Two Hours In Khartoum

CCXII

 

As the Electra winged toward Khartoum, the capital of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan just three hundred miles distant from El Fasher, Amelia excitedly repeated to Fred Noonan what she knew of the city, a magical place described to her by the true-life adventure books she’d read as a child.

For Amelia and Fred, the fabled legends of Prester John, who was reputed to have ruled a vast, speculative Christian kingdom in the heart of Africa, might have been tales they’d both heard in childhood.

More real, but seemingly less likely, was the person of Emin Pasha, a bespectacled, fez-wearing, Arabic-speaking German-Jewish physician who had risen to the post of Governor of Equatoria (today’s nation of South Sudan) in the 1880s, responsible for documenting and mapping the region even while keeping the peace among its scores of competing tribes.

Prester John, King of The Christians. He was reputed to be a direct descendant of Caspar, one of the Three Magi, and originally from India. There is no real evidence that Prester John existed. It is assumed today that his legend may be linked with the Christian Kingdom of Axum, once located in the west of today’s Ethiopia

Isaac Eduard Schnitzer, Emin Pasha, (1840-1892) was born in German Silesia (today’s Poland). Raised as a Jew, he was baptized as a teenager when his mother remarried to a non-Jew; not long thereafter, he began his wanderings toward the East. Skilled in at least 20 languages and trained as a physician, he served as doctor to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, adopting Islam in order to do so, but after facing court intrigues he travelled to Egypt and thence to Khartoum, where he became an intimate of “Chinese” Gordon, the Governor-General of Sudan. Gordon appointed the brilliant, eccentric Schnitzer to be Governor of the Province of Equatoria, a largely unexplored region. He was a gifted administrator, explorer, and ruler, but was struck down by malaria. Rescued by Henry Stanley, he of “Dr. Livingstone” fame, Emin Pasha died by the hand of slave traders who objected to his decree abolishing the practice

The modern city of Khartoum had been founded in the mid-19^th Century, but the ancient city, long ago called Soba, dated from the days of the Pharaohs, who considered the watercourses of the two Niles, from the Mountains of The Moon to The Delta, to be their proper realm.

Khartoum had been established as an Egyptian fortress and trading post guarding the place where the Blue Nile and the White Nile came together. The city dominated the Biblical land called Nubia, a place renowned for the loveliness of its beautiful black princesses, for gold, for spices, and for slaves. The very name Khartoum was mysterious --- it meant Meeting Place or Confluence or Magus or Dream or Safflower, or all of them in different languages. People of every race and creed lived in Khartoum in 1937. It was the first truly cosmopolitan city Amelia and Fred would see since leaving Miami.

Khartoum’s storied history had a dark side, as all such places must. In the 1880s the Mahdi Movement arose amongst the poorer classes of Muslims. According to the tenets of the Movement, a militant Islamic messiah the Mahdi, was fated to appear among the people, whom he would then lead against all infidels and apostates, eliminating them utterly before reestablishing the great Caliphate of the Middle Ages that had stretched from Spain to the Indies and from the gates of Vienna to the Great Rift Valley. 

On March 13, 1884, not many years before either Fred or Amelia was born, a self-styled Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, had laid siege to Khartoum with a vast army of religiously-intoxicated followers. They slaughtered the joint Anglo-Egyptian garrison in the city, including the famed Governor-General of Sudan, Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, and put the rest of the inhabitants of the city to the sword in a slow process of gory public executions. Over the next several years it is estimated that up to eight million Sudanese were killed by the Mahdi’s forces. British troops led by Lord Kitchener finally brought down the Mahdi and his brutal Islamic State at the Battle of Omdurman (a suburb of Khartoum) on September 2, 1898, establishing the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium in the process.

Charles George “Chinese” Gordon (1833-1885), also known as “Gordon of Khartoum”. He was killed by the forces of the Mahdi. British legend says he faced down his killers with nothing but a rattan cane; in truth, he had a revolver. Once he’d shot his bolt, he was decapitated with a scimitar, apparently against the Mahdi’s orders

Although, it, with its colorful cavalry charges, its imprecations to Queen and Country, its flashing scimitars and sabres, the clouds of powder that screened death from onlookers, and its appeals to a God by whatever name, seemed a part of the storied past, Amelia Earhart had been in diapers for the Battle of Omdurman, and the fall of Gordon of Khartoum had taken place only eighteen short years before that. There were plenty of old men in the alleyways and casbahs and in the Governor-General’s palace that remembered the defeat and the victory, the victory and the defeat, and most of all the slaughter. Muhammad Ahmad had lost his personal following by dint of the bloodshed he’d perpetrated, but for many the ideal of the Mahdi, and of the Caliphate restored, lived on.

 

“Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman” by Edward Matthew Hale

Intrigue, like a stew over a low fire, bubbled just under the surface at Khartoum. Egyptian nationalists seeking independence for an enlarged nation that included Sudan schemed against the British and against Sudanese nationalists who wanted a fully independent Sudan free of Anglo-Egyptian meddling. Northern Sudanese and southern Sudanese, united by faith but by little else, worked each toward their own ends. Alliances were made and broken by the day and by circumstance. Natives who favored modernity and with it British rule, worked with the Crown to undermine the various religious and underground political movements.

This was the metropolis into which Earhart and Noonan flew on the afternoon of June 13^th just hours after leaving El Fasher. It was a brief visit, marked only by a meal with the British Officers’ Mess. Somehow, Amelia remembered that she had forgotten to eat that day, and when asked to partake, she admitted she was, “famished . . . As hollow as a bamboo horse.” Later she was to write,

Two hours in Khartoum

East of El Fasher our route crossed a cartographical blank space as large as an outstretched hand with not a contour line on it or a river or the name even of a ‘village of the sixth grade’ . . . The first half is utterly flat, arid, uninhabited, and lacks landmarks altogether . . . Two hours in Khartoum! So  . . .  we refueled and paid our respects to the cordial British officials whose language sounded so very pleasant to our ears. That done, and our bill for 3 pounds 22s. landing fee settled, we were on our way again.

With the abolition of the 1930 Hays Code in the late 1960s, American cinema became far more dynamic and inventive. Films like Bonnie And Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969), Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Patton (1970) brought a depth and deftness to American filmmaking and a willingness to explore the vagaries of human nature, that had not been seen since pre-Code days. 1966’s Khartoum with Charlton Heston, is one of the last films of the romantic-adventure genre relying primarily on its exotic locale to drive its (rather predictable) storyline. Soon, audiences would demand more, and Pan American World Airways’ introduction of the 747 jumbo jet in 1970 would put once mystically faraway lands within the reach of ordinary Americans who were experiencing an unprecedented era of national affluence in those years