The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political Ecology and the Quest for Economic Power 9780755609222, 9781860648359

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Introduction — The River Nile and the Politics of Water1 —

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

The dramatic story of Nile politics and Nile control in the twentieth century, the period of European imperialism, technological optimism and rapid advances in hydrological science, is the topic of this study. The Nile has intrigued historians and poets since the days of the Pharaohs; this most famous river has been the subject of hundreds of poems and thousands of books, from Herodotus and Virgil and the travel notes of Islamic scholars and European novelists to the many modern books about Nile geology, hydrology, dams and politics. The River Nile in the Age of the British is a detailed account of what happened in the most revolutionary period in the river’s almost eternal history. Today the importance of the Nile is greater than ever. It plays a crucial economic, political and cultural role in the 10 countries through which it flows, and is the subject of heated debate in these countries, with their more than 300 million people. Millions look to the river for drinking water for themselves and their animals, for irrigation of their crops, as a source of power and as an object of cultural veneration and pride. Governments are preparing plans for further development and growth, while both regional political leaders and international bodies search for diplomatic and institutional ways to strengthen co-operation among the riparians and avoid open conflict over the sharing of the waters. This narrative of the River Nile is written in the conviction that knowledge of the past is necessary to understand the fundamental structures of, and the background to, established patterns of water use. Knowledge of how the past weighs on the present is a precondition for escaping the power of history. This book has three interrelated themes, all centring on the ‘main person’ of the story – the Nile itself. 1

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N I L E H I S TO RY A S WO R L D H I S TO RY A N D NAT I O NA L H I S TO RY

First, the book relates a new and different story of the rise and fall of the British Empire on the Nile. It starts by describing how the Nile came under British control at the end of the nineteenth century, and how the entire river was conceptually conquered by British water-planners at the dawn of the twentieth century. It goes on to analyse how London’s power gradually disintegrated under mounting pressure from the peoples of the Nile basin, from other Western powers and owing to internal contradictions within the Empire itself. As this narrative unfolds, a number of new interpretations of important historiographical questions in world history will be put forth. This book will, for example, offer a new interpretation of why Britain occupied the Upper Nile, with consequences for the whole question of the partition of Africa in the 1890s. It will also offer a new explanation of Britain’s attitude to Fascist Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia in 1935–36, which led to the failure of the League of Nations just before World War II. The book will reinterpret the background to the Suez crisis of 1956, highlight the post-war British idea that ‘Munich was on the Nile’ (in the Sudan), and show how the row with Nasser and the US Government over the Aswan High Dam dramatically illuminates the decline of old-fashioned imperialism. Regional and national questions such as the relations between Egypt and the Sudan, and why the Egyptian aim of ‘unity in the Nile valley’ failed, will be addressed from a new angle. Also discussed in detail will be the role of Emperor Haile Selassie in maintaining Ethiopia’s territorial integrity against strong international pressure, how an independent Sudan was born in the course of struggle over Nile waters, how unequal regional development in the Sudan can be explained from the perspective of water politics, and how Uganda’s political position and economic development has been tied to developments thousands of kilometres downstream on the shores of the Mediterranean. The book is thus also a history of how the lives of ordinary men and women living on the banks of the longest river in the world were impacted by high-level water politics.

T H E P O L I T I C S O F WAT E R O N A G R A N D S C A L E

As the essence of life and a primary resource on which human society is based, water has been the principal concern of humanity since the dawn of civilisation. Since the days of Sumer in the ‘land between the two rivers’, rulers have been preoccupied with water management, and societies have been fundamentally shaped by their water-management practices and hydrological environment. At the beginning of the third millennium, world leaders and global organisations are increasingly concerned with the world’s growing water crisis. More than half of the population of the world lives in international river basins, on the banks of rivers such as the Ganga, Indus, Mekong, Zambezi, Congo, Niger, Euphrates and Tigris, Jordan,

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Danube, Rhine, Colorado and Amazon. If conflicts over water are to be avoided, it is vital to understand how conflicts emerge, how concepts of water-sharing and water shortage are formed and used politically, and how relations between man and river can be transformed with far-reaching implications. No international river basin has a longer or more complex and eventful history of water politics than the Nile’s. By relating this detailed story of the hydropolitics of the Nile valley, in a period during which the conceptualisation, use and planning of the waters were revolutionised, and when many of the most famous politicians of the twentieth century – such as Churchill, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Eden, Nasser and Haile Selassie – played active parts in the game, this book may serve as a case study of a much more general subject: the political ecology of transnational river basins. The number of actors involved has been formidable. The Nile basin was home to many polities, and more than a thousand language groups, two world religions and other African religions, Arabs and Africans, Western empires and Muslim states. Some of the most ambitious water projects ever conceived were planned and implemented there. The biggest reservoir in the world in its day – created by the Aswan Dam – was completed in 1902. The Sennar Dam in 1925 allowed the creation of the biggest cotton farm in the world. The enduring plans for the Jonglei Canal aimed to create a ‘new Nile’, bypassing the swamps in the Southern Sudan. The new Aswan High Dam created the biggest man-made lake on earth. Plans for reservoirs at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and Lake Victoria and Lake Albert aimed to control the entire river. The Nile basin, an ancient birthplace of astronomy and the civil calendar of 365 days, now experienced a rapid growth of modern hydrology and climatology, and was at the forefront of developments in water-engineering technology. But perhaps most interesting in the context of water management, the Nile was the first international river basin where agreements were entered into among states about the sharing of water. The complexities and richness of this story should serve as a warning to water-planners who look for general models of how water conflicts or water disputes can be resolved. But the Nile serves as an example by which to explore various uses and meanings of water: how rivers have influenced policy and how they in turn have been shaped by politics; how concepts of nature develop, and how these concepts or particular social constructions of nature can have impacts on both river development and politics. The intention is to contribute to a better understanding of how water resources and social and cultural conditions affect water allocation within and between countries, and of the genealogy and role of dominant discourses in framing patterns of action. The endless mobility and multiple uses of river water inevitably mean that a wide range of states and administrative bodies will claim to have rights over it at some point or other. Conflicts over rights are often only socially or culturally explained, as various government bodies and groups attach political and cultural meanings to water that may be equally legitimate. This study will show that differing opinions about water-sharing in the Nile valley reflected spatial and material facts as well. The contenders were situated at different physical locations

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along the river, so these conflicts should not be analysed or understood solely in social terms. The river itself matters, as do our conceptualisations of it. This study tries to bridge the often conflicting technological, legal, economic and environmental approaches as well as matters of security, and aims to integrate them into a single analytical framework. In order to understand international and regional hydropolitics and the potential for water conflicts and water wars, conventional fragmentary or one-sided approaches are not very helpful.

T H E R I V E R BA S I N A S A U N I T O F S T U DY

This book trespasses on the commonly defined area of focus in social sciences which includes such topics as nation states, ethnic groups, social strata, culture and global economic institutions. Much historical research on the Nile has dealt with the history of individual countries or identifiable cultural or social units in the region. There is also a number of fascinating anthropological accounts of the hundreds of peoples in the Nile basin, including the Nubians, the Dinka, the Oromo, the Buganda and the Masai. This study will show how all these peoples became linked, not by the vague and slippery notion of ‘culture’, of trade, of economy, etc., but by the particular, moving ‘space’ they shared, the Nile, and by British Nile-basin policy. This book will shift the focus from national or local arenas to how the history of all the countries and peoples in the basin has been linked together and affected by the physical character of the river and by the water policies of the past. The Nile, which flows for more than 6500km from the heart of Africa to the Mediterranean, has created and strengthened regional economic unity in some areas while creating clear-cut economic barriers among and within other areas. But during the decades of British rule all became subject to an overarching Nile-basin policy. The Nile basin or the Nile valley is chosen as a unit of study, not on the basis of notions of a common Nile-valley culture or a Nile-basin civilisation. Rather than culturally homogeneous, the area has always been marked by extreme cultural heterogeneity, even compared to other major river basins such as the Mekong, the Amazon, the Euphrates and Tigris and the Huang He. Certainly the Nile valley has witnessed attempts to bring it under unified authority. Muhammad Ali took the northern parts of the riverain Sudan in 1821, and Egyptian troops moved southwards through the Nile swamps in the 1850s. But Egyptian rule did not develop into a coherent administration. What motivated this Egyptian expansion was not so much control of the waters of the Nile basin as such, but the search for gold, ivory and, at least in the beginning, slaves. The Egyptian national mythology that Egypt was the Nile and that the Nile was Egypt served as a rhetorical justification, but had no bearing on water planning in the basin as a whole, and did not at that time imply a regionalisation of the Nile basin based on ideas about watersheds, drainage areas, potential dam sites, etc. When the British entered the theatre of Nile-valley politics at the end of the nineteenth century – and throughout the period during which they were its rulers

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– the Nile basin presented (as it had for centuries and still does) a kaleidoscopic procession of civilisations and cultures. There was an almost infinite range of political systems and types of rule in the Nile valley, with striking differences in political and administrative organisation. Their Nile policies have to be reconstructed within this physical, social and economic context (see chapter 2). In the far north, the Nile had created the Egyptian Delta, rich, old, deeply rooted in tradition and sunk in the eternal cycle of fertility and decay. Standing on the shores of the Mediterranean was cosmopolitan and multicultural Alexandria, dating back to its founder, Alexander the Great, and prospering as a centre for the export of Nile produce: grain to Rome two thousand years ago and cotton to a growing world market from about 1820. A little south of where the river divided into two branches stood Cairo, metropolis of the Arab world and intellectual centre of Islam. Located predominantly on the east bank of the Nile, Cairo developed as a true river city; the river had always been its life-blood, and the thread of permanence that physically and economically had linked century after century of history. These downstream areas of the Nile had developed one of the strongest and most stable societies in the history of man. About 4000km upstream from Cairo, on the immense plains that are flooded every year by tributaries of the Nile in the Southern Sudan, lived the predominantly semi-nomadic Nilotic tribes, agro-pastoralists, illiterate, with very weak trading and economic links to the rest of the world. The most important linguistic grouping in the riverain Southern Sudan had been that of the Nilotes. Chief among them were the Dinka, the Nuer and the Shilluk. This large population lived on the fringes of the sudd – a block of floating vegetation in the water channel – depending entirely upon its waters, grassland and fish. These aeschopolous, tribal, Nilotic societies on the shores of the Upper Nile never formed any state administration whatsoever, except for the kingdom of the Shilluk (the Rek), with its centre at Kodok, or Fashoda. The Nile valley was thus home both to what in the literature has been regarded as a symbol of ‘oriental despotism’ and the almost ideal type of its opposite, the ‘stateless’ society. Somewhere in the middle of this continuum of state formations there had been a number of kingdoms of various degrees of stability and forms of administrative machinery. The three African kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro and Ankole in present-day Uganda had existed from about 1500, although none of them relied on Nile irrigation, but rather on the productivity of the rainfall in the inter-lacustrine region. Lake Victoria, called ‘Mother of God’ in the Bugandan language, played an important role for trade and as a military route. In the nineteenth century, the Buganda developed a fleet of canoes to extend their military power and to control the increasingly lucrative trade routes that linked the lake region with the coast. The Nile valley that the British took control over was also very diversified culturally and religiously. Where the White and the Blue Niles meet, at Omdurman, the first modern theocratic Islamic state established its power at the same moment the British were fastening their grip on Egypt. This Mahdist state was but one of many manifestations of strong Islamic influences in the Valley. Millions of people

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were followers of various Sufi sects, with their mystic Islamic belief and practice, in which people sought to find divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of Allah. Irrigated agriculture had played roles of modest economic importance in comparison with trade in northern and central Sudan. To the southeast, on low-lying islands in the middle of Lake Tana – the headwaters of the Nile in Ethiopia – were situated a number of churches and monasteries belonging to one of the world centres of the Coptic Church, established in about AD300. Ethiopia had for centuries – at least since the son of Vasco da Gama helped to rescue Christian rule from Muslim invaders from Arabia – been regarded by both Christians and Muslims as a battleground between Christian and Islamic cultures and civilisations. A visitor wrote in the seventeenth century, ‘No country in the world is so full of churches, monasteries and ecclesiastics as Abyssinia’, and for many centuries it had had ties to the Coptic Church in Egypt. In contrast to many other shared natural phenomena, the Nile has not in general stimulated processes of economic and cultural homogenisation. In the literature it is usual to read of a coast culture, a gold-mining culture, a prairie culture or even a river culture. But although the Nile can be described as a drainage basin, the river and the various Nile environments had partly framed various spatial patterns of man–river relationships and forms of regional identification. The Nile’s versatile potential as a source of water, as a communication link and, gradually, as a source of hydraulic power demonstrates the usefulness of political inquiry with a spatial dimension. It is important to integrate analytically how these uses have caused interactions between the physical and the mental world within the river basin, interactions that have helped to create a very wide range of different and competing concepts of man–river relationships and indeed concepts of the river itself. Confronted by a vast array of political forms, and their relations to the colonial power, the analytical task has been that of putting this bewildering variety into narrative order. An analytical point of focus has been to integrate the relationship between the Nile basin as a particular physical space and the Nile basin as a particular social and political construct, and the context and impact of this relationship under British rule. Water has been an element of nature that has not usually been problematised or incorporated in analyses of social change and political development. The book discusses real differences in human activities within the Nile basin and the kind of spatial interactions which this produced within the same basin, but most of all its focus is on how deliberate human and individual actions helped to transform a wide range of local man–river relationships, and how the roles of distance and of seasonal and annual river discharges influenced the options and nature of these arrangements. It therefore presents hydrological and climatic data to a greater extent than is usual in historical studies. Regarded in a long-term historical and ecological perspective, the Nile should most fruitfully be seen as an a priori existing, supra-individual and changing order which in various ways and to different degrees has framed human action and development efforts in the basin. An examination of the history, economics, politics and ecology of water in general and of the Nile in particular is an entry point for

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exploring the alignment of material structures and material interests in resource allocation and distribution. To choose the Nile as a unit of study is therefore not a conventional answer to the alleged crisis of nationally oriented history and social science, and of the modern territorial state and its legitimising myths. This story – as well as the Nile valley – is given analytical cohesion from the bringing together of an observable unity of a spatial construct and the dynamics of structural relationships related to a new basin-wide planning concept for the river. These factors both created a framework for and reflected a development whereby spatially differentiated societies, spatially differentiated water economies and spatially differentiated relationships between water and man or between the Nile and the societies it flows through, were linked together by a foreign colonial power and can be analysed as one coherent story.

T H E R I S E A N D FA L L O F T H E B R I T I S H NILE EMPIRE 1882–1956

This book deals with that short but revolutionary period in the history of the Nile when it was first conceptualised as both a political and hydrological planning unit. It was a period when British imperial strategists were generally in command, but faced by Egyptian kings and Ethiopian emperors; Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ali Abd al-Latif, Mussolini and Eisenhower, Egyptian nationalists, Ethiopian priests and Nilotic cattle herders: all were actors in a great drama of Nile politics and rivervalley development. The main actor in this story is what is called the British Nile imperial system. It includes the Government and the Foreign Office mandarins in London, but also the agents and high commissioners in Cairo, the colonial governors of Uganda, the Sudan Political Service and diplomats in Addis Ababa. It also encompasses such different imperial actors as the cotton lobby in Manchester and the leading British water engineers in Egypt and the Sudan. This system established and developed a particular imperial Nile discourse, with one overriding aim: how to secure British interests. The focus is therefore not solely the diplomats and strategists in London or the ‘man on the spot’ in Africa, the British rulers and policies in, for example, the Sudan or their activities in Ethiopia. The notion of a Nile imperial system that includes a wide variety of actors rests on two factors: the existence of a structuring Nile discourse that influenced British policies from the early 1890s to the 1950s, and the impact and importance of place on how British interests and Nile development were conceived. This system had a centre (London) and a periphery (or peripheries) of varying importance relative to each other at different points in time and to Nile development. This approach requires that analysis moves relentlessly from place to place, from river source to river mouth, from politicians to the hydraulic engineers, and from the river banks in Africa to London and back, since the roles and importance of individual policy-making nuclei differ and change, not least owing to their different locations relative to the Nile. This book thus tries to

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overcome the partly polarised discussion between the diplomatic historical tradition and the ‘man on the spot’ tradition, since both of these approaches are needed to understand the complexities of the issue and how the system functioned in its complexity. To understand the role of the British Nile empire it is necessary to analyse how various levels of history (social, technological, institutional and individual) and various spatial dimensions met each other in territorial socialisation of actors, and how the formation, reproduction and disintegration of water-use plans took place. Theoretically, it is an attempt to grasp interactions between historical changes that occurred in particular areas, and how these areas were conceptualised by policymakers, water-planners and nationalist movements, and thus to relate the parallel story of the historical construction of the Nile valley as a region and the emergence of such political entities as Uganda, the Sudan, and the Southern Sudan. It has been argued that the laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing more than the actions and passions of human beings. The functioning of such social institutions as the British Nile policy-making machinery should therefore always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions and attitudes of individual human beings. One can therefore not be satisfied by explanations in terms of ‘collectives’, as is very common in the literature on spatialisation and man–water relationships (ethnic groups, states, classes, genders, etc. are almost always described as if these collectives had individual wills) and also in studies of colonialism. Although this study is not primarily interested in individual intentions and actions as such, but rather in general British policies, technological developments and conceptual changes, there is no way to understand these phenomena other than through an understanding of individual actions. Even large-scale political and technological phenomena, such as the taming of the Nile, must be accounted for by the situations, dispositions and beliefs of individuals. To reconstruct a Nile story encompassing almost a hundred years in time and a tenth of the African continent in space – based on the understanding and reconstruction of individual actions – is easier said than done. It requires a great deal of research, since the individual actors are so many and occupy such very different positions, both socially and geographically – a number of prime ministers, foreign ministers and a small army of Foreign Office officials and water engineers, and more than ten states, with their own competing classes and elites. The theoretical and methodological approach chosen resembles a methodological individualism in important respects, but it is not absolutely that if one regards this as a theory of meaning, to the effect that every statement about social phenomena has to be a statement about individual human beings or it is unintelligible. All predicates that range over social phenomena must not be definable in terms of predicates that range only over individual phenomena; consequently, statements about social phenomena may be translatable without loss of meaning into statements that do not have to be wholly about individuals. It is claimed that in the social world only individuals are real, but this is insufficient for interpreting individual intentions and it is impossible to restrict analysis to individual actions as long as the

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aim is to tell the story of the Nile in the Age of the British, and of the great changes in water-related social and economic institutions that took place in the Nile valley during this period. The British Nile imperial system can be described as a field of forces in which a set of objective power relations (in the form of an established Nile discourse and a more or less stable imperial administrative hierarchy) imposed themselves on all who entered the system; kinds of relations that are irreducible to the intentions of the individual actors, or even to the direct interactions among them, but still have to be made understandable by an analysis of these intentions. An analysis of agency and structure, of individual actors and the imperial system, of the river, and of the regional stratified structural relations and mechanisms that give these relations shape, consistency and continuity over time must escape an ontological vision and explanatory logic that can only see flat social surfaces. In order to reconstruct and make intelligible almost a hundred years of intricate Nile politics, one cannot focus on individual motives and intentions alone. One has to look for what can be described as overall political and economic aims regarding the use of the Nile. The development of the Nile discourse itself, and a proper understanding of it, will guide expectations and interpretations of individual behaviour, as will the constraining impact of the main ‘character’ in our story – the River itself.

T H E O RY, M E T H O D O LO G Y A N D T H E P E DAG O G Y O F T H E N I L E AT L A S

The Nile as physical space represents a context of a special kind, but with implications for the methodological approach chosen. Methodological individualism tends to exclude explanations that appeal to social forces, structural features of society, institutional factors or, in our connection, geographical or spatial constructs. The source of trouble has usually been identified as the part played by social norms in the explanation of what holds societies together and accounts for social institutions and social change. This supra-individual ‘something’ has been given a very clear and rigid, almost ritualistic, determining role in understanding actions in works by scholars who disagree with the approach of methodological individualism. This book will therefore not look for a common culture on which intentional action must always draw, such as for example ‘the Victorian mind’ or ‘British imperial thinking’, although particular notions and approaches may be identified by such terms. What became evident, however, as the work proceeded was the apparent continuity in British Foreign Office perceptions of the Nile from the 1890s to the 1950s. The politics varied, reflecting changing power relationships, but the main perceptions remained generally constant for a long time. The primary aim of the British Government in Egypt – whether represented by the Agent and ConsulGeneral (until 1914), the High Commissioner (between 1914 and 1936) or thereafter the Ambassador – was to secure imperial interests, especially the control of communications through the Suez Canal, and thus control of the Nile became a

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constant worry. The various statements in the very rich source material could be translated into something that was definitely spoken by individuals, but which, in order to be analysed in our context, can be more fruitfully understood within the broader context of an imperial strategic discourse on the Nile, and a waterplanners’ discourse about the taming of the Nile. The Foreign Office literature on the Nile issue is extremely voluminous, but at the same time, and perhaps therefore, very concerned with the policies, agreements and projects of the past. Foreign Office bureaucrats kept a dialogue going with their own Nile ‘past’, a dialogue with which the politicians related, and which has to be understood in order to discover both continuity and change in their policies. What is included in the individual chapters is there not only for the sake of the narrative alone, but also in order to demonstrate both permanence and discontinuity in the British Nile discourse, and the longer time perspective underlying this dramatic period of political events. The water-planners were clearly very much influenced by each other, and it is fair to say that in the course of time (with some interesting exceptions) they developed an esprit de corps which must be taken into consideration if we are to understand their role. As a geographical phenomenon, the Nile limited and opened up options for political strategies and initiatives. In addition, therefore, to studying the social order and the changing Nile landscape as a result of individual intentions and state strategies, this book analyses the development of British Nile policy as affected by both social and geographical orders. The Nile basin is conceptualised on the one hand as a dynamic social category, and not only a physical setting for interaction. But the maps of interest are not only reflections of a mental world, but also of a material, physical world. The idea has been to escape that fallacy so widespread in social science and history: that of either regarding such physical space as simply a physical given for interaction, or explaining the spatial or the regional only in terms of the social. By focusing on the relationship between the hydrology of the Nile on the one hand and the character of basin-wide policies on the other, the analytical perspective can move between a focus on the political circles and diplomatic missions in London, Washington, Rome, Cairo, Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Kampala, to the district commissioners placed along various parts of the river and the people who lived there, to the spot itself and its most significant geographical economic and political factors. The apparent regularities and common characteristics of individual actions must make it important to understand and analytically include not only the traditions and limitations of the Nile discourse in British policymaking machinery, but also the a priori supra-individual order of a geographical, physical phenomenon like the Nile itself, how this makes only certain intentions and plans possible and rational, and then to try to analyse the changes of this order. History can be discussed and accounted for not only as a narrative progression, but also as structural shifts in ecological relationships. History in this broad sense deals with a shift in structures. The structure of any river strongly conditions the available choice of technique and water plans, with all their social and economic repercussions. Dams cannot be built everywhere, but only on sites that are geologically and topographically suitable. For hundreds of years the swamp ecology

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in the Southern Sudan and the abundance of rainfall in Uganda have affected not only local economic and political adaptations, but also British policies, in 1898 as well as in 1956. A historical narrative of the Nile valley or any other river valley of importance to the people and policy-makers living within it will be unintelligible if it overlooks such long-term determining factors. Some of the great events and conflicts in the Nile valley cannot be properly explained without taking into account underlying, often silent, currents such as the fluctuations and flow of the river itself, whose characteristics can only be discovered by studying them for long periods of time. Some of the political events in the period should be regarded as surface manifestations of these currents, and are explicable in terms of them. The droughts in 1879, 1889 and 1900, and the floods in 1947 stimulated new thinking on control of the Nile. But adaptation–stimulus theory, or the oversimplifications in much-used models such as the interactionist model derived from the ecosystem model or the causal hypotheses of the ‘cultural materialist’ type, are unable to appreciate, for example, the importance of the great, revolutionary visions of the earlier British water-planners. They would, they boasted, ‘take the Nile in hand’; they compared themselves to the Pharaohs; they wanted to show how the Englishman could tame the world’s longest river. The explanation of a historical development is not complete when only the agent’s intentions, goals and theoretical understanding of his situation have been discovered and interpreted. What is more rewarding is to try to find out how a ‘British Nile policy’ developed, and what made particular ideas and intentions work or not. It is not sufficient or even very meaningful to ascertain Cromer’s motives in 1896, or those of Lord Lloyd and Austin Chamberlain in the 1920s, or of Eden and Selwyn Lloyd in the 1950s, by themselves. The way the foreignpolicy system usually functioned enabled a certain consistency in making policy; it produced a synthesis between the personal or political instincts of the minister and the professional opinions, practices and style of his permanent officials. One cannot properly understand the conflicts between the British and the states they dominated or the conflicts within the British Nile system itself without taking into account how different actors operated, influenced by the finite horizons of particular settings, by different positions in different spatial units in the Nile basin. This is both a narrative of the rise and fall of the British Nile empire and a particular historical process of regionalisation of physical space, but also a story of how the Nile basin was transformed as the Nile was put to human use in different ways in the past. The Nile landscape of 1956 was in important respects a very different landscape from that which existed in 1882. Over the years a strong and close alliance between water engineers and Nile strategists had financed large and small waterworks. A map of major waterworks on the Nile can be read as a series of biographies of British policy in general and Nile policy in particular. But just as importantly, all the plans that never materialised also have to be reconstructed, since they had an impact on Nile development. The narrative will show how

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diplomacy may be regarded as a game of politics, but when it comes to hydrodiplomacy, how it has direct material impacts on environments and landscapes, and on human life. Water-planners and policy-makers constantly interacted with the Nile system, and in this process changed both society and the environment. But in order to understand the particularism of their ‘holistic’ approach, a story of the British Nile world has to be linked to a cultural history of how different people attached to and created for their environment different meanings – it must show different ‘Nile worlds’. The Nile was not only a setting for human action, but also induced meaning. Perceptions developed within the context of interactions between society, the river environment and the history of river control, that is the world of particular water experience. There was an ‘Egyptian world of experience’, a ‘riverine northern Sudanese world of experience’ and a ‘Nilotic world of experience’: the Nuer call the swampland in the south watered by the Bahr al-Jabal in flood toich, which can be translated as ‘Gift from the Mother’. The Arabs trying to penetrate it and the British trying to control it called the whole area the ‘Sudd’, or ‘Barrier’, and it was also often described by the British as the useless ‘Bog’. In order to understand the British period and the character of both British imperial expansion and exploitation of the Nile, the technological aspect should not be neglected. Imperial expansion and colonial control were of course not natural, unavoidable results of technological dominance, as has been argued, but this technological supremacy made colonialism potentially more efficient in controlling human subjects as well as nature. There is no direct causal relationship between technological transformation and Nile valley imperialism, but this study analyses how and to what extent technological changes and innovations affected the timing and location of British expansionism in the valley, and therefore also the limits to the British ability to change the Nile itself.

T R AV E L S A N D D O C U M E N T S

In line with the theoretical and methodological approach, the sources for this narrative are of two different kinds. One is relatively unusual in historical literature: the physical, observable changes in the landscape caused by anthropogenic impact on the river environment. Although the Nile cannot speak, and has no intentions or ‘meaning’ by itself, the barrages thrown across its stream, the fields along its banks, the reservoirs holding up its waters do. I have travelled along the Nile from Alexandria to Lake Victoria, and seen the old barrage north of Cairo, the impressive canals that turned Ismailia into an oasis, the Esna barrage and the monumental Aswan Dam, as well as the thundering Blue Nile Falls and the desolate Jonglei Canal. The character and importance of the Nile, and how it frames human activities, cannot be grasped from books alone. The written sources consist of a great number of plans for Nile development published by water engineers in Cairo, Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Kampala.2

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These and the debates about them constitute the public Nile discourse, framing individual intentions and actions. It has also been necessary to integrate knowledge produced by hydrologists and experts on climate, soil types and topography, so as to understand the particular structural constraints and possibilities for water control and economic changes afforded by the Nile. In addition I have studied thousands of files of previously classified diplomatic documents in the Public Record Office in London, government reports and memoranda, both in London and in the National Records Office in Khartoum, and collections of private papers of members of the Sudan Political Service in the Sudan Archive at the University of Durham. I have also consulted a collection of interviews with American leaders involved in the Suez Affair and the Aswan Dam (see the John Foster Dulles Oral History Project, Princeton University, and documents and transcripts of telephone conversations in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Kansas). In addition I have read reports and unpublished theses at national libraries in Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Uganda, Italy and the UK. Although part of this study resembles diplomatic history, it is not just that, in the sense that this tradition often exclusively concentrates on the role of statesmen. Narratives within this tradition have tended to create the impression that foreign policy was manufactured in the foreign ministries of Europe, unhampered by national contexts or by geographical constraints and opportunities. This book is concerned with the world of the diplomat, but it focuses on sources found in archives under odd headings such as ‘Irrigation’, ‘Lake Tsana’, ‘Hydrology’, etc. To reconstruct the world of the diplomat in this case means that I had to go beyond the archival filing system of the relevant ministries and archives.

F O U R PA RT S A N D S E V E N C H A P T E R S

This book starts with the British bombardment of Alexandria and the occupation of Egypt in 1882, and finishes with Britain’s crushing defeat at Suez in 1956 and London’s secret plan for strangling Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalism by diverting the waters of the White Nile. In the same way as the moving waters of the Nile, gathered from and permeating a certain area of land, thus binding the land and people together in a never-ending story, the narrative links actors at the Emperor’s court in Ethiopia, the Egyptian land-owning elite, the cattle nomads on the plains of the Southern Sudan and the ‘river people’ of Uganda, and moves its focus from place to place along the bank of the river. The narrative flows like a river, from year to year and from month to month, consciously underlining the repetitiveness of Nile diplomacy and Nile politics, framed as it was by the structural and hydrological characteristics of the Nile, and reinforced and reproduced by dominant conceptualisations of the river system. But now and then it apparently stops up, like the waters in a large river at a reservoir, in order to address theoretical questions or to explain changes in the human landscape and how the river was conceptualised in different periods.

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Part I deals with the coming of the British and how the Nile basin was conceptually conquered. The first chapter presents a new analysis of how and why the British became the masters of the entire Nile basin, and tries to depict the regional impacts of the fact that in 1904 London ruled not only the waves of the ocean, but also the longest river in the world. It rejects the prevailing theory of the European partition of Africa as being caused by rivalry among European colonial powers, and in which Victorian imperialism is portrayed as imperialism by default, moving into Africa because of fear of other European powers. The British policy of taking control of the headwaters of the White Nile has commonly been described as a policy based on ‘imaginations’ about African geography and false ideas about the Nile system. On the basis of a number of previously unused historical documents I will argue that the British expansion up the Nile basin was, on the contrary, an eloquent example of rational, cool-headed imperialism. As rulers of a ‘hydraulic society’ at the very outlet of the long and vulnerable River Nile, the British understood that stability and growth in Egypt required upstream water imperialism. The second chapter deals with how, at the turn of the twentieth century, the British had conceptually conquered the Nile in the form of a basin-wide Nile control plan, which was published in 1904. It presents the men behind it, William Garstin, the very clever Under-Secretary of Public Works in Egypt for almost two decades, and Lord Cromer, the ‘puppet-master’ of Egyptian policies from 1883 to 1907. It summarises the nature and character of the particular British ‘Nile world’, a perspective that came to have a fundamental and long-lasting impact on historical development in all the ten states of the Nile basin. Part II deals with the period 1904–1945. Britain was in command of Nile matters, but its strategy and planning concept were simultaneously gradually disintegrating under the pressure of external and internal forces. The third chapter starts with the impact of the Egyptian revolution, and how this had important consequences for British Nile strategy, for how the various cultural and political entities in the basin became connected to and disconnected from each other by this diplomacy, and how it also impacted on the way the Nile landscape was changed. It will highlight the planning history of the Gezira Scheme, the ‘dam of God and Allah’ as it was praised by Christian and Muslim leaders. It will show how this project was part and parcel of the British aim to create a Sudan that would gradually become more and more independent of Egypt. It will also analyse the deteriorating relationship between Egypt and London, and the tactics of the Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa over Lake Tana. Eventually this led to a little-known development whereby the British Prime Minister and Mussolini in Italy secretly aimed to make a deal over Ethiopia, in which Britain’s objective was to enlist Italian support for its reservoir plans on Lake Tana on the headwaters of the Blue Nile. It also shows how the relative importance of the two main Nile tributaries changed. The White Nile became less important than it had been in British strategy during the first decades of the British Nile era, while the Blue Nile basin grew in importance. The fourth chapter takes as its point of departure the Italian occupation of Ethiopia and the Anglo–Egyptian Agreement of 1936. Both these important events

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brought home to London that Britain’s days as the basin’s undisputed ruler were over. The decade or so between the Allenby ultimatum and the establishment of the Gezira Scheme in the mid-1920s and 1936 saw no great new Nile development projects. It was, however, a period in which Nile diplomacy was at the heart of regional politics. The chapter will show the changing role of the water issue in Anglo–Egyptian relations and tell the dramatic story of how Egyptian worries were aired again and again. It will analyse how British plans for the Nile were a principal but overlooked reason that London did not protest more strongly against Italy’s and Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia (a lack of resolution which eventually led to the break-up of the League of Nations). The chapter will also relate how British district commissioners in the Southern Sudan came up against enormous water plans for the swamps in the Southern Sudan, plans supported by the British Government and the Governor-General in Khartoum. It will also analyse the impact these plans had on regional, uneven development in the country. Part III deals with the collapse of the British Empire and how Britain’s Nile policies eventually failed. The fifth chapter deals with Nile policies after World War II and tries to put the history of the Aswan Dam and the Suez crisis in a broader regional and African perspective than has been done in the past. It relates how a financially bankrupt and politically weakened Empire tried to halt the Americans from undermining its power in the Nile valley at the same time as London was dependent on Washington for financial assistance. The chapter also tells the history of Ugandan plans to turn the country into a hydroelectric eldorado, of Haile Selassie’s aim to get Eritrea as compensation for the Tana Dam, and of a colonial research team that produced a magnificent study of man and the environment in the Jonglei area. The sixth chapter analyses the Anglo–American offer to help finance Nasser’s Aswan High Dam – a project that according to Nasser would turn Egypt into the Japan of Africa. Their withdrawal was the direct reason for Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, with all its later repercussions. This chapter puts the history of the Aswan Dam and of Anglo–American policies and rivalry in Egypt into a much wider context than usual. It presents a detailed analysis of Anglo– Egyptian relations, the question of the Sudan and the impact of the American ‘intrusion’ into areas London regarded as its exclusive domain. Unlike other studies of the pre-Suez issue, it also provides a description of plans for the Nile upstream, both in Uganda and the Southern Sudan, since these impacted and contextualised the importance of the Aswan Dam in regional diplomacy and political ecology. The chapter offers a day-by-day account of the negotiations that took place before the Aswan pledge was made in December 1955, an analysis of the pledge itself and its two stages, and the subsequent negotiations from December 1955 to July 1956. It also describes how the old concept of the Nile basin crumbled under pressure from a number of new political and economic forces both from within and outside the colonial administration. It shows how British inability to adapt to the new realities in the basin affected British Nile policies and the history of Nile utilisation, and that the combination of these factors finally helped to bring to an end the British age in the Nile basin.

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The seventh chapter deals with developments after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July 1956. In London this act by Nasser – in Downing Street nicknamed ‘the Mussolini of the Middle East’ – was regarded as the hitherto most serious attack on Britain’s vital strategic interests in the region. Nasser had mocked Britain’s role as the policeman of the region. The vulnerability of the imperial metropolis itself was demonstrated. Something had to be done, but what? London thought Nasser might ‘strangle’ Britain by stopping oil shipments through what it described as its lifeline. The British Government discussed plans to ‘strangle’ Egypt instead by closing off Egypt’s life artery. The water plan was meant to counter an ‘act of piracy’ with a plot that would soften Egypt’s defiant attitude: the British Government hoped that its political and economic influence in the Upper Nile basin could be employed as a whip to force Nasser into submission. This aspect of British policy during the Suez crisis has been ignored in biographies and autobiographies as well as in the voluminous studies on the subject. Part IV deals with the legacy of British Nile policies and the future importance of water and geopolitics. It shows the developments in the Nile basin after the age of the British and how these have been affected by what took place during colonial times. Conflicts over the Nile waters did not start with the age of the British in the Nile basin, nor did they end with the demise of the Empire. Since London’s crushing defeat in the Suez crisis and the emergence of independent Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and Zaire in the 1960s, regional hydropolitics became even more important in any analyses of regional developments in general. The epilogue shows that in the area of Nile control and Nile sharing, the legacy of the colonial period is still relevant and still has an impact. The dams built by the colonial power are still there. The water technology they introduced has created settlement patterns and deep-seated economic structures. The way the river was socially constructed has impacted on the relations among all the peoples in the basin until the present day. The water agreements that London was instrumental in establishing are still structuring water allocation in the basin. The British lion made its last imperial roar during the Suez crisis, but the echo of its Nile discourse is still heard, and the huge walls of stone and the great number of irrigation structures it established are still there – being not only remnants of the past, but of the past in the present.

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River Imperialism

When, eventually, the waters of the Nile, from the Lakes to the sea, are brought fully under control, it will be possible to boast that Man – in this case, the Englishman – has turned the gifts of Nature to the best possible advantage. (Lord Cromer) 1

When the British Government decided to take direct control of Egypt in 1882, it had many reasons for doing so. Development of the Nile was one of them. Lord Salisbury and British business interests were preoccupied with the region’s artificial waterway, the Suez Canal, and not the Nile.2 The Canal had become, and was regarded as, the highroad to the Indian Empire. But very soon the British came to believe that Britain’s position at Suez, the political stability of Egypt and a sufficient import of cotton to Manchester hinged on the Nile. About twenty years after the bombardment of Alexandria, London had occupied Uganda, fought a war in the Sudan and made Nile agreements with the Ethiopian Emperor and the governments of Italy, France, Germany and Belgium. London had made the whole majestic river, from its source in the heart of Africa to its outlet at the Mediterranean, a river of the British Empire, and put it under the rule of Queen Victoria. The literature on Victorian imperialism, the Nile quest and the partition of Africa is very extensive indeed, but available explanations are surprisingly few and similar. All seem to agree that London became a reluctant ruler of the Nile basin, because the British Government and British authorities in Egypt feared what other European countries might do in the region. But in fact the question was not so much whether the British would occupy the headwaters of the White Nile or the Sudan, but when they would do so. The British had occupied the banks of the Lower Nile to further their imperial interests. Now the geopolitical character of downstream Egypt and 19

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the importance of the Nile question stimulated regional imperialism of a particular kind. Britain expanded southwards not because the frontiers of imperial fear were moving, but because Egypt was facing the limits of water. It was not French imperialism that brought them to Lake Victoria and the swamps, but the waters of the Nile.3 But this dominant explanation of the partition of Africa and the Nile quest has it wrong: British leaders since the early 1890s quite systematically, irrespective of European rivals, planned for war and occupation of the Upper Nile. While historical interpretations have tended to be ‘water blind’, British strategists understood the importance of Nile hydropolitics.

WAT E R ‘A S VA LUA B L E A S G O L D ’

When the British took control of Egyptian affairs in 1882, they very soon realised that they had become rulers of an old hydraulic society, where the water question was at the very centre of public life. Egyptian agriculture had undergone profound changes in the decades prior to the British invasion. Parts of the pharaonic system of flood irrigation in the Egyptian Delta had been replaced by perennial irrigation under Muhammad Ali in the first half of the nineteenth century. He realised that Egypt had the climate, soil and people to cultivate more – the problem was water and how to overcome the economic repercussions of seasonal fluctuations in the Nile’s discharge. Egypt could either devise methods of raising the river or try to dig deeper canals into which the natural river water could flow. Muhammad Ali’s government started by lowering the canal beds in Lower Egypt. This was an enormously laborious task because the Nile was a heavily silt-laden river, and the many deep channels filled with mud every year after the autumn flood. During the reign of Muhammad Ali an entirely new type of technology in Nile control was introduced: the Delta Barrage. The aim was to raise the level of the waters behind the barrage. As the river subsided during the summer season, gate after gate was closed, so as to keep a more constant supply in the channels that cut across the Delta area. The barrage was placed where the Damietta and Rosetta branches separate, just south of the Delta. The same land could now yield one or two crops more every year.4 The conditions for an enormous increase in cotton production had been created. In 1820, cotton production and exports were negligible. From 1860 onwards cotton made up about 80 per cent of Egypt’s total exports. Since then the expansion of perennial irrigation and extensive Nile control works came to be seen as the prescription for Egypt’s wealth and water shortage problems, and were regarded as two sides of the same coin. The British came to a country where technological innovation on a large scale had already started. However, the new irrigation system had gradually fallen into disrepair, not least because of the Government’s financial problems. Uprisings in the late 1870s and early 1880s made the situation even worse. During the anti-Western Orabi rebellion, the nationalists destroyed canals and canal-beds, knowing that this struck at the heart of the Egyptian economy and foreign interests there.

