empire and colonialism that are good and some that are bad and some in between. It is also true that there are times when colonies are ripe for independence and times when independence is premature and it is sometimes hard to tell when the time is ripe.

Roman Imperialism was a good thing; it brought us western civilization. British colonialism brought the world the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Trinidad, Mauritius--not a bad heritage to pass on to a world that values freedom and democracy highly.

Had the makers of "Four Feathers" spent less time in film school and more time studying history they might have made a better film.