For most general readers and a few historians, Winston Churchill's The River War remains the definitive statement on Great Britain's campaign in the Sudan against Khalifa ‘Abdallahi's Mahdist forces in 1898. The young, inexperienced, and ambitious Churchill joined Kitchener's expedition in hope of making a name for himself as a subaltern in the British army and as a correspondent for the Morning Post and, at the same, to gather material for a book which he could sell to a large British audience which thirsted for tales of heroic deeds in exotic places. The victory at Omdurman provided Churchill with actual details which novelists like G. A. Henty and H. R. Haggard often had to conjure up: gallant actions of British officers, a glorious charge by the 21st Lancers, and fierce and wild resistance offered by ‘Dervishes’. In the end, Churchill concluded, civilization and the ‘arms of science’ had vanquished the ‘barbarians’.
In Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers & the River War 1896–1898, Ronald M. Lamothe revisits the Sudan Campaign and, in general, Sudan in the British imperial project from the reorganization of the Anglo-Egyptian army after 1882 to the January 1900 mutiny of Sudanese soldiers at the Omdurman barracks. Lamothe concludes that the decisive factor in the defeat of the Khalifa was not the British army nor modern weaponry but the discipline, ability, and bravery of the Sudanese infantry battalions, a group which Churchill almost entirely overlooked in his account of the war.
Slaves of Fortune attempts to do many things. Lamothe is very interested in writing a social history of the Sudanese soldiers. He examines their status as ‘slave-soldiers’ and how it evolved over time, and he investigates their complex racial, religious, and regional identities. In examining the daily lives of soldiers, Lamothe reaches into the realm of the ‘new military history’. Unlike British or Egyptian soldiers, for example, the Sudanese were given special dispensation to bring along camp followers and Lamothe examines the formal and informal relationships of these civilians and the soldiers: women cooked, washed, mended, built huts, brewed beer, and provided comfort. In examining martial race theory and British/Sudanese relationships, Lamothe adds to the historiography of imperial history. He rejects the traditional view that white British soldiers, shaped by Victorian sensibilities, could only see their social inferiors when they interacted with the Sudanese, and instead highlights complex relationships marked by camaraderie and competition. And finally, Lamothe provides new insights into the Battle of Omdurman and addresses traditional military subjects like tactics and command.
Lamothe does not try to hide the major historiographical weakness of Slaves of Fortune, namely the limited depth and the variety of the primary sources he utilizes. Most of his sources are published and non-published diaries and memoirs, campaign histories, and journalistic accounts, as well as official materials found in London, which have been used by many others in the past. Lamothe has also tapped into the papers of General F. Reginald Wingate, who spent much of his career along the Nile, at the University of Durham. But unfortunately, Lamothe admits, the National Records Office in Khartoum yielded mostly British sources and he was unable to navigate or gain access to any significant documents in Cairo. What he is left with, although he makes excellent use of them, are a handful of narratives and memoirs left behind by Sudanese slave-soldiers.
Slaves of Fortune is an important contribution to the history of Great Britain's campaigns along the Nile from 1896-8. Lamothe has shifted the traditional emphasis on British regiments and British officers to the Sudanese regiments. He challenges Churchill's Tommy Atkins versus Fuzzy Wuzzy opposition by reminding the reader that nearly two-thirds of all British troops were either Egyptian or Sudanese, and that slave-soldiers fought in both the British vanguard and in the Khalifa's. He has created a complex portrait of men who fought and played sport together, who competed with British regiments for battle honors, who served as scouts, porters and military recruiters, and who rarely questioned their lifetime service in the Anglo-Egyptian army. General readers of military history as well as scholars will learn much from Slaves of Fortune.