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In this situation, the British administration under Lord Cromer’s strong leadership (1883–1907),5 made water development a central task. Although Egypt was de facto ruled by Cromer and the British, the central administration of the country was carried out by a Council of Ministers in the name of the Khedive, who derived his hereditary powers from the firman of the Ottoman Sultan in Turkey. Technically, the Khedive was the Sultan’s vassal, but in reality he had become a more or less reluctant pawn of British imperialism. His government was effective within the scope ascribed to it by the British Consul-General, but with a more anti-British khedive, countermeasures had to be taken. Providing water was the key to imperial profits, national prosperity and political legitimacy with both rich and poor. The population had doubled in the course of a few decades and reached almost 10 million in 1897, making Egypt one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The growing number of poor peasants put pressure on the Government to secure greater and more reliable water supplies. The most powerful foreign trade agencies dealt in cotton, and the more that was produced the more they would cash in.6 The big landowners controlled about two-thirds of the cotton harvest. Just after the British had occupied Egypt, the former Khedive Ismail’s estates, close to one million feddans or about one-fifth of the cultivated land, had been sold to influential notables. This redistribution of agricultural land to the elite was a way of winning the loyalty of the most prominent members of society. The Egyptian state, seeking to maximise revenue, increase export duties and expand its profits from sales of state land, depended upon an improved irrigation system. Under Cromer’s tight financial control, a major aim was to improve debt service to European creditors. British banks supported increased cotton exports in order to buttress Egypt’s ability to repay its debts. In 1882 Egypt’s foreign debt had risen to £100 million, and annual debt service to £5 million,7 of which a large proportion went to Britain. The Lancashire textile industry wished to reduce its dependence on American cotton by increasing supplies of cheaper cotton from Egypt. So important was the Nile for British industrialists and bankers that, in the 1880s, The Times reported regularly on the discharge levels of the Nile. What mattered most to the British with regard to Egypt were not the cycles and amount of capital exported (as influential theories of imperialism suggest) but the fluctuations and quantity of Nile waters and how much cotton and profit a good Nile year could produce. The British had barely planted their flag on the banks of the Nile before they were met by demands to implement large hydraulic enterprises.8 More and more people saw the bounty of the Nile as a terrible waste of nature: in a normal Nile year most of the water flowed unused into the Mediterranean. To the big cotton farmers, to the cotton industry, to the Government, to the European representatives in the Caisse de la Dette and to British banks and industries, it was potential fortunes that passed by. Everybody knew that the gap between water demand and supply continued to grow in the all-important summer season. More water was the key to prosperity for everyone. Cromer and his officials were aware that the fate of governments had always depended on their ability to give ample water to thirsty lands and to protect the

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country from the permanent danger of devastating flood – the question of Egyptian wealth and stability had always been a question of water control.9 They were clear; they wanted to demonstrate, in the words of Cromer, the ability of Western civilisation in Nile control. The basin system of irrigation, which had been used throughout Egypt for thousands of years until the early nineteenth century and was still in operation in upper Egypt and in areas west of Cairo, could not meet increasing demands. Under this system the land was divided into basins of 1000 to 40,000 acres, with the longitudinal bank as close to the river as it could safely be placed and cross-banks between this and the edge of the desert. When the Nile rose, regulating sluices let water into these compartments, and the land could be flooded to an average depth of one to two metres. The water was held there for 40 to 60 days. After the river fell the water was drained back again to the river, leaving behind its silt. This system maintained the quality of the land, since it was both cleansed and given a thin layer, perhaps a millimetre thick, of fresh soil every year. Basin irrigation represented an optimal human adaptation to the natural fluctuations of the river, but by the end of the nineteenth century it was regarded by both the Government and the agricultural sector as outdated and inadequate. It provided insufficient water in the cotton-cultivation season, and was not reliable enough for large-scale cash-crop production. The damage done by a mismanaged water system would be proportionally greater as cultivation expanded. Thus, increased and improved water control was destined to top the agenda of any administration in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century. On the one hand the demand for water grew incessantly. On the other hand the Nile was far from being harnessed. Nobody in the land of Nilometers questioned that the provision and distribution of water were the responsibility of the Government. While some of the embankments of the basin system could be built by local peasants, the barrages and great reservoirs needed for all-year irrigation required technology and money that only the Government could furnish.10 And while the rulers of ancient Egypt could escape criticism by blaming the tears shed by Isis over the tomb of Osiris, the British had to deliver according to the standards of what was propagated as the technological and organisational superiority of an advanced civilisation. Opinions varied about what should be done. In 1880 a Frenchman, de la Motte, proposed building a dam at what was called Gebel Silsila. In 1882, an American, Cope Whitehouse, suggested Wadi Rayan, a depression in the desert that had already been mentioned by Linant Pasha,11 as a place for water storage.12 During the 1880s and 1890s, a number of projects were discussed and dam sites examined.13 British officials did not enjoy any monopoly over the Nile control scene. To narrow the gap between supply and demand for water was a continuous task and a permanent worry for the British. How to increase the yield of the Nile in what the water-planners called the ‘timely season’, that is the summer season in Egypt? How to protect agricultural lands against devastating floods? How to dam the excess water in September, October and November for use in the season of scarcity? How to construct dams that could reduce annual fluctuations in

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discharges? The complexities of this enterprise increased as perennial irrigation spread. Cromer had gathered around him a group of very able engineers and waterplanners, who worked in close co-operation with a large staff of Egyptian irrigation administrators. They managed not only to remove immediate obstacles, but to revolutionise the entire irrigation system. They turned the waters of the Nile into a resource that proved its worth – not only as an economic good but as perhaps the crucial political asset.

WAT E R S C A RC I T Y

By the early 1890s farmers all over the Delta could normally cultivate all year, but the upper limits of expansion using existing water-control technology had been reached. First the British, in 1891, repaired the old barrage system. The foundations, all of them below water level, and the sluice gates were greatly improved. The Delta Barrage could now hold up to a one-metre head of water, leading to unparalleled control of water levels in Lower Egypt. The overall effects were startling.14 While the costs of raising water to irrigate fields were greatly reduced, the cotton crop was doubled. Perennial irrigation was now possible over the entire cultivated area of the Delta. It proved to be a great material advantage to Egypt and it also led to abolition of the corvée15 (forced labour had been chiefly required to clear mud from the summer canals. In 1883, for example, about 85,000 men worked on canal clearance for 160 days, unfed and unpaid.16) Repair of the barrage, canals and dams was given priority.17 When the water level was artificially raised the canals did not have to be so deep and less canal clearance was required. A series of important though smaller projects was completed. Altogether these works contributed to the doubling of cotton production between 1888 and 1892.18 The tax derived from the enhanced value of the land provided funds to employ paid labour. The demand for land rose and its price doubled. But seasonal and annual discharge fluctuations meant that the existing watercontrol system, despite the great efforts put into it, did not always satisfy even actual demand, with grave economic consequences. In 1886 the amount passing into the Damietta branch had been so small, owing to greatly increased discharges to the central and eastern Delta, that a rough stone dam was thrown across the Damietta branch in summer to feed the canals there. In 1888 about 250,000 acres in Upper Egypt received no irrigation water.19 1889 was also a very bad year. Irrigation officers reported early the same year that the spirit of political resistance against the Government was ‘stronger now than ever’,20 and the cotton businesses suffered as well. The Nile discourse in the 1890s was unanimous on one central issue: control works of an altogether new type were required. It was increasingly evident that the seasonal fluctuations of the Nile somehow had to be evened out. Simply adapting to the natural fluctuations was now seen as insufficient if water security and further

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growth were to be achieved. The proposals of de la Motte and Whitehouse were discussed, but rejected by the British. From the beginning of the 1890s, a number of new initiatives were taken. The British engineer William Willcocks, produced a preliminary Report on Reservoirs in 1891 and Justin C. Ross a Note on Reservoirs the same year.21 Colin Scott-Moncrieff, Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Public Works, decided that a detailed study of reservoir sites should be given top priority, partly because public interest was so strong.22 In 1893 Ross read a paper before the Geographical Society in Scotland, expressing what was on everybody’s mind in Egypt: ‘We have now arrived at a stage in the summer irrigation of Egypt where the available natural supply has been completely exhausted, and there still remains more land to grow cotton.’23 In 1894 the first of a long line of seminal reports produced by British water engineers was published by the Government: Report on Perennial Irrigation and Flood Protection of Egypt.24 It estimated the future annual need for summer water in Egypt at 3.6 billion cubic metres.25 It asserted that if irrigation were introduced in Upper Egypt, where agriculture still depended on the basin system, and improved in Lower Egypt, annual income would rise from E£32,315,000 to the almost incredible sum of E£38,540,000,26 creating an estimated annual net gain of E£6,225,000 to the country. An overshadowing political and administrative question therefore naturally became: how to secure over 3.5 billion cubic metres of irrigation water in the summer season? And how to secure the country against potentially devastating floods? The most concrete suggestion of the 1894 report was to build a reservoir, which had been discussed in government circles for years, at Aswan in Upper Egypt. The dam was planned to be the biggest in the world.27 Its most innovative aspect was the way it was to be adapted to the character of the Nile, with numerous, very large undersluices to allow the entire floodwaters to pass through in order to reduce silt deposits, which, according to the report, would have progressively reduced the reservoir’s capacity by 55,000 cubic metres every year.28 However, this reservoir was even then regarded as insufficient over the long term, because its planned capacity satisfied only half of Egypt’s estimated needs. In view of this concern, the Egyptian Council of Ministers discussed possible dam sites outside the borders of Egypt and in the Sudan at a meeting as early as 3 June 1894.29 In June 1894, four years before British and French troops met at Fashoda on the Upper Nile and European imperial aspirations in the Southern Sudan caught the headlines of the international press, officials met in Cairo to assess concrete proposals for Egyptian dams in the Sudan, which was then still an independent state under the successor of Muhammad Ahmad, Khalifa Abdullahi.30 In this meeting Garstin, the new Under-Secretary for Public Works,31 opposed a plan for a reservoir proposed by Sir John Fowler, but his reason for doing so was not that the Sudan was an independent country; Garstin’s arguments were technical: there was no detailed survey of the river above the second cataract. Garstin underlined in his Annual Report (1894) that ‘construction of a second…(dam)…to the south will be merely a question of time’.32 In the 1894 report he wrote, ‘we may confidently predict’ that the Egyptian dam would be ‘only one of a chain which will

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eventually extend from the First Cataract to the junction of the White and Blue Niles’.33 Willcocks only wrote what seemed obvious to everyone who depended upon a controlled river, that the ‘infinitely better and more reliable’ flood protection for Egypt was to ‘control the Nile before it enters Egypt’.34 It had already become obvious that the Aswan Dam represented only a temporary solution. It turned out that the planned storage capacity of the dam, 2.5 billion cubic metres, could not be realised because of technical difficulties in handling the flood and silt problems. But further and unexpected political problems arose. In autumn 1894, just after the new report and plan were published, archaeological circles in France and Britain united in demanding a lower water level than planned at Aswan, in order to save the pharaonic temples at Philae from inundation.35 This opposition was so strong that it forced the Government in Cairo to amend its plan. The young journalist Winston Churchill captured the depressed and frustrated mood of British administrators in Cairo at the time: ‘The state must struggle and the people starve in order that professors may exult and tourists find some place to scratch their names’.36 The capacity of the dam was therefore reduced by more than 50 per cent, to a little more than one billion cubic metres. As the British acknowledged in the mid-1890s, the reservoir could therefore meet only 25 per cent of what were believed to be Egypt’s future needs.37 According to Garstin the reduction meant that 2,610 billion cubic metres would have to be supplied from elsewhere.38 This ‘elsewhere’ could not be along the Nile within the borders of Egypt, first and foremost because of the silt the Blue Nile carried from Ethiopia. Existing dam-building technology made it impossible to build a reservoir large enough not to become silted up in a short period of time (it was estimated that one year of Nile mud heaped up would make a pyramid 25 times the volume of that of Cheops). Regulation could therefore not begin until the flood had passed, and gates had to be provided with numerous very large undersluices, through which the water – heavily charged with deposit – could pass. The Nile’s physical character, its physiology and hydrology, thus made upstream water imperialism a rational option.

WAT E R P L A N S A N D I M P E R I A L A M B I T I O N S

British water-planners in the 1890s were looking upstream beyond Egypt’s borders to find the solution to their problem. They were all familiar with Samuel Baker’s 1860s descriptions of the Nile tributaries (which he had visited, but which for political reasons had been closed to Scott-Moncrieff, Garstin, Ross and others) and his imperial visions for their exploitation.39 Having visited the main tributaries of the Nile during nearly five years of exploration, he wrote that no serious attempts had so far been made to ensure a supply of water for Egypt during all seasons, and that one had to look upstream from Egypt for the solution.40 The British water-planners of the 1890s shared his vision. They knew perfectly well that even the dam at Aswan could not be operated properly without more exact

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knowledge of the Nile’s discharges upstream. Without information on the fluctuations of the river before it reached the reservoir, it would be virtually impossible to make the necessary estimates required for its management. In 1894 Willcocks had shown that the time taken by water to travel between Khartoum and Aswan was only 10 days during flood and between Aswan and Cairo only five days. Proper management of the reservoir therefore required a number of gauging stations along the Nile and its tributaries in the Sudan, as well as re-establishment of a working Nilometer at Khartoum, the junction of the Blue and White Niles. In 1882, before the era of reservoirs and before the successful Mahdist revolt, Mason Bey had already shown the necessity of establishing more Nilometers, both on the main Nile and on its tributaries in the Sudan, for planning purposes in Egypt.41 In May 1893, the Société Khédival de Géographie discussed in detail information on water discharges collected by gauging-stations in the Sudan (established by order of Ismail), from the time ‘when the Sudan was not closed’,42 as it was nostalgically formulated. Until 1885 Egypt had received daily information by telegraph from the Nilometer at Khartoum,43 and in 1875 a station was erected close to the village of Dakla in order to measure the Atbara.44 The death of Gordon in January 1885 was dramatic and caught the attention of the day,45 but the loss of the Nilometer at Khartoum represented a more direct threat to the people living off the soil in Egypt, because it jeopardised the optimal management of the irrigation system.46 River control depends on forecasts of the river. One type of forecast can be compared to a timetable. If the flood peak, for example, arrives at Roseiris in the eastern Sudan on 31 August, it would reach Aswan about 19 September. This was the type of forecast that would have been available to the British water-planners if they controlled the Nile, and without which it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to build the Aswan Dam. Proper management of the river in the long run also required other types of forecasts. One was to be based on the fact that when the rains upstream are well over, the river falls steadily and regularly until the rains start again. Without such meteorological information it was impossible to organise the summer irrigation programme well in advance and, in particular, to fix the amount of water available to different crops and areas because the amount of water that would reach Egypt in May could not be estimated. The general frustrations of the water-planners were expressed in the following way by Willcocks in 1893: ‘As Egypt possesses no barometric, thermometric, or rain gauge stations in the valley of the Nile, we are always ignorant of the coming flood.’47 What was considered a great loss by the water-planners in Cairo, as early as 1885, had far greater consequences in the mid-1890s because of the growing water gap, the vulnerability of the new crop-rotation system and because of the more exact hydrological information required for the new dam’s operation and dam building plans. The need for more hydrological information was felt to be so pressing that, immediately after the British annexation of the Lake Victoria area in 1894, Cairo asked the government there, through the Foreign Office in London, to erect and monitor a gauge on Lake Victoria.48 The crux of the matter regarding British study of the Nile in the early 1890s was described by Ross:49 ‘the Dervishes prevent any scientific examination’ of the

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Nile upstream.50 British hydrologists and engineers did not have any in-depth knowledge of the Nile’s upper reaches. They had no first-hand knowledge of the river in the Sudan, because it was closed to them. When the former head of Egyptian irrigation, Scott-Moncrieff, gave a speech in London after his return to the mother country, he described the implications of this paradoxical, almost absurd situation. On that evening in 1895 he told the audience that, ‘if a foreigner were to lecture to his countrymen about the river Thames, and were to begin by informing them that he had never been above Greenwich, he might be looked upon as an impostor’.51 But although he was in charge of Egypt’s life artery, he, just like the rest of the people at the meeting, had to go to ‘the works of John Speke, Samuel Baker, Henry Stanley and our other great explorers’ for information regarding anything about the river higher up than Philae. No wonder that Scott-Moncrieff ’s successor, Sir William Garstin, described these years as though a ‘thick veil had settled down on the Upper Nile’ as far as hydrological studies were concerned.52 Increased exploitation of the Nile in Egypt therefore encouraged a southwards expansion of the British occupation. Several years before the decision to occupy the Sudan was officially taken, and five years before the famous Fashoda incident of 1898, Scott-Moncrieff, Ross, Willcocks and Garstin were discussing the necessity of controlling the Nile upstream. Both Scott-Moncrieff and Garstin were members of the Bureau de l’Institut Égyptien,53 which was very much concerned with this issue and had many meetings about it between 1891 and 1894. A central concept in the government report of 1894 was that the hydrological features of the Nile and the future increase in summerwater demand would require regulation of the Nile south of the Egyptian borders, at Lake Albert and Lake Victoria. Willcocks wrote that what ‘the Italian Lakes are to the plains of Lombardy, Lake Albert is to the land of Egypt’. By damming the lake(s) ‘a constant and plentiful supply of water to the Nile valley during the summer months’ could be ensured.54 ‘There alone,’ he wrote, ‘we deal with quantities of water which approach’ the demand, since Egypt’s need could ‘be secured for Egypt by no system of reservoirs in Egypt itself ’.55 The previous year Ross had speculated along similar lines. He envisaged that raising the water level of Lake Victoria by only one metre would produce a water flow in the Nile which was ‘thirty times more than wanted’.56 These plans would be impossible to implement or even complete properly as long as the Sudan was still under the rule of the Mahdists. Moreover, no administration in Cairo would ever consider regulating Lake Victoria, which was roughly the size of Scotland, without improving the White Nile’s water transport capacity through the enormous swamps in the Southern Sudan, and without controlling the lake area. The water-planners also had definite ideas about the best locations of potential control works. The 1894 report pointed out rightly that the White Nile was the tributary that contributed most to the total flow of the Nile, during the dry summer season, when cotton was being grown.57 The waters of the White Nile were therefore described as being ‘as valuable as gold’.58 They knew that sudd was blocking the river,59 and that the White Nile lost huge amounts of water on its way through the swamps in the Southern Sudan.60 They also knew very well that it would be

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impossible to improve knowledge of the Nile unless the river was cleared for transport and measurement. General Gordon had pointed to the problem of sudd in the river in any expansionist policy in the Nile valley, and had strongly urged Ismail to take possession of the East African coast as the gateway to Uganda, because the Bahr al-Jabal tended to be impassable (this advice was followed by the British Government more than a decade later; see below). Attempts to clear the river during the Turkish–Egyptian regime had demonstrated that the sudd was best removed from the north, that is against the current, and that this task would demand a great deal of time, money and labour. The British realised, of course, that a hostile Mahdist regime would stop any technical mission aimed at carrying out a task of such dimensions.61

A N I M P E R I A L WAT E R S T R AT E G Y

The water-planners were in no doubt: the Nile ought to be brought under a single political authority. The discovery of the sources of the Nile had brought fame to their countrymen Speke, James Grant and Baker. Now Garstin, Scott-Moncrieff and Willcocks should ‘take the river in hand’.62 In 1893 Willcocks directly depicted their plans for the Nile as a worthy follow-up of these British discoveries.63 Garstin later wrote that if they succeeded in taming the Nile, such an accomplishment could be compared with the building of the pyramids.64 The ambitions ofVictorian engineers were formidable. Although their hydrological knowledge was deficient by current standards, the 1894 report, Garstin’s Annual Reports, and the discussions in the Khédival Society all show that they regarded their knowledge as sufficient to plan for waterworks upstream. What was conceived as the main obstacle to reaching their aims was one they thought should and could be overcome. It was neither technological nor economic, but political. Important sections of the Nile were still outside their ‘jurisdiction’. In his London speech in 1895, Scott-Moncrieff summed up the ‘Nile vision’ of the water-planners. He said, ‘Is it not evident, then, that the Nile from the Victoria-Nyanza to the Mediterranean should be under one rule?’65 The discourse on the Nile and its use among the experts in the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works definitely conceived of the entire Nile basin as their planning ground. In many countries such technical discussions among hydrological experts would be of marginal political and strategic importance. Not so in Egypt. A hydrological society had the ears of the rulers, and the rulers were interested in their ideas. Lord Cromer regarded the water engineers as the backbone of his entire administration.

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T H E B R I T I S H ‘ H Y D R AU L I C ’ R E G I M E

Cromer wrote in Modern Egypt that a non-sentimental but ample justification for the occupation of the Sudan and Uganda was that ‘the effective control of the waters of the Nile from the Equatorial Lakes to the sea is essential to the existence of Egypt’.66 Full of confidence and belief in the imperial mission and modern technology he wrote, ‘When eventually, the waters of the Nile, from the Lakes to the sea, are brought fully under control, it will be possible to boast that Man – in this case the Englishman – has turned the gifts of Nature to the best possible advantage.’67 Cromer’s Nile perspective was shared by the Government in London.68 There can be no doubt that prime ministers Salisbury,69 Gladstone 70 and Rosebery 71 and leading officials in the Foreign Office also realised that in order to maintain their control at Suez, to uphold stability in Egypt, to reduce French influence there, and to bring advantage to important economic interests in Britain, the task of controlling and using the Nile was a top priority. Improved water management and development of the irrigation system were seen as of fundamental importance. In order to understand the importance of the Nile-control issue in British political thinking in the late 1890s, it is necessary to reconstruct the role it had played in Cromer’s strategy for ruling Egypt. Cromer’s administration laid great emphasis on the planning and development of the irrigation sector from day one. Experienced water-planners were brought from India in 1883, the same year as Cromer took up service in Egypt. He gave their department an exceptional degree of autonomy. It was deliberately shielded from intervention by other European interests in Cairo. In 1890 there were 18 British officials in the Public Works Department, as compared to four in the Financial Department: the Under-Secretary of State, Inspector-General of Irrigation, four Inspectors of Irrigation, three Assistant Inspectors of Irrigation, one Director of Works and eight engineers.72 Cromer took up huge loans for irrigation works in 1884, departing from his generally stringent financial policy. A decade later, in 1894, he stated that he ‘never felt more confident in recommending an outlay of capital in order to realize a prospective profit’.73 His Financial Advisor, Alfred Milner,74 characterised the results of these investments as ‘one of the most marvellous chapters even in the romantic history of Egyptian finance’.75 Cromer later wrote that these expenses ‘contributed probably more than any one cause to the comparative prosperity’ of Egypt, and ensured no less than ‘the solvency of the Egyptian Treasury’.76 Success was to be followed by success: the profitability and security of perennial irrigation had created a demand for more water that steadily rose. The advantages of this new technology seemed obvious and irresistible to the men of the day; suddenly two or three more crops a year could be harvested and large tracts of desert could be converted into green fields. Between 1885 and 1899 E£7 million had been devoted to extraordinary expenditure on irrigation and drainage, and very successfully, according to Cromer and London.77 To Cromer irrigation works were not only a permanent priority, but also a policy that had continually proved its success.78 It had been instrumental in bringing

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Egypt financial solvency and political stability, and therefore nothing should come in the way of its improvement.79 From 1890 every Annual Report to London enclosed a separate Memorandum on irrigation activities. Everyone seemed to agree with his Financial Advisor: ‘The best thing the Financial Ministry can do is to place as much money as it can afford at their [British water-planners] disposal, confident that whatever is thus spent will bring in a splendid return.’ 80 Irrigation officials had considerable political influence.81 The Under-Secretary of State for Public Works attended all meetings of the Egyptian Council of Ministers, and, unlike other under-secretaries, remained during the whole sitting of the council. The engineers were also given responsibility for Egyptian agriculture, for antiquities in Upper Egypt and for the construction and maintenance of roads in the Delta, and maintaining bridges, culverts, siphons and pipes, etc. Their reports on the use of the Nile were often virtually copied by Cromer in his own despatches to London. This unique close co-operation between the political leadership and the man in charge of harnessing the Nile was dubbed the ‘Cromer-Garstin regime’ by later British irrigation advisors.82 Summing up British rule from 1882 to 1907, Cromer put hydraulic engineers on an equal footing with the army for internal political reasons: they helped to create a relationship between ruler and ruled that seemed to make Egypt and Suez safe for the British. The great remodelling of the Upper Egypt basin system was completed in 1892; the Mex Pumping Station began operation in 1893; the foundations of the Delta Barrage were improved; flood and spring rotational supply was introduced in 1897; the improvement of the drainage system of Lower Egypt was begun on a large scale in 1897, etc. While the soldiers held Egypt by physical force, the waterplanners ‘conquered their minds’ or, as Cromer’s Financial Advisor put it in 1892, ‘the British engineer secured the support of Egyptian public opinion’.83 They ‘justified Western methods to Eastern minds’, as Cromer wrote.84 Increased water supplies would entail that ‘the good results of European administration’ would ‘readily be brought home to the natives’;85 British success in Egypt depended on development of the irrigation structure and increased access to summer water. Cromer understood better than most people in the imperial administration the value of the Nile – not only for short-term development in Egypt but also for the longterm future of the British Empire.

T H E R A L LY I N G C RY: R E S E RVO I R S U P S T R E A M !

British strategists thought that the frontiers of their Nilotic empire had to be expanded. In 1891 Cromer wrote at length to Salisbury on the reservoir question. He said that all competent authorities agreed that something more had to be done, but not what that should be. There were four options: a new reservoir might be constructed ‘either at Wady Halfa, or at Kalabalah, or at Assuan, or at Silsileh, or a reservoir might be made in the Wady Raian’. He said that the subject was one of ‘utmost importance’ because, as he put it, ‘the prosperity of Egypt depends wholly on

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the Nile’.86 Later in the same year Cromer again wrote to Salisbury about the importance of the water storage question in Egyptian public opinion.87 He informed the Foreign Secretary in March 1893 that, with the exception of the years 1889 and 1890, there had been no years since the famine of 1878 in which the river had reached as low a level at Aswan as it did in the summer of 1892.88 The river acted as an independent historical agency, exploited skilfully by Cromer, and bringing closer the decision of what to do with the Nile upstream. A little later Cromer sent a telegram to Rosebery, supporting a circular that had been addressed to the European powers in Egypt by the Egyptian Government, requesting that the economies effected by the conversion of the debt should be applied to constructing reservoirs in Upper Egypt.89 He strongly supported Willcocks’s and Garstin’s 1894 report and he not only actively backed the plan for the Aswan Dam but was very active in securing money and political backing for its implementation. The dam should be built by Britain; it would ‘crown her work in Egypt’. It would also be an undertaking that would ‘do more benefit to the people of Egypt than almost any improvement that has yet been instituted in the country’.90 The enforced reduction of this reservoir was as much a blow to Cromer’s political aims as to the water-planners’ engineering ambitions. It was becoming increasingly evident that, in order to maintain control over Egypt in the long run and to develop the cotton crop at the same time, it would be necessary to take control of the rest of the Nile basin. The British had become leaders of a hydraulic civilisation, and they realised some of its implications for imperial strategy. By 1889 Salisbury had concluded that not only should Britain stay in Egypt but that it should also undertake the occupation of the Upper Nile.91 The decision to attack the Mahdists should be deferred until the recovery of Egypt would enable that country to pay for it.92 As long as it was not clear whether they would stay in Egypt, and as long as Egypt had enough water for its summer crops and had no money to finance both reservoirs and wars, Cromer rejected proposals to march southward. He informed London that he disagreed strongly with those who, in the early 1880s, wanted to occupy the Sudan. In 1884 he asked himself whether, by allowing Charles Gordon to go to Khartoum, the Government intended to establish a settled form of government there and he answered ‘in the negative’.93 If the aim was the complete abolition of slavery in the Sudan, as the Anti-Slavery Society argued it should, he said that they would have to ‘send an English army to occupy the country’.94 Cromer was not an anti-imperialist, of course, but only wanted British imperialism to be rational, non-sentimental and to act with purpose and strength. He did not agree with those who favoured a ‘forward policy’ in the Sudan, dreaming (as Winston Churchill put it) of a ‘bright or vague vision of Imperial power, of transcontinental railways, of African Viceroys, of conquest and commerce’.95 In 1886 he wrote to London, complaining that all the authorities in Cairo except himself were in favour of an advance on Dongola. Cromer was ‘opposed to making any advance at all’, while the Egyptian authorities and the Khedive, Mohammed Tawfiq Pasha,96 favoured the idea because they regarded it as ‘a first step towards the reconquest of the Soudan’.97 Cromer and London wanted a period of peace and

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stability that would allow the country to recover from the chaos of the previous decade. London agreed with Cromer; officials in both centres were looking for an opportunity that could legitimise the occupation in both Egyptian and British public opinion, and they were looking for an occupation that could be sustained. The time for action was coming closer.

T H E N I L E VA L L E Y – A B R I T I S H ‘ S P H E R E O F I N T E R E S T ’

There is clear evidence that, by 1890, Salisbury and Cromer had decided to take military and political control over the Nile basin. By 1887 Egypt had become financially solvent. Occupation southwards would be necessary some day, but it was wise to play safe and act when the time was ripe and the moment right.98 Cromer wrote to Salisbury a long letter on the issue in 1890, arguing that he had ‘always been fully aware of the desirability of bringing the Soudan back to Egypt’. He even drafted the following sentence but deleted it from the final letter: ‘I have, therefore, always looked forward to the occupation of the Soudan’. What Cromer awaited was fulfilment of the ‘essential conditions’. He wrote that the great mistake made by Ismail Pasha, who had lost both the Sudan and territories in Uganda and Ethiopia,99 was that ‘before he had learnt to administer efficiently the Delta of the Nile, he endeavoured to extend Egyptian territory to the centre of Africa’. His experience should be a ‘warning’, Cromer stressed, a lesson which should be taught to the Egyptians.100 This was a clear and strong criticism by a leader of a hydraulic downstream state of another, but less pragmatic, leader of the same state. In 1890 the British were already discussing preparations for an occupation of the Sudan.101 There was general agreement that an eventual occupation of Dongola on the southern side of the barren district of Batunal-Haggar (‘belly of stones’) ‘from a purely military point of view, could only be of use to us as a stepping stone, as an advanced base for an advance upon Berber or Khartoum’.102 Cromer agreed with Kitchener,103 the Sirdar of the Egyptian army, who had proposed a reconnaissance and extension of the railway south of Wadi Halfa in 1890. But Cromer added in his usual practical manner that was to become typical for the Victorian expansionism in the Nile valley – if ‘sleepers were available’.104 While official rhetoric remained that Egypt would eventually be evacuated,105 the British leaders were discussing how they could build railways for military purposes from Egypt to the Northern Sudan, stressing the historic ‘right of Egypt’ to its lost territories.106 Cromer argued for patience in dealing with the Sudan.107 Britain should not drift into a reoccupation without any idea about the aims of such an occupation. While the Egyptian elite pressed for reoccupation, both for nostalgic imperial reasons and for more practical water needs, Cromer and Salisbury were waiting for the right moment and the right excuse. Britain had now formulated its policy of the ‘unity of the Nile valley’. Salisbury and Cromer believed that the security of the British position at Suez, the development of Egypt and the welfare of the British cotton industry all depended upon

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placing Uganda and the Nile valley under their control.108 Their object was not so much to eradicate the slave trade or support traditional British commercial development, as to create a political and military situation in which efficient hydraulic control of the Nile could be put into effect.

Control of the Sources of the White Nile The headwaters of the White Nile were the first area to come under the control of London. In the late 1880s, before the British Government’s Nile valley policy had been formulated, the British Imperial East Africa Company was chartered to occupy Uganda after having been used to checkmate private explorers from other countries.109 The German adventurer Carl Peters had made a treaty of protection with Mwanga, the ruler of the Buganda, in 1889. This was revoked with the Anglo–German Agreement of 1890, which declared the areas north of latitude 1º S to be within the British sphere of influence. The British Imperial East Africa Company administered the region on behalf of the British Government. The company’s agent, Frederick J.D. Lugard, made a treaty with Mwanga, and Buganda was placed under the company’s protection. Soon Frederick J.D. Lugard had also made treaties of protection with the rulers of the western states of Ankole and Toro. Shortage of money soon forced the company to abandon its plans. It also became evident that this private company could not adequately deal with British diplomatic and strategic interests, as these were now perceived to be. What London needed was a more legitimate and stable form of British presence in an area that was considered a strategic key in the Nile basin and thus in the whole of East Africa. On the last day of 1891, the Company decided to evacuate Uganda, and this was notified to the British Government and accepted. Gladstone informed Queen Victoria that the late administration had accepted the planned evacuation of the East Africa Company, ‘with the design of founding a new and complete policy…on the construction of a railway and a subsequent renewal of occupation’.110 Shortly afterwards Gladstone again wrote to the Queen, this time to inform her that the company’s evacuation had to be postponed, ‘with a view to better means of removal and security for persons and property’. Since the resources of the Company were ‘unequal to their continued occupation of Uganda’,111 the Government was prepared to assist the Company by a pecuniary contribution towards the cost of prolongation of the occupation for three months, up to 31 March. It was important that no power vacuum should be created. London’s direct control over Uganda was established on 1 April 1893 by Sir Gerald Portal, who had been appointed leader of the occupying force on the advice of his friend, Lord Cromer. The occupation was supported by a vigorous agitation in England during 1892, especially influenced by powerful appeals by the wellknown Captain Lugard. Hearing that some British politicians were contemplating abandonment of Uganda, he had returned to Britain to fight in support of the annexation of Uganda. Lugard started his public campaign with an article in The

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Times and a paper to the Royal Geographical Society. He stressed that Uganda was important because Egypt was important, and Egypt needed security for Uganda and the sources of the Nile. What would happen if these headwaters fell into the hands of other European powers? Lugard also revealed that ideas about damming the headwaters, as a means of exerting pressure on Egypt, had been discussed in the early 1890s as one argument in favour of the occupation of Uganda.112 It was not very important militarily to control the whole of Lake Victoria, but only those parts of it that were crucial to the water supply of the Victoria Nile. For such strategic reasons, and partly as a result of pressure from missionary sympathisers in Britain, the British Government declared a protectorate over Buganda in 1894. In May 1895 the Cabinet decided that Uganda and the whole region down to the Indian Ocean should be placed under a protectorate. The same Cabinet meeting also discussed the Uganda railway. On 28 May 1895 it was finally decided to build it.113 Its construction was supervised by the Foreign Office under the direct responsibility of the Prime Minister.114 It was this railway that Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, described in 1908 as a ‘political’ railway, precisely because it was meant as a way of telling the world that Britain ruled the headwaters of the White Nile and that its intention was to stay. Three years later, the River War started.

T H E R I V E R WA R

For Cromer and the Government in London, a strong economy in Egypt had been regarded as a precondition for any upstream expansion. It was therefore important that the financial situation improve year by year, primarily thanks to improved irrigation practices. A more secure supply of more water was seen as a guarantee of further development along the same road. The Government could make use of extra water and could also pay for the occupation. Politically, after Abbas Hilmi II became Khedive in 1892,115 the British had to reckon with a ruler who gave encouragement to growing nationalist sentiments.116 For Cromer, these developments made British control of the Nile upstream both more important and more realistic. By providing Egypt with the water it needed, political alliances could be built, while British upstream control was regarded as a useful political weapon against opposition in Egypt itself. This strategy was not easy to implement – it required political skills to have Egypt pay to conquer the Sudan and to legitimise this as an Egyptian reoccupation, while at the same time aiming to establish British power upstream in order to weaken Egypt’s opposition to British rule. Since the early 1890s, Kitchener and Reginald Wingate had been working under a cloak of military secrecy to cement understandings with chiefs in southern Egypt and the Northern Sudan so as to make the march south easier. By 1895 the occupation had begun to be generally discussed as an undertaking.117 In March Cromer informed London that extension of the Egyptian telegraph from Korosko to the Murrat wells and continuation of

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the Egyptian railway to Aswan would both help the ‘ultimate reconquest of the Soudan’.118 The master plan was to mobilise Egyptian troops to fight the war, and for the Egyptian Treasury to pay the cost. Cromer thought that the Egyptian Treasury could not deal simultaneously with both the planned reservoir and the Sudan campaign. They should wait for the right moment. Suddenly, in March 1896, London decided to go to war. Close upon midnight on Thursday 12 March, Kitchener, in Cairo, received definite orders by telegraph from London. The Cabinet had found the excuse they needed. The main public justification was the threat of the Dervishes – the killers of Gordon, the martyr. This was a pretext (Cromer’s Annual Report, published in the first days of March, mentioned only briefly the general security of the frontier and the insignificance of the Dervish attempts to disturb it). The real immediate aim was to support Italy, after its army had been routed by the Ethiopians at the battle of Adwa. This could not be publicly declared because it would have alienated the Egyptians, who were to pay for the military advance.119 Italy provided the ‘wave to float’ the British Prime Minister ‘over the Soudan bar’, Cromer wrote.120 In spite of British rhetoric, the Egyptians were sceptical, although Abbas II and the Egyptian nationalists favoured what they called a ‘reoccupation of the Sudan’. Egyptian public opinion generally saw it as being mainly in the interests of the Italians and criticised the participation of British troops; it subsequently condemned Anglo–Egyptian victories. The combination of official justification and European secret diplomacy made it possible, however, for London to obtain support from the European-controlled Caisse de la Dette in Cairo, in a law-suit against the Egyptian Government, with regard to the appropriation of money from the general reserve fund for the expenses of the Dongola expedition.121 The Government demanded withdrawal of E£500,000 from this general reserve fund,122 and the Caisse allowed the withdrawal by majority vote. Meanwhile, the British Cabinet had authorised an advance to Akasha, midway between Wadi Halfa and Dongola. By the beginning of June, the northern half of the old Dongola Province had already fallen. The Mahdist forces had been defeated with heavy casualties. The advance paused, but not because the British were reluctant, as has been suggested in the literature. The British Government forbade Kitchener at the outset to advance south of Dongola. The reason for that restriction was purely financial. Salisbury warned the Queen that nothing more could be expected at the time, since Egypt did not have the money to pay for a further advance, and they could not ask for more money from the Caisse de la Dette. Moreover, they also had to adapt their military strategy to the character of the river. They had to await steamboats, which could not arrive until the rise of the Nile in the autumn. From Khartoum to Wadi Halfa, continuous navigation was impossible owing to the cataracts (which are rapids rather than falls). For more than 6km the river was split up into a number of channels with rocks and rapids. In flood it was possible, with difficulty, to drag boats over the cataracts. This was done by large numbers of men during the campaign. The timing of the campaign thus had to pay heed to fluctuations in the level of the river. On top of this, the occupying army had to battle an outbreak of the water-borne disease

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cholera. It started at Aswan and spread southwards to every Egyptian army post, and killed more British soldiers in a month than did the whole river war.123 But by 23 September 1896, the whole of Dongola had been ‘reclaimed from barbarism’.124 Three days later the British controlled the main Nile up to the Fourth Cataract, and their most forward post was at Meroe, the ancient city of Kush. The march to Dongola was regarded by Cromer and the British Government as the first step in a much wider imperial Nile strategy, which had the issue of water control at its heart. Cromer and Salisbury had no intention of stopping there, although that was the slogan of the propaganda war. In 1896 Cromer had almost triumphantly informed Salisbury that, owing to the establishment of Nile gauges in the Sudan after the occupation of Dongola, ‘considerably earlier information was obtained this year of the river than has been possible in recent times’. This was, he said, a fact that ‘cannot be overrated’,125 and he later wrote to the British Prime Minister that the registration of the water levels of the Nile in the Sudan ‘kept pace with the advance of the Anglo–Egyptian army’.126 In February 1897 London publicly stated what had been the opinion for some time: ‘Egypt could never be held to be permanently secure so long as a hostile Power was in occupation of the Nile valley up to Khartoum’; the duty of giving a final blow to the ‘baleful power of the Khalifa’ devolved on England.127 Both Cromer and the British Government had for some time been ‘practically and irrevocably committed to an offensive policy’.128 When it became clear that British financiers had decided to finance the Aswan Dam, Cromer’s main reservation disappeared.129 The occupation could be financed from the Egyptian budget. In spring 1898 British troops arrived at Berber in order to take part in the campaign. The Battle of Atbara on 8 April 1898 brought Kitchener’s forces close to Omdurman, the capital of Mahdism. In line with official propaganda, Kitchener told his men in an appeal before the battle to ‘Remember Gordon’. In July 1898 Cromer attended a Cabinet meeting in London to discuss the Nile valley policy in this new situation; Anglo–Egyptian troops were on the verge of crushing the Sudan’s independence; Britain had already placed its foot on the shores of Lake Victoria. Salisbury afterwards told Queen Victoria that they had discussed their plans for the Nile valley after they had taken Khartoum. He reported that Cromer had suggested that the Egyptian and British flags should fly side by side, and that the ‘gunboats with Gen. Kitchener and a small force should go up the Nile as far as Fashoda (600 miles): and as much farther as was practicable: and that any other flag in that valley should be removed’.130 They were not so much concerned about the French threat, but about how to expand forcefully and with public support both in Egypt and in Britain. To stop at Khartoum – north of the great marshes of the White Nile, where the Nile’s yield could be significantly increased, and hundreds of miles from Uganda, where they had plans to dam the second biggest lake in the world – made no sense. Not to British strategists, and even less to the Egyptians, who were paying for the campaign. As part of his Nile strategy, Cromer had several months earlier sent his most senior water-planners to Dongola in the wake of the occupying army. In April 1897 Garstin had already submitted his report on the Nile cataracts.131 Cromer

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wrote to Salisbury early in 1898, ‘There can be no doubt that the most crying want of the country [Egypt] at present is an increase in the water supply’. He mentioned that ‘for a long time past’ he had constantly been hearing complaints about water, that all competent engineering authorities agreed that nearly ‘all that can be done with the present supply of Nile water has been already accomplished’.132 He would send Garstin to study the White Nile in 1899, and the White Nile, Bahr al-Jabal, Bahr al-Zaraf and Bahr al-Ghazal in 1901.133 When in 1899 Garstin proposed to remove the sudd in the Bahr al-Jabal blocking the river’s flow, he received immediate financial support from Cromer. Cromer’s argument was that the question of increasing the summer supply of the Nile was of such vital interest that the expenditure was fully justified.134 To Cromer, the Sudan and the Upper Nile region were important because of their waters, which, if tamed and regulated, could yield great economic and political returns to Egypt.135 Cromer saw clearly that it was not sufficient for the British just to keep out European rivals; they had to take control of the banks of the Nile upstream, not only for pre-emptive, military-strategic reasons, but for realisation of expansive, economic objectives. The so-called ‘reoccupation’ was regarded as inevitable; what was debatable was when and how it should take place. For full control of the Nile, the British expansion up the Nile valley was believed to be a rational expansionist policy.136 The European threat was not an issue at the Cabinet meeting in June 1898, but control of the Nile was. Salisbury and his Government, Cromer and the Egyptian Government, and Kitchener and his officers planned the military campaign in a way that clearly shows that they were not simply planning for a battle or two. Direct military preparations for an advance on Omdurman began at the end of July 1898. Above Al-Matammah on the west bank of the Nile, on 24 August, a combined Anglo–Egyptian force of 26,000 men was gathered. It comprised a British division of two brigades, an Egyptian division of four brigades, mounted troops, artillery, engineers and a flotilla. On 2 September 1898 these forces attacked the Mahdists in what was to be called the Battle of Omdurman. During that warm Friday, about 10,000 Sudanese were killed and about 10,000 wounded, while on the British side only a few died. On the following Sunday morning, the British and Egyptian flags were flung to the desert breeze above the ruins of the Palace of Khartoum. The British and the Anglo–Egyptian forces had no plans to stop at the confluence of the two Niles, although no further military operations on a large scale, or involving any considerable expenditure, were planned.

‘No Water, No Arabs’ British control of the Upper Nile was also part of an imperial ‘contingency plan’. London could use this control to silence Egyptian opposition to their dominant but insecure position at Suez. Egypt’s geopolitical situation – compared later by Churchill to a ‘deep-sea diver whose air was provided by the long and vulnerable

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tube of the Nile’ – was clearly understood by the British. This idea of controlling Egypt from upstream was not new to British strategists. As early as 1851, Charles T. Beke, at that time one of the most famous students of the Nile, sent a Memoir on the Possibilities of Diverting the Waters of the Nile so as to prevent the Irrigation of Egypt to Palmerston.137 Sir Samuel Baker, who had already been consulted by the British about the possibility of the Mahdists diverting the Atbara, knew the Upper Nile better than any other European. Since the 1860s Baker had publicly discussed and advocated the need for Nile works in the Sudan. Baker was perhaps the person who most persistently advocated British occupation of the whole Sudan regardless of any European threat.138 Ever since his travel book of 1867, he had repeatedly put forward arguments for British expansion.139 Two years after the British had occupied Egypt Baker said, ‘The Arabs have drunk at these wells (i.e. the Nile) for thousands of years. Erect a fort so as to command the wells, and the Arabs are at your mercy. No water, no Arabs. You have all the frontiers you need in the White Nile.’140 Baker urged the British to take control upstream in order to control Egypt.141 In 1892 he wrote confidently that the task of regaining the Sudan would be Kitchener’s responsibility. He wrote Kitchener a personal letter enclosing a sevenpage memorandum on ‘Military Routes Towards Berber’.142 The first sentence read, ‘Berber is the key of the position which commands the Nile 200 miles north of Khartoum’.143 Its occupation would cut Khartoum off from all communication on the Nile and it also commanded the route to Suakin and the road towards Korosko via Abu Hamed. He proposed ‘getting rid of the term “Soudan” and call it Upper Egypt instead, owing to the role of the Nile in Egypt’s economy’.144 Baker’s article in The Times in 1893 was very clear in arguing that Britain should raise the level of Lake Albert in order to control the water supply of Egypt.145 Such questions had been discussed when the Interlacustrine Region was occupied,146 and the British thought that the planned reservoirs upstream could be used both to increase the water supply downstream and (to a certain extent) to hold water back when it was most needed. Cromer understood the potential political power of this leverage, not least since the Egyptian leaders kept informing him that, more than anything else, they feared foreign powers in control upstream.147 In 1893, therefore, Baker publicly declared what Cromer and Salisbury agreed with, but could not say. If we settle down at the headwaters of the Nile, we command Egypt; and a barrage at a narrow pass, where the Nile cuts through a rocky defile only eight yards in width, below the exit from the Albert Nyanza, would raise the level of the great reservoir of the Nile by fifty feet and entirely control the water supply of Egypt.148

Cromer and Salisbury thought that control of the Nile waters would tighten their grip on Egypt, and could be a useful insurance against the day when they might be forced to grant Egypt a form of independence.

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E U RO P E A N R I VA L RY O N T H E N I L E

The piecemeal conquest of the Upper Nile caused military problems but also created political opportunities. After the occupation of Dongola, the curtain had come down on the first scene of the Sudan play and preparations were now being made for the second.149 It was during this next phase that the perceived and propagated ‘French threat’ served British strategists as a means of rallying support behind expansionist policies. The 1880s and 1890s were decades of European imperial rivalry, forming an important aspect of the general background to what took place in the Nile valley. Here the geopolitical situation had very particular characteristics, owed to the character of the Nile and the uneven developments in water-control practices. In addition, London had a complicated agenda: the British Government was aiming at getting the Egyptian Government to pay for and Egyptian soldiers to fight a war for British imperial aims, without being forced to offer territorial or other compensation to European powers. The ‘River War’ was a very difficult diplomatic undertaking, and was therefore also called the ‘Foreign Office War’. The War Office was marginalised, because to defeat the ‘Dervishes’ militarily was not seen as the most formidable challenge. What was crucial to the British Government and to Cromer was the cost of the campaign, who should pay for it, its diplomatic aspects and how to justify it so as to weaken French opposition in Egypt and win acceptance for British territorial gains in the Nile valley. Kitchener, as Commander in Chief, was therefore placed under the firm control of Cromer, who could approve or reject any plan Kitchener suggested. The ‘Soudan campaign’ was a war in which the media played a very important role, and the Salisbury Government, helped by the Intelligence Department in Egypt, showed that it was up to the task.150 On the European diplomatic scene they used the defeat of Italy, while publicly they pointed to the danger the Mahdists presented towards Egypt as a pretext for the march to Dongola in 1896. These moves made it easier to overcome the permanent French opposition to Britain in Egypt and to enlist sufficient political and financial support from European interests there. Two years later, at Fashoda, the French captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand created another historic opportunity. London sent British soldiers with an Egyptian flag to Fashoda in order, as it was said, to restore to Egypt its rightful provinces. The public enemy now was France, whose ulterior aim was to use the Nile weapon against Egypt. By this move London managed to strike a fatal blow at its European rival in the Nile valley and at the same time temporarily to mute Egyptian nationalism, since London had saved the country from being strangled by Paris, and given its ‘lost provinces’ back. European rivalry was certainly a driving force in colonial policies, but it was also a rhetorical device that imperial powers could exploit in order to cover up other and more fundamental aims.

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The Blue Nile Basin, Italy and Ethiopia In 1890 London had declared the whole Nile valley its ‘sphere of influence’. No other European power was to be allowed to acquire a foothold in the Nile valley. The British developed a Nile valley diplomacy in light of regional geopolitics; they were aware of the basic hydrological characteristics of the river system and the relative importance of tributaries, headwaters and possible dam sites. Their diplomacy was adapted to both ecological and political constraints. Although the British knew that the Blue Nile contributed almost all the waters of the main Nile during flood,151 they understood that the White Nile was the river of importance for the Egyptian sefi-season and cotton cultivation. They also knew the difficulties involved in damming the silty Blue Nile and its tributaries, something that directed their interests at this stage towards the White Nile basin. Rather than taking control of the river and its banks themselves, in the 1890s the main aim of the British in the eastern part of the Nile valley – the Ethiopian Blue Nile basin – was therefore to bar other powers from interfering with the Nile flood. Menelik II, King of Shewa (or Shoa, 1865–89), and Emperor of Ethiopia (1889-1913),152 expanded the Ethiopian empire. In May 1889 he signed a Treaty at Wuchale (Uccialli) with Italy. Of the 20 articles of the Treaty, one set up the boundaries of a new colony to be called Eritrea and which the Italians were allowed to occupy (when Menelik permitted Italy to occupy Asmara, he was warned by an aide that this ‘was giving up the door to his house’).153 Menelik’s weak position at the time was to cost Ethiopia dearly in decades to come. Cromer and Salisbury thought that a strong Italian position in Eritrea would weaken Ethiopia. This would serve British interests in the long run, since Britain could then later emerge as King Menelik’s friend, giving London the influence at court that British leaders sought. Cromer and London urged, however, that the Italians should be stopped short of the banks of the Nile. Italy tried to obtain a frontier that would include Kassala, and a footing on the Atbara. The British Government objected to these Italian aims. On 7 February 1891 Salisbury sanctioned Cromer’s proposal for occupying Suakin and the Tokar area as a countermove. On 15 April the Anglo–Italian Protocol was signed. In article III the Italian Government engaged ‘not to construct on the Atbara river, in view of irrigation, any work which might sensibly modify its flow into the Nile’. Cromer and London questioned Italy’s motives in the area, but Italy was not at the time regarded as a threat in the Blue Nile basin. The British consul in the newly occupied territory reported that ‘perfect tranquillity prevails’. His problem was not the Italians or ‘European rivals’, but more prosaic matters: the lack of camels and an order from Cairo prohibiting the export of ivory.154 The Italians interpreted the Treaty of Wuchale as giving Italy a protectorate over Ethiopia. In 1893, when Menelik learned of the Italian understanding of the Treaty, he renounced the whole agreement. The Italians then risked a major military confrontation. They went to war with Ethiopia, and in one of the bloodiest of all colonial confrontations Ethiopia won the Battle of Adwa on 1 March 1896.155

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A settlement after the battle cancelled the Treaty of Wuchale and acknowledged the full sovereignty and independence of Ethiopia, but the Italians were allowed to retain Eritrea. In spring 1897 a British mission arrived in Addis Ababa under the leadership of Rennell Rodd, Cromer’s second-in-command. Rodd was accompanied by Wingate, Captain Count Gleichen, who a couple of years later would write a very impressive book on the Sudan and its water resources primarily from a military point of view, and by Lord Edward Cecil, Salisbury’s son. The mission had been sent by Salisbury to convince Menelik that the Anglo–Egyptian military campaign in the Sudan concealed no designs on himself. They managed to secure from him a pledge of neutrality. On 14 May 1897 an Anglo–Abyssinian Treaty of amity and commerce was agreed upon; the British intended to support Menelik in order to maintain unity and himself as the state’s new leader.156 London had successfully positioned itself as Menelik’s friend against Italy.157 Wingate and Gleichen wrote a report on their mission afterwards in order to speed up the British military advance in the Sudan.158 As other reports produced by Wingate had exaggerated the strength of the Mahdists in the Sudan and the French on the Upper Nile, this exaggerated the regional power of Menelik and the likelihood of an Ethiopian–French alliance. Regarding the French, Wingate suggested that they would have no insurmountable difficulties, with ‘the assistance of the Abyssinians’, to establish treaties or take effective possession of countries in the vicinity of the Nile valley. As if this was not alarming enough, Wingate also reported that there was imminent danger of an Ethiopian–Sudanese alliance, quoting two merchants in Addis Ababa as saying that ‘blood must be wiped out by blood’.159 Wingate therefore concluded that there would appear to be just time, within the coming winter, to carry out the occupation.160 The British Government and Cromer did not think that Menelik posed a danger,161 although Wingate and others tried to sound the alarm bell, in order to hasten the decision to march southwards. Menelik did not co-operate with the French missions trying to reach the Nile through his territory. Charles de Bonchamps left Addis Ababa for the Nile in May 1897, and Menelik, who had crushed the Italian forces a year earlier, could have provided enough support for this small mission to succeed. When Bonchamps later arrived at Gore in Ilu-Babor province, within Menelik’s territory, his original 56-member escort had long been seriously reduced. Forty-five had deserted and their camels had run away. So bad was the situation that their cook went berserk and had to be tied to a mule. The fiasco of this French mission was complete,162 as reported in The Times in March 1898; to Cromer and Salisbury, this must have been a very clear demonstration of Menelik’s indifference. The Intelligence Department and Wingate increased the pressure, however. He wrote that information had been received from Berber that ‘reliable secret agents’ had come from Omdurman, confirming previous stories about the arrival there of two Abyssinian envoys bearing a French flag and a message to the Khalifa that, if he bore this flag in battle, all the power of Egypt would be to no avail. Rumours were partly spread by the Intelligence Department.163

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Wingate and Kitchener wanted to move faster than the politicians. Wingate’s report to Kitchener, in August 1897, about potential and real threats from King Menelik and European rivals, was intended to convince the political leaders to act at once.164 Kitchener and Wingate preferred to take Khartoum the following winter. But Cromer was adamant. Wingate wrote privately to Kitchener and said that he had met Cromer the day before, and that the latter was strongly against altering the tactics already laid down. He was ‘most strongly opposed to any such action and that the plan of a slow advance by the Egyptian Army was not in any degree altered by the Abyssinian situation’.165 He also instructed Wingate not to give the impression to the War Office or to the Foreign Office that the situation was worse than it was. The fact remained for Cromer that the British taxpayer was not interested in paying for the occupation of the Sudan. Wingate tried to spread alarming news to the press (he even worked for Reuters during some crucial days of the Sudan campaign) and told Kitchener that although he felt the mood was shifting, he concluded that no money would come this year for the military campaign. Cromer was against it, the Foreign Office had other things to do. Wingate eagerly wrote to Kitchener, ‘I hope you will give me a chance for a fight if there is one’. But the British Government and Cromer were not much impressed. Ethiopia and the Ethiopian elite were still struggling with the terrible impact of the plague that, by 1892, had killed almost all the cattle in the country. Although the Ethiopian highlands were very fertile,166 time and time again Ethiopia had experienced the horror of starvation and disease caused by droughts and plagues. Between 1888 and 1892 it has been estimated that a third of the population died and an untold number of families sold themselves and their children into slavery. Such was the situation that people ate human flesh. Once a ‘woman of Ensaro who ate seven children’ came before Menelik. ‘Have you really eaten human flesh?’ he asked. She confessed to having strangled and eaten the seven children. Menelik could, it is said, scarcely restrain his tears and murmured, ‘Oh God! How my country has fallen into ruin’.167 London knew that, in such a situation and when Italy, its principal foe, controlled Eritrea, Menelik had other things to do than to fight an expansionist war against Anglo–Egyptian troops on the plains of the Sudan. Instead Cromer and London sought an agreement about the waters of the Nile with the Emperor. They would support Menelik and hoped in return to obtain his support for their Nile policies.

The White Nile Basin, Germany, Belgium and France What concerned Cromer and Salisbury most was the other part of the Nile valley – the White Nile basin. Here was that tributary which William Willcocks in 1893 had described as more valuable than gold to the development of Egypt and the cotton crop and where Samuel Baker had speculated about erecting a fort to command the ‘wells’ of Egypt. First, the British Government and Cromer’s administration worked hard on the diplomatic scene.

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In July 1890, London had reached an agreement with Germany that for the first time officially recognised the Nile valley as a British ‘sphere of influence’. Some years before, fuss about the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had shown who had the upper hand in the area. Emin, appointed Governor of Equatoria by the late Charles Gordon, and now commanding the Egyptian garrison in Equatoria, had been cut off from Egypt by the Mahdists in the Sudan. The vision of this man as depicted in the press, left alone in the middle of the ‘dark continent’, so shortly after Gordon’s death, captured the emotions of many Europeans. He must be rescued from barbarism, it was claimed. The question of who should lead the Relief Expedition to Equatoria – the American-British journalist and explorer Henry Stanley or the German explorer William Junker – became a diplomatic issue. London won the day, and Stanley set out to rescue him in 1888. Emin himself, elevated to the rank of pasha, felt quite safe where he was living and did not want to be rescued. But in April 1889, he and Stanley, with some 1500 others, left the region, and they arrived at Bagamoyo, in present-day Tanzania, on 4 December.168 In this way the last remnants of Egyptian control in the area were removed by London, with Stanley as the medium. The official British justification was to save Emin (a rescue operation) and on behalf of Egypt to defend the Nile valley against the intrusion of other European powers (Junker was, however, no real threat at all and Emin, as I have said, did not want to be rescued). The rescue operation was a very innovative move that helped to prepare the ground for the British occupation of Uganda, which had started at about this time with the chartering of the British East Africa Company.169 Carl Peters has been described as another German explorer who was racing to rescue Emin.170 Peters managed to sign an agreement with King Mwanga in Uganda. But London did not think the German Government would support it. Salisbury remained confident, and did not believe the myths produced in some parts of the popular press. The German Ambassador had assured Salisbury in June 1889 that ‘Uganda, Wadela and other places to the east and north of Lake Victoria-Nyanza are outside the sphere of German colonization’.171 Therefore, when the Anglo– German Agreement was signed on 24 June and 1 July 1890, it was done without any noticeable conflicts. London gave away Heligoland, a barren island in the North Sea, while the German Government agreed to major demands in the Nile valley, British access from Uganda to Lake Tanganyika, the lion’s share of the land west of Lake Nyanza and an acceptance of the British ‘sphere of interest’. In 1894 London reached an agreement with King Leopold II of Belgium. By that agreement London gave Leopold the rare status of a private enterprise empire-builder in the Congo. The Congo obtained international recognition as an independent state, and in that state with its enormous territory Leopold was king – but in his personal capacity and not as King of Belgium. On his side Leopold accepted the British ‘sphere’, while at the same time he was offered a lease on the left bank of the Nile as far north as Fashoda. Importantly, this lease was terminable on his death.172 London thus obtained a guarantee that this – at that moment – not very important stretch of the Nile would revert to Britain after a few years, while it established a buffer against the French and served as a constant reminder to

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Egyptian nationalists that Britain was necessary to guarantee their country’s security against upstream threats from other European powers. Leopold was too weak to represent any real danger, and for the British he was an instrument to keep out the French; Paris protested sharply. France argued at this point that the area was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and that therefore Britain could not presume to barter the territory. London did not reach similar agreements about ‘spheres of influence’ with France in the early 1890s. The French Council of Ministers decided to suspend negotiations regarding the Upper Nile in late 1894, after having witnessed the Anglo–Congolese Agreement of 12 May, regarded as one of the wildest pieces of diplomatic juggling on record. It was then that Sir Edward Grey’s speech in the House of Commons sent the French a signal that was not to be misunderstood;173 it ‘must be perfectly well known to the French Government that’ interference in the Nile valley ‘would be an unfriendly act, and would be so viewed by England’.174 Although they had taken Uganda and established agreements with most European powers, London watched closely the activities of Paris, Brussels, Rome and Berlin in the area. After the agreements of the mid-1890s, and when London controlled the African lakes and its forces led by Kitchener had overrun the Mahdists, it was only the French that could cause any problems at all. But to what extent was the threat conceived as real, or to what extent was the French factor a result of the adventurism of proimperial forces in France, whose naïveté was exploited to the full by the British?

FA S H O DA R E V I S I T E D

A Railway Man At this point it is necessary to digress to discuss more in depth a historiographical puzzle of great importance for the understanding of what took place on the Upper Nile in the 1890s. This can also serve as an example to show that much of the literature on the Fashoda crisis has a major common weakness – it disregards the hydrological factor and the geographic and hydrological character of the Nile. Many influential historical reconstructions and interpretations of ‘the race to Fashoda’ have ascribed to a certain Frenchman working in Egypt, Victor Prompt, and to his hydrological ideas, a most important role in the development of imperial rivalry in the Nile valley. These ideas, published in the early 1890s, are said to have created ‘a sort of nightmare’ for British rulers in Cairo and provided French imperialists with a rational goal in the Upper Nile. He has been described as a hydrologist and been ascribed a decisive role in stimulating that ‘defensive imperialism’ which finally forced the British to occupy the Upper Nile in order to forestall French attempts to take control of the river banks at Fashoda. Because of him, it was said, ‘il faut occuper Fachoda’.175 But Prompt never did say what historians claimed he said. His whole thinking about and strategy for Nile control have been misinterpreted. His influences on

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French and British policies have furthermore been greatly exaggerated; Prompt caused no stir among the British and played no significant role, if any, in making French policy in relation to the Upper Nile and the Bahr al-Ghazal. He was not even a hydrologist but an engineer who came to Egypt in 1889, appointed as a French administrator of the Egyptian railway. It is true that he made several speeches in Cairo on the control and use of the Nile in the early 1890s.176 But the interpretations of Prompt’s ideas have all been limited to only one of his four speeches, on the ‘Soudan Nilotique’ of January 1893. Prompt’s proposals for control of the Nile can be reconstructed only if all his speeches are analysed. The main purpose of Prompt’s two speeches in 1891 was to convince his primarily Egyptian audience that Egypt should immediately occupy the Sudan. The reason for this proposal was clear and in line with what Garstin and Willcocks thought: by controlling the Nile south of its borders, the water supply in Egypt during the low season could be increased. He thought that the Nile was experiencing a reduction in the annual average natural water discharge. This would have dramatic consequences for Egypt’s ‘whole existence’. It was first and foremost the river’s natural regime which made Egyptian reoccupation of the Sudan necessary, according to Prompt. The hope and the recommendation were that Egypt should reoccupy the whole of the Nile valley in order to establish more reservoirs upstream. In his first speech he proposed three reservoirs between Khartoum and Aswan. Another part of his note was related to his proposal for the ‘Canalisation du Nil’ in the Sudan. He suggested that the Nile could and should be made navigable up to Khartoum, at a cost of a little more than 13 million francs. If implemented, he argued this project would facilitate the military conquest and occupation of the Sudan from the north, and would also make economic exploitation of the area more profitable. By implementing these three water projects, Egypt would benefit by an immense extension of agricultural area, and would be able to abandon old irrigation methods. In an annexe, he even discussed possible future irrigation projects in the eastern Sudan along the Blue Nile (the area that later became the site for the Gezira Scheme). He argued that it would be possible for Egypt to profit by cultivation there, without negative effects on Egypt’s water supply during the all-important summer season. His second speech in 1891 dealt only with reservoirs in Upper Egypt. He said the reservoir plan was unquestionably the single most important problem in Egypt at the time. The speech offered strong support for the British-sponsored plans for Aswan, elaborating on the great economic benefits for Egypt. (In January 1893 Prompt again advocated Egyptian reoccupation of what he called its lost provinces. He offered a broad description of the whole basin and suggested how it could best be exploited for the benefit of Egypt and the Egyptian economy.) The third part of his speech had the subtitle: ‘Intérêts Agricoles et Commerciaux de l’Égypte dans les contrées que forment le bassin du Nil’.177 Prompt focused on a barrage at the Equatorial Lakes in present-day Uganda: the problem addressed was what he regarded as the potential and the positive and negative consequences of a reservoir at Lake Nyanza. This speech did nothing more than follow the lines of well-known British

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plans for the river upstream. Prompt wrote that, if desired, a dam could be built on the Nile in Uganda, so as to give Egypt important and much-needed water, a project which, according to him, could not be opposed on sound grounds. According to Prompt, the potential threat to Egypt, which he recognised and highlighted, came from the British presence on the headwaters of the White Nile. Egypt should occupy the whole course of the Nile up to Lake Victoria. Egypt’s reoccupation should be restricted geographically to what was important: the course of the Nile itself.178 Il résulte de ces considérations que l’occupation de ces points importants du cours du Nil, Khartoum, le Sobat, Donfilé, le lac Mououtan N’zigueh est indispensable non seulement à l’agrandissement de la surface cultivée de l’Egypte et à la diminution des impôts, mais même á sa sécurité.179 Prompt’s speeches supported Egyptian expansion, and warned about British intentions upstream. He did not play the French card, he did not speculate that France could throttle Egypt at Fashoda, and he did not suggest that either Fashoda or the Bahr al-Ghazal was the hydrological key to the Nile basin. Even if his ideas and opinions have been misrepresented in the historical literature, Prompt might, of course, have had some influence on French–British rivalry. If contemporary political actors thought he was playing the French card or if they held the opinion that Sobat was at Fashoda or that Fashoda was the ‘hydrological key’ to the Nile basin (Prompt never mentioned a dam at Fashoda), then the theory of Prompt’s importance might yet have some validity. But Prompt’s contemporaries tended to ignore him. A. Silva White’s book, which dealt with irrigation in Egypt and the importance of basin-wide water development – including that stretch of the river that passes through the Sudan – did not mention Prompt at all.180 Nor did Sidney Peel’s 1904 book Binding the Nile. Jules Cocheris discusses Prompt in his 1903 book Situation Internationale de l’Egypte et du Sudan,181 but his ideas were represented as a normal part of the Nile discourse in Egypt. There is no evidence in the sources that anyone regarded Fashoda as a hydrological ‘key point’ in the Nile valley.182 Samuel Baker, for example, who was more familiar with this area than any other European (he had been Ismail’s governor of the region in the 1860s, with his headquarters at Fashoda), had described in his book of 1863 the extreme flatness of the area, including the Sobat,183 and in his famous book of 1867 wrote that the country around Fashoda was ‘dead flat’.184 In none of his books is Fashoda even hinted at as a hydrological key point, and these books were bestsellers at the time. The German Georg Schweinfurth’s book The Heart of Africa, another bestseller, described the area, implicitly refuting any idea of Fashoda as a hydrological key point. The Italian Elia Lombardini’s description of 1865 could also have been consulted, and was by British water-planners. In 1879 Emin Pasha published his diary concerning the ‘Strombarren des Bahr el-Gebel’, in which he described his journey which aimed to reach the Sobat junction, but which failed because of sudd in the Bahr al-Jabal.185 In French, a number of authors from J.P. Arnaud to Alfred J. Chélu showed beyond doubt that if anyone wanted to dam the Nile, he should not attempt to do it at Fashoda. The assumption that has prevailed in the literature, that Fashoda was the key or ‘at the headwaters’ of the Nile,

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is simply wrong.186 Fashoda was not at the headwaters of the Nile but was a village in the middle of an immense plain more than 1000km north of the headwaters. Nor is there any evidence that policy-makers thought ‘the Nile watershed in the Bahral-Ghazal’ to be the key. The distance between this watershed and Fashoda is many times the distance between Paris and London.187 The British understood this. They had therefore already placed their foot on Lake Victoria, and built what Churchill later called, in order to underline the British strategy in the 1890s, the ‘political railway’ from Mombasa to the headwaters of the Nile.188 A potential French force at Fashoda therefore did not represent a strong water weapon. It did not create fear in London but would raise an outcry in Egypt, since it struck at the very heart or the very symbol of the lost Upper Nile valley empire which, under Abbas II, they were fighting to get back. The so-called Prompt effect is a myth, and he should not be blamed for the ‘race to Fashoda’.189 But what happened in these few months in 1898, when Europe was on the brink of war because of a remote Shilluk village deep in the Southern Sudan?

FA S H O DA : I M AG E A N D R E A L I T Y

There were political forces in France that dreamed of bringing the British imperial success in the Nile valley to a halt. France had backed out of the proposed joint action against Urabi in 1882, which had left its position at Suez fundamentally weakened, especially after Cromer became virtual ruler of Egypt. The Anglo–French liberal entente was one casualty of Egyptian developments. Pro-imperialist forces in France wanted to turn the tables on Britain. They could not conceal a spiteful bitterness over British successes. They hoped to gain African territories and they wanted a foothold on the Nile, in order to reopen the Egyptian question. They rested their Sudan case on the res nullius theory (that the country was ‘no man’s land’, since it had been left by Egypt) and that the first power to occupy it had the right to keep it. The Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1894 to 1898, Gabriel Hanotaux,190 attempted to arrest any such French efforts to reach the Upper Nile.191 He is often described as a staunch imperialist, but with Britain he was mainly guided by an interest in improving relations. To challenge London on the Upper Nile would reduce the chances for an Anglo–French entente, for which Paris was striving.192 Other forces in France were seeking to establish a French foothold in the Nile valley in spite of repercussions in Europe. Compared to the systematic nature of British planning for the River War, the plans made in Paris appear trivial and almost accidental. In Paris a number of missions were discussed. Pierre Monteil had been given new orders. He was not to go to the Nile at all. The expedition was to be limited to the Upper Ubangi. In August 1894 Monteil was eventually sent to the Ivory Coast, and had to give a formal commitment that he would ‘never send a body of French soldiers or even a single man into the Nile Basin’.193 In 1895 a report was prepared on what was then called ‘Mission du Congo-Nil, le Bahr al Ghazal’,194

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which came to be called the Marchand mission. Marchand’s orders were not signed until 26 February 1896, long after London had decided to occupy the Sudan and by which time Britain had already been the real and formal ruler at the headwaters of the White Nile for two years.195 This mission could therefore not have sparked off the Nile quest, which the British had started more than six years before and which, by 1896, they had almost won. Nor was Marchand concerned with Prompt or his water plan. In reports and letters to Captain Victor Liotard in November 1896, Marchand wrote about the strategic importance of the three points of ‘LadoFachoda-Dem Ziber’, a ‘triangle stratégique du Haut Nile’, but without linking them to dams in any way. Of course the British public and policy-makers were aware of the discussion in France and about the imperialistic fervour of some groups in that country, including a project of trying to occupy the Bahr al-Ghazal. The Morning Post referred to a story in the Dépêche Coloniale about two French missions heading for the Upper Nile, Marchand’s and Liotard’s. The force was later to be augmented by some gunboats, and two thousand rifles were to be distributed to the natives. But this story did not cause a stir either in London or Paris. At the end of February 1898, the British Ambassador in Paris informed Salisbury of an article in Questions Diplomatiques et Coloniales (15 February) about the same expedition. Liotard, Governor of Upper Ubangi, was to go north, via Zeriba-Soliman or Deim Ziber, and Captain Marchand from Semio to Tambura. At Tambura, Marchand’s expedition was to divide into three groups, ultimately reaching Fashoda by boat. The article speculated on the possibility of an understanding between the (long-dead) Mahdi and the French officers, in order to reach Khartoum before the arrival of an Anglo– Egyptian force.196 London’s policy was clear; if a French force was found in occupation of any portion of the Nile valley, Kitchener should convince its Commander that his presence in the Nile was an ‘infringement of the rights both of Great Britain and the Khedive’.197 The British knew that such a French force would be very weak. On 18 August 1898 Salisbury was informed of rumours of a French occupation of Fashoda,198 and on 7 September that the French had hoisted their flag there and that the force consisted ‘of eight European officers and eighty Senegalese troops’.199 Kitchener, the general of a victorious army, with about 40,000 soldiers under his command, several gunboats, Maxim guns and plenty of ammunition, and a secure supply route on the Nile, was sent upstream with parts of his flotilla. London knew that Marchand’s mission was in a bad shape. But The Times assured those few who might have been worried about the French that the Marchand expedition was a failure and that Liotard had no intention of penetrating to the Nile.200 When the British Government learned that Marchand and his mission had reached Fashoda they seized the opportunity this created and used it for what it was worth. They decided immediately to send two flotillas, one up the White Nile, and the other up the Blue Nile. They used the French at Fashoda as an excuse. Kitchener set off up the White Nile with five gunboats, a company of Cameron Highlanders, two battalions of Sudanese infantry, a battery of artillery and four machine-guns.

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On 19 September Kitchener reached Fashoda, greeted Marchand, hoisted the Egyptian flag, and presented the Frenchman with a formal letter of protest. Marchand was in a very weak position, as he himself admitted.201 The hostile reception given to Marchand by the Mahdists seems to show that he had not achieved success in his dealings with Omdurman.202 He was in want of both ammunition and supplies, and it would take months to reprovision him from the interior because of inadequate transport.203 But in defiance he wrote Kitchener a letter, signed ‘Commissioner for the French Government over the Upper Nile and the Bahr el Ghazal’. Marchand said that his force was ready to die rather than haul down the French flag.204 He soon realised, however, that he did not have sufficient backing from the French Government and that his position was untenable. In a letter published later, Marchand admitted, ‘One hundred and fifty men against forty thousand! Is it not funny to the extent of being side-splitting?’205 They stood few chances against Kitchener, and against local, natural conditions. Marchand was stuck on a narrow strip of dry ground surrounded by vast marshes. It was difficult to retreat westward, because of the navigation of the Bahr al-Ghazal, particularly during low water. The channel might be obstructed with sudd. He could not escape southward for the same reason and in the north were the British. As for land transport, his resources were clearly inadequate. Kitchener wrote, Our general impression was one of astonishment that an attempt should have been made to carry out a project of such magnitude and danger by the dispatch of so small and ill-equipped a force, which – as their commander remarked to me – was neither in a position to resist a second Dervish attack nor to retire; indeed, had our destruction of the Khalifa’s power at Omderman [sic!] been delayed a fortnight, in all probability he and his companions would have been massacred.206 The French Government, in this situation, implemented a diplomacy of appeasement with London. The new Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé, congratulated the British on the success of their army at Khartoum.207 He also told the British Government that he supposed the British flotilla would continue its course upriver from there at once and that they then might fall in before long with the man he carefully called ‘the French explorer Captain Marchand’ (my emphasis). Delcassé underlined that Marchand was an ‘emissary of civilisation’ and not of the French Government. Delcassé emphasised many times, according to Monson, that all causes of difference between the two Governments should be amicably settled.208 He denied any involvement in the Marchand mission.209 The British, on their side, chose tactics out of strength. Salisbury and Cromer, with Kitchener on the ground, had the French diplomatically cornered and militarily against a wall. While the Anglo–Egyptian occupation of the Northern Sudan had trumped French obstructionism in Egypt, British strategists now thought they could cause Paris a crushing defeat, helped by the adventurism of French imperialists. The British reminded the French of earlier British claims.210 Salisbury instructed Monson to tell Delcassé that ‘all the territories which were subject to the Khalifa passed to the British and Egyptian Governments by right of conquest’ and that this right was ‘not open to discussion’.211 They did not reciprocate Delcassé’s effort to

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appease. The next day Monson reported a new conversation with the French Foreign Minister. Delcassé repeated that Marchand had no authority to decide questions of right, which ‘appertain exclusively to the competence of the British and French Governments’.212 When Monson had informed the French Government about Salisbury’s policy, Delcassé repeated his ‘declaration of ignorance as to the whereabouts of Captain Marchand’ and said his latest news about him dated from March 1898.213 Monson reported to Salisbury on 18 and 22 September that Delcassé again laid stress upon there ‘being no Marchand Mission at all’. Salisbury and Cromer’s exploitation of the Marchand mission was brilliant diplomacy. By insisting that the Marchand mission was a French Government mission, at the same time as the British knew that he was in an extremely weak position, they could both humiliate the French in the Nile valley and emerge as the protector of Egypt (in fact, Cromer and Salisbury believed that the British in reality saved Marchand’s life).214 In Paris, parts of the press were already battering a weak government over the Dreyfus Affair and rumours were circulating that Marchand had been abandoned by his Government. Delcassé showed the British Ambassador articles in which the Minister was portrayed as ‘the author of national disgrace’.215 The embattled French Government hesitated. It would look upon any formal demand to withdraw as an ultimatum. Delcassé said that to treat the French occupation of Fashoda as unjustifiable would be resented by the whole of France, as an insult to national honour. Rather than submit, he said, France would ‘reluctantly accept war, but he could not believe that there was any desire in England to go to war over such a question’.216 On 1 October Salisbury asked Cairo to inform the Sirdar that Paris had decided not to instruct Marchand to leave Fashoda. They were desperately hoping that London would purchase his departure by concessions of territory. London refused, of course, and power on the ground and diplomacy won the day. Finally Paris had to accept realities, Marchand had to leave the Upper Nile by way of Ethiopia, and the defeat of France was total. The good news was announced by Lord Salisbury on 4 November. He was speaking at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, where the guest of honour, Kitchener, had just been raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum.217 British readers of The Times could read, in the last days of the nineteenth century, the official version of a very successful campaign: London had had no imperial ambitions at all. First, they were fighting the Dervishes, the ‘tyranny of fanatics’, who had killed Gordon and later endangered Egypt’s borders. Secondly, they fought imperial France. The Fashoda affair was described as an incident that could not be settled on the spot, but was ‘destined to stir the British nation to its depths’. It was the Sirdar’s duty to request Major Marchand at once to evacuate the dominions of the Egyptian Khedive.218 Britain had occupied the Upper Nile as a duty to civilisation. France had been profoundly humiliated, while Britain emerged as the undisputed ruler of the River Nile.

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THE NILE IN HAND

London now controlled the Suez Canal, Egypt and the Nile upstream. It had become clear: Britain was not prepared to share, with any other European country, political rights over any important portion of the Nile valley. It was not even willing to let any part of the territory situated upon the eastern slope of the watershed between the Nile and the Ubangi come under the control of other powers.219 When the defeated French signed an addition to Article IV of the 1898 Niger Convention in March 1899, the Nile valley was finally British. The 16-year-old dispute over Egypt was definitely closed. Furthermore, by the Agreement of 1904, E£6 million was unconditionally handed over to the Egyptian Government. This represented another turning point in the British occupation, since it gave them considerable financial freedom, while French opposition to British rule was officially over.220 The Nile campaign was not imperialism by default, but far-sighted imperial politics. The Anglo–Egyptian advance into the Sudan was not entirely a move in European policy, nor did it arise wholly from local events within Africa. A mixture of these factors was at work, but the structural regional water issue and how it was conceived by the British strategists were the main reasons. By controlling the Upper Nile beyond Egypt’s frontier, Britain’s position in Egypt and at Suez was strengthened. They achieved the goal without violent conflicts or war with France or other European powers, and they achieved it almost free. During the Sudan campaign, British propaganda underlined Egypt’s historical rights to its ‘lost provinces’.221 The River War was therefore called a ‘reoccupation’ in public rhetoric and in contemporary documents. The fighting was done mostly by Egyptian soldiers and two-thirds of the costs were paid by Egypt. On his way to Fashoda, Kitchener ordered the vessels to fly Egyptian colours, and he met Marchand wearing the uniform of an Egyptian general with a tarboosh on his head.222 Britain’s role was said to be to support Egypt against alien powers which could interfere with the Nile. But London and Cromer had their own plans, under the shield of Egypt. At Khartoum the Egyptian and British flags had been raised side by side but, as was stressed by Salisbury in full agreement with Cromer, ‘This decision will have no reference to the manner in which the occupied territories are to be administered in the future’. Less than a year after Kitchener had hoisted the Egyptian flag at Fashoda and ‘reoccupied the lost territories of Egypt’, Cromer dictated the 12 articles of the Condominium Agreement between Britain and Egypt. This agreement reflected who had the upper hand.223 This Anglo–Egyptian Agreement has been described accurately as a polite fiction for British control.224 It nominally gave Egypt and Great Britain joint responsibility for the administration of the reconquered territory – but in effect the Sudan was now treated as a British possession in London. For the Egyptians the idea of the ‘Unity of the Nile valley’ was not a slogan, but an ideal of greatest importance. Muhammad Ali and his successors had extended Egypt to the Great Lakes, but the Mahdist uprising had driven the limits of Egyptian control down to Wadi Halfa. The Egyptians therefore supported this ‘reoccupation’ and thought it natural and lawful, although they resented Britain’s leading role in the

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Above The occupation of the Sudan was officially described as an Anglo–Egyptian occupation. The picture shows Lord Cromer, the British consul in Egypt, and the Egyptian Khedive standing on a podium in the Sudan draped in the British and Egyptian flags. Below The River War, 1896–98, against Mahdist rule in the Sudan ended at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, where the Anglo–Egyptian army under British command and with modern weaponry wiped out the Mahdist army. On 2 September 1898 a British division of two brigades, and an Egyptian division of four brigades, mounted troops, artillery, engineers and a flotilla attacked the Mahdist forces. During that warm Friday about 10,000 Sudanese were slaughtered and about 10,000 wounded, while on the British and Egyptian side only a handful were killed. In order to make his victory final and as humiliating as possible, Kitchener ordered the skull of the late Mahdi to be dug out; he wanted to send it to the Queen – a barbarous act in an hour of imperial triumph.

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undertaking. While on the one hand Egypt had had its formal control over the Nile valley extended, at the same time by being the clearly junior partner in the march southward, the Egyptian Government had given the British a pretext for taking the Nile, as Cromer later summarised this process of imperial, geopolitical expansion. In the Southern Sudan, the Egyptian position and presence were even more marginal than in Khartoum. They had been wiped out from the area around the Equatorial Lakes, which London controlled all on its own.225 On the Blue Nile, Cromer was working for an agreement with Ethiopia on the use of the Nile in Egypt, an agreement to which Egypt would not be a party, and was supporting Menelik against Egyptian, French and Italian claims to its territory. In the very voluminous literature on the partition of Africa and the Nile quest, European rivalry has been interpreted as a necessary and sufficient precondition for British expansion in the Nile valley. I have tried to show that it was rather the growing water crisis in Egypt in the 1890s, and the water-controlling visions of the Cromer–Garstin regime, that made the destiny of the Upper Nile subject to the political and economic development of the irrigation economy under British leadership. Whereas it has been claimed that the ‘frontiers of fear’ motivated the British march upstream, this interpretation focuses on another impetus: the limits of irrigation water in Egypt and the abundance of Nile waters upstream. It has been said that the British perception of the Southern Sudan was of a worthless region – the ‘bottom of the barrel’. Here we have argued that the Southern Sudan was regarded as the very opposite – a barrel filled with water: the region possessed something which, to the British-controlled irrigation economy in Egypt, was more valuable than gold. The Sudan was therefore not a buffer state like Afghanistan, to which it has been compared in the literature, but the very opposite. It was directly linked, via the Nile, to the development prospects of agriculture, cotton exporting and stability in Egypt. This analysis defies the general description of British policymakers as influenced by that ‘defensive psychology’ that kept watch over northern India and had been transferred into Africa.226 On the contrary, their plans for ‘taking the Nile in hand’ were grounded in a feeling of strength and confidence. Instead of a theory that ‘suggests the kind of defensive imperialism that extends beyond the areas of expanding economy but acts for their strategic protection’,227 a reflection of some sort of Victorian mind, this analysis has put forward a new theory, suggesting that the British Upper Nile policy was a kind of water or river imperialism that extended beyond the areas of expanding economy, but acted for Egypt’s continued agricultural and economic development. Mainstream diplomatic history has told its story as if the Nile and its waters had no practical, enduring importance.228 However, the Nile and its physical characteristics made upriver expansion a rational policy. The sources clearly show that this was no occupation by default; it was no step in the dark. Nile hydrology and Nile valley geology made the British occupation of the Upper Nile a farsighted imperial policy.

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A British Nile

On…the entire course of the Nile no works of any kind involving a control of its water – either direct or indirect – should be permitted to be constructed by any private Society or individual, and…all such works should be constructed by, and remain in the hands of, the Government of Egypt. (Earl of Cromer) 1

In 1904, when the Scottish engineer and Under-Secretary of Public Works in Egypt, William Garstin, issued his Report on the Basin of the Upper Nile, he had produced one of the most interesting and influential documents in the modern political and economic history of the Nile valley, as well as in the history of river-basin planning in general. The report presented a comprehensive new solution to the region’s most important issue – how to control the Nile. Garstin was well aware of its importance: To rescue the Upper Nile from the marshes in which it has lost more than half its volume; to control and regulate the Equatorial lakes, making them add to the flow of the river at will, to cause the waters of the Blue Nile to rise and irrigate the fertile tracts through which they pass; to secure to Egypt a constant and sufficient supply for the entire area between the cataracts and the Mediterranean; to free that country from the ever-present danger of a disastrous flood – these are the tasks worthy of comparison with any previously recorded in the world’s history, and which, if successfully accomplished, will leave behind them a monument that will probably endure long after all evidences of those erected by an earlier civilisation shall have passed away.2

The plan’s perception of the Nile problem grew from the political strategy developed by Cromer and Salisbury, and was enriched by new geographical and hydrological 54

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research. It profoundly influenced regional economics and politics during the whole of the twentieth century, and will continue to haunt most plans for Nile use in the twenty-first century. In spite of this, its architect, Garstin, is seldom mentioned in studies of Egyptian, Sudanese or for that matter Ugandan and Ethiopian history. Even though his 1904 plan was not implemented as outlined, its vision captured peoples’ minds, and the way in which the Nile problem was conceptualised dominated thinking on the Nile in the whole of the twentieth century. Since control over nature always means some human beings’ control over other human beings, and since the Nile was at the heart of British strategy, this book argues that an analysis of the character of this plan and the way it conceived of the Nile and how it could be used reconstructs British imperial thinking in the region. The plan also reflected how the peoples living in the inter-lacustrine region on the water tower of Africa, or in the Gezira or the floodplain of the Southern Sudan, had been drawn into the maelstrom of world politics because of the Nile. The plan linked them closer together than ever, all subjected to a dominant, comprehensive downstream water perspective. The concept of river basins in general, and of the Nile in particular, should not be regarded as a universal or objective idea, but as contingent on particular historical and geographical circumstances. To understand the modern history of the Nile valley, it is crucial to understand how it emerged as a single political, hydrological and planning unit and the details of the way this regionalisation took place.3

N O BA S I N – M A N Y R I V E R S

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British had conquered the river on behalf of rationalistic Western science. The coming of the British meant the coming of a political and technological power bent on taking control of the valley, militarily, diplomatically and, most important in our context, in order to exploit its waters. For the first time, a report was published that provided a hydrological, topographical and geographical description of the whole basin and a plan to harness it. It was written by an outstanding water-planner with great influence in Egypt, but it was a result of collective British efforts. The report crowned years of Nile studies on which the Egyptian Government, supported by Cromer and political strategists in Whitehall, had spent huge amounts of money, dispatched teams of surveyors all over the basin and erected current meters thousands of kilometres upstream.4 The 1904 plan presented a solution to a problem that had emerged with force during the 1880s and 1890s. It aimed to reduce what the elite in Egypt and British strategists alike regarded as a growing and ultimately menacing gap between water demand and water supply in Egypt during the summer, through large-scale manipulation of the river south of Egypt’s borders. The plan was very ambitious: to control the Nile throughout ‘its entire length’ and adding to its volume by ‘drawing upon the almost inexhaustible resources of the natural reservoirs which supply it’. Then the agricultural wealth in the northern parts of the basin ‘should increase to an extent beyond the dreams of the most sanguine reformer’.5 With the

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1904 plan and its implementation, the fruits of the occupation of the Upper Nile could be harvested. It was a testimony to the British railway and Kitchener’s flotilla, but Garstin’s methods stood in sharp contrast to the violence of military might. A fundamental improvement in water control required extensive manipulation of the river upstream, and the peoples of the Upper Nile became subjected not to the temporality of military power but to the permanence and endurance of a specific basin perspective. In order to control the river throughout its entire length, as Garstin stressed again and again, the British had to rely on proper knowledge of the river system, extensive scientific data and sound decision-making. By their understanding of the Nile as a single hydrological unit, and thus the Nile basin as one planning unit, the British established a close hydropolitical connection between Egypt and the Central African lakes and between London and all the people who lived within the Nile watershed. For thousands of years the dominant practical concept of the waters of this part of East and North Africa had been that of many rivers. Even in Egypt the Nile had been regarded as the ‘Egyptian’ Nile, and although the river was considered a deity, the river upstream of Egypt was widely regarded as practically irrelevant and therefore basically unknown. Garstin complained how difficult it was for laymen, that is British, European or Egyptian laymen, to understand that the White Nile was one river, since it had so many different names from Lake Victoria to Egypt.6 He wrote, ‘Who, for instance, is to understand that the Victoria Nile, the Bahr-el-Gebel, the Bahr-el-Zaraf, and the White Nile are all one and the same river? It would be infinitely simpler were the whole stream, from its outlet at Lake Victoria to its junction with the Blue Nile at Khartoum, to be called by its best known name – the White Nile. Such a change would be to the advantage of the general reader as well as of the geographer and the map-maker’7 (and to the imperial water plan). The coming of the British put pressure on localised perspectives. The all-dominant power in the Nile basin created a Nile that had hitherto been unknown. In order to grasp the novelty inherent in the British ideas about the Nile, and of their Nile empire, it may be useful to provide brief background notes about the role of the river before the advent of the British. On its way from the mountains of Burundi, the Ethiopian plateau or the Central African lake region to the temperate Mediterranean coast, the Nile, crossing one of the hottest and driest desert areas in the world (the greater part of the Nile valley lies within the influence of the distant trade winds, which account for the prevailing aridity of most of the basin), had framed the development potential of the areas it passed through. The combined influences of the length and width of the drainage basin, stretching over three climatic zones, many soil types and extreme differences in topography, had in the course of time created frameworks for extreme differences in levels of economic development and in the structures of economic systems and relationships. The Nile had impacted trade routes and settlement patterns. In Egypt, owing to the combined effects of the flow from south to north and the winds from north to south, boat transport has always been relatively easy to organise and tax. Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt could be united via the river, and the stones for the pyramids

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in Lower Egypt were brought by river from Upper Egypt. Also, in the Northern Sudan, cities were situated on its banks, such as Shendi (it developed into a centre for long-distance trade both northwards and east- and westwards in this part of Africa), on sites where the Nile could be crossed fairly easily. But while goods had been carried between parts of Ethiopia and Eritrea and Eastern Sudan and Egypt for centuries, trade links between the southern and northern parts of the Nile valley had been much weaker. The sudd on the Upper White Nile made these almost impossible. Until the work of the British sudd-clearing party at the beginning of the twentieth century, river communication in this area had been extremely difficult and uncertain. The annual formation of one of the biggest swamps in the world, during the flood season, had inhibited communication for centuries. Already Roman Emperor Nero and his centurions were stopped by the sudd.8 The permanent sudd in the dry season varies from 8000 square km to 19,000 square km depending on the river flow. The combined effect of the swamps and the sudd contributed to the separation of the Nile valley into two parts – conceptualised in the Arab north and by the British by naming the whole area the Sudd Region, or ‘barrier region’. Until the era of the British, the Nile was a serious natural barrier to human contact.9 The areas that the British called Tanganyika, the British East Africa Protectorate or Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya had all developed their trading links to the east, to the ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa. The Nile valley had never been a single economic unit. The river had for centuries guided the direction of settlement, navigation, the growth of trade and towns, types of water usage, and the contexts of natural and artificial irrigation practices in a divisive way. The cataracts upstream of Aswan, the sudd of the White Nile and the gorges of the Blue Nile hampered communication and trade. The topography, soil types and the hydrology of the river made basin irrigation on a large scale possible in Egypt but difficult in the Northern Sudan, while the swamps of the Southern Sudan served as natural grasslands for the Nilotic cattle nomads there and the rainfall on the Ethiopian plateau and over the Lake Victoria basin made irrigation unnecessary in most parts of Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. The seasonal rise and fall of the Nile in the Delta north of Cairo had created particular elementary human relationships with the river, and thus framed the basis and character of local economic life and its institutions; and helped to create one of the true irrigation civilisations of the world. Cropping patterns were largely dictated by the timing of the flood and the structure of the basin irrigation system. The lands were cropped once a year and followed a two-year rotation of wheat and barley alternating with hirsim and beans. Since the land slopes down gradually along the banks of the river, in comparison to many other large rivers, it seldom flooded. The land had been divided into a series of basins by a system of dykes, some running perpendicular to the river, others parallel to it. Canals dug through the high lands along the banks allowed rising floodwaters to flow into these basins. When the Nile was low, the water was laboriously raised by shadufs or lever baskets operated by hand, and sakyas or Persian wheels turned by oxen. The soil consisted of silt brought by the Blue Nile tributaries from the Ethiopian Plateau, varying in thickness from about

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150 to 200cm, and forming one of the most fertile soils in Africa. The conditions for developing such large-scale irrigation schemes were not as good in Upper Egypt or the Northern Sudan. The water and the climate were the same, but the water had to be lifted up to the plots. The main stream of the Nile, from Khartoum northwards to Aswan, flows through deserts and has a narrow strip of vegetation on either side. In the Southern Sudan the rise and fall of the Sobat (rising in Ethiopia) and the tributaries of the White Nile (coming from Uganda and the western Sudan) led to the natural irrigation of large areas of grasslands during certain months of the year and thus regularly restored the very foundations of the local agro-pastoral and semi-nomadic societies. The character of their economy and their settlement and movement patterns was formed by the river’s fluctuations and the flatness of the topography, but the system was entirely different from the Delta economy to the north and incapable of producing a surplus. Instead of playing a unifying economic role in the basin, the Nile has had a profound influence on the creation of many different economic activities and social systems. It has been argued that the basis of every civilisation is its vital, endlessly recreated links with its own environment; those links which create and recreate, throughout its long history, all the elementary relationships with the soil, water, endemic diseases, etc. In this respect the Nile valley has always been and still is made up of several rather than one single civilisation, based upon different but vital and endlessly repeated links with the river. The diversity of geographical areas, ethnic groups and cultures in the Nile valley cannot be analysed as belonging to a single destiny or coherent succession of time phases, although all inhabitants share a common river and live along that same meandering line on the map. It is this contradiction between existing cultural and economic structures as existed in the 1890s and the British visionary plans for the entire river basin, as expressed in Garstin’s report, that makes it fruitful to analyse this diversity of geographical areas, ethnic groups and cultures as belonging to one history of the Nile basin during the British period. The Garstin report signals a historical period where the different peoples in the Nile valley with different interactions with the river were captured and huddled together, as it were, by British conceptual regionalisation of the Nile valley, by Britain’s Nile policy and its plans for using the Nile.10 The report and its importance in the thinking about the Nile meant the institutionalisation of a historically contingent process – it had developed a new and particular territorial, symbolic and conceptual identity, thereby establishing the Nile as a specific regional entity. In ancient times, a more limited concept of the Nile as a geographical area and as a political unity was followed by the construction of irrigation works. (For example, the reclamation of the left bank of the Nile followed the original unification of Egypt under Menes, while that of the right bank was undertaken by the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty.) For London, Cromer and Garstin, the main aim was not to create political unity under one regional state, but to use a common resource in the interests of a foreign, colonial power. This new conceptualisation of the Nile basin as a finite, complete and interdependent system created new links between widely different societies. The combination of the river’s

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character and the way the British conceived of the Nile suddenly brought together in a common historical destiny Egyptian nationalists, the European cotton industry and the Dinka cattle nomads in the Southern Sudan, and the Ethiopian Ras and the Sudanese riverain elite; and in between, the banana-producing economy in the lake region and the cotton fields in the Delta. This British regionalisation did not match individual and local consciousness or experiences. The development of this contradiction between this particular form of top-down regionalisation and local understandings of space is one important aspect of the history of the British Nile. It is also a history of the institutionalisation of a particular region, where the first phase can be described as the construction of territorial shape (the British discovery and mapping of the Nile and making it their sphere of interest), the second as the construction of symbolic shape (the publication of the different Nile plans and Nile reports) and finally the construction of institutional shape (the establishment of British political administration and an Egyptian irrigation service with branch offices in countries upstream). These three phases happened almost at the same time, and thus enhanced the normative status and symbolic and actual power of this particular regionalisation process.

T H E M A H D I S T S TAT E – A P O L I T I C A L BA R R I E R TO N I L E R E S E A RC H

In a comparative and long-term perspective, the 1904 plan is revolutionary, but both in scientific content and concepts of water control it stood on the shoulders of a number of discoverers and water experts. The water-planners in the service of the British Empire did not invent a new tradition. They rather brought what had started thousands of years earlier to an entirely new stage. The Egyptian Public Works Department played a central role in establishing this region, as it were, in the minds of the people and the politicians. Particularly important was the research carried out after the Anglo–Egyptian army had crushed the Mahdist forces. Then, finally, the ‘veil’ that had prevented the water experts from revealing the hydrological secrets of the Nile ‘was removed’, as H.E.Hurst, the foremost Nile expert for decades, later expressed it. The Mahdists, at Abba Island in the middle of the White Nile, were not interested in basin-wide hydrological research and no British or Egyptian irrigation engineers had been allowed up the Nile to map the character of the river. The earlier period of how modern scientific explorations gradually conquered the Nile has often been described by emphasising its romantic and adventurous aspects. Certainly, geographical expeditions in search of the sources of the Nile had exercised the European imagination for a long time. Alexander the Great had sought the solution from the oracle of Zeus Ammon. The Roman, Lucian, wrote that Julius Caesar would have preferred the renown of finding the source of the Nile to his victories in civil wars. The exotic Nile of the Pharaohs, the not-yet-understood Biblical stories about the river and the excitement caused by the rumours of the

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‘Mountains of the Moon’ in the heart of Africa were all intermingled in the modern European quest to find the sources of the Nile.11 Here, only some main findings will be summarised, so as to enable the reader to understand the scientific context of the Garstin report, and how the Nile region’s symbolic shape was created and subsequently institutionalised. The story of the quest to discover and map the Nile is not only one of accumulating knowledge; it is one of stark Eurocentrism from the very beginning, a Eurocentrism unconscious of its own biases. The European discourse on Nile discoveries was solely based on European sources and travellers. A prelude to this quest started about 1770, when the Scottish traveller James Bruce boasted that he had discovered ‘that spot which had baffled the genius, industry and inquiry of both ancients and moderns for the course of nearly three thousand years’. As a ‘mere private Briton,’ he continued, he had ‘triumphed’ over ‘kings and their armies’. He engraved two medallions with an inscription from the Roman poet Claudian, ‘Nec contingit ulli hoc vidisse caput’ (‘None had the fortune to see this spring’), and the date, AD 1770. Bruce forgot that both Ethiopian kings and Portuguese missionaries had been there before him.12 However, he re-established Lake Tana as a source of the Blue Nile, and he rightly considered, as did many of his contemporaries, the White Nile to be of little importance to the flood of the main Nile as compared to the Blue Nile. Three decades later, Muhammad Ali took possession of the northern parts of the Sudan, and in the 1840s and 1850s Egyptian expeditions, often with European travellers in tow, opened up the White Nile and established trading posts on the Bahr al-Jabal, south of the swamps, and in the Bahr al-Ghazal. The puzzle was where to find that place enmeshed in European romanticism, the ‘Mountains of the Moon’. Were they the mysterious sources of the White Nile? 13 In the late 1850s an expedition was supported by the Royal Geographic Society in London, starting from the east coast of Africa. Captain John Speke went from the coast of Mombasa with Richard Burton to search for the source of the Nile from that direction. After finding Lake Tanganyika, Speke went north and reached the southern end of a huge lake, formerly known to the Arabs as Ukerewe, but named by Speke in honour of Queen Victoria.14 He had discovered for Europe what since then has very often been called the source of the Nile. Speke made another expedition in 1860 with Captain Grant. They marched around the south and west of the Lake and found the falls that were named the Ripon falls on the Victoria Nile. They were told about the existence of another Nile lake to the west. Speke and Grant were unable to verify this information and handed it on to Sir Samuel Baker, whom they met at Gondokoro on his way upriver. In 1864 Baker found that the information about Lake Albert to the west was correct. Ten years later Henry M. Stanley went up from the east coast and after going around Lake Victoria he found what later was called Lake Edward. Lieutenants Watson and Shippendall, working under Charles Gordon while he was Governor of Equatoria, mapped the Bahr alJabal the same year and drew a map of the White Nile from Khartoum to Lake Albert.15 The main course of the Bahr al-Ghazal was mapped by Petherick and

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Gessi between 1864 and 1878. Farther south, Stanley went up the Congo in 1887, through the huge forests to the Semliki River, following it to Lake Edward, which he recognised as the same lake he had seen in 1874. From 1890 onwards, surveys of Uganda were made by British officers and gauges were erected after the British had taken control of the interlacustrine region. On the Blue Nile little happened. The first known attempt to navigate the tributary was made by a wealthy American big-game hunter, W.N.Macmillan, who hired one B.H.Jessen, in 1902 and 1905, to take on the job. He did not succeed. (It has been claimed that Jessen was a Norwegian,16 whereas others have argued that he was Swedish.17) As late as 1925, the British consul in northwest Ethiopia, Colonel R.E.Cheesman, noted that the latest maps still showed the course of the Blue Nile as a series of dotted lines.18 The other minor tributaries were less known, and aroused less interest. The course of the Atbara, as far up as its junction with the Setit, was roughly known before 1864, when Baker made a more thorough exploration of these rivers. The Sobat was explored by Marno and Junker in the 1870s as far as Nasir. Only after 1898 did British officers survey the narrower rivers such as the Baro and the Akobo. The mapping of the broad outlines of the river’s geography was carried out by Europeans, but often they only reported what the local people knew. Basin-wide hydro development required much more detailed information – including data on water flow, fluctuations in discharges, topography and geological knowledge – than the travel descriptions furnished. When the British army prepared the occupation of the Sudan they complained about the quality of these narratives: ‘It is marvellous how so many travellers have gone through the country without reporting a single fact of any value’.19 The history of the Nile in these years saw a shift from the era of adventure that has attracted so many authors and produced so many books, to the less spectacular but more significant and inventive scientific-technological era of the irrigation engineers. The British were the first to synthesise existing knowledge of Nile hydrology. The questions they asked reflected downstream perspective and interests, and thus framed both descriptive and prescriptive options: what was the exact relationship between the Blue and the White Niles and the water flow in Egypt during the seasons of the year? Why was the discharge of the White Nile during flood generally no more than three times that of the low season? Where could the waters most profitably be used and how could the water be used so as to benefit Egypt’s summer cultivation and the introduction of cash-crop production in the Sudan in the long run? How could the river be improved as it passed through the swamp, so as to channel more water to the north at the appropriate time of the year? What tributaries could be neglected because they were unimportant to the main Nile during the summer? Almost 50 years earlier, Gustav Adolph von Klöden had published his Das Stromsystem des oberen Nil, in which he summed up the known hydrography of the river, with a greater wealth of detail than had been available before. Eight years later, Elia Lombardini published Saggio Idrologico Sul Nilo, in which, using his long experience of river control in Lombardy, he published the additional information

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that had accumulated since von Klöden’s work, especially the discovery of the equatorial lakes by Speke and Grant in 1862. In 1885 Josef Chavanne compiled a description of the Nile that incorporated the surveys of the Bahr al-Jabal and the Victoria Nile by General Gordon and his staff (1876 and 1877), and the observations of Emin Pasha (Schnitzer 1872), Georg August Schweinfurth (1874) and his articles in Petermans Mitteilungen, and Junker, whose many observations were made public at scientific meetings in Cairo in the 1880s and who published a book in English in 1890.20 In 1891 Alfred Jacques Chélu dealt with the Blue and White Nile systems south of Khartoum. In 1897 de Martonne described the hydrography of the basin of the Upper Nile, but did not deal with the basin of the Blue Nile. His work brought together previous observations on the Equatorial Lakes and the surrounding country, as well as the basins of the Bahr al-Jabal, the Bahr al-Ghazal, and the White Nile. The works of von Klöden, Lombardini and E. de Martonne summarised the hydrography of the Upper Nile up to 1856, 1864 and 1897 respectively, but the knowledge was not precise enough to permit the formulation of basin-wide water-harvesting plans, although the general regimen of the Nile and its tributaries was known.21 The death of Charles Gordon in 1885 caused a public outcry in Britain, but what was more important to the irrigation economy of Egypt was the loss of the Nilometer at Khartoum. Until then Egypt had received daily information by telegraph from this Nilometer.22 In 1875 a station had been erected in order to measure the Atbara. Mahdist rule of the Sudan meant that the water-planners in Egypt could not really improve their understanding of the river and the water could not be properly controlled.23 It is significant from this perspective that, immediately after the British had occupied Dongola, gauges were established there. Cromer told the British Prime Minister that the impact of this could not be ‘overrated’.24 No sooner had the British moved into the Sudan than Cromer sent Garstin on long expeditions up the Nile in the Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia. Since London ruled a ‘hydraulic’ downstream state, this affected the way the Nile came to be studied and measured, and how it came to be known and thus conceptually and technologically conquered. River gauges were erected as the British moved their troops upstream. Gradually much more precise knowledge of the rise and fall of the different tributaries was obtained.25 A technological innovation also came to their assistance, as H.G. Lyons in 1902 introduced current meters. Before that, discharge measurements had been made by measuring a cross-section of the river and inferring the mean velocity over the cross-section, either from observations of the slope of the water surface, or from observations of surface velocity made by means of floats. The current meters gradually succeeded the pioneers’ methods as the normal means of measuring discharges all over the basin.26 The Blue and White Niles and the Atbara were measured frequently in 1902 and 1903, as were the tributaries of the White Nile in the dry season of 1903, and the rainy seasons of 1902 and 1903. These more accurate measurements confirmed a fundamental assumption: the White Nile carried more water during the Egyptian summer.27 But Garstin could not have drawn up his plans without his own field observations, as he ascended the Nile by boat or ventured into the swamps and forests on foot, in the wake of Kitchener’s flotilla.

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T H E ‘ S U D D ’ – A NAT U R A L BA R R I E R TO N I L E R E S E A RC H

After a political obstacle had been removed by the crushing of the Mahdists at Omdurman, the British met with a natural obstacle on the Upper White Nile. The sudd, the enormous amount of floating vegetation in the river, had to be tackled. In 1898 Kitchener and the occupying army were unable to send their gunboats up the Bahr al-Jabal because it was completely blocked.28 The same year, Garstin suggested that a sudd-clearing operation should be financed. As long as the river was blocked it was difficult to know its natural hydrological system, and it was out of the question to propose any definite plan as to how to control the river. Two expeditions were subsequently financed by the Egyptian Government. The aims of the two Sudd Expeditions were to open and widen the natural channel, and to clear certain portions of it. Major Peake’s sudd-cutting expedition in 1899–1900 worked with five gunboats and a ‘gang of 800 Dervish’ prisoners guarded by 100 Sudanese. With them were five British and a number of Egyptian officers.29 The average depth of water was found to be only about one metre. The true riverbed was from four and a half to about six metres during the dry season, which was the only time of the year this work could be undertaken. A curious fact, but very helpful, was that when the papyrus was fired, the fire frequently spread along what was afterwards discovered to be the true bed of the river. The vegetation consisted mostly of papyrus and tiger or elephant grass, a kind of bamboo that could be more than six metres high. There was also an abundance of ambatch and long swordgrass. First workers cleared the top of the sudd block. Then prisoners were landed with large saws to cut along the true river bank. This was either submerged with a metre of water over it and papyrus and sudd covering it, or was solid ground with ant nests. This solid ground was narrow and always surrounded by swamp. Cross and parallel cuts were made through the sudd, dividing it into manageable blocks. Then a steamer tore the blocks out. The bows of the steamer were run into the block; a loop of steel hawser, the ends of which were made fast to the steamer, was passed over the bows, where it was taken by the men standing on the block, placed in the trench cut and trodden down with their feet. The steamer then went full speed astern, the men all standing on the hawser to keep it in position. In the case of tough sudd, as many as twenty trials had to be made before they managed to tear the sudd block away. When the block was torn out, the steamer went slowly astern until the block was towed clear into the current – if there was one. It was then made to float downstream, where it gradually disintegrated. If there was no current, it was towed to a piece of open water as a temporary measure, waiting for a current. The team saw blocks that were over seven miles in length. When the river was clear of these blocks, the hydrologists could study it. In the history of the Upper Nile the sudd-clearing operations signalled another milestone or watershed. The organisation of these very difficult operations – the steamers, the British commanders, the workers who were brought from prisons in the north to fight the blocks of sudd – leaves no doubt: the British were bent on conquering the Nile. While Speke and Baker’s expedition to the source of the river

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The river in the south Sudan now and again became and becomes choked by papyrus and different types of plants. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the British organised large sudd-clearing campaigns to open the main river for navigation and hydrological research. This picture indicates the flatness of the swamp region, and the work required to remove the floating mass of vegetation.

may symbolise European fascination with the geographical secrets of the Nile and the individual courage it took to reveal them, the expedition to clear the river from the blocks of vegetation in the inaccessible swamps may serve as a symbol of the power of modern technology, and the British spared no efforts to reveal the river’s hydrological secrets. The explorers could act as individuals, but the clearing operation required large-scale collective organisation and modern technology. While Speke’s discovery made him into a European celebrity, Major Peake and his sudd-cutters, who managed to turn the previously unnavigable river into a navigable river, opening up north-south trade, were forgotten. In the following years, British administrators and officers traversed the Upper Nile. They were not searching for gold mines, the myth of an African paradise or the ‘golden Africa’, as colonial fortune-seekers elsewhere. They were dispatched to map the country in great detail, but first and foremost to find out more about the various tributaries of the Nile.30 The vastness of the area, the unhealthy climate and the diseases, which prostrated the explorer and paralysed his efforts, and the difficulties in getting labour, transport and supply made mapping the river system a very difficult and laborious task. Hydrological surveys were undertaken in spite of all this throughout the Upper Nile. Dupuis, who wrote part of the 1904 report, travelled from the Sobat River to Twi on the Bahr al-Zaraf, and surveyed as far as Bor on the Bahr al-Jabal in order to ascertain whether the opening of a new river channel from Bor to the mouth of the Sobat was feasible. In 1900, Major Gwynn made a survey of the country from Famaka on the Blue Nile to Nasir on the Sobat. Lieutenant Bayldon collected information about the Bahr al-Arab, the Kyr and the

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Lol. They surveyed and levelled, and a series of regular discharge measurements was instituted. Everything was done with one aim in mind: how Nile measurements here could improve Nile control in Egypt. Nile descriptions were also directly modified by political considerations. Simply to formulate a claim for British control over tributaries that were found to affect the water supply of Egypt was, for example, thought unwise at the time, because it would give an opportunity for other powers to express their own opinions as to which tributaries really did materially affect the Nile flood. France, King Leopold,31 Italy and Ethiopia might put forth competing views as to the importance of the tributaries, so the British should not be too specific, went the argument.32 Garstin was here also up to the task: his ‘Nile’ description had integrated both hydrological and political concerns.

THE 1904 PLAN – A ‘CONQUERED’ NILE

The report bears clear marks of the early twentieth century – in its planning concepts and in its basin concept – and reflects a downstream perspective in the way it describes the river system, its benefits and drawbacks. The following detailed description is thus a reconstruction of a specific Nile perspective, and also crucial hydrological information, necessary to an understanding of the independent historical agency of the Nile and the character of the various Nile control projects put forward during the British. The Nile of the Victorian engineer was a different river from that of Speke and the explorers. Speke had searched for a definite source, and found it. Standing on the small hill to the west of the outlet, looking over the bay, where today there is a partly cracked monument to his memory, he thought he could fix the river’s starting point. The lake Garstin saw, as he journeyed for months on end through the Upper Nile and the interlacustrine region, was not the river’s real source. His aim was not to identify a specific source in order to solve a European geographical puzzle, but to control the river for the benefit of the northern drylands. He knew the lake was not the source, since he had seen rivers running into the lake, the most important being the River Kagera, which drains the highlands of Karagwe and present-day Rwanda. Garstin noted that the natural conditions of the lake area seemed to ensure a fairly even outflow at all times of the year and, importantly from a technical point of view, the rivers were for the most part not running streams but stretches of swamp. The Victoria Nile lost a lot of water in the marshes to the north and as it passed through Lake Kyoga. Garstin did not fully understand the time lag of five to six months between the peaks in water level in Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, but this was not so important then (it became an issue of world historic significance, however, when Prime Minister Eden discussed how to ‘strangle’ Nasser in 1956; see below). The many-branching system of Lake Kyoga and Lake Kwania was much obstructed by sudd, connected on the northeast with the lake that was named Lake Salisbury, so the quantity of water that reached Lake Albert was practically constant

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throughout the year. This was a dramatic discovery, since it made earlier speculations obsolete about a great reservoir on Lake Victoria. What also concerned Garstin was that the surrounding area consisted of a series of hills and valleys, the latter being occupied by papyrus swamps or dense forests that made it difficult to build storage works. What later were called the ‘Western Lakes’ of the protectorate consisted of Lake Albert, Lake Edward and Lake George. Garstin stressed the importance of Lake Edward, fed by the Semliki, which in turn was connected with Lake George by a broad channel fed by the River Mpanga, draining the eastern slopes of Ruwenzori. (Garstin’s new understanding of the river system made agreement with King Leopold more desirable than had been believed before, which was an important background to the 1906 Agreement).33 The Semliki flowed through, and south of Lake Albert the river formed the western frontier of the kingdom of Buganda. The chief tributary of the Victoria Nile was the River Kafu, the basin of which includes a great part of Buganda and Bunyoro. Lake Albert was regarded as the true source of the Nile and as the best place for a reservoir of the Nile. An increase in the level of the lake would not greatly enlarge the surface area, because of the steepness of the shores. Evaporation losses would not be much increased. The British had no clear idea of Lake Albert’s normal discharge. Garstin had a gauge erected there in 1904. From Lake Albert, Garstin noted that the flow of the Nile slightly increased, because a number of seasonal torrents added to it. After Nimule, Garstin saw the river, known as the Bahr al-Jabal (the ‘river of the mountain’, in Arabic), plunging over the Fola Rapids and other rapids to Rajjaf (not until 1923 were discharges regularly measured at the Fola), receiving a number of torrents that significantly increased the river flow. The 1904 report discussed where dams should be built, and ruled out Lake Victoria as the best place. Garstin discovered that the role of Lake Victoria was limited to passing a constant supply into Lake Albert. On Lake Albert the situation was very different, since it was on that lake that the supply of the White Nile depended. The 1901 report had proposed a dam at Lake Albert, which, after evaporation losses had been deducted, would make 10 billion cubic metres available, which could be discharged downriver during the months of low supply. A rise of three metres, it was estimated, would enable 15 billion cubic metres to be stored. The 1904 plan suggested regulating works of very ordinary dimensions at the outlet of Lake Victoria and a dam at Lake Albert, but these projects could – and this was Garstin’s most important discovery – most profitably be postponed. The reason was Garstin’s observation of the river’s behaviour in the Southern Sudan. He re-emphasised the importance of the Upper White Nile in the supply of summer water, but realised that to harness its waters would be more difficult than previously envisaged. According to Garstin, most benefit would be gained by first attempting to control the river, or change the river system radically, in the Southern Sudan. The background to this drastic suggestion was what happened between Ghaba Shambé, where, according to Garstin’s definition, the marsh or the swamp commenced at the junction of the Bahr al-Jabal with the White Nile. At Malakal, north of the swamp, the

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discharge in a mean year was found to be about half of that measured at Mongalla, south of the swamp. It was estimated that the amount of water ‘lost to evaporation’ – which was the expression used – reached an annual total of 12,175,000 cubic metres or the equivalent of 386 cubic metres per second of water that, instead, could have run to the north.34 The amount of water retained in the swamps was considered as being roughly proportional to the discharge of the Bahr al-Jabal at Mongalla, that is the higher the flow at the head of the swamps, the greater the reduction before it reached the tail of the swamps. The reason was a complex interaction of topography, swamp ecology and flooding regime. When the river received a discharge greater than the banks could retain (and in this stretch the river has no clear banks and a slope of only 10 centimetres per kilometre), the water flowed into the surrounding lands.35 In flood, the river spilled out in all directions, and because the banks are higher than the adjacent land, very little drained back. The swamps were interspersed with shallow lagoons – some of considerable size – filled with Nile water. The water was regarded as being lost due to evaporation from these lagoons and to absorption by aquatic water plants. The Bahr al-Zaraf, the eastern branch of the Bahr al-Jabal, was regarded, if remodelled, as a possible alternative to the main river. Garstin was also concerned about another branch of the Bahr al-Jabal that left the main stream through the swamp to the north of Bor, flowing northwest parallel to it. He called it the Gertrude Nile, in line with the traveller Grogan’s proposal, who had passed through the area a couple of years before (the Dinka of Pabek call the river Atem, and those at Tau call it Awai).36 At Lake No (known in Arabic as Moghren al-uhur or the Meeting of the Rivers) the river is joined by its western tributary, the Bahr al-Ghazal or Gazelle river, and here the swamp proper ends. The lake is a shallow expanse of water surrounded on all sides by reedy marshes. The Bahr al-Ghazal enters its western extremity and drains the extensive northeastern plateau of the watershed between the Nile and the Congo. Bahr al-Ghazal (so called by early Arab traders because of the amount of game to be seen near it) was entirely a Sudanese river, but it was regarded as useless because it brought no water to the main Nile. It is fed by numerous smaller streams which are the life-blood of the societies they run through, but, for the British, one single issue overshadowed all other concerns: in the last 300km it lost its entire slope, traversing a series of immense marshes in which the waters were ‘sucked up as a sponge’.37 Rivers such as the Bahr al-Arab, the Bahr al-Homr, the Rohl (Naam), Jau, Tonj, Bongo, Wau, Boro, Sopo, Chel, Kuru, Biri, Mulut, Getti, Sueh, Jur and the Rodi were, like the mother river, regarded as rather useless, uninteresting rivers, because of their feeble contributions to the main Nile, and there were no plans to harness them.38 Where the ‘mother river’ enters the White Nile, it is little more than a deep and reedy ‘tunnel’ of almost stagnant water, playing no role whatsoever in the ‘system of supply’.39 The report conceived the crux of the problem of the Upper Nile, and hence of the Nile in the Southern Sudan, as on the one hand to preserve the ability of the marshes to regulate floodwater and on the other to find some means of reducing water losses, during the dry season, when water was needed in the north. The 1904

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plan was made up of two closely interconnected parts and came to form the skeleton of all subsequent proposals up to the present day. Garstin suggested a number of solutions in order to prevent ‘waste in summer’. All spills and all branch channels should be barred, the latter by means of small earth dams or small masonry regulators, all the way between Gondokoro and Ghaba Shambé. Experiments on planting ambatch should be initiated as a means of closing these channels. Secondly, they should study the possibility of excavating a completely new channel for the summer water of the Upper Nile, in an alignment running from Bor to the Sobat junction with the White Nile, ‘leaving the great Swamp Region altogether to one side’.40 This ‘new river’ should be designed to carry 1000 cubic metres per second. Its length would be approximately 340km. A regulator should be constructed at the head of the new ‘river’ or canal so as to enable water to be diverted into the canal, or the river, as required by demand in the north, and using the area around the river in the Southern Sudan as a natural regulator. Only if the canal should turn out to be impracticable should they instead try to improve the Bahr al-Jabal and Bahr alZaraf by cutting off the worst of the meanders and by closing the connections between the river channel and the great lagoons. At the same time the swamps should be maintained as an escape valve for floodwater. This was another reason Garstin now favoured the new canal project. His suggestion of 1899, to confine the water of the river at all seasons to a well-defined and properly embanked waterway, would have achieved the latter goal. But it would also have increased the water flow during the flood season, which would have increased the danger of high floods downstream. Therefore the new canal should have sufficient capacity to carry the summer water but not be so big that it could carry the floodwater. Garstin summed up the benefits that would accrue to Egypt and to the Sudan north of Khartoum: ‘could an increased discharge of from 600 to 700 cubic metres per second be added to the volume of the river at the period when water is most required (the advantages) are so great and so obvious as to warrant an attempt to secure them even more difficult and more costly than what is proposed in these pages’.41 This was the ‘Garstin Cut’, later called the Jonglei Canal. Downstream of Lake No, the river was called the White Nile. After a sharp turn to the east it is joined by the Bahr al-Zaraf, mainly fed by spill-waters from the Bahr al-Jabal in the swamps and by the Sobat coming from Ethiopia, which was also described as a very important river. This was because it had been discovered that Egypt depended for some months of the year on the discharge of that river for the greater portion of its water supply. At certain periods, its water shrinks to a very insignificant amount, its bed becoming almost dry. But when full, it brings with it nearly three times as much as that brought down from the Equatorial Lakes. It is to the cloudy, milk-white colour imparted by the Sobat water that the White Nile owes its name. At Khartoum this river joins the Blue Nile, where the river becomes the Main Nile. The British had known for some time that the Blue Nile and Atbara contributed the greater proportion – later they fixed this at 70 per cent – of the total annual

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discharge. During the years of flood irrigation, the Blue Nile with its floodwater and silt was the life-giving source. The engineers very soon realised that the contribution of the White Nile to the total flow was between 10 and 20 per cent, but that this average figure could not conceal the importance of this tributary to Egypt. In this period, from about January to June/July, the mean total discharge of the main river at Aswan was about 13.8 billion cubic metres, of which the White Nile contributed 10 billion cubic metres and the Blue Nile 3.8 billion cubic metres. In May, when demand was at a peak, the White Nile contributed almost everything while the Atbara was dry and the Blue Nile had dwindled.42 They also knew that most of this variation was caused by the Sobat, which is the main stream of the Baro and Pibor tributaries. However, they knew very well that, compared to the Blue Nile and Atbara, the White Nile was a constant stream, partly because of the natural conditions of the Central African lake area that ensure a fairly regular outflow of the river, and partly because of the regulating role of the marshes in the Southern Sudan.43 Garstin called the White Nile the parent river, because it made life possible in Egypt and Sudan, and because it had the greatest potential for improving water supply during the summer. But in the perspective of this book, another hydrological phenomenon is extremely important, and Garstin described it vividly some years later: to those who do not know the Nile, he said, and have not studied its discharges, it is difficult to explain this wonderful arrangement, whereby these rivers [the Blue and White Niles] automatically compensate one another, so that, at the time when one system is passing on a large volume of water, the other is storing up its discharge, and when the former begins to decrease in volume, the stored water takes its place and makes good the deficiency.

The comprehension of these facts he considered to be one of the most important results of their studies, and this new perception of the river system tied firmly together the destinies of Ethiopia, Uganda and the rest of the Nile basin countries. The Blue Nile collected its flow from Lake Tana but, as Garstin stressed, primarily from the tributaries of Didessa, Dabus, Fincha, and Balas, which drained the western face of the Ethiopian plateau before reaching the Sudan, and from the Dinder and Rahad in the Sudan (both with headstreams on the Ethiopian Plateau). The volume which passed the outlet of the lake was considered to be small compared to what was added by the drainage of the Blue Nile valley or by its many tributaries. But importantly, Lake Tana passes out practically clean water at all stages. Garstin and Dupuis, who had studied the area and produced a separate report that was enclosed with Garstin’s 1904 report, stated that it was therefore both possible and advisable to build a dam on the lake, but at the time this was not given priority. Cromer gave the reason in his introduction to the report: ‘in spite of the engineering advantages to be obtained by the adoption of the Lake Tsana project, I am of the opinion that, on political grounds, the alternative plan mentioned above is to be preferred’.44 In 1901 he had already noted on the same topic, ‘However

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considerable may be the material gain, there can be no question of entertaining any proposal which would be calculated to disturb the very friendly relations now happily existing between Great Britain and Egypt, on the one hand, and Abyssinia on the other hand’.45 Cromer cautioned British and Egyptian interest in the dam, because he still hoped that it would be possible to reach an agreement with Menelik based on the exchange of letters in 1902 (see below). Ethiopia is a highland country, and on its almost 500,000 square km of highlands lived almost all its human and livestock population, while probably around 90 percent of its arable land was found there. It is the physical properties of these highlands that had bounded Ethiopia’s agricultural history, rather than the Nile and its tributaries. Its relative wealth was not derived from harnessing rivers, but was based on rain-fed agriculture. Here the river’s power was not demonstrated in the creation of green fields: its corrosive power was shown in the deep gorges that intersect the highland plateau, impacting communications and shaping political and economic relationships, but more as a barrier than a link. The highlands provided both the water and the fertile silt that the Nile tributaries have carried down to the Egyptian Nile Delta, by the decomposition of the basaltic blanket that covers these very same highlands. While the rock around Lake Tana is hard, downstream it is soft and easily eroded, thus producing the material known as Nile silt. Its valley was still unknown, since the river runs in a deep cleft gash, several thousand feet below the general surface level, and at the time no explorer had been able to follow it throughout its length. The Atbara, with its main tributary, the Setit, was described as a similar torrential discharge stream, with plenty of water when in flood, but dry during the summer. On none of these rivers were storage works thought to be possible or advisable at the time. The greater part of the central Sudan, regarded as beginning at the latitude of Khartoum, is a huge clay plain covering the flat country between the Blue and the White Niles and continuing eastwards to the foothills of Ethiopia. Even in large areas with reasonable rainfall, there were very few permanent inhabitants because drinking water was scarce in the dry season. The northern part of the country was an almost rainless zone, on the edge of the Sahara. Rainfall gradually increased from north to south, but it was both erratic and seasonal. Topographical features had created a region without water bodies large enough to produce local precipitation (the Nile was too narrow here). Moisture comes from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but winds are needed to bring it to the plains, and these winds must be raised to altitudes at which condensation becomes possible. The result is an erratic and seasonal rainfall pattern, largely determining the patterns of human life in the region, making the human being a migratory animal not very used to sedentary cultivation. Much of the land north of Khartoum was desert except for a narrow strip along the Nile. In some places the desert was – and still is – the river bank. Only on narrow strips along its banks, where the contours were suitable, with incessant work and small return, could waterwheels irrigate crops independently of the rain, and so give rise to settled villages. From Abu Hamed southwards, artificial watering

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was more common, but lifting water up to the fields was time-consuming and costly. It turned out to be an event with historical implications that the first person to produce a comprehensive British analysis of their new acquisition was, significantly enough, a Nile engineer. In his 1899 report, Note on the Soudan, Garstin described the Nile in the Sudan and the development potential of that country, a country that to him was identical to the riverain Sudan. The Nile valley south of Abu Hamed was divided into three distinct regions, depending on where on the Nile they were situated – the Nile proper, between Abu Hamed and Khartoum, the Blue Nile, south of Khartoum, and the White Nile, south of Khartoum – and the distances given were distances on the Nile from the border with Egypt, furnished by the Intelligence Department of the Egyptian army. He thought that in future it would be possible to undertake irrigation works on a large scale on that portion of the Nile that lies between Khartoum and Berber. But, more importantly, he immediately saw (as among others Samuel Baker had done decades before him) the potential of the Gezira. There, he said, the soil was composed of the richest alluvial deposit, and since the area was a ‘flat expanse’ it required only winter irrigation to be capable of raising a ‘magnificent wheat crop’.46 In 1901 he wrote that the fertile plains on both sides of the Blue Nile ‘extend for an immense distance, only wanting irrigation to render them as productive as any land in the world’. The Gezira – the word means ‘island’ or ‘promontory’ in Arabic – is an immense plain of about five million acres. It was deposited in bygone days by the effects of wind, not only in the fork between the two rivers but also to the east of the Blue Nile. One could ride for day after day across a levelness which appeared as flat as a billiard table. Nothing broke the horizon but the roofs of occasional villages. In the northern part of the Gezira there was an entire absence of trees except along the river bank. The Blue Nile cut through this plateau, standing 10 or 15 metres below the level of the plain, so that it was impossible to bring even the floodwater onto the plateau. Irrigation would therefore require works to be constructed in the river, to lift the water up to the plateau. Canals would have to be made from a dam, or a weir, down to such a point that the fall of the land could be counteracted by the slower fall of the canal, and the water would be at the level of the land. (Drainage was not thought to be necessary, because the Gezira was a high and dry plain, whereas the Egyptian Delta was low country near sea level.) Garstin thought that eventual large-scale irrigation in the Sudan would have a logical corollary – it would interfere to a greater or lesser extent with the flow of the Nile to Egypt. All the waters of the Sudan came from other countries (except the Bahr al-Ghazal). The Sudan was seen as a kind of transport channel for Nile waters to Egypt. The 1904 report argued that until sufficient research and experiments had been carried out on the Upper Nile and in the Gezira, the lands of Middle Egypt should be converted from basin to perennial irrigation (this was estimated to cost about E£1.6 million). When this money had been spent, the programme comprising the construction of the Aswan Dam and the Assiout barrage would be completed. The Aswan Dam should be raised (estimated to cost about E£500,000), and the Rosetta and Damietta branches should be remodelled (estimated to cost about

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E£900,000). Egyptian irrigation would have been improved, while it awaited the optimal solution. In a covering letter to Foreign Minister the Marquis of Lansdowne, Cromer described the 1904 report as a document of ‘the highest interest and value’.47 The whole expenditure on the waterworks would be approximately E£21.4 million, of which E£13 million would be spent in the Sudan and E£8.4 million in Egypt. Cromer gave, as had Garstin, priority to the plans for the Upper Nile and especially for the Bahr al-Jabal. Cromer suggested that E£5.5 million should be allocated for the proposed regulation works in the swamps. Although the remodelling of the Bahr al-Zaraf would cost E£2 million less, Cromer did not hesitate to argue that the new channel project should be chosen. The project on the Upper Nile was called an Egyptian project by the British. If the whole project were to be implemented, 750,000 acres of land could be converted from basin to perennial irrigation in Egypt; 100,000 acres made capable of irrigation by pumps; 800,000 additional acres brought under cultivation; and the increased revenue to be derived from taxation would, at ‘moderate rates’, be E£1,205,000 a year. The priority this was given is most clearly illustrated when its costs are compared to the total cost of the Sudan campaign from 1896 to 1898 (E£2,345,345).48 The plans for regulating the lakes in Uganda (estimated cost E£2 million), barrages between Assiout and Keneh in Egypt (E£2 million) and conversion of the Upper Egypt basins (E£5 million) would have to wait. The planned Sudan irrigation projects were a reservoir at Roseiris (E£2 million), a barrage on the Blue Nile (E£1 million) and a canal system in the Gezira (E£2 million). Cromer was of the opinion that the improvement of railway communications should take precedence over the execution of any of these water projects, both because this would facilitate the future construction of the barrage and the reservoir, and because he doubted whether the population needed for cultivating these new lands was available. The 1904 plan was fully supported by Cromer and the British Government in London.49 Cromer wrote, Then for the first time, the Government and the public were placed in possession of the opinions formed by a highly qualified hydraulic engineer, after a thorough examination of the whole of the Nile Valley, as to the steps which would be necessary to increase and improve the supply of water, on which the whole future development of Egypt depends. It was always sufficiently obvious that the power, which held the waters of the Nile, commanded Egypt’s supply. Sir William Garstin showed, in addition, that, if the supply was to be increased, the scene of action would have to be not in Egypt itself, but in the remote provinces of the Sudan.50

This comprehensive plan could not be executed within a period of less than 10 to 15 years, under the most favourable circumstances. The plan was technologically and politically complex, although almost one-dimensional compared to the contradictory needs of contemporary water planning in most regions of the world. If it lacked anything, it was thought, it was only the exact numerical results required to implement concrete irrigation projects. It did not have to include water uses other

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than irrigation (no industrialisation, direct human consumption or layers of organisms dependent on water for their survival as part of what were later called ‘ecosystems’ had to be included, as is the rule today, for what are termed ‘integrated multi-purpose plans’).

A Downstream Perspective When Garstin put the final touches to his report, he had produced a description of the Nile that can serve as a very clear example of how some may be able to impose their definition of a river basin on others, or on societies, in the same river basin, with different but equally legitimate definitions. The new river map that they were drawing was a British river, as it were; the lakes became the Victoria, Albert, Edward, George and Salisbury Lakes, the Upper White Niles became the Albert and Victoria Niles, the falls became Ripon and Murchison Falls, etc. But more important in our perspective was the process by which the many rivers came to be regarded as a single river basin, as one hydrological and planning unit. What had, in the past, been regarded by and large as a local river, or as many rivers, was now described as one basin or water system, hydrologically unified, and from source to mouth it was conceived of more as a potentially benevolent servant to the irrigation economies in the north and, at the same time, as a potent political weapon in the hands of London. The physical space of the Nile, its tributaries and its watershed, covering about one-tenth of the African continent, was basically regarded in the 1904 plan as one river that existed for the benefit of the irrigation economies in the north, and for the one political authority that had taken the river in hand. What emerged was a conceptually conquered river, a river whose very raison d’être had become transformed into a waterway that was to be a servant to the irrigation economies downstream. The people living along the banks of both the main Niles and their tributaries upstream, who had always attached their own meaning and value to the river passing through their societies, were regarded accordingly. The mode of thought, the interpretative framework and the descriptive intention were all concerned with improving knowledge of the river in order to control it for the benefit of the northern drylands. The strength and rationality of this perspective cannot be explained only in terms of social variables. It is true that the British were Eurocentric and pro-Egyptian; they regarded the black Africans as more primitive than the Arab ‘Mohammedans’, and they were of course more interested in modern capitalistic irrigation than in traditional pastoralism. But the perspective of the 1904 plan was also a natural outcome of the fact that their main interests, geographically, were downstream. If the British had been more interested in Uganda than in Egypt, and the report had been published in Entebbe, for example, the Nile of their scientific observations would have been a very different river. It is therefore not correct to label it as a British imperial plan, since that only describes its social background and neglects perspectives affected by objective place; it was a British imperial downstream plan.

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Garstin’s conceptualisation of the river, as one interconnected river basin, was a modern perspective, defining it implicitly as an area of land drained by a river and its tributaries. The idea of a drainage basin as a suitable framework for the study and organisation of the facts of physical and human geography was developed long before Garstin.51 It seemed to offer a concrete and ‘natural’ unit, which could replace other, more arbitrary, politically defined units, and form a geographical context for more objective scientific study and planning. But the concept of a river basin is also a social construct and a historical construct, deriving its authority from objectivising science, with far-reaching consequences for the peoples who share a common river resource.52 Garstin distinguished the Nile basin from other areas of northeast Africa, the drainage system, the riverbeds and the Delta constituting a distinguishable space. The physical unity of the river basin was described as hydrological, and it was precisely this physical unity that gave the basin concept societal relevance. In Egypt the river had long been called an Egyptian river, Bahr al-Misr. In this cradle of irrigation and civilisation, this reflected deep-seated cultural attitudes. It is, however, important to distinguish between the traditional and the ‘modern’ Egyptian-biased perception of the Nile. The 1904 perspective was not new in the sense that it was based on downstream concerns. Under Muhammad Ali and Ismail, the Egyptian leadership became significantly more concerned with the Upper Nile. They established garrisons along most of the White Nile up to the lakes, crossed the swamps and supported expeditions to study the Nile. But it was only under British rule and with achievements in scientific research that the 1904 report could properly describe the entire Nile. This very ambitious vision of hydro development carried with it not only opportunities, but also promises of political and economic development. It caught the imagination of the day, as well as that of later times.53 If bureaucratic inertia is a significant aspect of project culture, this plan added to the historic stability of the structuring role of this Nile perspective on subsequent Nile policies. When the British administrators met, to have their afternoon tea and talk politics, in the Gezira Sporting Club on the Gezira in the middle of the river at Cairo, this perspective was constantly nourished by the Nile flowing slowly and mightily past them.54 If knowing a particular society means knowing the way it is conceptualised by its members, the British administration in the first decades of its rule was hydraulically oriented. Everybody knew that the Nile had sustained the life of the country for thousands of years, meandering south–north from the cataracts in the Sudan until it reached Cairo. Most, if not all, of the administrators had been to see the temples at Luxor and to Aswan, 950km south of Cairo,55 where the river marvellously enters Egypt under the permanently blue sky of Upper Egypt, and where it receives no tributary whatsoever in the country in which it means everything. The British, and all those whom they had to please to some extent or another – the European bondholders, the Egyptian landed aristocracy and the Sultan – were preoccupied with profitable water control. At the same time they saw huge amounts of water flowing unused into the Mediterranean. They had already, they thought, achieved great things in the water field. The Aswan Dam, a gravity dam hailed as an engineering feat at the time, had been

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opened in 1902 by Abbas Hilmi, the Khedive. The opening signified a revolution in water control technology; Aswan was the biggest reservoir of its kind in the world. But at the same time its shortcomings demonstrated the imperial rationality of a more basin-wide perspective. In the same year a barrage at Asyut was erected, the only one that crossed the whole river, from bank to bank in a single, uninterrupted line. When the sluices were closed and the upstream level of water was raised by about three metres, it fed the Ibrahimia Canal in summer. This canal was the largest in Egypt and one of the biggest in the world. It took off the river on the west bank above the barrage, being the main source of supply for the converted basin lands. It fed the whole of Middle Egypt and the Fayum. The Zifta Barrage had been built on the Damietta branch of the Nile, some 87km downstream of the Delta Barrage. Work commenced in 1901 and was finished in 1903. The purpose of this barrage was to hold up water during the early flood period to feed the northeastern part of the Delta, as the old Barrage did for the southern portion of the Delta. In Lower Egypt the upturn in cotton production started in 1895. When Cromer left Egypt in 1907, the area devoted to cotton had increased by 427,000 feddans,56 and the percentage planted with cotton was roughly doubled between 1879 and 1913. In 1912 cotton accounted for 80.1 per cent of Egyptian exports, while the figure was ‘only’ 66.6 per cent the year after Cromer came to Egypt.57 Egypt’s financial recovery was therefore not brought about by ‘financial jugglery’ in Cairo, but by the work of the irrigation engineers. But still, every year when the river was at its lowest in summer, the cotton crop thirsted for more water. The British also tried to improve the drainage system, and between 1885 and 1905 spent some E£1.4 million on it. Under British rule, Egypt had been transformed and its landscape changed with the help of the Nile. Much land, especially in Upper Egypt, was still watered only once and could not support more than one harvest a year. Grains were therefore still the most common crop, instead of cotton as elsewhere. If the flood happened to be low, water would not be available for all the cotton fields in the Delta. Conversely, if the flood was high, there was the danger that the waters might break through the banks and run uncontrolled over the land. The river flowed through the centre of the valley but, as visitors travelled on one of the luxurious boats that trafficked the Nile, they could see the land rising from the mountains up to the banks of the Nile. The banks were higher than the eye of the spectator on the deck of his boat, and therefore all views of the interior, as far as the hills, were blocked. The silt from Ethiopia had been deposited in this way. It had made the soil fertile, but left the country dangerously vulnerable to high floods. North of Cairo they had seen how the Nile, entering the Delta and giving life to very fertile agricultural land, was the only source of economic growth and profits. Dividing into two branches, each flowed separately through the Delta to the sea, the river created a green garden in a desert country, criss-crossed by irrigation canals. Time and again the river itself brought home to them the importance of improved control of the country’s life artery. In February 1900 Cromer wrote to the

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Prime Minister in London that the ‘unprecedented failure of the Nile flood constituted by far the most important event of last year’.58 His report to London brought detailed information about the low level of Lake Victoria; that the level at Aswan was 1.75 metres below the average of previous years; and that the discharge at Aswan was only 578 cubic metres per second, compared to 1146 in 1878 and 955 in 1889. Cromer reminded Salisbury of the economic consequences of low Nile years: after the failure of the flood in 1877, 900,000 acres of land could not be irrigated, and he mentioned the economic benefits of Nile control; although the flood of 1899-1900 was described as the worst of the century, only between 250,000 and 270,000 acres were left unirrigated, thanks to successfully completed irrigation works. In Lower Egypt the ill effects of the flood were scarcely felt, thanks to the repaired Nile Barrage. No wonder, then, that the Cromer-Garstin regime, in alliance with the British Government, was bent on improving control over the Nile along its entire course, in order to develop irrigation and flood control in Egypt – and the 1904 plan provided the solution.

Aqueduct to Northern Drylands To obtain a clearer understanding of the particular territorial, symbolic and institutional shape of the British regionalisation of the Nile, one may compare their visions of the Nile and society in Egypt with their visions of the Nile and society in the Southern Sudan. About 4000km upstream from Cairo, on the immense plains that are flooded every year by tributaries of the Nile in the Southern Sudan, lived the predominantly semi-nomadic Dinka and Nuer agro-pastoralists. For hundreds of years, the Nilotic peoples of the Southern Sudan had adapted to the seasonal rise and fall of the river between Juba and Fashoda and developed complex social and cultural organisations from Egypt, based on a cattle economy and fishing. Only one of the three Garstin reports had a paragraph devoted to the people of the Upper Nile. It was entitled ‘The People of the White Nile’. In half a page it stated that ‘Arab races’ inhabited the banks to Abu Zeid, from there to Tonga the Shilluk dominated, south of the Sobat was ‘the once populous race’ of the Dinka and south of Tonga ‘the Nuers are the occupiers’ of both banks of the Nile, extending up the Ghazal rivers, and south of these again lived Dinka. Like the reports of 1899 and 1901, the 1904 report was, in line with its ambitions, not only a hydrological survey but also a description of the inhabitants. In the 1904 report this subject was paid even scarcer attention, but where comparison is possible, the impression given is of a smaller population than five years earlier. It is as if the growing importance of the Nile plan made the local people on the plains ever more marginal.59 Garstin’s uninhabited region, where only mosquitoes could thrive, was the home of perhaps millions of people and cattle, and it certainly meant something to the local inhabitants. As an anthropologist in the service of the British, Edward

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After William Garstin put forward his plan for digging a new water channel from Bor to the Sobat junction in 1904, the hydraulic engineers, with the support of the British and the Egyptian governments, undertook to carry out different types of research to find the best solution to the problem of the Bahr al-Jabal. Here, among the tukuls and cattle camps of the Dinka and the Nuer, large machinery was put in place to find the best way of changing the river in the area. This picture from before World War I shows a dredger working on the embankment of the river.

Evans-Pritchard wrote about 40 years later, ‘But Nuer think that they live in the finest country on earth’.60 In the Nilotic ‘world of experience’ the Nile water was conceived of quite differently. For example, in the Nuer language, the swampland watered in flood is called toich, meaning ‘Gift from the Mother’, while the Arabs, trying to penetrate, and the British, trying to control, the same area, called it sudd or barrier, also often described by the British as the useless ‘bog’. In a local perspective the water losses in the area were natural storage, where water was kept in channels, lagoons and pools for use in the long dry season, and it was regarded as an asset of absolutely crucial importance to the economies. Fifty years earlier, explorers had already noted the local peoples’ ability to block the course of the river and to establish training works in the side channels and spills for fishing purposes, described as solid works regulated by rows of strong stakes driven into the ground. In 1842 it was also noted that the Atem river, now planned as part of the Garstin Cut, was artificially fed and maintained by the Dinka living along the river.61 Furthermore, to the Nilotics the river was not just water or the material resources it embodied.62 It was also the land on which it flowed and hence all the environmental factors associated with it, such as the pasture of their herds, regarded as a gift from God. Some of the myths of these people speak of creation as having taken place in the Nile, from which people then crawled, and sacrifices of young girls to the river spirits were still not uncommon.63

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The economy of the area was (as it still is) dependent on the grazing provided by the river through the annual cycle of river flow and the relative levels of the river, river bank and floodplains. The core of the economy was cattle herding, being the basis for the social and economic order. Cattle were all they possessed and everything was sacrificed for their possession and accumulation.64 If a man would marry he had to find cattle to pay the bride price. If he killed a man, even by accident, he had to pay cattle compensation. The whole social economy was based on cattle. But there is more to it than that. The physical and psychic well-being of the people was wrapped up with the well-being of their cattle. Without cattle a Nilotic would no longer be a Nilotic, and the Nilotic world would no longer be a Nilotic world. A few goats and sheep were kept. In addition a man possessed his spear and his fish spear, and very little else. The annual cycle of river flow had created a rhythm of annual and seasonal migration. In the rainy season, May/June to October/November, when heavy rain and a river in flood caused the water to spread far and wide, the people lived with their animals on the higher ridges, 10–50km from the river. On some occasions the whole district was under water, perhaps to a depth of some centimetres, and the only areas that remained dry would be the debbas, made by nature or the hand of man. The cattle migration has never been entirely regular, owing to cattle sickness, weather and local feuds. What were regarded as more permanent villages stood on these ridges. As the rains came to an end and the floods subsided, the cattle and their herders moved towards the rivers and the intermediate land where the grass was naturally irrigated. At low water and during the long dry season, the previously flooded lands dried out and produced excellent grazing when it had elsewhere become scarce or had disappeared. In the dry season the whole economy depended upon this grass, just as diet depended upon the fish in the waterholes created by the diminishing river. In the dry season, the rain-fed grasslands were of critically poor quality, and inadequate for cattle maintenance. The people never had enough grain. The soil was capable of bearing good crops, but only when conditions were ideal (that is to say, when the crops were not killed by drought or flood), and these conditions obtained then, as now, about once every ten years. The floodplain grasses, or the toich grassland, had therefore always been one of the most crucial factors upon which the productivity of the local cattle economy depended. The temporary villages close to the waterways and khors, mostly fed by the spill-waters of the Bahr al-Jabal and its tributaries, were deserted when the rainy season began and green grass sprang up in the hinterland. The region was thus an area where livelihood wholly depended on flooding, rather than being threatened by it.65 What made (and make) the Nile a bad conductor of water to the north were exactly those factors that sustained the millions of cattle, sheep and goats and the way of life of the people in the south. A reduction in the natural swamp would have dramatically reduced their grazing lands; the digging of Garstin’s canal would have seriously interfered with their seasonal migration routes and adversely affected the risk of contagious disease. The plan to save water would seriously have affected the local habitats of birds, mammals and fish, ecological and

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conservation issues entirely beyond the scope of the 1904 plan. It would probably also have changed the local climate and local rainfall. The British plan would have deprived the cattle in central Southern Sudan of almost all grasslands in the latter half of the dry season, when grass was scarcest. The plan did not offer the local population any protection against high floods. On the contrary, because of the forced alteration of dwelling patterns that would have been necessary because of the changes planned in the river’s fluctuation cycles, even relatively modest floods could have had catastrophic consequences. The demands of the irrigated agriculture in the north contradicted the needs of the natural and more wasteful irrigation of the toich land in the south and, as the British authorities, Garstin and the Egyptian elite saw it, this also required a fundamental change in the river’s natural character in the Southern Sudan. According to the 1904 report the Upper Nile region had no value except as a water supply region to the water-starved areas downstream. What mattered was how the local ecology could be entirely changed: the Bahr al-Jabal enters these marshes, they said, as a fine river, with a considerable discharge, while it leaves it as a rather insignificant stream, having lost from 50 to 80 per cent of the supply. The territory was therefore far from being useless; it was described as being at the heart of any real improvement of basin-wide Nile control. The whole plan was based on one fundamental principle that virtually left the Southern Sudan out of the picture as a potential beneficiary. The plan conceived the waters on the plains of the Southern Sudan as ‘lost water’ and it was the prevention of this that was regarded as the chief problem in the whole Nile basin. Garstin wrote about the ‘immense advantage’ to be realised by ‘leaving the great Swamp Region altogether to one side’. These advantages were, he said, so ‘evident that they can be understood by all’.66 He wrote that ‘throughout the whole region…it is extremely rare to see any sign of human life…the whole region has an aspect of desolation beyond the powers of words to describe’.67 Garstin described the whole central Southern Sudan as something close to a ‘no man’s land’, and the people who lived there as people with no voices. This notion of the role of the Nile water was already expressed in the 1901 report, where it was described as being ‘at present wasted in the swamps’. The swamps should be dried up either by embanking the Bahr al-Jabal ‘between Bor and Lake No’,68 or by using the Bahr al-Zaraf as an ‘additional channel for the summer supply’.69 This conceptualisation of the White Nile as ‘solely…the carrying channel which supplies Egypt with summer water’ 70 was not only shared by the British policy-makers in Cairo and London at the time, but came to affect conceptualisations of the Nile until the present day. Garstin naturally called the whole area the ‘Sudd Area’, the ‘barrier area’. The whole region was conceived of as being locked in a kind of zero-sum game with the irrigation economies in the north.71 The Sudan Agent in Cairo complained in 1905 about the ‘fallacy gaining ground’ in Egypt that the Bahr el-Ghazal was ‘one large marsh’. That was, he noted, ‘as seen from the river’, indirectly criticising the surveyors. As a matter of fact, he argued, the larger part of that country was not marsh at all; on the contrary it was very fertile, and he was convinced that it would be ‘one day by far the richest

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province of the Soudan’.72 Baker also had another vision of the Bari country, bordering the White Nile to the south. Here the corn tax could be collected from ‘an immense area of rich districts’, while Fatiko – ‘the Paradise of Africa’ – had the makings of a superb park ‘with a climate as cool as France’.73 But the Nile vision inherent in the 1904 plan won the day, and defeated these romantic ideas of parks and paradise. It helped to reinforce and deepen an image of the Southern Sudan as being a huge bog or swamp – a kind of ‘no man’s land’ but home to a mighty river being deprived of its strength there. The Promethean character of the undertaking made it tempting for Garstin to discuss development potential in general. He argued that progress in the Sudan necessarily had to be slow, not only because of previous misgovernment but also because of the character of the people. The mixture of ‘Arab and Negro blood’ had led to ‘the production of an indolent race, one which hates hard work, and which has never at any time applied itself to the cultivation of the soil’.74 He also mentioned the unhealthy climate, especially in the south of the country. The process of development in the Sudan generally would therefore take many years. On the White Nile in the South it was, he said, ‘difficult to see what could be done’; this region ‘may well be left alone’,75 described more or less as a heaven for mosquitoes and a damp hell for men. This fundamental downstream British regionalisation and conceptualisation of the Nile basin and the role of the Southern Sudan within it dominated the Nile discourse (and development plans) for almost the entire British era. Seen from the narrow strip of green between the river and the desert in Egypt, it was natural to conceive of the upper stretches of the Upper Nile basically as an aqueduct to the dry lands in the north. It was described as a ‘carrying channel which supplies Egypt with its summer water’,76 a channel that could be improved by British competence and technology, while the Blue Nile should serve the Gezira plain of the Sudan and Egypt (this perspective was challenged by British district commissioners in the Southern Sudan and by the Government in London in the 1950s, as we shall see, but by then it was too late to bridge the widening economic gap that their Nile policies had helped to create between the north and the south in the Sudan). The 1904 plan institutionalised and popularised the notion that the Nile was one planning unit, apparently based on a neutral and scientific point of view of the Nile river or the Nile basin as a ‘natural unity’. Yet this idea of physical unity should not be understood to constitute some kind of permanently valid imperative for human action in the basin, but as a historical construct marked by the period and the manner in which this regionalisation took place.77 What made the 1904 plan so promising for the irrigation economies in the north, however, was precisely what made it devastating for the riverine Southern Sudan: the manipulation of water of the White Nile in such a way that it would have reversed the natural seasonal rise and fall of the river in the South. This change in the natural river regime would have deprived large sections of the people there of a very large proportion of the resources essential for the all-important pastoral component of their economy.

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British construction of the concept of the unity of the Nile basin, the description of the Nile as one hydrological unit where the flowing waters of the river upstream and downstream were connected and linked, the method of measuring the water flow and the selection of places where the water flow was to be measured, all reflected the perspective of a downstream authority aiming at controlling the river upstream for its own benefit. Now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the technological capabilities existed to manipulate the river upstream on a large scale, and use of the Nile basin could be planned according to the intentions of a single political authority. Garstin’s visionary perspective dominated the British Nile world.

C H U RC H I L L O N T H E N I L E

Garstin presented no plans of future hydropower development below the African lakes, although the many rapids obviously had great potential in this regard, since to do so would complicate and contradict his irrigation schemes in the north. But Winston Churchill did. Churchill was one of those central political personalities of the twentieth century who were repeatedly involved in the Nile and Nile politics, and who in different capacities at different times played an important role in the history of the river. He had fought at Omdurman and written The River War. In 1908 he published My African Journey, another book on the Nile, in which he aired grand visions of development and control of the White Nile tributaries in Uganda. Churchill’s focus was how the Nile could be used in Uganda. He stressed that the railway to Lake Victoria had been ‘projected solely as a political railway’ to reach Uganda and to secure British predominance in the Upper Nile. Now he suggested extending the line to Albert Nyanza, its ‘natural and necessary extension’.78 The railway was described in prose typical of him: as an ‘iron fact grinding along through the jungle and the plain, breaking with its whistles the silences of the Nyanza, and startling the tribes out of their primordial nakedness with “Americani” piece goods made in Lancashire’. He suggested that Jinja was destined to become a very important place in the future economy of Central Africa. Since it was situated at the point at which the Nile flows out of the Great Lake, it was at once on the easiest line of water communication with Lake Albert and the Sudan, and also where great amounts of water-power were available. Churchill argued that there was power enough to ‘gin all the cotton and saw all the wood in Uganda, and it is here that one of the principal emporia of tropical produce will certainly be created’.79 On Ripon Falls he wrote that it would be perfectly easy to harness the whole river and let the Nile begin its long and beneficent journey to the sea by leaping through a turbine. It was possible, he argued, that nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass of water be held up by so little masonry, ‘to the benefit of man and the incalculable destruction of mosquitoes’.80 At Nimule, on the present border with the Sudan, at the head of the Fola Rapids, he argued that another great reservoir of the Upper Nile must some day be constructed. He also referred to Willcocks’s visions for

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the Southern Sudan, visions that neither Garstin’s 1904 report nor Murdoch MacDonald’s 1920 report discussed at all. ‘I spent hours,’ said Sir William Willcocks, the ‘practical mystic’ of hydraulic engineering, ‘looking at the site [Fola Rapids] and seeing in a vision a great regulating work of the future’. In his 1908 book, Churchill strongly advocated a modernisation in the heart of Africa, with the help of the Nile system. He suggested that ‘exact scientific control of the whole vast system of Central African waters, of the levels of every lake, of the flow of every channel, from month to month and from day to day throughout the year, is a need so obvious and undisputed as to leave argument unemployed’.81 But Churchill’s vision came to nothing at the time. He disregarded or did not know that to His Majesty’s Agent in Cairo, to the Governor-General in Khartoum and to the Foreign Office bureaucrats, the Nile was an Egyptian river, and if something was to be done upstream the focus was first to be on the swamps in the Southern Sudan. Cromer and Garstin were against such proposals, as was the Government in London (it was not until fifty years later that Uganda built its first hydroelectric plant). Their plans were not concerned with the water needs of the Buganda, the Basoga, the Bakenyi, the Baruli, the Bagungu or the Langi living along the Victoria Nile, nor of the Acholi, the Madi, the Lugbara, the Metu, the Jonam and the Alur living along the Albert Nile. Neither were they concerned with the preservation of natural beauty. Other British men on the spot had very different attitudes. The Governor-General of Uganda some years later thought, for example, the Murchison Falls to be of a special quality and grandeur, where it was possible to stand on a flat rock, literally on the edge of the channel, above the spray, and watch the irresistible surge and thunder of the great mass of water, as it rushed past with a speed and force and a roar that numb the senses, so that a man was conscious only that ‘he is a very little animal’. He feared that, in the future, the Nile would become ‘imprisoned in tidy concrete channels and become just a quantity of kilowatts’.82 Garstin’s vision for the Nile was nature controlled by engineers, and had no place for this kind of aesthetics.

P RO M E T H E U S O N T H E N I L E

Water, like many other building blocks of life, has generally been absent in the construction of most social science theories, just as the role of the Nile has generally been neglected in historical studies of this part of the Middle East and Africa. Analyses that disregard the waters of the Nile disregard the structuring potential of nature on patterns of human actions and the reality, as well as the pedagogy, of the atlas. The Nile has most often been a backdrop, an element of nature that is not usually incorporated in historical narratives of social change and political developments. To the extent that the Nile has been relevant in historical studies, the river basin has most often been treated as simply a physical setting for interaction. The Nile as a geographical fact cannot be relegated to some short notes in the introduction, since it flows every year and every day and every second and produces

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and reproduces life all the time, and because it at all times is historically constituted and variously conceptualised. The Nile that emerged in the 1904 report was not the ‘real’ Nile, but a British Nile, conceived of and represented in a Promethean downstream perspective, an image of enormous importance for the development of the whole region including Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanganyika and even Kenya and the Congo, as well as Egypt and the Sudan. The constructivist countertendency to try to explain the ‘spatial’ exhaustively in terms of the ‘social’ is also unfruitful. The various physical settings can help explain the different Nile worlds produced and reproduced over time in the Nile valley at large. This story of the Nile in the age of the British shows that the waters of river basins will have different political and cultural meanings to contending parties, meanings that potentially complicate mediation and negotiation among various interests. These meanings will generally reflect the type and technological level of water use, which again has often developed as an adaptation to the particular river’s natural behaviour on a local scale. They will be culturally and socially contingent, but have a material structural base. Although the 1904 description of the Nile was formulated by a water engineer, the plan and its implicit view of the Nile were the result of a long process of interaction and negotiation between scientists and explorers, between British water engineers, Egyptian water experts and the Egyptian Nile tradition, as well as between engineers and politicians – it was at the same time both the crowning of and the revolutionising of the Nile discourse in Egypt. The model of the Nile that was drawn up corresponded very clearly to commitments of British modernising ideals and imperial strategy in general, but more importantly in this context: it formulated this strategy adapted to local geopolitical structures and concerns and thus created a new basin-wide Nile epistemology. The view of man’s ability to control the river was very optimistic. It postulated a potentially limitless capacity for technological innovation and for controlling floods and droughts by mastery of the river.83 It was not concerned with the consequences for nature, but with social, economic and technological development. It reflected the amalgamation of the professional culture of the water engineers, the corporate culture of the Egyptian Public Works Department, and the civilising culture of British imperialism. Improved empirical evidence or knowledge are insufficient in themselves to explain this great shift in the scientific understanding of the river and the planning of its exploitation. It reflected new power relations in the Nile valley, and the plan itself was consciously designed as an instrument to reinforce these newly established relations. Political, economic and military interests shaped, by way of the organisation and funding of Nile studies, the research priorities and the formulations of problems that the research and the plan were intended to solve. The plan represented the imposition of a science-based perspective and strategy in a river basin where most peoples still regarded the fluctuations in the river as the will of the gods, and as a force that man, at best, might be able to adjust to. The new vision became so influential because downstream interests were dominant in the basin and because the plan was pushed by the hierarchically dominant forces in

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Egypt (supported by London), and because Egypt was and remained a society in which everything hinged on its waters. Other constructions of the Nile or the ‘Niles’ coexisted with this perspective, but in the competition for conceptual power and planning frameworks these did not stand a chance. The various peoples living along the Nile conceived of it according to their own modes of operation and economic relations to the waters that passed by. The Nile that conceptually emerged was, as nature usually is, elaborately entangled and fundamentally bound up with social, cultural and immediate political interests. To reduce the competing Nile perceptions to cultural contingencies or to a codification based on social variables alone is to reduce the impact of nature itself on how it becomes socially codified. Such an approach will overlook a more interesting aspect of river conceptualisations in a basin where its waters are essential to life and social development. The contending parties will tend to view the river differently according to their physical situation, i.e. according to where they are situated in physical space. The Egyptians, in the past, now and in the future, will approach the Nile from a downstream position, as the British did until after World War II, when their Egyptian interests still dominated, and when they still hoped to placate Egyptian interests so as to maintain their position at Suez. This particular construct of the Nile was not only a product of social variables, of British intentions and plans, but was impacted by nature itself. This story of the Nile in the age of the British primarily tries to reconstruct British policies and motives, and to examine how their plans for the Nile – and various peoples’ reaction to them – helped shape the modern history of this enormous area. The narrative that follows will also be a critique of the naive realist perspective that assumes that environmental and moral issues progressively come to light simply through the extension of scientific understanding. It will be a story of how political changes in the Nile valley and beyond caused new environmental issues and new stakeholders to emerge, partly promoted by the British themselves. At the same time, this focus on the social construction of the Nile should not be taken to mean that there is no such thing as nature or a ‘real’ Nile, as modes of thinking in constructionist social science argue. On the contrary: the following is also a story of how this real Nile escaped British perception of it, and turned out to be a less useful imperial political weapon than London had conceived it to be.

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The Nile as Stick and Carrot

The power which holds the Soudan has Egypt at its mercy, and through Egypt can dominate the Suez Canal.1 (Foreign Office memorandum, 1923) God has committed to our care the millions of many diverse races and tribes, who depend upon this mighty river.2 (Albert B. Lloyd, 1906)

In 1908 Cromer had confidently declared that the Englishman had taken the entire Nile in hand. By the end of his and Garstin’s regime, plans for taming the river were very ambitious in comparison with any other river system in the world at the time, and all the projects were designed to serve the overall interests of one imperial authority. For the first and only time in the Nile’s history, one might speak of a ‘King of the Nile waters’– Lord Cromer. But ten dramatic years later, the British grip on the river had loosened. The Egyptian revolution of 1919 set in motion political forces that tore the imperial Nile strategy asunder. Paradoxically, a material precondition for this revolution was the fundamental but slow transformation of the Nile environment in Egypt after 1882. The revolution in the irrigation system had given political and economic muscle to social groups and classes that strongly opposed British rule. The issue of who should control the use of the river, therefore, came to play an important but neglected role in the struggle for Egyptian independence. The revolution in 1919 and the British declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922 suddenly changed the political landscape and therefore also the context of Nile planning. Britain’s main strategic aims in the Nile valley remained the same: to secure its political and military position at Suez and to increase the export of long-staple 87

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cotton to Lancashire. Regional political stability and economic growth in England were seen as being dependent upon the same factor – increased exploitation and control of Nile waters. But the strategy that had been laid down so forcefully at the beginning of the century could no longer be implemented; the British abandoned the principle of unified water control. The role of the Nile – running majestically through the desert country more or less as it did under Cromer’s rule – became both tacitly and overtly more of a political weapon in Anglo–Egyptian relations. The Financial Advisor to the Egyptian Government in the early 1920s aptly described one aspect of this change in British thinking: the dominant conception of the Upper Nile was not any more one of a potential beneficial aqueduct to the Egyptian Delta and the cotton crops there, but as a potential threatening ‘pistol’ held to the head of an independent Egypt. The basic planning concept of the Cromer-Garstin regime, that the waters of the White Nile should be used in Egypt, while the excess waters of the Blue Nile should be used in the Sudan, was considered to be too rigid and partly irrelevant when Egypt was heading towards independence. The relative importance of the tributaries in the British order of things changed.3 Until then the White Nile had been both politically and economically the most important tributary. The British had fought the River War, built the railway halfway across the African continent from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, and brought hundreds of different African ethnic groups from Dongola to the shores of the Ugandan lakes under British rule in order to secure their control of the White Nile basin. Now the Blue Nile basin – especially the Gezira plain and Lake Tana on the Ethiopian plateau – entered centre stage both politically and economically. Partly also because of the interests of Lancashire and a British company, the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, the Sudanese riverain elite around Khartoum and Sennar, the Emperor and local princes on the Ethiopian highlands became important actors in what developed into a hydropolitical drama with an almost endless number of important scenes, directed by the British Government in London but under growing pressure from various nationalist forces in the Nile valley. While the Nile in its upper reaches continued to flow and fluctuate as it had done since long before the British had occupied Cairo, dispatched forces up the Blue and White Niles and sent the King’s African Rifles to the court of the Kabaka on the shores of Lake Victoria, the context, though not the aim, of British Nile policies changed rapidly, with important consequences for the development of the river. The 1919 revolution and its aftermath came to affect man–river relationships and inter-state relations in the Nile basin in profound ways, with consequences which extend far beyond even the present day. Although Cromer’s claim about Man taking the Nile in hand was technologically naïve and unrealistic, technological and social changes revolutionised the relationship between man and the river, especially along a small stretch of the Blue Nile in the mid-1920s. The very complicated development that unfolded in the Nile valley as a whole cannot be grasped within a traditional state perspective or in a localised context. The Egyptian struggle for independence, the emergence of the Sudan as a distinct,

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sovereign state, the growing gulf between the riverain north and the peoples of the floodplains in the south of the Sudan, the position of Ethiopia on the international scene and the strength of the Ethiopian leadership are here analysed as revolving around the following, interconnected issues: how the growing antagonism in Egypt between British imperial aims and Egyptian nationalism and the slogan ‘Unity of the Nile valley’ made the Sudan ever more important strategically, and impacted its rebirth as a state; how on the Upper White Nile the great visions for hydro development were replaced by planning inertia and that this, seen from the perspective of the agro-pastoralists living in the Southern Sudan, meant that a modernising push had been temporarily shelved; how British concerns about downstream water development contributed significantly to the uneven regional development in the Sudan and would frame development options of the Southern Sudan and Uganda for decades to come; and finally how ever more ambitious irrigation schemes in Egypt and the Sudan affected the ability of the Emperor in Addis Ababa to maintain the territorial unity of Ethiopia.

R E VO LU T I O N A N D WAT E R D I S T R I B U T I O N

Immediately after the armistice, in November 1918, a delegation led by Saad Zaghlul,4 leader of the Wafd,5 called on Reginald Wingate, the former Governor-General of the Sudan and, since January 1917, British High Commissioner in Egypt. When they demanded autonomy for Egypt and abolition of the protectorate, what has been called the Egyptian revolution started. It was the first major nationalist, anticolonial uprising to succeed, and the literature on what took place is very extensive. Like all major historical events it had many causes and complicated consequences. One very important but partly neglected aspect was how the Nile question influenced and was impacted by it. When the Ottomans sided with the Germans in 1914, London had broken Egypt’s mostly ceremonial connection with the Turks altogether and turned Egypt into a British protectorate. The Khedive was deposed, martial law declared and the Legislative Assembly dissolved. British civil servants were brought in to run the bureaucracy and British troops to control the people. Zaghlul and the nationalists demanded both an end to the protectorate and that they should be allowed to go to London to negotiate directly with the British Government. Wingate and the British Government rejected Zaghlul’s demands. Riots broke out and the political opposition, initiated largely by upper-class Egyptian notables and landholders, developed into a revolutionary mass movement. In March, Zaghlul was arrested and deported. Instead of dampening public unrest, this action only added fuel to the flames. The movement was national and had won the sympathy of all classes. London responded by dismissing Wingate, a symbol of British imperialism in Egypt. He was replaced by General Edmund Allenby, the famous leader of the Palestinian campaign, who was named Special High Commissioner.6 Allenby recalled Zaghlul and his associates from exile, in an attempt to appease Egyptian opinion. The Wafd leader immediately

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proceeded to the Versailles Peace Conference to present Egypt’s case. He met with little success. The British protectorate was recognised at the conference, and to the Egyptian delegation’s dismay, on the same day as they arrived in Paris, the American envoy publicly supported the protectorate. However, British pro-imperialists were worried. They regarded rhetoric about ‘self-government’ as a disastrous catchword, invented by the Bolsheviks – conveyed foolishly, they thought, through the medium of a friend – the American President Woodrow Wilson. Strikes by civil servants and student protests throughout Egypt led London to appoint a committee of inquiry in April, known as the Milner Mission. This was headed by the British Colonial Secretary, Alfred Milner. Since the Boer War, Milner, who knew both the country and the importance of the irrigation question there (see chapter 1) from his time as Financial Advisor, had strongly defended British imperialism in both Britain and abroad.7 In December 1919, at Allenby’s suggestion, the Milner Mission travelled to Egypt to make enquiries into the future relations between the two countries and how Egypt could be granted ‘self-governing institutions’ while maintaining the protectorate and safeguarding British interests. It was boycotted by the nationalists, who opposed the continuation of the protectorate. The Mission’s work in Egypt, between December 1919 and April 1920, stirred heated public debate. Reluctantly the Government in London and Allenby acknowledged Zaghlul as the person with whom to negotiate. In the summer of 1920, Zaghlul had a series of meetings with Milner in London, at which Milner agreed unofficially to what Zaghlul had demanded of Wingate, a treaty instead of the protectorate.

‘Nefarious Schemes’ in the Sudan In the midst of these political upheavals, a new British-sponsored plan for control of the whole Nile was published. The barrages and dams should be built upstream of Egypt, and the most profitable project was in the Sudan – the Gezira Scheme. Water scarcity was still felt in Egypt, although the British administration had continued to support improvements in the irrigation system. Additional supplies of water were absorbed almost immediately, and the demand for more was scarcely less pressing than before. The Esna Barrage was built soon after the completion of the Aswan Dam, 160km north of it, and was intended to improve basin irrigation in the Quena province. Work started in 1906 and was completed in 1908. The Aswan-Asyut scheme was regarded as so successful that in 1905 the decision was taken to heighten the existing Aswan Dam by five metres, raising the water level in the reservoir by seven metres, and thus more than doubling its storage capacity. By this means sufficient water was made available in summer to irrigate nearly 1 million feddans of otherwise fallow land in the northern tracts of the Delta. Heightening of the dam was finished in 1912. By 1914, perennial irrigation extended as far south as Deirut, in the northern Asyut province. But improved irrigation did not lead to less demand for water. On the contrary, a success of this kind does not satisfy; it rather creates a demand for more of the same.

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Nearly every year the summer supply was regarded as insufficient for the irrigation of the cultivated land that depended on it. In 1914 the river was so low that rice irrigation had to be wholly prohibited to meet the demands of other summer crops. Although the year 1917 was favoured with a very large natural summer flow, the cotton cultivation was so intense that there was no water available to secure watering for other important crops. Influential social groups and individuals demanded, moreover, that cultivation should be expanded into areas that lay fallow for want of water. The total cultivable area of Lower Egypt was considered to be 3 million feddans, of which 500,000 feddans still lacked water. In Upper Egypt demands could be heard all the time for conversion of existing basin land to perennial irrigation. The total area there was considered to be 2.3 million feddans, of which 1.1 million had been converted to perennial irrigation. In a normal year the estimated minimum storage thought necessary was at least 7 billion cubic metre waters. The population had almost doubled from 6.83m in 1882 to 12.75m in 1917, and even if the increase in crop area had been very impressive, it had by no means kept pace with this rate of population growth, unprecedented in Egypt’s history. The development of river control was still regarded by the British as one of the chief achievements of Western rule over ‘oriental minds’, as Cromer had put it. It brought political prestige to the imperial power, wealth to British industries and Egyptian landowners, and political stability among the fellahin. Looking back at the achievements of the British engineers, both London and the Egyptian nationalists acknowledged that, for several decades, British administrators and planners had been a driving force in this water revolution. By the end of World War I they had helped to develop a society that was more and more dependent upon a wellfunctioning and ever-expanding system of perennial irrigation, and on ever greater human and technological control of the river. This new relation between man and river in Egypt made the Egyptians more, not less, vulnerable to its fluctuations. On the one hand they expected the British to deliver what they had promised to do – a more secure water supply. On the other hand there was a growing and more vocal fear, nurtured by large landowners and nationalists and indirectly supported, as we shall see, by some British engineers, that the British Government would exploit London’s upstream control to force Egypt into submission. What the British did with the Nile was therefore at the very centre of the discourse on imperial legitimacy and imperial rule, and they could not, as rulers had done in the past, blame the tears of Isis or the punishments of the gods if the people of Egypt suffered as a result of water crises. Egyptian nationalists used the Nile question to boost their support, as Egyptian expansionists had exploited and would exploit the notion of the hydrological unity of the Nile valley as a logical framework for a Greater Egypt. The revolution in river control had deepened the Nile’s importance as a geopolitical structure, but also its economic potential, especially in the central Sudan. When Murdoch MacDonald (British Advisor to the Ministry of Public Works, 1912–1921) in 1919 submitted his Nile Control Works: Note on a series of control works to regulate the irrigation water supply of the Nile valley, it was bound to be hotly debated. It dealt with a most critical subject at a most critical time of mutual

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distrust between British experts and the Egyptian population. The preface discussed Egyptian water demands, while most of the projects it recommended were to be built in the Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia. The most important project was the Sennar Dam and the Gezira cotton scheme on the Blue Nile in the Sudan. MacDonald promised that Egypt should be compensated for water taken from the Blue Nile by implementation of new water conservation projects on the Upper White Nile in Uganda and in the Sudan. According to the report, the Sennar Dam was to supply enough water to irrigate about 300,000 feddans in the Gezira area. This project was not new. Ideas for irrigation projects along the Blue Nile in the Sudan had been discussed by Samuel Baker as early as the 1860s. Garstin’s report of 1901 had already described the Gezira as central to the economic policy of the Sudan. In line with Cromer and Garstin’s policy at the time, the 1904 report gave priority to works on the White Nile, but it restated that, for the future of the Sudan, the Gezira would be crucial. But significantly, Garstin suggested that the Gezira should be a wheat-producing area, with only a little allowance for cotton, because wheat would not need water during the months of scarcity in Egypt. The first British proposal for the Gezira was therefore a mere diversion barrage to irrigate 100,000 feddans during the flood season, which would not at all affect water discharge in Egypt, as long as most of the flood passed unused to the sea. The site was obviously attractive to the ‘economic mind’ of British politicians and to the ‘technocratic mind’ of the irrigation experts. To the Sudan Government a cotton scheme on the Gezira plain became a cornerstone of economic and political strategy, and they worked hard to achieve their aims. The first problem was who should pay for the project. The British Government had no money to spare. Egypt could be expected to pay for a railway but not for waterworks that might in the long run have a negative impact on Egyptian interests. When, on 10 September 1910, Wingate, the Governor-General, sat down to write one of his innumerable letters, once again after having visited the King at Balmoral on the preceding Thursday afternoon, he was finally very optimistic about the project.8 The King and the Prime Minister had eventually promised to back the scheme. He also placed his hopes in the fact that they had a ‘very powerful asset’ in Milner through his influence and networks.9 For some time Wingate and the Sudan Government had been underlining the importance of the project and strongly argued that it was a ‘matter of most vital importance to do all we possibly can to induce British Capital and thus the British Capitalists to have a vested interest in the Sudan’. The following year his effort met with some success. In 1911, a more detailed and focused report on the potential of the Gezira was drawn up by Dupuis, who in 1904 had written the section on the Blue Nile and Lake Tana in Garstin’s report. An agreement was made between the Sudan Government and the British-controlled firm, the Sudan Plantations Syndicate Limited,10 whereby the syndicate undertook to carry out experiments in testing Egyptian long-staple cotton in the Gezira area. Wheat was out; cotton was gradually on its way in, but still on a very modest scale. The Sudan Government managed to establish and maintain close contact with the cotton industry in Lancashire, a fact that became very important in the years to

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come. The cotton industry was optimistic about its potential and eager to start. In 1912, the British Cotton Growing Association described the Gezira area: The total area is about 5 million feddans, of which probably 3 to 4 million are irrigable, a district nearly as large as the Egyptian Delta. There is, however, insufficient water in the Blue Nile during the early months in the year to irrigate more than 1 million feddans, and large storage works would be necessary before the whole area could be brought under cultivation.11

They understood the potential of the Gezira plain, but also realised the limit on its development – water. The Gezira could become the largest cotton farm in the world and the Sultan could provide all the necessary inexpensive labour that was required. The industry therefore became an eager supporter of new control works on the Blue Nile. When the board of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate met on a cold Thursday afternoon in London, just before Christmas in 1913, to decide on their Gezira policy, they did not realise that they were about to launch the biggest cotton plantation in the world and a project that would have far-reaching geopolitical consequences in the decades ahead. But they were rather confident that they were onto something big. They had already received a letter from His Majesty’s Agent in Cairo asking them to send two representatives to join him and the Advisor to the Egyptian Government, Murdoch MacDonald, on a journey to the Blue Nile in January 1914.12 The British Government decided to support the Gezira Scheme in the same year. In 1914 an Amending Act increased the project budget from £1–2 million. Work began in 1914, but on a very modest scale. The upper limit of the irrigated area would be only 120,000 acres, it was publicly declared, as compared to the potential of about five million acres noted by the cotton industry. Wingate asked for immediate instructions; owing to the semi-famine conditions that prevailed on the Blue and White Niles in 1913, the supply of labour would not be difficult if the work started right away.13 World War I temporarily shelved the project, although the excavation of the main canal was begun, some buildings were erected, and experiments at the two pilot stations at Tayiba and Barakat continued for some time. The scheme was not allowed to die. Kitchener, agent and Consul-General in Egypt, wanted to use the Gezira as a sort of penal settlement, sending Egyptian convicts to relieve the crime situation in Egypt and at the same time work on the Gezira Scheme. The plan was to put the convicts into trains in Egypt, inside the prisons at the break of dawn and, chained by the leg, they would be led through the third-class carriages to the buffers of the coaches.14 Eventually the convicts were sent to the Sudan on a pilgrim ship instead, in order to save money on the transport.15 The Governor-General of the Sudan was worried that the scheme would be forgotten and that money would not be forthcoming.16 Wingate agreed with Kitchener’s view that no funds were available in 1915, but optimistically he wrote, ‘Perhaps when Constantinople falls will be a good opportunity to push the matter again’.17 In order to keep the plan afloat, the Sudan Government established a Gezira

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Committee. It functioned during the war and consisted, among others, of the Financial Secretary and the next Governor-General and Sirdar of the Egyptian army, Sir Lee Stack, the Civil Secretary. In December it was decided to send a delegation to England to meet the British Government and the Syndicate and discuss the whole matter. The relationship between the Governor-General and the Syndicate had now become so close that Wingate wrote to the Foreign Office saying that the Sudan Government worked ‘more or less in partnership’ with the Syndicate, and he asked that the company representative should be given a (diplomatic) passport whereby his movement across continents could be facilitated. The reason was that he was ‘frequently coming and going between London and Khartoum and is often the bearer of official letters’,18 as Wingate wrote to Lloyd George in 1916. He stressed that cotton prospects were very great and that money expended in the Gezira – in what he described as ‘practically a British possession’ – would decrease future shortages of cotton in the Empire. Lloyd George was also reminded that he had enabled the scheme to be started by sanctioning a loan of £500,000 from the National Debt Commissioners,19 and that the then Prime Minister, Asquith, had said two days after war was declared that he wanted to go ahead with the Gezira cotton-growing scheme – in spite of the war. The Board of Trade appointed a Committee on the Growth of Cotton in the British Empire. At a meeting of the Committee in 1917, MacDonald told the Committee about the fantastic prospects of the Gezira for the whole Empire. These hearings should be quoted in some detail since they indicate rather clearly the hopes of the cotton industry and the ambitions of the water engineer, and the content of high-level, secret Nile discussions in Britain before the Egyptian revolution: Q: What do you estimate to be the ultimate capacity of the Gezira with all storage and such other works as can be made, about 4,000,000 feddans in round figures? A. Yes, there is a 3,000,000 area there on the coloured map in front of me. Q. Shall we call it 3,000,000 feddans? A. Yes. Q. Of which 1,000,000 could be under cotton? A. Yes. When you take in Lake Tsana, it would be a huge scheme. Egypt, for instance, has in its delta just a trifle over 3,000,000 feddans, and there the population must be well over 8,000,000. Q. Is it too much to say there is a second Egypt here? A. It is not; it is a second delta. Q. Looking 50 or 100 years ahead; it is not too much to say that? A. It is not. (The CHAIRMAN): Provided you get the water? A: Quite.20

In 1917, in London, MacDonald repeatedly asserted that it should be possible, except in the very lowest years, to irrigate a gross area of 900,000 feddans. Even if a terrible year like 1914 should occur once in ten years, the irrigation of 900,000 feddans could be considered a very good commercial proposition, although in the tenth year it would be necessary to reduce the area to 500,000 feddans.21 At the same

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time the Sudan Plantations Syndicate wrote to the British Government and said that it was prepared to endeavour to raise a loan of £500,000, carrying interest of 6 per cent per annum, repayable after two years. The official and more modest plan for the Gezira was met with an outcry in Egypt. The report and its compensation projects did not impress the Egyptian nationalists very much, although it promised Egypt all the water it would need. They were primarily concerned with the Gezira Scheme and what it meant to their Egyptian Nile. Lord Allenby reported to Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary,22 that by far the most significant point made by ‘Egyptian extremists’ was that the planned water control works in the Sudan were intended to ruin Egypt, and would place Egypt at England’s mercy.23 The Egyptian nationalists agitated against British Nile policy in general and the new plan in particular in the mosques of Cairo and Alexandria and throughout the country. The Egyptian daily, Al-Ahram, and other newspapers carried long articles denouncing the British policy ‘of separating the Soudan from Egypt’, arguing that London was using conflicts over the use of Nile waters as a political weapon. This propaganda was regarded by the British as a double-edged sword: by dramatising the danger that British upstream control might pose to Egypt, the nationalists could produce an effect to the contrary. The Egyptian farmers might be inclined to say that if the British can indeed ‘turn off the tap they must, at all costs, be propitiated’.24 Since the Egyptian nationalists described the Nile as an Egyptian river and the Sudan as part of Egypt, they argued that Egypt had a right to a free hand in the use of its waters and that that had been the British policy in the past. They accused the British Government of exploiting London’s upstream control to threaten Egypt into silence. They wrote that, while the Egyptian nation was demanding independence, the ‘English pushed forward their nefarious schemes to stem the flow of Egypt’s life’s blood’.25 The Gezira Scheme was regarded as an imperial plot. The plans for the Sennar Dam across the Blue Nile brought old nightmares to the surface. For the first time in its long history, Egypt faced the realistic prospect of a dam upstream. Until then, permission had to be obtained from the Egyptian Government before even pumping machinery could be installed, or low-level canals constructed anywhere in the Sudan, on the Nile or its tributaries. And now, just when the Egyptians were demanding independence from London, the British planned to throw a huge dam across the river in another country!

Poisonous Criticisms In the British camp there were public disagreements. Allenby told the Foreign Secretary that every journalistic dart directed against the British had been steeped in ‘poisonous criticisms’ of the water schemes and of MacDonald personally, accusing him of fraud, and the ammunition of the campaign came ‘exclusively’ from the pamphlets of two British engineers, Colonel M. Ralston Kennedy and William Willcocks. At a time when an authoritarian state leadership and a united British

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front were of real importance to the status quo, some of the most prominent British engineers actively sided with London’s antagonists. Colonel Kennedy, at the time working in the Sudan, was the first to claim that MacDonald had tampered with the data on Nile flow during the lowest year on record, that is 1913/1914, presumably in order to convince the Egyptian public that his dam in the Sudan would not be dangerous to Egyptian interests. He argued that certain documents about water discharges had been falsified. What Kennedy did not know, but which would most likely have been devastating to MacDonald in Egypt, had it been disclosed, was that MacDonald in addition to his position in the Egyptian Government drew £1000 as a salary from the Sudan Government. MacDonald, on his many visits to the Sudan, used to dine with Wingate when in Khartoum; Wingate mentioned to a friend, as early as 1914, that he was much struck by MacDonald’s readiness to ‘fit in with the Sudan Government’s requirements’.26 The later leader of the British Cotton Growing Corporation noted the same year that MacDonald would accept ‘almost anything coming direct from Wingate himself ’.27 Kennedy sought to bring charges against MacDonald in the Sudan. But the Sudan Government and Wingate would not allow the courts to hear Kennedy’s charge against MacDonald, because, as it declared, MacDonald was not a Sudan official. In 1919 they were both in Egypt, Wingate as High Commissioner and MacDonald still Advisor to the Ministry of Public Works, fighting for the Gezira Scheme against Egyptian opposition, Kennedy, and the grand old man of Egyptian irrigation, William Willcocks. When Willcocks accused MacDonald of producing inflated figures for Nile discharges in order to minimise the fear of future water shortages in Egypt, of overestimating the discharge of the Blue Nile, and of being wrong about the periods of river surplus and shortage in Egypt, and claimed that his plan would seriously harm Egyptian agriculture, the issue became a nightmare – to the British.28 The British authorities believed that Willcocks was better known and more trusted than any other Englishman in Egypt, and that the majority believed Willcocks to be right.29 He was, after all, the celebrated designer of the Aswan Dam, known all over Egypt as an excellent water engineer and as a man who, for decades, had helped to improve Egyptian irrigation. Willcocks also protested directly to the Foreign Office, but in vain, unable to understand the strategic change of policy in London towards the Sudan and that the British Government backed MacDonald’s plan.30 Willcocks also criticised the close involvement of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate in the Gezira Scheme. He said that the Sudan Syndicate official is ‘out to make money; the Sudan Government official is out to do God’s work. There is between them the difference of a whole Heaven.’ He certainly overlooked the very close relation between the British officers and the Syndicate! In 1920, the Ministry of Public Works presented a new version of MacDonald’s proposals in two volumes called Nile Control: A Statement of the Necessity for Further Control of the Nile to Complete the Development of Egypt and Develop a Certain Area in the Sudan, with Particulars of the Physical Conditions to be Considered and a Programme of the Engineering Works Involved. It was submitted to the Nile Projects

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Commission that had been established by the British Government as a response to Egyptian criticism of MacDonald’s ideas.31 One of the main aims of Nile Control was to placate Egyptian opposition to the British plans for the Gezira Scheme. The ‘certain area in the Sudan’ was the Gezira. Future water requirements here were equated with the ultimate water requirements of the Sudan, except for only 16,416 feddans in the Blue Nile, Berber and Dongola Provinces. Therefore the Egyptians had no reason to fear the Gezira. There was enough water, and new projects on the White Nile should give Egypt all the water it would ever need. According to MacDonald, the Jabal Auliya Dam alone would be sufficient for a long time to come, and at the same time allow the Sudan a possible increase in the scope of the Gezira Scheme. MacDonald calculated that the Sennar reservoir, allowing for evaporation losses, could store 487 million cubic metres from surplus floodwater. If another 1913 occurred, 300,000 feddans could still be watered without detriment to Egypt, because water should be taken from the Nile in the period between 18 January and 15 April. But the Egyptian nationalists did not trust him or believe his assurances. The official endorsement of the Minister, Sirri Pasha, of the MacDonald report was met with ‘consternation’ in Egypt. To appease his critics, Sirri Pasha announced that he would resign if the construction of the Sennar Dam went ahead before the soundness of the schemes had been properly assessed.32 The British needed to do something to bolster their Nile projects and the authority of their Irrigation Advisor, and convince the Egyptians of their good intentions. As a ‘calming initiative’ they initiated the Nile Projects Commission, which was established in 1920, to evaluate the Nile projects and Willcocks’s and Kennedy’s criticism of these, and the discharge figures on which they were based. Who would sit on this committee became a burning political issue, and London gave in to the Minister’s demands for an Egyptian on the Commission.33 They proposed their friends,34 while the Egyptians at the end declined to nominate a representative, because they thought he would be a hostage.35 London stated that it was ‘unfortunate that there is not an Egyptian on the Commission, but technically the other members will put on much better without him’.36 The Commission was headed by Chief Engineer John F. Gebbie, an employee of the British Indian Government, Dr G.C. Simpson, a meteorologist to the Government of India, and an American, Mr Harry Thomas Cory. To Willcocks and parts of the Egyptian public, the Commission and its work were part of the same big fraud. The detailed connections between the Commission and the British Government are not known. But without doubt Allenby had very close contacts with the Commission, as had MacDonald. For example, the Commission stated at the beginning of chapter 4 of their draft that they had consulted with the Public Works Ministry. The Egyptian Minister, Sirri Pasha, objected to this under mounting pressure from the nationalists, and demanded that it should be revised before publication. He said he had never ‘been consulted either individually or in concert with other members of the Ministry’.37 The Commission had consulted only MacDonald but he had not thought it necessary to discuss the question with the Minister. At this stage the British were prepared to do much to appease Sirri Pasha

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since he threatened to resign.38 The credibility of the Commission would be at stake if it became a public issue that the Commission had not consulted the Minister but only MacDonald. Allenby therefore approached Gebbie and Simpson to persuade them to revise the text. They complied, for which they were thanked by the Foreign Office in London.39 In 1921 the Commission submitted its report and freed MacDonald on all charges, supported his projects, stated that Willcocks’s allegations were unfounded and reassured Egypt that the Nile brought down enough water for both the planned Gezira project and Egypt, but it felt unable to offer advice on allocation.40 The Nile Project Commission accepted that the White Nile dam, the Gezira, the Sennar Dam and the Hammadi Barrage could be carried out at once. Allenby had therefore been right when, in a strictly confidential letter to Curzon, he prophesied some weeks before the Commission members returned from the Sudan and before they had started to write their report that there was ‘every reason to believe that they will agree to immediate prosecution of both schemes’.41 The Council of Ministers subsequently adopted a resolution to congratulate MacDonald and approved the credits necessary for the Jabal Auliya and Nag Hammadi projects. Willcocks and the nationalists were not convinced. Willcocks said he was prepared to ‘lose all’ in exposing the biases of the Nile Commission and MacDonald’s role in what he called the ‘big fraud’. MacDonald took Willcocks and Kennedy to court, because he wanted his name cleared. The Foreign Office advised the Egyptian Government to keep out of the case.42 Allenby and MacDonald, however, persuaded the Egyptian Government to allow the government lawyer to take part in the proceedings and to pay MacDonald’s expenses. London thought this unwise; the Egyptian Government should not associate itself in any way with MacDonald.43 Curzon wrote personally and confidentially to Allenby stating that the British Government preferred the Egyptian Government to stay out of it altogether.44 The Foreign Office later argued in their internal discussions that some people even in England might have thought the British Government ‘responsible for the prosecution’ of Willcocks.45 Allenby also tried to put pressure on Willcocks to withdraw his accusations, but Willcocks refused. There was no alternative, he reported in strict confidence; the ‘trial must proceed’.46 Willcocks was duly found guilty of slander in the British Consular Court in 1921. He was effectively silenced; part of the judgement was that if he repeated his criticisms he would be deported from Egypt. Kennedy, on his side, was indeed deported and was denied the right to publish his works on the Nile and Nile discharges. MacDonald’s position had, however, become so weak that Allenby forced him to resign a few months later.47 The official explanation, which in the Foreign Office was characterised as ‘lame’, was that he had grossly underestimated the costs of the two projects he proposed. The British authorities were so embarrassed by MacDonald that Allenby and the Foreign Office, in concert, did what they could to persuade him not even to return to Egypt as a private consultant in November 1921.48 1921 was a terrible year for the public standing of the British water engineers in Egypt.

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E G Y P T AT T H E S U DA N ’ S M E RC Y

Meanwhile the Milner Report, published in February 1921 (described by the British Prime Minister as a ‘most vital moment to the Empire’) and under growing Egyptian opposition and distrust, recommended an end to the protectorate and the negotiation of a treaty between Britain and Egypt. The British Government was still not prepared to accept an independent constitutional monarchy. Milner resigned in protest, but not because he, the well-known ‘apostle of imperialism’, had altered his general attitude. He thought it impossible to exercise British control in Egypt without Egyptian co-operation. Instead, control over Egypt should be exercised from the Sudan. But it took some time before the diehards realised Britain’s weak position in Egypt. Negotiations in the wake of the report were formally opened in July 1921 between the Egyptian delegation, led by Adly Yeghen Pasha, and the British Government. In a speech, Zaghlul likened Adly Pasha negotiating with the British Government to ‘King George V negotiating with King George V’.49 Zaghlul put up what the nationalists thought should be conditions for participation: abolition of press censorship, withdrawal of martial law and, most important, abolition of the protectorate. Present on the British side were experienced Nile basin policy-makers such as Curzon, Murray and Lindsay.50 The Sudan question was not discussed in the negotiations. But the fact that the issue was not at the forefront does not imply that the issue was unimportant. It was precisely during this period that the British started to play their Sudan and Nile cards vigorously and in secrecy, and the Egyptians rallied under the banner of a powerful slogan: ‘Unity of the Nile valley’. The negotiations did not succeed. The situation in Egypt became more and more difficult for the British authorities. About one year after the Milner Report was published, on 10 February 1922, Field Marshal Allenby arrived in London, with his resignation in his pocket, frustrated over the Government’s attitude, and welcomed only by a few friends and some journalists.51 Allenby declared that he would not continue as High Commissioner if the Cabinet did not adopt a more liberal attitude.52 He had already been telling London for some time that all his British advisors thought that if Britain would not admit the principle of Egyptian independence, there would be serious risks of a revolution throughout the country.53 Hoping to outmanoeuvre the nationalists and to build up a group of pro-British politicians in Egypt, Allenby persuaded London to promise independence without previously securing British interests by a treaty. When London unilaterally issued the declaration of independence on 28 February 1922, the British Government took care to reaffirm the importance of Egypt in British overall imperial strategy. The declaration ended the protectorate, but importantly, and pending negotiations, it reserved four matters to the discretion of the British Government: the security of imperial communications, defence, the protection of foreign interests and of minorities, and the Sudan. Lloyd George told Parliament that Britain had no intention of giving up its overall position in Egypt, would never allow the progress that had already been made to ‘be jeopardised’, and

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could not agree ‘to any change in the status of that country which would in the slightest degree diminish the security for the many millions of British capital which are already invested there’.54 Because of Egypt’s specific strategic importance, on the highway to India, it had to be under British control in some way or another. In Cairo, at the height of the crisis, the High Commissioner continued to give parties; at the Semiramis Hotel, the British community rehearsed for another amateur performance, this time of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, to be performed in Sultania Opera House,55 as if to tell everybody that Egypt and Suez were not going to be surrendered. Britain had unilaterally granted Egypt independence as a tactical move, while the strategic aim clearly was to maintain overall control of the region. It was not an imperial power changing its aims or relinquishing its status – it took only one step back, that is upstream, in order to maintain its foothold on Suez. The British Government assessed its strategy and position after the declaration of independence. The most important British strategists in this period, the Foreign Ministers Balfour, Curzon and Austen Chamberlain,56 the Foreign Office bureaucrats Murray and Lindsay, and the ‘men on the spot’ such as Allenby and Lord Lloyd, High Commissioners in Egypt, and Sir Lee Stack and Symes, Governors-General of the Sudan, as well as representatives of the Lancashire industry, were in no doubt that a far-sighted imperial policy in this part of the Mediterranean and the Middle East entailed placing a firmer hold upstream on the Nile. London took care to ‘remind’ the anti-British Egyptians of a physical paradox of which they were sadly aware: the core areas of agricultural life in Egypt were in Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika and Ethiopia; it depended on rainfall falling outside its borders. In this situation London could allow Egypt to have a treaty, as long as Britain had the Nile. Or, as the Foreign Office formulated it, ‘The power which holds the Soudan has Egypt at its mercy, and through Egypt can dominate the Suez Canal’.57 To the Egyptian nationalists, the whole Nile was an Egyptian river, and the national discourse conceived it as a property of Egypt. Most Egyptians regarded the Sudan as part of Egypt, and they therefore thought that the country should be made ‘independent’ in the same way as Egypt. The Committee on the Egyptian Constitution (Dastur) recommended that King Fuad (1917–36) should proclaim himself King of Egypt and the Sudan, and issued a Draft Convention in 25 articles which was intended to replace the existing Condominium Agreement of 1899, regarded as an imperial dictate by Cromer. The anti-British and pro-Egyptian unrest spread to the Sudan. On 11 May there came into the hands of the Government a document entitled ‘The Claims of the Sudanese Nation’. The writer, Ali Abd al-Latif, was immediately arrested and committed for trial by a civil court.58 The year before, he had founded the United Tribes Society, openly inspired by Egyptian nationalism. The White Flag League was led not by a Northern Sudanese Arab but by a man who was a Dinka on his mother’s side and a Nuba on his father’s. When a man with such an ethnic background could advocate the unity of the Nile valley, and put a map of the Nile valley on the movement’s flag, the British had reason for worry. The British Government had no time to lose; it had to strengthen its position in the Sudan at the cost of Egypt.

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The traditional system of irrigation was revolutionised during the nineteenth century and especially during the British period in Egypt. Perennial irrigation was introduced in both the Lower and Upper Nile, partly by repairing the Delta Barrage, by building the Aswan Dam in 1902, by building a number of large structures across the Upper Nile in Egypt, and by improving the canal irrigation system over most of the area lying close to the Nile.

The fronts on the Sudan were thus clear: in Cairo the King was declared King of Egypt and the Sudan. In London the Government worked to weaken Egypt’s position in the Sudan and strengthen its own. A formally independent Egypt, London calculated, would for geopolitical reasons be a weak downstream state since its economic lifeline was transnational in character. The Government formulated a kind of ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for Egypt, whereby Egypt should no longer be regarded as a part of the British Empire, but as being within the ‘ring-fence of the British Empire’.59 London acknowledged its new and less secure position at Suez, and one way of limiting the damage was to take more positive action in the Sudan. One small but indicative part of London’s policy was that it sent Allenby to the Sudan just after the declaration of Egyptian independence was issued, attempting to treat the question of the Sudan in practice as having been settled in the interests of Britain. The Egyptian nationalist press complained fiercely, and argued that the negotiations had expressively put the Sudan question among the Reserved subjects. From many points of view the British position in the Sudan looked very weak. The Northern Sudanese and the Egyptians shared the same language and the same religion, and the great majority living north of the confluence of the Blue and White Niles considered themselves Arabs. For centuries the Egyptians and Northern Sudanese had traded with each other, establishing camel routes across the desert. The Sudan had been occupied by British and Egyptian troops, and Kitchener had chased Marchand away wearing an Egyptian uniform, hoisting the Egyptian flag. London had occupied the Sudan and beaten its European rivals in the name of Egypt. In the early 1920s Sudanese independence looked unlikely. The British developed and followed a long-term strategy that aimed at countering their comparative disadvantages. One method was to exploit memories of Egyptian

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The Aswan Dam was opened in 1902, hailed as a victory of British political, economic and technological might. It represented an entirely new technology on the Nile and was the biggest reservoir of its kind in the world. The dam turned out to be one of the soundest engineering projects in the history of water control, but it did not store sufficient water to meet the demand in the summer season. The reservoir could only dam the tail end of the flood due to the large amounts of silt in the Blue Nile. Moreover, archaeological circles in both France and Britain objected to the project, since it threatened to drown the ancient Temple of Philae. Winston Churchill captured the mood of the British administrators and the Egyptian elite at that time: ‘The state must struggle and the people starve in order that professors may exult and tourists find some place to scratch their names’.

misrule in their propaganda. Another method was to clamp down on all signs of pro-Egyptian political movements, and to strengthen the system of indirect rule under benign, paternalistic British leadership. Lord Milner and the Government in London recommended the greater use of tribal organisation. The British tried to fight unionist sentiments. For example, when a Muhammed Mabrouk el-Zani shouted in a parade at Malakal on 24 September 1924: ‘Long live Fouad, King of Egypt and the Sudan’, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. In 1926 the GovernorGeneral, Maffey, made ‘devolution’ official policy, in line with London’s strategic considerations. Tribal organisation, broken by the Khalifa and long neglected by the Condominium powers, quickened again under the active leadership of London and Khartoum. The new local national elite should be shaped, so as to become more loyal to Britain than to Egypt.

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When the British ‘took the Nile in hand,’ as they said, this implied a technological revolution in water control in the Nile basin, and in some places the Nile environment was fundamentally transformed. This picture shows workers building the Sennar Dam in the Sudan.

After having conquered the country in 1898, nominally in co-operation with Egypt, who in reality had made the greater contribution to the campaign, and officially in order to regain its ‘lost provinces’, the British gradually and efficiently established an administration over most of this huge country. According to the 1899 Agreement, the military and civil government had been invested in a GovernorGeneral appointed by the Khedive of Egypt. He was supposed to be nominated, but in reality was chosen, by the British Government. The Anglo–Egyptian Sudan was therefore run by London, administered by the British Sudan Political Service, but developed with Egyptian funds. While the British had the political power, Egypt paid the expenses, just as they also had picked up most of the bill for the Sudan campaigns. Egypt made a series of advances between 1900 and 1910 to a total of some E£5.4 million for capital development, enabling the railway to be built from Atbara to the Red Sea and a new port constructed at Port Sudan, the Blue Nile to be bridged at Khartoum and the railway to be extended to the Gezira, to Sennar, and across the White Nile at Kosti.60 In spite of the fact that the Sudan Political Service consisted of very few administrators and the budgets of its Government were meagre indeed, under the leadership of the Governor-Generals Kitchener and

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The Makwar Dam at Sennar was a very central topic of strife during the Egyptian revolution and in Egyptian opposition to and mistrust of British rule. It was a ‘nefarious scheme’ which London would use to destroy Egypt. The Egyptian nationalists turned out to be wrong, although the dam enabled the British Government and Allenby to punish Egyptian nationalists in 1924 by threatening to enlarge the Gezira Scheme by taking out more water from the Blue Nile than agreed upon. It has since its establishment played a crucial and central role in the Sudanese economy.

Wingate Britain had managed to establish peace and order, and gradually started to transform and modernise the country, especially the central riverain areas. The Anglo–Egyptian Sudan was not a British colony and London could not simply turn it into one. That would fatally destroy Britain’s relations with Egypt and would not be accepted by the international community only a few years after the famous 14 points stated by the US president Woodrow Wilson in January 1918. Compared to other countries in the British Empire, it was ruled in a unique way. It was administered not by the Colonial Office but by the Foreign Office and, owing to the country’s ambiguous legal and formal position, the British civil servants in the Sudan came to enjoy an unusual degree of independence of action. This also helped to develop an administration that became known for its benign paternalism and concern for the local people’s interests, a relationship that has been described as ‘bonds of silk’,61 but which was made possible by this particular overall imperial strategy. It was only natural that the Anglo–Egyptian Agreement of 1899 on the Sudan was now described internally by the British as being a ‘child of opportunism’, a temporary modus vivendi, which had safeguarded British interests without calling

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for a large expenditure of British revenue. After 1919 and what has been ironically called the British declaration of Egyptian independence, British manoeuvring in the Sudan was restrained (in the 1950s the 1899 Agreement would play an altogether different role, as we shall see). It gave legal support to Egyptian propaganda about the Sudan as part of Egypt; the occupation had, in fact, been described, also by the British, as a reoccupation of former Egyptian territories. Egyptian nationalists accused London of usurping Egyptian rights there. To them, even the assertion that there existed a ‘Sudan Question’ was in itself a challenge to the Egyptian people and their cause; to them the Sudan was part of the ‘Egyptian Question’. The British Government argued that they had assumed obligations that had placed them in the position of trustees for the Sudanese and that they had promised them that they should never again come under Egyptian misrule. What was important for British strategists was that Britain should not be exposed to the charge of being the first to tear up the 1899 Agreement. Rather than following the letter of that Agreement, they should listen to the ‘will of the Sudanese people’, argued the British Government and the Sudan Political Service. The question of control of the Sudan became a struggle over who had the right to speak in the name of the Sudanese, and therefore it became crucial to form alliances in the Sudan. In 1919 all matters related to Nile control in the Sudan were still under the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt, a legacy from the time when Cromer and Garstin had been in charge. While the line of authority between the British in Cairo and Khartoum in other policy areas might vary, Cairo and London invariably had the upper hand within the imperial set-up when decisions about water control and water allocation were made. As Governor-General, Wingate was clear when he set out to govern the country: on the water question ‘the Sudan had nothing to say’. He would follow ‘whatever policy’ Cromer told him to adopt.62 While Wingate thus accepted the system during the early years of occupation, in 1913 he raised the question of the future of the Irrigation Department in the Sudan. In what was to become another country depending upon artificial watering, he of course knew that this was an important political and economic question. Should it be a ‘strong and more or less independent department of expert engineers’ or remain a ‘somewhat weak adjunct’ of the Egyptian department, with ‘practically no powers of its own and little or no views on independent decisions?’ 63 After 1919 this became a question of strategic relevance. And how much water should the Sudan be allowed to use? In 1904 the Sudan was allowed to take, in the ‘timely’ period, only 12,000 cubic metres, sufficient to cultivate 10,000 feddans of summer crops. In 1918 the authorised limit was doubled to 20,000 feddans. But cotton cultivation on a grand scale, as now envisaged by Wingate and the Sudan Government, would require a much more drastic increase in the Sudan’s share of the water. If the Sudan was to develop, it simply must have more Nile water, and to get it, quarrels with Egypt were unavoidable. Since the British wanted both to develop the Sudan and make the administration of the country less dependent upon the Egyptian treasury, they had to acquire British capital. That meant – in short – cash-crop production and large-scale irrigation.

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There was, and had for some time been, only one area, not only in the Nile valley but in the Empire as a whole, where the British saw any real potential for irrigation and production of the cotton they needed: the Gezira plain.64 The Gezira story is a story of modernisation on a grand scale, as it is a story of British rational, economic imperialism at its zenith. It shows how British banks and industrialists and the Sudan Government worked in partnership but with different interests for the same immediate Nile goal. These interests impacted and were framed by the British Government trying to balance industrial interests at home, a long-term hydropolitical strategy in the basin and very important and complex diplomatic issues in Egypt. It is thus a story that defies simplistic theories about the relations between capital and imperial politics, and of how and why cultural and social constructs of nature do change.

T H E WO R L D ’ S L A RG E S T C OT TO N FA R M O N T H E B LU E N I L E

Between the two world wars the British leaders in Cairo, Khartoum and London shared one great aim regarding the Sudan – they wanted to establish the biggest cotton plantation in the world there. The Gezira Scheme should be so attractive that it could obtain financial support from British banks and industrialists, give the Government of the Sudan more funds of its own so as to reduce its dependence on Egypt, develop the Sudan economically in an area which would necessarily bring its elite into competition with Egypt, and demonstrate the superiority of British policies and technology. This meant irrigation on a large scale, taking water from the Nile and, certainly, conflict with the co-dominus, Egypt. It does not take a shrewd politician to understand the value of the Gezira Scheme in producing both Sudanese anti-Egyptianism and profits for Lancashire. The Governor-General, Sir Lee Stack, aired the dominant British view on the Sudan and the Gezira when he discussed the issue with London: ‘The future of the Sudan is the future of the Gezira scheme’.65 And, he added, ‘on the future of the Gezira scheme depends the certain supply of one of the most vital needs to England’s industries’. Both economic and agricultural changes in Egypt endangered the steady supply of Egyptian cotton in the future. Egyptian cotton was regarded as one of the best strains in the world and was grown with great success, but Egyptian nationalists protested the huge export of raw material to Britain. This exclusive reliance on cotton also left the country’s economy dependent upon one crop whose value fluctuated widely on the international market. Lancashire was alarmed when it got to know about another ‘widespread movement…on foot in Egypt’.66 This dangerous movement was not Egyptian nationalism, but a cotton plant – Pelion. The ‘movement’ aimed at replacing traditional long-staple cotton, Sakellaridis, with the short-staple, Pelion. The landowners and farmers shifted because this new variety gave bigger harvests. Lancashire objected strongly to this development – more than 17.5 million of their spindles were using Egyptian long-staple cotton, and only a

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few of them could use any other kind. The cotton industry subsequently submitted a series of memoranda to the Foreign Office. Their concern was shared by Curzon and the Government. Curzon asked that Allenby ‘immediately draw the attention of the Egyptian Government to this important problem’,67 and the Board of Trade urged the Foreign Office to protest strongly.68 Allenby acted swiftly and, in the Annual Report for 1920, he reported that the Pelion movement had been stopped. The affair did add to the growing feeling of uncertainty regarding Egypt’s future role as a long-staple cotton farm for Lancashire. In 1920 the Egyptian Government decided to limit the area under cotton cultivation. Once again the alarms went off in Lancashire. The British cotton industry and the cotton traders complained to the Foreign Office. They feared that this measure was the result of pressure exerted by Egyptian nationalism. Allenby tried to calm them; the decision resulted from changes in cotton prices, he argued. It was thus economic rather than political. But taken together, the signs were clear: future long-staple cotton import from Egypt was increasingly uncertain and the cotton industry had to look even more vigorously for alternative cotton farms for their spindles. The Sudan Government had its own reasons for pushing the Gezira. In 1919 it had negotiated an Agreement with the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, and obtained the Treasury’s consent to raise a loan of £6 million. While the Egyptian Government wanted to postpone the project, the Sudan Government wanted it implemented as soon as possible. MacDonald suggested a compromise that was accepted: in February 1920 the British Government gave an undertaking that the initial area of 300,000 feddans would not be exceeded without reference to the Egyptian Government. The Egyptian Government accepted that the work could continue, although this decision was harshly criticised by the nationalists. At the beginning of 1920, the Egyptian Government and Allenby in Cairo announced to the Egyptian public that work had stopped on the Gezira Scheme. The intention was to calm anti-British protests in Egypt. On 1 April 1920 the Foreign Office asked Allenby whether it was the case that the work on this project really had been suspended, since the cotton industry was worried.69 Allenby answered in a strictly confidential letter that the action was taken to ‘allay unrest caused by misinterpretations of the effect of the Blue Nile Dam on the future water supply of Egypt’.70 But it should be regarded as a temporary suspension, pending the expected endorsement of the project by the Nile Projects Commission. Allenby confidently told London that a considerable amount of work had been done on subsidiary matters, such as building the cement factory and digging the canal, which has ‘continued uninterruptedly’. The Foreign Office faced problems in quelling the unease in the cotton business and the Foreign Secretary sent explanatory letters to the industries concerned; the Foreign Office tried to talk MPs out of raising the issue in Parliament, so as not to be forced to give answers which could have detrimental or unforeseen consequences in Cairo. The scheme also faced financial problems. The cost of the dam had rocketed. A new estimate, in 1919, put the cost of the Gezira works alone at £4.9 million. The British Treasury guaranteed a loan of £6 million to replace the £3 million loan

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promised in 1913. The Treasury insisted on the cessation of work in late 1921, owing to financial problems and general policies towards overseas engagements. The Foreign Office seconded the decision but without any enthusiasm. They thought it unavoidable to bow to the Treasury decision.71 The Foreign Office then instructed the Sudan Government to close down operations at once, though they might continue some stone dressing.72 Stack protested and then Lord Allenby intervened, clearly with renewed support from the Foreign Office, and met the Chancellor of the Exchequer. What worried both Allenby and the Foreign Office was the grave political consequences that this decision to close down the works would have. Soon afterwards the cessation of work was suspended and a new loan guaranteed.73 Meanwhile, the cotton industry did what it could to influence opinion and policymakers. In late 1921 the Plantation Syndicate held another meeting in London. The chairman’s speech captures the thinking of the cotton industry and the British establishment at the time. We hear much in these days of the desirability of developing in other countries such industries as are complementary to and not competitive with those of Great Britain. Here we have a perfect instance in a country where our flag flies of a complementary industry – a means of feeding the mills of Lancashire, which in turn will sell to the Sudan increasing quantities of their finished products. We hear also of unemployment here and of money spent, largely unproductively, in relief of it. Any interruption with work on this Dam means more unemployment and cancellation or postponement of contracts for sluices, ginning machinery, ploughing engines, light railway material, and all sorts of engineering stores… The native has learnt that he can always depend upon this sprinkling of British officials to give patient and disinterested consideration to all his grievances and never to go back upon promises once made. They have been led by the Sudan Government to count upon the completion of the Dam. Its completion spells for them prosperity and insurance against starvation, and they have not been free from famines in the past. Any interruption of the work now might be construed by them as a breach of faith due either to the weakness of this country or to the sacrifice of Sudanese interests to ill-informed extremist clamour in Egypt. In short, our position in the Sudan is based primarily upon the natives’ confidence in our keeping faith with them, and this confidence, built up for over 20 years, must not be lightly risked.74

The need for urgency in increasing Sudanese long-staple cotton production was repeatedly emphasised by the cotton industry; Lancashire was ‘suffering from acute depression in trade’ caused chiefly by the ‘scarcity of raw material’.75 In 1922 the Corporation sent a strictly confidential letter to the Prime Minister, describing the Sudan as ‘well nigh the only country in the world to which Lancashire can turn’.76 The cotton industry had continued to work closely with the Sudan Government, and had developed much closer relations with the Governor-General and British administrators in Khartoum than with the anti-British Government in Cairo, also because the President of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation, Currie, had worked in the Sudan for many years.77 Both Curzon and Murray regularly attended meetings of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation. When the declaration of

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Egyptian independence was issued, the leaders of the industry told the Foreign Office that the ‘development of the Sudan is of first rate importance’, and that the British Government could not avoid the ‘responsibility of defining the political status of the Sudan’.78 The cotton lobby wanted firm British control there and the Egyptian nationalists brought to silence. They urged a policy by which Britain should take ‘complete control’ of internal Sudanese administration till such time as selfgovernment ‘by the Sudanese themselves can be introduced’. Finally, not long after Egyptian independence, on 17 October 1922, a contract between the Sudan Government and Pearson & Son Limited was signed for the ‘Construction of a dam and subsidiary works at Makwar on the Blue Nile and the construction of irrigation canals and subsidiary works for the Gezira’.79 The dam and the canals were to be completed by July 1925. The prospect of extensive cotton production in Gezira held the promise of enabling London to define a new political status for the Sudan. The Nile project would create an economic foundation for an administration independent of funds from the Egyptian Treasury and would give birth to and strengthen a Sudanese economic group and political elite that would prosper from British-initiated projects, and which, it was therefore hoped, would develop a natural allegiance to British policies. In 1919, when the Egyptians were in uproar against the project, the Sudan Government issued a statement saying that it would rent all land within the planned irrigation area. The proposals were later embodied in the Gezira Land Ordinance of 1921.80 This was to have a profound effect not only upon the social and economic life of the Gezira region but throughout the Sudan. By renting the land for 40 years, instead of nationalising it, the ordinance provided for a system of local land control but also one in which the Sudanese tenants would have to rely for 40 years on British loans and British water policies. The idea was an innovation and unique in an imperial context. For example: the gross profits were to be distributed among the state, private capital and Sudanese tenants, 35 per cent to the Government, 25 per cent to the Syndicate and 40 per cent to the tenants. This system also meant that the interests of the Sudanese were directly tied to a British project that was born in conflict with Egypt and which, it was expected, would continue to be in conflict with Egyptian nationalist propaganda. A petition against criticism of the scheme was signed by the omdas, notables, merchants and Sudanese officials of the Kamlin district: In conclusion, we desire to associate ourselves with the noble Sir Sayed Ali-elMirghani, El Sayed Abd-el-Rahman-el-Mahdi, El Sherif Ali-el-Hindi and the other members of the Sudanese delegation, in all representations they have made on behalf of the Sudanese nation and in favour of the Makwar dam.81

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A Nile Ultimatum While work on the Sennar Dam and the Gezira Scheme proceeded, the radicalisation of the Egyptian people continued. The enforced compromise on the upper limit of the scheme apparently did not help much to weaken the nationalist movement, while the cotton industry thought it a straitjacket. Since 1912, the latter had publicly referred to the scheme’s enormous potential, which became obvious to everyone when work started. The higher cost of the project also encouraged higher productivity goals. Water and cotton were still in short supply, with consequences for corporate profits and the local population. For example: the Sudan Government had instructed that all the cotton should be sold abroad. Local women were forbidden even to hand-spin cotton. According to a British administrator, the women said, ‘Isn’t it our land? Why shouldn’t we women have a bit of cotton? Truly this Government is hard on women.’82 The problem was how to get more water to the land. The British agreed: it depended upon further storage work on Lake Tana. In Egypt, meanwhile, the upper classes feared more and more that the agitation of the nationalists had unleashed among the population a political attitude that could also threaten their own position. Former allies of Zaghlul were now willing to work with the British. The Liberal Constitutionalist party was formed and a constitution was promulgated. Zaghlul was released again, after having been sent into his second exile to the Seychelles. The British hoped that by letting him take part in the first elections under the new constitution, the situation could be normalised. Meanwhile, work on the Makwar Dam proceeded unhindered, in Egypt by now more or less regarded as a fait accompli. The Wafd won a sweeping victory in the elections and in January 1924 Zaghlul became Prime Minister. During that year a number of British officials and Egyptian collaborators were murdered by extreme nationalists. Then, on 19 November, Lee Stack, Governor-General of the Sudan and British Commander in Chief of the Egyptian army, was assassinated in Cairo. The assassination was a blow to the Egyptians who wanted to normalise relations with Britain as well as being a blow to British security in the region, but it also created an opportunity for tough action. The British Government, Allenby and the Sudan Government described the murder not simply as the work of extremists, but rather as the natural outcome of the campaign of hatred mounted by Zaghlul and others. A situation had emerged in which the British could clamp down harshly on Egyptian opposition, with some support at home and abroad, and so they did – immediately and severely. First they implemented a scheme for the elimination of Egyptian personnel in the Sudan, which had been secretly drawn up in 1920,83 hoping in this way to remove the Egyptian side of the Condominium at a stroke.84 But what shocked the Egyptians most was the Nile ultimatum. As a direct and explicit reaction to the assassination of Stack, Allenby announced on 22 November 1924 his famous Nile ultimatum: ‘the Sudan Government will increase the area to be irrigated in the Gezira from 300,000 feddans to an unlimited figure as need may require’.85

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What the Egyptians feared had come to pass! The British reactivated their downstream complex. London gave the Egyptians a demonstration in water-power that would never be forgotten, and that affected the way British Nile policies were later conceived of and interpreted. The area of cotton farming in the Sudan was to be increased without asking Egypt, thus annulling the commitment made in 1920. Did the ultimatum show that Allenby, the ‘liberal’ in 1922, had become the autocratic villain in 1924, as popular explanations suggest? The political situation had changed, requiring other tactics than in the wake of the Milner Report. Allenby later wrote that his intentions were to impress upon Egypt ‘the extent of a Power which the country, to its own detriment and ours, had been too long purposely taught to despise’.86 The extent of this power was to dam the Nile, and he knew that he struck at the very centre of the Egyptian downstream complex. In 1922 it had been very important to minimise the fear and distrust caused by the Nile report. Now the time had come to show the fist. A number of important political changes followed. Zaghlul did not accept Allenby’s demands and resigned the next day. This rallied the moderates and discouraged the extremists. Ahmad Ziwar Pasha formed a new Government, which accepted the British demands unconditionally. All Egyptian army units were expelled from the Sudan, and a new Sudan Defence Force, separate from the Egyptian army, was established. The Sudanese battalion that mutinied in support of the Egyptians was crushed. On 27–28 November 1924, more than twenty people were killed. Three were sentenced to death and shot by a firing squad. The ideas of the League of Sudanese Union, which towards the end of 1922 had sent a letter to Prince Umar Tusun of Egypt, in which it stated that in the Sudan there existed a movement ‘the purpose of which is to support the Egyptian people’, and expressed its belief that ‘the Sudan should never be separated from Egypt’ and exalted the cause of the ‘the Nile Valley from Alexandria to Lake Albert’, were clamped down on.87 In Britain the politicians publicly disagreed about this use of their Nile power. Ramsay MacDonald, who had just stepped down as Labour Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary (January–November 1924), criticised the ultimatum. He regretted that the British had now told the Egyptian cultivator that they ‘hold him in the hollow of our hands’. The Egyptians had been frightened, MacDonald admitted, but he suggested another course more in line with what he called British traditions. They should not ‘take a single gallon of water required for Egypt’, but should instead get a joint ‘board set up to deal with the whole problem of the Nile water in the Sudan and Egypt…and you and we will cooperate to produce peace, happiness and prosperity’.88

A Dam of God When the Makwar Dam was finished in 1925, it altered the context of Nile politics as well as the Nile environment. A barrage, 3025 metres long, with a maximum height of 40 metres, was put across that river, giving Egypt almost 80 per cent of its water.

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The opening of the Sennar Dam in 1925 was a very important event in the history of the Nile. It showed that the time had come when other countries than Egypt could build large dams in stone on the Nile. The picture shows the Governor-General of the Sudan and the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Lord Lloyd, taking part in the official opening ceremony. It should also be seen as a celebration of a unique example of very close co-operation between British capital and His Majesty’s Government’s foreignpolicy strategists.

It had two functions: as a regulator and as a reservoir. As a regulator it would raise the water level to command the Gezira Canal during the time of the high Nile. As a reservoir, it would store water in the period of falling flood for use in the low-water season. The annual storage cycle was laid down by agreement. The Gezira Canal would extract water by gravity for irrigation purposes from July until April. The water foundation was laid for the biggest cotton plantation on earth, competing with Egyptian cotton on the world market. Near the little village of Sennar, where a few crumbling ruins were still a reminder of the capital of the famous Fung kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Blue Nile was now harnessed on a really grand scale. For generations, most of the people had been living in villages in the central belt of the Gezira, relying on rain-grown millet, or durra, while the hinterland was mainly deserted, some places settled, others purely nomadic. The new dam was hailed as a gift of God and Allah and a triumph of man and – the British. It was no longer the Nile that was revered as a deity; it was the ‘lofty building’ of concrete and cement that received the praise. At the official opening ceremony the Bishop and the Mufti both made speeches. The bishop said, Almighty God, Eternal, Unchangeable; the only wise God, the great Father of mankind: we pray Thee to bless this Dam, the Reservoir and the Irrigation Scheme, not only that thereby the people may get wealth and prosperity, but that rightly using these Thy gifts they may increase in wisdom, in learning, in religion and true

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righteousness…We praise Thee for the wisdom and foresight of those who conceived the idea of harnessing the waters of this river for the use of men: and herein do we especially remember William Garstin and Herbert Horatio Kitchener.

The Mufti then spoke: ‘We stand here to-day to raise our hands in supplication to thank the Almighty, the Highest, the most Exalted and the Greatest of Kings for the great favours he has shown to us by the completion of this lofty building, and of the great Gezira irrigation scheme’.89 The bishop and the mufti provided what in a long historical perspective could be seen as an ecumenical baptism of the Sudan as a modern Nile state.

THE DREAMS FOR ETHIOPIA

From the plains of the Gezira, our geographical focus now moves farther upstream on the Blue Nile – to Ethiopia. Because of the character of the Nile, Ethiopia’s modern development was deeply affected by the revolution in Egypt and the Gezira Scheme in the Sudan, thousands of kilometres downstream, and the policies of London and of the court in Addis Ababa regarding the Tana Dam had far-reaching consequences for the peoples of Egypt and the Sudan. But, as will be shown, British plans for a dam on Lake Tana affected not only regional history, but also world history.

The Regional Water Tower The British Government had for decades been trying to obtain formal permission from Ethiopia to build a large dam at Lake Tana and an agreement for using the Nile. A private citizen, Mr Aitken, had made a proposal for Lake Tana as a reservoir at the turn of the twentieth century. The British Government and Cromer strongly opposed such a project at the time: to transfer rights over Lake Tana to a private company was ridiculous, be it a British company or not. It might jeopardise British strategic interests in the valley. In 1903 the first state-sponsored survey of Lake Tana and its potential was undertaken on the initiative of Cromer and Garstin.90 In the following years, the Government in London, and Cromer and Kitchener in Cairo, tried secretly to reach an agreement with Menelik that would allow a reservoir to be built at Lake Tana – if this were desired in the future. In his foreword to the official Garstin report in 1904, Cromer quoted himself from 1901, arguing that no such dam should be built, or even thought of. No project could be executed, nor, indeed, any preliminary investigation take place, without the ‘full consent and approbation of the Emperor Menelik’. He added that there were obvious objections to a large reservoir, since Lake Tana constituted one of the main sources of Egypt’s water supply, ‘being located in a foreign country, however well-disposed may be its ruler’. Cromer apparently had two agendas – one for the public and one

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for secret diplomacy related to Egypt. In the report he did not disclose that, in January 1904, he had sent to the Foreign Office the text of an arrangement he had authorised J. Harrington, the British representative in Addis Ababa at the time, to make with Menelik, regarding a British dam there.91 Cromer and the British Government worked hard to reach an agreement with Menelik on the Nile. In diplomatic negotiations the agreements of the past are important, but when it comes to delineating spheres of influence in river basins it matters even more, owing to the permanency of many of the issues involved, lent to them by the eternal role and character of rivers. Nile agreements and interpretations of these agreements came to play a profound role in the history of Ethiopia and in Ethiopia’s relation to the other Nile valley states. An Exchange of Notes between Great Britain and Ethiopia led to what is called a Treaty of 15 May 1902. The British considered their legitimate ‘sphere of influence’ in the Nile basin finally to be confirmed by all relevant parties, since Article III in the English version of the Agreement included the following assurances:92 His Majesty the Emperor Menelek II, King of Kings Ethiopia, engages himself towards the Government of His Britannic Majesty not to construct or allow to be constructed, any work across the Blue Nile, Lake Tsana, or the Sobat which would arrest the flow of their waters into the Nile except in agreement with his Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of the Soudan.93

The Treaty framed potential Ethiopian ambitions on the Blue Nile and other tributaries, and provided a diplomatic ground for British Nile policies in Ethiopia. At the end of Cromer’s regime, London and Cromer tried hard to reach an agreement with Menelik to build a British dam in Ethiopia. In January 1904, Cromer dispatched to the Foreign Office the text of an arrangement he had authorised Harrington to make with Menelik. Here it was suggested that the Sudan Government should undertake to pay the Emperor or his successors the sum of £10,000 sterling annually as long as friendly relations between the two governments continued, and as long as Menelik agreed not to construct any work on the Nile or its tributaries. It was thought unwise to deprive Ethiopia of a valuable asset without compensation. In a ciphered telegram in January 1907, Cromer suggested that London should acknowledge a debt to Ethiopia of £40,000 – with deductions for cattle raids in the Sudan.94 In February they offered Menelik £15,000 for his account in the National Bank of Egypt.95 In May 1907 the offer was apparently withdrawn because Menelik did not accept the terms. This initiative did not succeed, and no agreement was signed. Neither the Government of the Sudan nor Cairo or London set aside money for payment of the subsidy. No sources in the Foreign Office confirm that Menelik signed the actual notes. The British diplomats worked hard to try to establish what happened; the conclusion was that Menelik had always made difficulties about the form of the note, although he seemed to have accepted it in principle.96 The cautious Menelik was not caught. The British tried hard to win him over, but without success. Afterwards, when Haile Selassie claimed the promised money, they argued that a voluntary offer to pay money does not constitute a legal obligation.

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Cromer and the British Government also worked to reach agreements with the European powers on the Ethiopian question. In 1906 a Tripartite Agreement between Britain, France and Italy was signed in London.97 Article 1 declared that the three states should try to maintain the political and territorial status quo of Ethiopia, but if the country broke up, the Treaty was regarded as an important instrument for preventing rivalry among the powers. The Treaty included a list of agreements, among them the Anglo–Italian protocols of 1891 and 1894.98 It recognised Britain’s and Egypt’s hydraulic interests: ‘a) The interests of Great Britain and Egypt in the Nile basin, more especially as regards the regulation of the waters of that river and its tributaries (due consideration being paid to local interests) without prejudice to Italian interests mentioned in (b)’.99 The Tripartite Agreement also contained some reservations of hydraulic interest in favour of Italy, and the provision that the Italian Government could claim exclusive economic influence in the west of Ethiopia as well as along the railway corridor between Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.100 The engineering works planned for Lake Tana remained more or less in abeyance until just before the outbreak of World War I, when the new and more ambitious plans for the Gezira Scheme made a reservoir on the Upper Blue Nile more urgent. Lord Kitchener reported optimistically to London that the Government in Addis Ababa, owing to its financial difficulties, would probably now be willing to negotiate a treaty. He proposed arrangements very similar to those suggested by Cromer, but provided for an increase in annual payments of £20,000 as soon as work was actually started. Kitchener described this as a ‘small payment’ compared to the wealth the dam would generate.

The Dam that Slipped Away When Colonel Doughty-Wylie, British representative in Addis Ababa at the time and attempting to negotiate with Emperor Lij Iyasu (1913-1916), left his post in February 1914, he wrote that he regretted very much that he was unable to secure signature of the Tana Treaty. The European war had made the matter, already difficult, practically impossible. In the Sudan, Wingate pressed for dispatch of a Tana Mission in 1915. His man in Ethiopia, Wilfred Thesiger, reported considerable difficulty in getting anything definite out of the ‘dilatory Abyssinian Government’.101 The British representative was pessimistic since the Ethiopians were entirely occupied with the question of Eritrea and Tigray.102 Doughty-Wylie and Thesiger were the first in a long row of British representatives to complain about lack of success in getting Ethiopian acceptance of the dam. The struggle for the Tana Dam was an issue that would remain at the heart of Anglo–Ethiopian relations for five decades. During World War I, however, it was more important for London not to offend Italy by African initiatives, in the light of what was happening in Europe. British restraint in Ethiopia should encourage Italy to join the British side in the European war. Such considerations led to another treaty

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between the two countries with long-term regional and international consequences. In the 1915 Treaty of London, Italy was promised support in future rectifications of frontiers in Africa, including Ethiopia, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Wingate urged the sending of a Tana Mission, arguing that the scheme was now undoubtedly more important than was originally supposed,103 but nothing happened. Italy, for its part, attempted to exploit this situation by securing concessions and guarantees from London. Two years later the Italian Chargé d’Affaires in Addis Ababa sent a memorandum in which the Italian Government reminded London of what it now considered its right: to be consulted about British negotiations with Addis Ababa regarding the Tana Dam. The Memorandum concluded that Lake Tana was in the ‘Italian sphere of action’.104 This was a clear sign that even if it had wished to do so, Britain would not be able to overlook Italian interests in the Lake issue in the future, and for the time being the Gezira activists in the Sudan had temporarily lost out. After the Egyptian revolution, the damming of Lake Tana became more important. A reservoir would permit a more profitable development of the planned Gezira Scheme in the Sudan. It could also be more useful as a diplomatic card against Egypt. All the actors were familiar with the old legend whereby Ethiopia was able to block the Blue Nile, or divert its course, so as to starve Egypt, support the Copts there and bring Islam to its knees. London knew that for centuries Egypt had felt the constant threat of Ethiopian control over the Blue Nile. Now the British planned to exploit the power inherent in this myth, but London was not free to act as it pleased. In Ethiopia, the change of leadership brought some hope of negotiations for a dam. When Menelik II died in 1913, his grandson, Lij Iyasu, succeeded to the throne. His association with Islam was one reason that he was unpopular with the majority Christian population of Ethiopia and also with European governments. Ras Tafari (1892–1975), the son of Ras Makonnen and cousin of Menelik, became a centre of resistance. Lij Iyasu was deposed in 1916 after he had dallied with the Central Powers. Menelik II’s daughter, Zauditu, became Empress in 1917 while Ras, or Prince, Tafari was named regent and heir apparent to the throne. Zauditu was described by the British representative as ‘a woman of small intelligence and no education. It is probable that she has little knowledge or comprehension of current internal questions, and none of foreign affairs.’ Ras Tafari (who later became Haile Selassie I and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974) was regarded at the time by the British as a moderniser, but also as in a weak position with respect to the utterly conservative group of ‘priests, scribes and eunuchs’ around Menelik’s daughter.105 Outside Ethiopia he was often described as ‘Regent’, but he was neither de jure nor de facto entitled to that description at the time. Political matters he therefore had to refer to the Crown, with consequences for the Tana negotiations. The opposition of the Empress and feudal barons and priests from Gojjam and Begemdir made it ‘premature’106 to press for construction of the Tana Dam and the Ras’s hands ‘were tied’.107 The British Representative in Addis Ababa concluded regretfully, in 1920, that there was not the slightest possibility of arriving at a satisfactory Tana Dam Agreement with the Government in Addis Ababa.108

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If London was to achieve its aims, secrecy was necessary. A new survey of the Tana area was started just after the Egyptian revolution and it was carried out with due precautions. The real names of the participants were not in their passports,109 they were called ‘irrigation officials’ rather than ‘engineers’,110 and Addis Ababa should not get the impression that London was sending a ‘mission in any sense of the word’.111 To win the friendship of the local people, they should be provided with a couple of rifles with ammunition, and other presents of less value, such as common field glasses, sword blades, watches, knives and so forth as gifts to lesser chiefs and priests.112 London and Stack in Khartoum should ‘pave the way’ for the Sudan Government to take the place of the Egyptian Government in relation to all matters connected with the project. The ‘Sudanese’, however, should remain at the Lake. The Sudan Government should pay them for any work which would be undertaken there. In order to hide this from the Egyptian Government, which financed the work in reality, Lord Allenby, in his capacity as High Commissioner for the Sudan, could be ‘referee for correspondence’. Some of the most important British waterplanners and advisors to the Egyptian Government took part in this ‘water plot’. Both Percy Marmaduke Tottenham, Under-Secretary of Public Works after 1921, and Dupuis, formerly advisor to the same ministry, attended a number of meetings at the Foreign Office in London in 1922 and 1923.113 The goal could not be reached without secrecy, they thought. This was especially the case since, as Dodds in Addis Ababa reported, the Ethiopian Government would not do anything which ‘they thought would be disliked by the Egyptian Government’,114 an attitude which made a difficult diplomatic situation even more complex. The third factor was Italy and France. When the Fascists came to power in 1922 a more expansionist policy was implemented. In particular, Mussolini intended to acquire influence and territory in Africa (and in the Mediterranean basin). The humiliating defeat at Adwa in 1895 was still remembered, and from the 1920s onwards Mussolini’s long-term aim was Italian control over Ethiopia. France was the junior partner in this European rivalry, but was still a force that could not be overlooked in the small diplomatic milieu in Ethiopia, where secret diplomacy had proved to be virtually impossible. The naïve optimism of the immediate post-war years was gone.

Carrot and Stick At the end of 1922, just after the declaration of Egyptian independence, London reassessed its policy, and the dual character of the dam, in a secret memo: His Majesty’s Government are indeed in the position of being able to threaten Egypt with the reduction of her water supply, and this is sufficient in itself to create a feeling of anxiety and resentment in Egyptians; on the other hand His Majesty’s Government cannot offer to increase the water supply of Egypt unless the construction of the Tsana reservoir is undertaken. Once this work is completed they

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will be able, without in any way abandoning their power to damage Egypt by reducing the supply, to tranquillise Egyptian anxiety by offering to increase that supply to a very great extent.115

Nile control and the Tana Dam were regarded as a carrot and stick against Egypt in London. It was therefore rational that they feared that the Egyptian Government might initiate negotiations about the dam on their own, thereby spoiling what Foreign Office bureaucrats called ‘our market’. After the declaration of Egyptian independence it was important that Britain should be ‘the first in the field’. Means of speeding up the negotiations with Addis Ababa were discussed. The Foreign Office used propaganda about the slavery question in Ethiopia as one means of pressure. Allenby highlighted another route: negotiations would be much facilitated if Tafari was informed that, on their satisfactory conclusion, he would find £10,000 in war loans in his account in the Bank of Abyssinia, in addition to any preliminary payments.116 The Foreign Office and Stack decided that the Sudan Government should assume responsibility for paying compensation to the Government of Ethiopia. So touchy was this issue that Stack considered the matter ‘of too secret a nature’ to be referred formally even to his own council.117 Then the policy-makers were faced with the problem of finance. They were prepared to make themselves dependent upon the cotton lobby, and they were looking for ‘enterprising far-seeing capitalists’, as the Nile expert in the Foreign Office expressed it.118 The Foreign Office approached the cotton industry in England to ask for financial support for a deal,119 since they realised that Allenby’s sum was far too small and that the Sudan Government did not have the funds. The cotton industry confirmed that it was willing to pay Ethiopia what was considered necessary. To the industry the dam was more important than before, especially since it was now realised that the cost of the Gezira irrigation scheme had been greatly underestimated. The area of the scheme would have to be extended beyond the 300,000 feddans agreed upon in order to make the cotton farm profitable. The Foreign Office asked Sir James Currie confidentially for the cotton industry’s opinions on a touchy diplomatic issue. Should Egypt be invited to participate in the financing of the reservoir, or should the reservoir rather be regarded as the ‘most effective lever to induce’ Egypt to agree to new water-sharing arrangements with the Sudan? The Foreign Office wrote that to show its hand at this stage would ‘deprive that lever of much of its power, and would be regarded in Egypt as an admission of an imprescriptible Egyptian right in the waters of Lake Tsana.’120 Currie’s opinion was clear. The time to approach the Egyptian Government would be when the Foreign Office had secured an option to build the reservoir – and not before. The cotton industry wanted British monopoly over the dam as well as more waters for the Gezira. Currie also informed the Foreign Office that the Corporation was willing to advance the necessary money to the Ethiopian Government but on one condition – the Foreign Office should do its best to develop a scheme for implementing the project within 12 months of the date of such an advance.121 The British Government agreed with Currie and disagreed with Allenby. Giving Egypt

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temporary rights to the water, they thought, would weaken the chances of moving the Egyptian Government towards a satisfactory agreement on the irrigation question in the Sudan,122 and it would also affect Britain’s role in Egypt and at Suez.123 It was too early to decide what they should ‘try to get out of Egypt’ in return for a 50 per cent interest in the Tana reservoir.124 A necessary first step was to obtain the goahead from Addis Ababa without the involvement of the Egyptians. London was quite aware of Egyptian agitation against such a project, and realised that excluding Egypt from the negotiations could stiffen Ethiopian resistance to British proposals. Therefore the British did their best to ‘keep the negotiations quiet’.125

Pressure and ‘Baksheesh’ in Addis Ababa The British Government’s plan for Lake Tana faced opposition in Cairo, had support from Khartoum and was struggling with a government in Addis Ababa that was dragging its feet. Initially, London underestimated the degree of Ethiopian resentment, hoping and boasting that some ‘bachshis’ (bribes) would be enough to secure agreement; an initial offer of some thousands of pounds to Ras Tafari was considered. They underestimated his negotiating skills.126 After the Foreign Office had held unofficial consultations with the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation, Claud Russell, Dodd’s successor, was given authority to negotiate with the Abyssinian Government if there was, in his opinion, a reasonable prospect of concluding a satisfactory agreement on the basis of a lump-sum payment in two instalments. The first would be up to a limit of £50,000 on the signature of the lease, and the second up to a limit of £150,000 on the completion of the reservoir and an annual rent up to a limit of £30,000, to date from the completion of the reservoir. Russell accordingly opened discussions in May 1923. In the final British text, Ethiopia would permit Britain to ‘maintain and control the dam as may be necessary after construction’, would grant a ‘lease of land contiguous to the outlet of the lake for the erection thereon of the buildings necessary’, would permit Britain to ‘place steamers and boats on the lake for the transport of materials’ and to ‘construct and maintain a road between Gallabat and Delgi’. In exchange, the British Government would guarantee payment to the Ethiopian Government on conclusion of the Agreement, on completion of the dam and a yearly sum as long as the dam was in use.127 The Ethiopian Government was more difficult to bring on board than the British had expected. Ras Tafari met strong opposition from within his own Government and from the local rulers of the Lake area. Tafari complained that he was being accused in some quarters of ‘selling Lake Tsana to the English’.128 He also complained about the secrecy surrounding the plans, which he claimed weakened his own position internally.129 When Tafari hesitated, Russell tried to threaten him, saying that the dam would be built whether the Government wished it or not. London objected strongly to Russell’s diplomacy of open threats.130 Curzon told him the obvious diplomatic fact:

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that he should bear in mind that ‘His Majesty’s Government are not in a position to threaten the Abyssinian government’.131 A frustrated Russell openly disparaged Tafari, and described him as ‘ignorant, vain and childish’, although, as he admitted in his report to the Prime Minister, it was ‘impossible not to be attracted by his good manners and his unfailing amiability’. Russell argued that Ras Tafari lacked the ‘bulk and stature which impress the Abyssinians’, that he was too humane and too gentle for the task before him, and that the hopes of those will be disappointed who believe that the reign of Ras Tafari will mark an epoch in the history of the country. He also regarded the Government as very weak, stating that it was now two years since the Government had last shown a ‘manifestation of power’.132 It gradually became evident, however, that Ras Tafari was not going to give them the dam at present or as a present. He was more concerned with maintaining Ethiopia’s territorial integrity and reacquiring Eritrea, which he considered part of his land. Eritrea was perhaps the only matter on which all parties in Ethiopia agreed. The way to get it, Tafari thought, was to trade land for water, or to achieve territorial gains by granting London a dam on his lake. London was still hoping that it could get a dam with proper compensation. Allenby, Stack and the Foreign Office had already proposed that the Boma plateau in the southeastern Sudan could be ceded to Addis Ababa, if that would bring them the reservoir.133 In a memo on Lake Tana written in July 1923, the Foreign Office summarised London’s policy: the reservoir should be built immediately because of the water requirements of the Sudan (and the cotton industries) and its political value as a lever. The Foreign Office understood the Ethiopian fear of British territorial footing there by building the dam. The Italians would also oppose it, and the French, ‘on principle, would probably try a deliberate subversion of our scheme unless previously bought off ’. In this situation the British representative in Addis Ababa suggested enlisting the direct support of the French and the Italians and, as compensation, to support the territorial claims of these countries. The ‘valuable asset’ owned by the British in the northern territory of Kenya could, for example, be handed over to the Italians.134 This would put ‘before them a fait accompli’.135 Russell discussed this idea secretly with the Italians in May 1923, against the advice of the Foreign Office.136 In early July the same year, the Foreign Office sent one of its many ciphered telegrams to Russell, instructing him to have ‘no communication’ with the French or Italian Governments. This road should be blocked – at least for the moment. London still hoped for an agreement with the Ras. At the same time they knew that the Egyptians, ‘in their distrust of everything British, would almost rather do away with water than see the British Government secure the concession and actually control the reservoir’.137 In this situation, secrecy was crucial. Owing to Addis Ababa’s suspicion of the British Government, the Foreign Office thought that a single word from the Italian Government, the French Government or the Egyptian press ‘would very likely be enough’ to block further negotiations. Murray also warned against debates in Parliament, since everything that could harm Britain would be commented on ‘at length in the Egyptian press’.138

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Imperial Split on Lake Tana The politics of Lake Tana provoked disagreement among the British Nile strategists, partly reflecting the ‘geography of the office’, or upstream versus downstream perspectives and interests within the British Nile empire. In Egypt, E.M. Dowson, one of the senior British administrators, was furious at British Nile policy and the line for the Tana Dam, which he dramatically phrased as putting a ‘pistol at the head of independent Egypt’. The project would dam the virtual fertiliser of Egypt, and therefore it was regarded in Egypt as more important than the Makwar reservoir from both the economic and the political points of view. The Egyptians would most likely ‘claim the continuance of God’s regimen rather than the imposition of Great Britain’s’. Dowson objected to what he saw as a deliberate abandonment of the principle of unified Nile control, a principle which, he said, the British had defended with success before the war, but which was now being undermined by Britain itself. Dowson argued that opposition to the Tana Dam and other upstream projects would be manageable if Egypt had reason to believe that the control of the dam would be operated in the general interest of both countries, although under British advice. The effectiveness of British control over the waters of the Upper Nile had been ‘as incontestable as its legitimacy’, and because Egypt was so disadvantageously placed, geographically, and ‘impotent politically, she was still wholly dependent on Great Britain not only for the increase but even for the maintenance of her water supply’.139 Dowson’s memo on Nile policies illustrates how Egypt’s geopolitical situation influenced the thinking of some British administrators. Allenby was also critical of the policy of the Foreign Office, since he thought that, if they paid for the cost of the reservoir, Egypt should be given water for a limited number of years. Allenby argued that his proposal should not be regarded as a barrier to water development in the Sudan. After the planned projects on the White Nile were implemented, Egypt would be able to relinquish a larger proportion of Tana water to the Sudan. The Foreign Office rejected this line of reasoning. British rule in the past had demonstrated, they argued, that additional supplies of water in Egypt had been absorbed almost immediately, and the demand for more was rendered ‘scarcely less pressing than before’. Therefore, a promise to relinquish water in favour of the Sudan in the future would never be fulfilled. But, most important, ‘the acquisition of this new water supply by Egypt would rob the planned Lake Albert reservoir of much of its effectiveness as a political lever’. London was of the opinion that the British should ‘make use of whatever levers fate or our own exertions may have placed in our hands’.140 They also had to placate the cotton industry. Currie threatened the Foreign Office that if Allenby’s suggestion became official British policy, it would be ‘most deeply regretted’ by the Corporation, on whom the Foreign Office relied for financial support.141 The Foreign Secretary settled the matter in May 1923. London did not agree that Egypt should be offered more than a half right in the Tana reservoir, in return for a proportional contribution towards the cost of the undertaking, and its acceptance of the complete abandonment of the 300,000-feddan

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limit which had been put on the development of the Gezira. As soon as demand for water increased in the Sudan, Khartoum would take over the full use of the Tana reservoir, on repayment to Egypt of the sum originally contributed by it.142

T H E I TA L I A N FA S C I S T S : B L AC K M A I L O R C O - O P E R AT I O N ?

Then Italy and Mussolini entered the Nile theatre. Rome clearly understood that Egypt’s independence had profound implications for British Nile strategy, not the least since they were very familiar with the secret British overtures to Tafari. Since 1906, the Italians had argued that the Tripartite Agreement of Great Britain, Italy and France entirely altered the prospective position of Italy. Before this Agreement, a territorial connection between the Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland could have been obtained but, since France was given the hinterland of Djibouti and Great Britain the area supplying the Nile, there would be no room for the Italian connection. The Italian Government had never admitted British interests in the Nile waters without at the same time reserving its own claim to a territorial connection between its two African colonies. In meetings Balfour and Lloyd George had rejected this interpretation, but both parties ‘concurred that this was one of the questions to be settled between the Governments at a later stage’. The Italians thought that that time had now come. In October 1922, the Italian Ambassador protested the secret British activities, since, in his words, Lake Tana was a zone which, by well-known precedents, was reserved to Italy. The Italian Government also declared that if the information about British steps to obtain the concession for barrage works on Lake Tana was true, Italy would be obliged to draw attention to the Tripartite Agreement signed in London in 1906. According to this Agreement Britain was to act together with the representatives of France and Italy, or at least to inform them about its intentions. Italy feared that a Tana dam would place Britain in a privileged position over Italy in the very zone where Italy, according to its interpretation of Article 4 of the 1906 Agreement, was given the most important territorial rights, and Britain had rights of a hydrological nature only.143 In the Foreign Office it was exclaimed: ‘This is sheer blackmail’.144 The British Government gave a more diplomatic answer to the Italians. It repudiated Italy’s interpretation of the 1906 Agreement and referred to the Anglo–Ethiopian Agreement of 1902, which, it said, clearly contemplated negotiations in regard to the Tana reservoir between the British and Abyssinian Governments. The Foreign Office also stated that the admission of Abyssinia into the League of Nations replaced the guarantees of integrity given in the same Agreement, and therefore also deprived the ‘spheres of interest’ concept of much of the value Italy attached to it. Curzon rejected Italy’s position, while emphasising in the same diplomatic note to Rome that, owing to the world shortage of cotton, Britain considered that ‘no effort should be spared to increase the area under that crop in the Sudan’.145 To this note there was no Italian reply.

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In November, Russell telegraphed alarming news. The Government in Addis Ababa had announced that it would conduct an independent investigation into the Tana scheme before it took any decision. To Russell this was the end of it; the time had come to break off negotiations.146 London instructed Russell to protest in very strong diplomatic language. Russell again suggested that since Ethiopia refused to co-operate, joint action between Italy and Britain could be undertaken. London could, for example, support Italian plans to construct a road between Eritrea and Ethiopia, presumably from Asmara to Gondar via Adwa. The Foreign Office reassessed the situation. The previous year it had been adamant that, according to the Tripartite Agreement of 1906, control of the waters of the Nile was ‘the sole concern of His Majesty’s Government’.147 In January 1923 the policy had been to defer saying anything to the Italians until Britain was in a position to put before the Italians a ‘fait accompli’.148 The Foreign Office thought the Italians would ask for a good deal more than Russell had indicated, and that he had gone too far in both directions. Britain should not withdraw its support of ‘Abyssinian independence’, and should not offer concessions to Italy, but might be positive to Italian requests for concessions. The Foreign Office thus informed Russell in June 1923 that the time was not yet opportune for an approach to the Italian Government.149 In late November 1923 the Foreign Office abandoned its earlier line. Now ‘Anglo–Italian co-operation’ was seen as the ‘most likely way to overcome Abyssinian obstruction’.150 Russell was informed that one possible offer would be that Italy should open up ‘the fertile Tigre province by a motor road from Eritrea’.151 In the memo, the Italians were said to ‘have plenty of room for expansion before they can get astride of any of the rivers which form the Blue Nile system’. The railway to unite Eritrea and Italian Somaliland was characterised as hopelessly impracticable as a step in the ‘Italian encirclement of Abyssinia’, and as a preliminary step to eventual absorption,152 that should therefore be opposed. Curzon declared that further negotiations with Addis Ababa would serve no useful purpose, and they were brought to a halt. On the same day, the Foreign Office informed Allenby in Cairo that no opportunity would be lost of enlisting Italian support for the scheme.153

Ras Tafari’s Success In 1924, two things happened that surprisingly impacted British policies on Lake Tana: the Labour Party came to power in Britain, and Ras Tafari went on a European tour. Ras Tafari went to Europe to seek support for his country and its policy in the League of Nations. His relations with Britain were at their lowest ebb when he left Addis Ababa. Russell did not even take part in the farewell ceremony at the station on his departure. Ras Tafari enjoyed great success in France, just before arriving in Britain. The Observer wrote that Tafari’s visit delighted Paris owing to his personal conduct and

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dignity. They contrasted him with the notables who accompanied him, who, during their first night in a Marseilles hotel, slept on the mat beside the bed and in the empty bath – boots and all. They had their ‘own way of tasting the joys of French civilisation’.154 The Daily Express wrote, from Paris: ‘He smiled from time to time, and in point of dignity outshone all present. He had the appearance of a deity receiving homage’, and he ‘looked like a miniature in chocolate porcelain as he stepped from the train at the Gare de Lyon’. The attendant dignitaries were described in a very different manner: ‘Burly and fiercely looking, clad in black velvet cloaks, with grey pith hats, they made one realise the force that has kept Ethiopia unconquered throughout the ages’. The Manchester Guardian wrote about his elegance, and the ‘100 per cent blackness of this new Power which rises of its own’.155 The Foreign Office produced thousands of documents related to Ras Tafari’s tour. It was sent detailed reports about what had been going on in other capitals, and assessments of the gifts he had been given. The senior British Foreign Office bureaucrats were troubled by all this: that his tour was such a great success but also that MacDonald wanted a different policy from the Conservatives. Tafari crossed the Channel in a special steamer with an escort of two destroyers. On arrival in London, at Victoria Station, he was met by the Duke of York (later King George VI). The new British Prime Minister considered the visit so important that he had decided to meet the Emperor every day during his one-week official visit. The British Government put pressure on the University of Cambridge to offer him an honorary degree. Three albums of photographs of Lake Tana had been made by the Sudan Government for presentation to Ras Tafari, Ras Hailu and Ras Gugsa. The presentation had been delayed for political reasons. Now it was used by MacDonald. He showed Ras Tafari a nicely bound presentation copy of a book in Amharic called ‘Lake Tsana’ with photographs of scenes at the site of the proposed dam.156 MacDonald hoped that this more positive approach would bear fruit. MacDonald put forth a proposal that was very different from the one that had been submitted to Ras Tafari the year before, by the Conservative Government.157 He suggested that Ethiopia should, in consultation with Britain, appoint a fully qualified engineer to examine the proposals of ‘the Sudan Government for the construction of a reservoir at Lake Tsana and to report to the Ethiopian Government upon them’. MacDonald also suggested, to ensure impartiality, that this engineer might be nominated by the US Government or, if the Ethiopian Government preferred, by the League of Nations. The reservoir should, however, be ‘operated for the benefit of the Sudan Government, in accordance with an agreement to this effect to be negotiated between His Majesty’s Government and the Ethiopian Government’.158 Ras Tafari replied the following week, and apparently agreed to all the points, except one: he would not yet commit himself to how the engineer should be appointed.159 John Murray, the ‘General Secretary’ of British Nile diplomacy for a decade and more, suggested at the same time that it was best to leave the project alone for the present. The right time would come ‘in [the] early part [of] next year’. Then

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MacDonald’s Minister at Addis Ababa should finally present the Empress with King Theodore’s crown, which had been kept in Britain since the British had defeated his troops at Magdala on 10 April 1868. The British could ‘take advantage of the good temper’ to address a formal note referring to the London conversation and asking the Ras to join Britain in asking the US Government to nominate an engineer to prepare a detailed plan and estimate for the reservoir.160 But nothing happened. Meanwhile the British had found that it was impossible to keep the findings of the Tana mission secret any longer, although its publication might confirm and strengthen the fear of the Egyptians and the distrust of European rivals. The question of whether Tafari and his council should ‘be allowed to see’ the report had been discussed earlier. Then it was decided that there was a need to ‘keep secret’ the value of the concessions, which would be discussed freely in the report.161 Publication turned out to be unavoidable, but it was essential that any speculations as to the value of the concession should be omitted.162 The report by Grabham and Black was finally made public in 1925. In line with overall tactical considerations at that time, the whole book started by stressing that the mission from the very beginning had been organised under the Projects Department of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works.163 When Bentinck was sent to Addis Ababa to take up his duties as Minister in April 1925, he was given clear instructions on the urgency of the Tana issue. Official policy was now to enlist Italian support. The problem remained of what to offer Addis Ababa and Ras Tafari in return for the concession. In addition to annual payment, one idea that had been discussed since 1920 was concession of the port of Zeyla.164 A definite decision on Zeyla was postponed, to make it ‘available as a makeweight to throw into the scale in the event of continuous Abyssinian opposition’ to the scheme;165 Zeyla was thus characterised as ‘a weapon in reserve’.166 There was little optimism about obtaining the necessary concessions without joint Italian– British pressure. The British regarded Ras Tafari’s position as still very weak, and further eroded after his visit to Europe. Negotiations with Addis Ababa were postponed until results of Anglo–Italian talks could be ascertained. Then, out of the blue, a Grand Duke, Alexander Mikhailovitch of Russia, briefly entered the Nile scene, and caused alarm at the Foreign Office by mixing religion and water in a very innovative way. The Duke went to Addis Ababa in 1925 with the idea of selling Ras Tafari documents purported to be the title deeds to a portion of the Holy Places at Jerusalem, for generations claimed by the Coptic Church. The Duke’s hope was to extract, in return for these documents, a concession for a dam at Lake Tana! The Foreign Office noted immediately that London should inform the Italian Government about this, since it might ‘make them more ready to help us’.167 Bentinck suggested as a countermove that Britain could offer monastic facilities in Jerusalem in return for Tana.168 London was against such a deal; distribution of monastic facilities was not the business of the Foreign Office.169 These were said to be exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Holy Places Commission (which was yet to be appointed). Instead they would take a strong line with the Orthodox Patriarch to cede to Ras Tafari a room in the Convent of Abraham.170 The Grand

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Duke failed, however, to achieve his aim and left Addis Ababa in August 1925. He accepted the gold rings and elephant tusks given him as gifts from Ras Tafari, but at Djibouti he offered the elephant tusks for sale and disappeared from the history of the Blue Nile basin.

The Secret Deal between Mussolini and Chamberlain Austen Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary in the new Conservative Government, soon decided on the Italian path, strongly supported by the cotton industry. He asked the Sudan Government to place the services of MacGregor of the Nile Commission at the disposal of the British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Ronald Graham.171 Graham was told that London was contemplating enlisting Rome’s support in obtaining the Tana concession.172 Negotiations should start at once, in part because Mussolini now was ‘very friendly disposed’.173 Britain should be willing to recognise Italy’s claims in western Ethiopia to reversionary territorial rights, and to an exclusive economic influence there, involving British support for the grant of economic concessions to Italy. The crux of the matter now centred on the scope of such an ‘exclusive economic influence’. London feared that Italy could demand recognition of its right to use water flowing into the Nile from ‘its’ area. MacGregor insisted that London must claim monopoly over the water, since it was already scarcely sufficient for the Sudan and Egypt. George Schuster, the ‘strong man’ of British Nile politics in the Sudan, argued that this was not a tenable position in light of possible Italian opposition. With reference to Article 4 (a) of the Tripartite Agreement of 1906, he argued that it limited British hydraulic rights by the reservation that ‘due regard (is) paid to local interests’.174 It was untenable to insist on a monopoly over every drop of water, since small, local schemes could use floodwater without detriment to downstream needs. Since hydrological knowledge was still scarce, and in order to avoid being forced to bring Egypt into the negotiations, Schuster argued that the problem should be discussed in more general terms. London’s position should therefore be to ensure that Italy did not interfere with the quantities of water flowing into the Nile, or with the regime of the river, in a manner that might seriously ‘prejudice existing interests or future development’. The issue of sharing Nile waters and the right of water withdrawal in Ethiopia and Eritrea was regarded as the main stumbling block in Anglo–Italian negotiations.175 Now British economic interests acted. The President of the Board of Trade, in London, took the unusual step of writing a long letter to Chamberlain in which he made it clear that it was ‘absolutely necessary to expedite the maximum possible development of cotton growing in the Sudan Gezira’, and that this could not be achieved without a Tana Dam.176 A heavyweight committee was set up to advise on London’s policy: Ashley of the Board of Trade, Sir James Currie, Director of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation, Bentinck and John Murray of the Foreign Office. Their recommendations seconded those of the President of the Board of Trade. Something had to be done immediately. Failure to reach an agreement with

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Ras Tafari was attributed to Italian opposition. The committee therefore concluded that this Italian opposition would have to be ‘bought off ’.177 Finally, after months of preliminary talks, Mussolini and Graham exchanged secret notes about Lake Tana in December 1925. This came to have a profound influence both on British policy in the area and towards Italy, for the next decade and beyond. The original note to the Italian Government started with a statement that Mussolini was well aware of the vital importance of the Blue Nile for irrigation purposes in Egypt and the Sudan, that he had been informed of the negotiations undertaken in Addis Ababa in order to obtain a concession for construction of a barrage at Lake Tana by Britain, acting in a ‘fiduciary capacity for the Sudan Government and mindful of Egyptian interests in the matter’, and that so far these negotiations had led to no practical result. The original note then continues (italics added): I have, therefore, the honour, under instructions from His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to request your Excellency’s support and assistance at Addis Ababa with the Abyssinian Government in order to obtain from them a concession for His Majesty’s Government to construct a barrage at Lake Tsana, together with the right to maintain a corridor road for the passage of stores, personnel, &c, as also the right to maintain an adequate establishment at the lake itself for the upkeep and protection of the dam. His Majesty’s Government, in return, are prepared to support the Italian Government in obtaining from the Abyssinian Government a concession to construct and run a railway from the frontier of Eritrea to the frontier of Italian Somaliland. It would be understood that this railway, together with all the necessary works for its construction and for its running, would have entirely free passage through the corridor road mentioned above.178

Britain also stated that it was ‘prepared to recognise exclusive Italian economic influence in the west of Abyssinia and in the whole of the territory to be crossed’ by the railway, and ‘promised to support all Italian demands for economic concessions in the above zone’.179 Britain and Italy reached an Agreement in which the two countries undertook to give each other support in furtherance of their respective interests in the country. The British Government hoped that the ‘Tsana-notes’ would strengthen their position vis-à-vis Addis Ababa. London hoped that Italian backing could give it more than had been suggested in the proposal of the former Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Then political disaster struck – the existence of this secret agreement with Mussolini became known. Now the British Government was in for a long and complicated, diplomatic and political battle. Ethiopia, as a new member, decided to bring the issue to the League of Nations. The British Government found itself in an awkward position. Whatever it did, it would lose out. To placate public opinion in England, and Ethiopian and French opposition, it had to back away from some of its commitments to Mussolini. By staying close to Mussolini Britain was alienating

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Ethiopia and France. This manoeuvring in murky water required high diplomatic skills and political shrewdness – and London lost out. It had now become unavoidable to publish a version of the Agreement. It would be fatal to Britain’s image and interests worldwide if the notes were published in what was considered their blunt ‘imperialistic’, original form. In the early months of 1926, therefore, the Foreign Office, the Embassies in Paris and Rome and the Minister in Addis Ababa, worked to reword the Agreement. The problem was that the still-secret text could not be changed without Rome’s acceptance. In February 1926, Britain and Italy informed the Ethiopian Government of the Agreement, but did not yet hand over the text. Since the notes were to be published by the League of Nations, London told the Ethiopian Government that Ethiopia should hear of the Notes from them ‘rather than from other sources’.180 In the meantime, the Foreign Office asked Bentinck and Count Colli, the Italian representative in Addis Ababa, to work out an alternative text, which they submitted in March 1926.181 These notes had a less aggressive tone towards Ethiopia, and stated basically that Britain and Italy would support each other in negotiations with the Ethiopian Government. The Foreign Office, however, objected to this new version, because it was unclear on the main point: ‘Our renunciation is doubly contingent a) on our getting Tsana & b) on our getting it with Italian help’.182 Chamberlain told Graham that it was not ‘clear enough on British interests in Lake Tsana and on Italian assistance for getting it’.183 Mussolini disagreed with the changes proposed by Graham in Rome. Italy put forth a counter-proposal: it wanted a ‘transition note’ between the original December Agreement and the new Agreement that was to be published. In May Chamberlain approved Graham’s refusal to this new Italian proposal.184 A few days later it was also decided that the notes prepared by Bentinck and Colli should be abandoned. Bentinck now wrote to London, ‘We are riding for a fall’.185 Instead London and Rome should now accept the notes as ‘originally signed with alterations’.186 These alterations were significant: the word ‘demand’ was replaced by the word ‘request’ throughout; the term ‘corridor road’ was substituted with ‘motor-road’; and the phrase ‘the right to maintain an adequate establishment at the lake itself for the upkeep and protection of the dam’ was deleted. The important thing was to reduce and downplay the impression of territorial control.187 On 15 June Lord Lloyd transmitted to the Egyptian Government what officially was called a ‘copy of the note addressed to the Italian Government on 14 December by His Majesty’s Ambassador at Rome.’188 It had also been communicated to the Abyssinian Government on 9 June and was ultimately to be registered with the secretariat of the League of Nations. In fact it was a fake copy of the original note. Mussolini now had his hand on the British on the Horn of Africa: he knew that the British knew that he could reveal them as liars to world opinion and the League of Nations. The Conservative Government was also acutely aware that any public discussion or parliamentary question might create diplomatic difficulties. In July the Government was informed by the ubiquitous Sir James Currie that Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal MP, planned to raise questions in Parliament about Government policy in relation to Lake Tana. Currie had got word of this and informed his old

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friend in the Foreign Office, John Murray. Murray got permission from the Foreign Secretary to speak ‘freely’ to Wedgwood Benn, telling him that the Government was ‘only pursuing’ the policy that successive Governments had followed in regard to Lake Tana and Abyssinia. The aim was to stop a public discussion, since it ‘would be likely to intensify Abyssinian distrust of our intentions’.189 Chamberlain minuted that ‘we are indebted to Sir James Currie for this action’,190 and Murray noted some days later that it now looked ‘as if the debate would not come off ’.191 When the Foreign Office learned that a question was to be asked on 5 July in Parliament about what the term ‘exclusive economic interests’ for Italy in Abyssinia implied, they asked Graham for advice. What should they say? Would Mussolini accept that, by ‘exclusive Italian economic influence in the west of Abyssinia’, London had ‘intended merely to bind themselves not to press the claims of British subjects competing with Italian concession-seekers in that district’? 192 Graham answered that the words ‘intend merely’ should be omitted. The rest was acceptable, but the Italian ‘feeling is becoming increasingly touchy on the question of Abyssinia and our agreement’.193 When Ras Tafari saw Chamberlain’s public definition of ‘exclusive economic rights’, his dry comment was only that ‘he could not understand why interpretation therein … had not been embodied in the notes’.194 Now Leader of the Opposition, Ramsay MacDonald asked in Parliament whether this Agreement was to be used for the purpose of ‘coercing the Abyssinian Government into granting Italian claims and our own later on’. Chamberlain answered in the negative: it was not to be used for and it ‘cannot be used for the purpose of coercing the Abyssinian Government’.195 Chamberlain wrote to some Commonwealth member states that, in the parliamentary debate, he had had the opportunity to talk of ‘the innocence of British policy’ and the ‘propriety of the action’ of the Government.196 Chamberlain reaffirmed that the notes handed over to the Emperor in June 1926 were identical to the Notes of December 1925.197 In their answer to the League of Nations, the British Government solemnly declared that there was ‘nothing in the Anglo–Italian notes to suggest coercion or the exercise of pressure on the Abyssinian Government’.198 Many did not believe the assurances of Chamberlain and the British Government. The Washington Post, for example, commented that ‘Abyssinia was to go the way of China’.199 In publicly pleasing domestic public opinion, however, the Government weakened the secret commitments given to Italy. The Foreign Office and their man in Addis Ababa developed different opinions about what tactics to follow in this situation. C.H. Bentinck thought it advisable to pay more attention to the needs and sentiments of Ras Tafari and his Government, and complained about London and Khartoum’s lack of understanding of the Ethiopian scene. Bentinck also warned against what he saw as London’s willingness to please the Italians. He thought Britain was giving away the few diplomatic cards it possessed; London complied too quickly with the Agreement, without getting anything in return. Bentinck complained that London had already recognised exclusive Italian economic influence in Western Abyssinia, although the note of 14 December made such an offer conditional on success in the Tana negotiations.200 London thought its

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experience had shown that the only way to success was to work with the Italians. It was regarded as necessary to force Ras Tafari into agreement, or simply to enforce British interests in collusion with Italy. Stronger medicine than mere talk was required. Murray ridiculed Bentinck when he wrote to Chamberlain at the beginning of March 1926, ‘In his anxiety to smooth Ras Tafari’s ruffled plumes it almost looks as though Mr Bentinck had adopted an apologetic attitude’, an attitude, he asserted, that ‘seldom pays in an Eastern Country’.201 Murray also defended the Italian line of the Foreign Office. He stressed that it had been ‘ultra careful to respect the spirit’ of the Agreement. To act in this accommodating way ‘at such an early stage’, Murray suggested, may not ‘be without compensating advantages in the future’.202

Ras Tafari’s Strength and Sorrow While trying to convince Haile Selassie, Bentinck in Addis Ababa worked hard for what was called ‘one white man’s policy’ in Ethiopia. As long as the European powers were not united, it seemed impossible to put enough pressure upon the Ethiopian Government. But the Italians did not want to work together with the French, and vice versa. The Germans told the Emperor that they were his real friends. The Agreement had given London Mussolini’s support, but that was simply not enough, as long as Britain continued to be faced with the ‘conspiring opposition’ of the other European powers. The French feared that the prospective rights that derived from the Tripartite Agreement of 1906 would be prejudiced by the form and contents of the 1925 notes. They wanted the Anglo–Italian Agreement to go up in smoke, as the Foreign Office put it. London went out of its way to explain to the French that the phrase ‘exclusive rights’ was not directed against France or any other nation, only against British subjects ‘on condition – and it is only on that condition – that with Italian support we obtain the Tsana concession’.203 This was also the main reason London was careful to send the public version of the Notes of Exchange first to the French Government. London had yet again underestimated the diplomatic and political skills of Ras Tafari. When on 10 June the Notes had been handed to Tafari,204 he refused to give a direct response. Instead he referred the whole question immediately to the League of Nations. Murray minuted on Ras Tafari’s official reply that the dominant feeling in London was that he ‘evidently is confident that passive obstruction will continue to prove successful’.205 The Foreign Office also minuted that it was difficult to understand how the Abyssinian Government, usually so dilatory in the discharge of business, could act so very expeditiously in this case unless with the help of some foreign supporters.206 The official Ethiopian newspaper Light and Peace published a very critical article on Italian and British intentions regarding Lake Tana. Colli was furious;207 Foreign Office staff in London minuted it as ‘the greatest rubbish’ and ‘so silly’.208 To ease the pressure on Ethiopia, Ras Tafari eventually managed to split what turned out to be a weak Anglo–Italian front. He sent friendly messages to Mussolini in June 1926, after Italy had courted him. Bentinck asked the British

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Government to send a reassuring message to Addis Ababa to counterbalance Italian flirtations. What the Foreign Office called the spirit of the Agreement with the Italians in the beginning of 1926 was gradually eroded on all sides. Britain had so far lost the confidence of Ethiopia and harvested uneasy relations with Italy and France. Nonetheless, it was still regarded as very important to keep the Agreement with Italy. It was at least something – and Britain ‘must not risk losing it’.209 A new British note in May 1927 aimed in part to reassure the Ethiopians that London did not seek territorial control: ‘any rights which may be accorded to His Majesty’s Government to construct works for the control of the water supply at Lake Tsana and the Blue Nile shall not imply any encroachment whatever upon Ethiopia’s sovereignty’.210 But this promise did not remove the apprehension of the Government in Addis Ababa. Tafari thought that Britain’s interests in Ethiopia itself (disregarding Eritrea) were more crucial than Mussolini’s,211 and he had less faith in British motives than in Italian ones at the time. Ras Tafari instead proposed building a dam with Ethiopian funds, if possible, hoping to form a company and then rent surplus water to the Sudan Government. The economy was doing well, so what had been a totally unrealistic project a decade ago now was quite possible. To the great irritation of British Nile strategists, he declared that British subjects would be permitted to buy only a limited number of shares in this company.212 Parallel to this Tafari aimed to develop a modern bureaucracy by recruiting the newly educated elite for government service. He employed foreign advisors in order to speed up modernisation and he also tried to set about abolishing slavery. When the British received this reply to their note they were shocked and bewildered. The Sudan Government considered the wording offensive and impertinent,213 and demanded a reply that set out British rights. Another line was to proceed as if nothing had happened.214 The British Government’s fears had come through; their legation in Ethiopia had already warned that they were dealing with an ‘impossible and dilatory people who would appear all to expect to live as long as Methuselah!’ 215 In 1927 the British were further away from getting such an agreement than perhaps at any time before. Ras Tafari and the Abyssinian leadership feared not only that an eventual agreement would imply that they had ‘sold’ their lake, but also that they would find themselves in a position where they had invited the British to exercise control over the Lake area and the Nile tributaries.216 The maintenance of the proposition that a motor-road should be built from the Sudan to the Lake substantiated this fear. Britain’s alliance with Ethiopia’s historic arch-enemy, beaten at the Battle of Adwa but still occupying Eritrea, increased opposition to signing any deal with the British. Bentinck reported that it was the Agreement with Italy that ‘excited so much suspicion’.217 The fear was now prevalent, he informed Chamberlain, that if the British were to ‘obtain the Tsana concession, we might find an excuse to push the Sudan frontier up as far as the Lake’. Chamberlain reported to the Cabinet that relations with Ethiopia were less than satisfactory and that no progress has been made towards the construction of the Tana Dam.218

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We may demonstrate the diplomatic climate by an example: in December 1927 Ras Tafari’s daughter, visiting England at the time, became mixed up with the subject of Lake Tana. Ras Tafari had sent a letter via the Foreign Office to the King, asking him to take an interest in his daughter while she visited the UK. The Foreign Office refused to pass this on. It was at that time extremely frustrated by whole Tana issue and the Emperor’s actions. The Foreign Office wrote to Bentinck that, in these circumstances, Chamberlain did ‘not feel justified in submitting to the King that His Majesty should pay any regard to His Imperial Highness Tafari Makonnen’s request and therefore he has instructed Mr Bentinck so to inform His Imperial Highness’.219 Bentinck did as he was told, but in writing, and afterwards informed London that Ras Tafari reacted very negatively, and ‘would have her fetched back from England’.220 Murray minuted that Bentinck should not give the impression to the Emperor that ‘coldness to Ras Tafari’s unfortunate little daughter was our only recourse’, and he hoped that Ras Tafari now realised that ‘if he treats our interests with contemptuous disregard we do not propose to propitiate him by gifts & adulation’.221 Bentinck again wrote to London that Tafari was ‘much hurt’ that his daughter should have been mixed up with general diplomatic questions by the British Government.222 Now the Foreign Office had second thoughts, maintaining that the daughter was a card, but one that had to be played less clumsily. Bentinck was not ‘displaying his usual skills & tact’.223 The department had never supposed that Bentinck should include any reference to Ras Tafari’s daughter in an official and formal note to the Abyssinian Government. London had instructed Bentinck to raise the issue, but thought it should be done orally and privately. If this correspondence were published, it ‘would expose us to a charge of breach of good taste, to say the least’.224 Bentinck now proposed to have discovered that ‘there was a misunderstanding of a cypher telegram’ and that London had never intended that the question of Tafari’s daughter should enter the political realm. The Foreign Office agreed, and wrote to Lord Stamfordham that, in the event that Ras Tafari settled ‘the outstanding cases’ referred to by Bentinck, London should convey a message that his wife, the Princess Manen, could count on a warm welcome when she visited Jerusalem and then came to see her daughter in England. Bentinck should state in writing that it never had been London’s intention to mix the Princess’s stay in London with the broader political issues. Bentinck should insist that this incident was closed and refuse to reopen it.225 The same day Buckingham Palace asked the Foreign Office to instruct Bentinck to tell Ras Tafari that Princess Yashimabet had been received by the Queen and that ‘we were charmed by her manner and appearance’.226 Relations with Italy deteriorated. In January 1928 Bentinck informed London that the new Italian Minister was pressing hard for a concession to work coal to the west of Gondar, some 30km from the shore of the Lake, thus openly rejecting British interpretations of the 1906 Treaty and the spirit of the 1925 Agreement.227 He also told them that only the indiscretion of the Counsellor of the Italian Legation (who had an English wife) sometimes ‘lifts the veil’ about Italian activities, and that the Italians were ‘pouring’ weapons into Eritrea. He even reported that his Italian

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colleague was ‘very anxious’ to obtain for his country the concession to construct the Tana Dam. The Legation in Addis Ababa reported secretly to the Foreign Office that they were sure that Italy’s ultimate aim was to obtain in Abyssinia a colony where ‘the excess population of Italy, so sedulously fostered by fascism’, might find an outlet.228 The Foreign Office agreed with this assessment,229 and thought that Italy’s long-term goals were expansionist.230 London acknowledged that they were not much nearer to getting a reservoir built than they had been ‘at any time during the last twenty years’.231 When the British learned about the Italian–Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship, Chamberlain stated publicly that Britain did not object to a mere treaty of friendship and arbitration.232 He had no alternative, owing to the way the Exchange of Notes with Italy had been justified. In reality, all that he had fought for seemed lost. The Foreign Office decided to ‘congratulate Italy on a diplomatic success and Abyssinia on having got rid of those suspicions which were so prominent after the publication of the Anglo–Italian exchange of Notes’. The pact between Italy and Ethiopia was officially signed on 2 August 1928, and declared that there should be ‘unbroken peace and perpetual friendship between the contracting parties’.233 It was time for evaluation of past policy and discussion of a future one. The Foreign Office, in February 1929, argued that Britain should work harder to try to gain some benefits from the 1925 Agreement, since so far it had reaped only disadvantages from the deal. The reason for the setbacks, they summarised, was that they had never really worked in close alliance with the Italians. But it would not be easy to enlist active Italian support for the Lake Tana scheme again, since at this juncture Italy had little need of British support, but this was regarded as the most viable alternative.

The Americans on the Blue Nile! At the end of 1927, Chamberlain was furious at Ras Tafari’s diplomacy for another reason. The Ethiopian Government had ‘with characteristic bad faith’ arrived at an arrangement with an American firm ‘behind our backs’.234 The Ethiopian Government had suddenly and without British knowledge, they claimed, sent Dr Martin to the US to ask an American company to study the possibility of building a dam at Lake Tana. London could hardly believe it – American capital invading the troubled waters of Nile diplomacy – and literally at the headwaters of the Nile! According to sensational reports in many newspapers, Martin had practically concluded an agreement with the American White Engineering Company Ltd.235 The Foreign Office read articles in the Daily Chronicle of 4 November 1927 entitled ‘Nile Dam Scare’, suggesting that the Americans planned to ‘sell water’ to the British for irrigation purposes.236 The British feared that Martin had ‘dazzled’ the Americans, owing partly to what the Foreign Office called ‘their traditions of easy money made in real estate’. They feared that the US Government was involved, since they had known for some time that America intended to have a Minister at

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Addis Ababa.237 The New York Times ran the headline ‘Abyssinia sees independence at stake in the Tsana dispute’.238 The San Francisco Chronicle carried a front-page article, entitled ‘U.S. insists on open door in Abyssinia. Move to push dam project threatens controversy with Great Britain. Italy and France drawn into tangle.’ 239 If the US Government backed this concession for an American firm, London realised they were in for a great diplomatic campaign. Martin, the man Chamberlain had refused to meet and the Foreign Office had addressed ‘in a minatory sense when he called to see one of the officials’, had even met President Coolidge while in Washington.240 The official line of the Foreign Office was to remain cool; they were ‘not alarmed’, relying ‘entirely on their asserted treaty position’ about the Nile question from 1902.241 Soon the British Government had come to terms with the new situation. Twenty-five years of negotiations with Ethiopia had got them nothing but trouble. The secret negotiations with Mussolini had also proved to be a dangerous way. Now they turned to the White Engineering Company as an acceptable, although far from optimal, alternative. They had found out two things: J. G. White was apparently not an entirely American company. The Department of Overseas Trade thought that the British company J.G.White & Co., Ltd ‘was registered to take over all the business outside North America’ of the J.G.White Company in New York.242 This Ras Tafari did not know, and the Foreign Office did not disclose what they thought was their secret. The Foreign Office hoped that the White Company, ‘inspired and discreetly backed by us’, could succeed in obtaining far more than the British could do themselves,243 including the road from the Sudan to the Lake, since it was precisely on such points that it was hoped that ‘American participation may prove of value’. This was not the first time the British attempted to let the Americans work for them, but it ended in failure this time, and in the collapse of the Empire the next time (see chapter 5). Secondly, the Foreign Office hoped that an American company at the headwaters of the Nile might make it easier to strike a deal with the Egyptians, not only about Nile water but subsequently also on larger issues. The American concession caused consternation in Egypt.244 Lord Lloyd also saw opportunities. The US Embassy in London told the British Government that the White Corporation did not contemplate going ahead unless and until the Ethiopian Government had reached an understanding with Britain and the Egyptian Government.245 London went out of its way to give Egypt information on the activities of the Americans,246 obviously in order to activate their downstream complex while at the same time underlining the crucial and beneficial role of the British in securing their water. An American firm at the headwaters of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia was one reason the British now pushed for a Nile Waters Agreement with Egypt (see chapter 4). At a time when the US was taking ‘an official interest’ in Lake Tana,247 Lord Lloyd repeated his worry from Cairo. He argued for the necessity of stating one principle at the very beginning of discussions: that there should be no American control after construction. That must be in the hands of the Sudan Government.248 He wanted to use the Americans for what they were worth in his dealings with the Egyptians, and the Foreign Office agreed. The dealings of the Foreign Office itself with the

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White Company had to be kept as ‘secret’ as possible. It would be disastrous if these were to become known to the Ethiopians before the company and the Foreign Office had come to an understanding.249 The Foreign Office agreed to these tactics. The British should again first approach the Emperor and afterwards, if it was thought desirable, Italy could be informed.250 The Company was also interested in secrecy, not because they were doing something wrong, they argued, but because of Ethiopian distrust and German competition.251 The Foreign Office also had tactical issues to consider in its relations with the American firm. London could not approach the company through official channels, since that would involve an official admission that the British were ready to abandon some of their claimed treaty rights. The Sudan Government should deal with the company.252 The Foreign Office sent Fraser, who had worked in the Sudan for years and therefore knew the details of the Nile question, to the US. J. P. Morgan and Company invited the White Company to come to London to discuss the issue with the Sudan Government as the Foreign Office had requested. Executives of the White Company were willing to co-operate but declined to act as ‘the agent of the British Government in undertaking the work’.253 London wanted to go slowly until it knew that the Company were ‘willing to play the part we design for them’, once more grossly overestimating British power to shape events. The company was particularly critical of plans for the road from the Sudanese frontier to the Lake, since it knew that the Ethiopians especially feared ulterior motives behind the proposal. If London made that a sine qua non, Ethiopia would at once drop the whole scheme, White argued.254 The Foreign Office answered privately that the reason for the road proposal was purely economic: to bring machinery and material from Port Sudan through the Sudan and up to the Lake area would be cheaper.255 In 1928, London informed the Emperor that it had heard that the Ethiopian Government was ‘contemplating arranging for the construction of the dam to be undertaken by the US firm of J.G.White and Company’ and, playing the role of an outsider, stated that the British Government would be glad to ‘learn at an early date the terms upon which the Ethiopian Government contemplate granting the concession’.256 Ras Tafari informed Britain officially that Ethiopia would contract with the White Company, and that after concluding a suitable agreement would show this to the British Government.257 Now the time had come for the British to say to the White Company that if it was prepared to do this business on lines the British approved and to co-operate with London frankly and wholeheartedly in every detail, then ‘we will back you in every possible way’. London hoped that the company understood that, without British consent, it could not do anything. And if the British were really satisfied that the company ‘would play the game’, London could leave the final negotiations to be undertaken in Addis Ababa. This should not, they hoped, be a three-cornered business, however, but a united front against Ethiopia.258

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U P P E R W H I T E N I L E – P L A N S O N PA P E R

In Egypt public opinion and the nationalist press asserted again and again that the region of the Upper White Nile and the Equatorial Lakes was an unredeemed portion of the Egyptian Sudan. Muhammad Ali’s and Ismail’s dreams of an Equatorial Egypt had not died. Their efforts to establish administrative control in these areas, partly by employing Europeans such as Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon and Emin Pasha, had created an interest constantly held alive by Egyptian nationalism. The Egyptians were therefore naturally particularly concerned about British schemes there, but British interest in the area had much diminished since the Garstin-Cromer regime. The 1920 plan described the Upper White Nile as a river that should be exploited for the benefit of Egypt, more or less along the same lines as Garstin’s plan from 1904. In addition, MacDonald’s projects should compensate Egypt for water taken for the Gezira. The 1920 report stated that the plans for the Upper White Nile would make it possible to send down through the sudd and to the White Nile a fantastic 1900 cubic metres per second during the eight months of scarcity each year, by abolishing the Sudd area permanently.259 By drying up the whole swamp, a new and firmer riverbed could be constructed. But the plan was unrealistic, and mainly diplomatically motivated. MacDonald glossed over the difficulties that water planning on the Upper White Nile had met with since the publication of the 1904 report, when Garstin had repeatedly emphasised that the plan would be ‘one of the most important ever taken in hand by hydraulic engineers’. It would mean altering the regimen of a great river, upon a scale larger than had ever yet been attempted. Garstin stressed that it therefore was ‘imperative that before coming to a decision we should have before us the fullest information possible’.260 His Annual Report for 1906 stressed the need for extensive surveys in order to decide which alternative to choose. In addition to surveying and levelling, a regular series of discharge measurements of the river and its affluents would have to be instituted. Gauges for the registration of the water levels would have to be erected and houses built for the staff. Between 1902 and 1922, the Ministry of Public Works established 39 river gauge stations between Khartoum and Nimule, on the White Nile and Bahr al-Jabal, four on the River Sobat, one on the River Baro, two on the River Pibor, nine on the Bahr al-Zaraf, four on the Bahr al-Ghazal and one on the River Jur. Many of them were read regularly, several times a month, for decades.261 In 1899 there had not been more than a few places in the Nile basin where rainfall was measured regularly. In 1904 there were already 40 stations south of Berber.262 By 1905 the number of stations had grown to 78.263 In addition, the Ministry in Cairo organised rain data collection from all over the catchment area. It employed scientists at the British Legation in Addis Ababa, and from Uganda and Kenya rainfall data was communicated monthly by the directors of the Scientific Department. To carry out such studies on the Upper White Nile was not easy, owing to the vastness of the area, the unhealthiness of the climate, and the difficulties associated with labour, transport and supply. In 1906 Dupuis reported on the setting up of iron telegraph posts ‘every fifth

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kilometre between Taufikia and Lake No and on the lower two hundred kilometres of the Zeraf and Bahr el Gebel’, and that a small ‘native colony was established to provide’ the nucleus of what later developed into a British-manned Egyptian irrigation headquarters on the Upper Nile.264 This made the work there more pleasant, but brick houses and a tennis court at headquarters did not make research and surveys in the swamps much easier. The technical and logistical difficulties encountered were considerable. Two steamers were ordered from Britain for the use of the irrigation service on the Upper Nile. The barge conveying various portions of these boats to Wadi Halfa sank in the Nile during flood. The new machinery sent for excavation trials in 1907 was the most potent symbol of modernity in the Southern Sudan; ‘a large dipper dredger, a powerful grab dredger, a tow-boat, and six large coal barges…’ 265 All this research had not reduced the uncertainties about what to do, and since no one at the time really wanted the canal, there was no pressure to come up with a final solution. P.M.Tottenham, then Inspector-General of Irrigation for the Sudan (1909-15), disagreed with the Garstin Cut. Instead of this very large-scale project, he wanted to encourage the idea of improved embanking and enlarging the natural river channels.266 In 1913, ‘work in the swamp region’ was suspended. Because of the Great War, little more was done until 1923.267 So when MacDonald suggested, in 1919, that by 1940 they would have built a 40 billion cubic metres storage dam at Lake Albert, regulated Lake Victoria and completed the sudd channel, sending down the White Nile 1900 cubic metres per second during the months of scarcity each year, this was not based on new research, but at best on wishful thinking – with a political motive. In the autumn of 1921, the Egyptian Government decided to send a team to survey the Nile from Nimule to Lake Albert in Uganda. The Nile Projects Commission had seconded MacDonald’s proposal and recommended establishment of an Upper White Nile Division, in order to carry out more extensive surveys of the area. The Division was to be headed by Tottenham. This mission obtained immediate support both from the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office, in line with British upstream policy. In mid-1922, Allenby discussed the Upper Nile survey, this time with Balfour.268 In June 1923 a report on the mission was submitted to the Egyptian Minister of Public Works. The report should primarily be seen as a diplomatic move to remind the Egyptians about their downstream position.269 Hydrologically the report is uninteresting. The Sudd Scheme, which everyone since Garstin’s report in 1899 had agreed would have to be implemented before any reservoir on the Lakes would be of any use, was not discussed. Tottenham focused rather on the construction of a dam close to the outlet from Lake Albert. He also underlined in his note to the Egyptian Government that ‘every proposal would have to be forwarded to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London’,270 which impressed on the Egyptian ministry Cairo’s dependency on London. Dupuis also raised public objections to the Garstin Cut the same year, saying now that he had never been able to convince himself that this proposal had sufficient advantages to compensate for its ‘colossal cost and difficulty’. He admitted that nothing had

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been done in the swamps between 1913 and 1923 and made a plea for the Jabal Auliya Dam.271 Then, almost out of the blue, in 1925 the Egyptian Government approved a project for the Upper Nile in the swamp region, submitted by W.D.Roberts in May of that year. It approved an initial credit of E£1.1 million for canalisation of the ‘Sudd’. The plan more or less followed the Garstin Cut. A direct channel should be cut from Bor to a point at kilometre 200 on the Bahr al-Zaraf and from their embankment of the bed of the Bahr al-Zaraf should be cut. The cost was spread over five consecutive budgets with a further annual expenditure of E£100,000 for the following 15 years. This decision was not so much a sign of a powerful will on the part of Egypt finally to implement the project, but rather a means of maintaining an Egyptian presence in the Sudan. The year before, the Egyptians had been driven out of the Sudan in the wake of the Allenby ultimatum. The execution of water projects implied the existence of Egyptian Government machinery in a country from which, in all other areas of activity, they had been expelled by the British. The preparations therefore dragged on. While the water-planners argued the need for more studies, the Egyptian Government approved a specific project for mainly political reasons, and the Foreign Office urged immediate implementation of this upstream project in Britishcontrolled territory, arguing that studies of the sudd project were ‘sufficiently completed’ and that work could start immediately.272

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Nile Diplomacy, Bog Barons and War

His Majesty’s Government are indeed in the position of being able to threaten Egypt with the reduction of her water supply, and this is sufficient in itself to create a feeling of anxiety and resentment in Egyptians; on the other hand His Majesty’s Government cannot offer to increase the water supply of Egypt unless the construction of the Tsana reservoir is undertaken. Once this work is completed they will be able, without in any way abandoning their power to damage Egypt by reducing the supply, to tranquillise Egyptian anxiety by offering to increase that supply to a very great extent.1 (Foreign Office memorandum, 1922)

By the late 1920s, the pioneers of British Nile policies, Cromer and Garstin, Kitchener and Dupuis, Wingate and MacDonald, had all left the scene.2 Egypt had won formal independence, but also disclosed its vulnerable geopolitical position as a downstream state. The Egyptian nationalists sought control of the Nile and regarded the Sudan as an integral part of Egypt. Britain had ‘lost’ Egypt, but was a strong upstream power. London had both the financial and technological capacity to control, or threaten to control, the river upstream. Britain had exploited this geopolitical asset against the Egyptian nationalists, and wanted to use it to develop Sudanese identity vis-à-vis Egypt. Water withdrawals in the Sudan and the plans for the Lake Tana reservoir became keystones in London’s efforts to maintain regional influence. Developments in long-staple cotton production in Egypt, and changes in the 139

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international cotton market, had made the Gezira Scheme more important to British industries and also to Sudanese finances. The planned expansion of this scheme made the Lake Tana reservoir crucial to British economic and administrative policies in the Sudan, and to the new economic and political Sudanese elite on which Britain based its rule. London had tried to negotiate with Ras Tafari, Mussolini and an American firm, but after more than 25 years of diplomatic activity the prospect of the dam was as bleak as ever. The British Government’s desperate but disastrous attempt to reach agreement with Mussolini on Lake Tana, the need for urgency regarding White Nile projects and the pressure from the Sudan Government and the cotton industries for more waters to the Gezira put London in a difficult position. They had to improve the Empire’s public image in the valley as well as to establish a system for Nile development that was realistic and expansive. London, moreover, clearly realised that there would be no chance of negotiating a new overall treaty with Egypt on the outstanding issues, unless the political damage of the Nile ultimatum was repaired. The British strategists had reassessed the policy of Cromer and Garstin, now described as being ‘too closely associated with exclusive Egyptian control’ of the Nile and partly responsible for what was called the ‘monopolistic attitude’ so deeply ingrained in Egyptian public opinion. The basin-wide perspective was rejected, but the Foreign Office in London tried to maintain the role previously held by Cromer and Garstin, as a kind of General Command of Nile development. This is a story of how they did not succeed. The Foreign Office in London regarded itself during this period as the natural control centre and think-tank for utilisation of the Nile. When Allenby had suggested that Britain might consider it expedient to seek from the League of Nations a British mandate for the Nile and its waters, as distinct from any territorial question, it was unrealistic but expressed the importance given to the Nile. Sitting at their desks in Whitehall close to the Thames, the British politicians and foreign policy bureaucrats tended to conceive of the Nile as a river in which Britain had both an interest and a duty to control. In the coming decade they not only faced nationalists, kings, emperors and rival European powers in the Nile valley, but they also shut the mouths of British companies, deceived the Colonial Office and lied to their own people. Their very complex imperial, political instruments did not make it easier: in Egypt, Britain had a High Commissioner until 1936, and then an Ambassador with special powers. The Sudan was ruled from the Foreign Office in London, Uganda was under the Colonial Office. Tanganyika was ruled by a British Governor and Commander in Chief, after Britain under the Treaty of Versailles (1919) had received a League of Nations mandate to administer the territory. In Ethiopia, finally, London had a British representative. The administrative set-up was one of many factors that contributed to the developing contradictions. The idea of a kind of General Command of Nile control turned out to be a naïve illusion. This chapter is therefore also partly an analysis of politicians and foreign policy bureaucrats trying to formulate a clear policy in a complex physical, economic and cultural environment, which they neither fully understood nor were able to control.

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The story is organised around three interrelated events and topics: the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929, the Italian occupation of Ethiopia and the Aswan Dam issue in the 1930s. These cannot be understood unless related in great detail and unless the character of the overriding Nile discourse is reconstructed in its empirical richness (giving many quotations). The story will follow hitherto unrecognised lines of historical importance and theoretical relevance, and move between the Emperor’s Palace in Addis Ababa and the King’s Palace in Cairo, from Whitehall in London to the Duce’s headquarters in Rome, and from the closed rooms of major Western companies to farmers and cattle nomads on the Sudan plains and priests in the Ethiopian highlands. These events are interconnected in a special way, because of the physical character of the Nile and the specific ideas the different actors had about the river. The chapter identifies complicated global, regional and local lines of frenetic activities – all of which revolved around the Nile and its exploitation.

T H E N I L E WAT E R S AG R E E M E N T O F 1 9 2 9

In early 1925 the Egyptian Prime Minister, Ahmad Ziwar Pasha, asked Allenby to revoke the instructions in his Nile ultimatum, which had so infuriated and shocked the Egyptian public. When, on 7 May 1929, Lord Lloyd, in a letter to the Egyptian Government, emphasised that Britain committed itself to guaranteeing Egypt its future water supply, this in rhetorical terms reversed the Allenby ultimatum. Lloyd wrote that the British Government regarded the safeguarding of those rights as a ‘fundamental principle’ of its policy, which would be observed at ‘all times and under all conditions’.3 London also accepted the judicial principle that the first user of the water of any stream, i.e. Egypt in this case, should have a voice in the disposal of all its waters. But what had happened and what did the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929 mean, and why was it a tragedy for some parts of the Nile basin but a blessing for other parts? It was definitely an important moment in the history of the Nile valley, and in the history of international river basin management in general. As an Agreement on the allocation of international river waters, it has been hailed as one of the first of its kind in the world. In the literature it has been celebrated as an act of statesmanship, but what was the geopolitical context and background to the Exchange of Notes, and what regional and local impacts did it have? Ziwar, who had unconditionally acceded to all British demands when taking power after Zaghlul resigned, complained in 1925 that the Egyptian Government had always maintained that the development of irrigation in the Sudan must in no way be of such a nature as to damage irrigation in Egypt or to prejudice future projects crucial to meeting the needs of the country. He felt that ‘this principle’ had been fully admitted by His Britannic Majesty’s Government in the past.4 This gave London an opportunity to declare a shift in policy. Allenby replied the same day that the British Government was disposed to direct the Sudan Government ‘not to give effect’ to the previous instructions mentioned in his ultimatum.5 The British

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line was now again to tell the Egyptians that only they could guarantee them the water they needed, a guarantee less trustworthy than before, it is true, but on the other hand carrying more political weight, perhaps, since they had already once proved the power of upstream control. London now wanted to be seen as a kind of broker between the more aggressive Nile policy being followed by the Sudan Government on the one hand and Egypt on the other. The British strategists now aimed to convince the Egyptian general public that Egypt would be compensated for water taken at Sennar – with London’s help. At the same time it was strategically important to break down what London called the ‘monopolistic attitude’ of Egyptians to the Nile waters. Since 1920 they had been discussing whether to establish some kind of Nile Board or Nile Commission that could bring more actors and more countries onto the Nile scene. After repeated initiatives from London, a Nile Water Commission was appointed in 1925. Officially its purpose was to examine and propose a basis on which irrigation in the Sudan could be carried out with full consideration of the interests of Egypt, and ‘without detriment to her natural and historic rights’.6 The aims became far less ambitious owing to Egyptian opposition. It originally had three members, but the chairman from the Netherlands died in June 1925. The other two members were R.M.MacGregor, representing the Sudan Government, and ‘Abd al-Hamid Pasha Sulayman, the Egyptian representative. In February 1926 they produced a final report.7 The Commission represented an important break with the past, and its report reflected the new political map in the basin; it is an example of the political pedagogy of water reports in international river basins. For the first time in the river’s long history, a representative of an upstream state (the Sudan Government) could discuss Nile waters on an equal footing with Egypt. The Sudan was also given the permission to have an Irrigation Department under Khartoum’s authority. The Commission formally accepted the Sudan’s right to withdraw water for Gezira. The Report concluded, on the other hand, that Egypt should be ‘able to count on receiving all assistance from the administrative authorities in the Sudan in respect of schemes undertaken in the Sudan’,8 and it was emphasised that the Sudan should accept a limited rate of irrigation development.9 In a shorter time perspective it was significant that the Commission abolished the limitation on the cultivated area in the Gezira and substituted for it a volumetric limitation. There were obvious technical and practical arguments for this since it established a more controllable and flexible system. But this change also gave the Sudan an additional benefit that neither the British nor the Sudan Government disclosed. MacGregor knew that the official required water–feddan ratio in the Gezira had been grossly inflated by MacDonald.10 Thus more land could be irrigated per cubic metre of water. MacGregor calculated that it would be possible to extend the Gezira by about 1 million feddans without extracting more water from the river. Allenby informed the Foreign Secretary of this discovery. The experts disagreed about how many feddans could now be watered, but the implication was that the Allenby ultimatum turned out to have been unnecessary from a hydrological point of view. His Majesty’s Government was subsequently given much more leeway

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with the cotton industry and the Sudan Government. They could have an enlarged cotton farm in the Sudan, while London at the same time could try to repair the political damage done in Egypt. What has been interpreted in the literature as a rapid British ‘change of mind’ regarding Egypt was, therefore, partly a result of other things; MacDonald’s inflated water–feddan ratios, published in 1919 and 1920, turned out to be of great hydropolitical advantage in the late 1920s. London could, overnight if it so wanted, almost double the irrigated area in the Sudan without taking from Egypt more of the Nile waters, waters which the Egyptians still considered as their own. To the Sudan Government it was crucial that the Commission should make it clear that their figures on water needs were not to be taken as necessarily representing the maximum quantity the Sudan might take without prejudicing Egyptian interests. Water requirements at national level are difficult to establish anywhere in the world, and in a large, undeveloped country, such as the Sudan was in the 1920s, the task was almost impossible to accomplish on scientific grounds. (At the end of the 1930s the British estimated the Sudan’s requirements to be about six billion cubic metres, or about 10 per cent of Egypt’s requirements, while at the beginning of the 1920s these same requirements were considered to be less than one billion cubic metres.) Khartoum also argued that the Commission should stress that they had not considered the question of rights, but had looked at the position solely from the point of view of proposing practical arrangements which could meet the actual requirements of the two countries over the next few years. Khartoum feared that possible restrictions recommended by the Commission might bind the Sudan forever to limits which were not acceptable. The British Government agreed, and the report was formulated in such a way that both parties could be satisfied for the present. The need to decide between conflicting interests did not arise and was postponed. The conclusions and recommendations of the Commission were neither accepted nor rejected by the Egyptian Government. But London thought that the Nile Water Commission was at least a step in the right direction in a period when most other things were going against them in Egypt. When Allenby left office, in May 1925, he was succeeded by Lord Lloyd and in April 1927 Adly Yeghen Pasha resigned, succeeded by ‘Abd al-Khaliq Tharwat, or Sarwat Pasha, a Liberal Constitutionalist. He negotiated a draft treaty with the British Foreign Secretary, but it failed to win the approval of the Wafd. Then, in the midst of Lloyd’s authoritarian efforts to restrict the activities of opposition parties, and while dispatching the British fleet to Alexandria to back up the British claim that the Inspector-General’s service as Sirdar of the Egyptian army should be extended, the High Commissioner sent a confidential letter to Chamberlain in which he proposed to offer Egypt a Nile settlement that could form the basis of a much wider settlement between the two countries.11 Britain should confirm that Egypt, as a result of its physical configuration, must rely to a greater extent than the Sudan on irrigation works, and that it must therefore exercise an influence on the general development of works designed to store the waters of the Nile. Britain would give the Egyptian Government ‘all possible assistance’. In view

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of the news that the British had helped to spread in Egypt – about the American firm in Addis Ababa and the plans of the Emperor to build his own dam at Lake Tana – these assurances were regarded as important by the Egyptians. But Lord Lloyd’s proposals were subject to important conditions: the Egyptian Government should ‘avail themselves of the opportunities thereby offered’, i.e. work together with the British Government in carrying out ‘without unreasonable delay’ a development programme on the Nile.12 The British intentions with the Nile Waters Agreement should not simply be seen as institutionalisation of some kind of sudden altruism, but rather as a diplomatic tactic within a difficult and contentious political and hydropolitical situation. Lord Lloyd has been characterised as ‘a champion of the rigid safeguarding of British interest in Egypt’.13 In this case he showed tactical flexibility to secure imperial interests. Lloyd hoped that British goodwill regarding the water question would further what was already considered a positive development in Anglo–Egyptian relations and Egyptian Nile politics. Considering the next moves, Lloyd reported optimistically to his Foreign Secretary that Egypt apparently had concrete plans for the Upper Nile. An Egyptian Public Works Commission (of which Butcher was a prominent member) had criticised the slow progress on the Upper Nile.14 The Foreign Office thought it therefore possible that the Egyptian Government, before it finally decided to heighten the Aswan Dam, would start work in the Upper Nile.15 But London was again disappointed that Egypt opted for raising the Aswan Dam rather than developing the White Nile reservoirs. The Foreign Office noted that this was ‘wholly detrimental to British interests’. Still Chamberlain supported Lloyd’s diplomatic efforts and wrote that he should ‘not relax’ in reaching agreement with Egypt on the water issue.16 Lord Lloyd and London took steps to bring the Uganda Government into line. It was important that Uganda should not publicly protest against British-sponsored water plans upstream nor demand compensation from Egypt at this particular moment. Such would be premature and only infuriate the Egyptians. The longterm aim was to stress the necessity for a ‘comprehensive agreement’ regarding construction and operation of works that were not in Egyptian territory, and for which the consent of both the Sudan and Uganda Governments would be necessary.17 Lloyd knew that Egyptian opinion feared unjust attempts to make use of Britain’s geographical position.18 Lord Lloyd’s proposals were not handed over, now because the Egyptian Government rejected the Treaty of Alliance.19 But it was important to London that an agreement should be in place before more control works were carried out. The Egyptian Government proposed instead that works could be started before any such agreement was made, since this latter arrangement would increase what Egypt considered its ‘established rights’. Egypt wanted to raise the height of the Aswan Dam for a second time without having to discuss water allocation with the Sudan, while Britain wanted Egypt to take part in the upstream schemes in some way or another, but only if there existed an allocation agreement. London thus had to win over those in Khartoum who regarded such an allocation agreement as premature.

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For its part, the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt told Lloyd that it could not accept any abdication of the control hitherto appertaining to it in the valley as such, owing to public disapproval. To the Ministry a Nile Board was a bad idea. Tharwat resigned in March 1928, and Mustafa al-Nahhas (Nahas) Pasha, Zaghlul’s successor as leader of the Wafd, became Prime Minister. The negotiations did not make much progress. The King dismissed Nahas in June and dissolved Parliament in July. In effect, the constitution was suspended, and Egypt was again governed by royal decree under a Liberal Constitutionalist Premier, Muhammad Mahmud Pasha. An agreement on the Nile became more likely. Negotiations took place against a background of serious water shortages in Egypt and conflicts over its use. The 1928 flow was very low. One example among thousands can be given: in April, Lord Lloyd wrote to Chamberlain about the difficulties a British cotton growing firm, the Aboukir Company, was facing owing to water shortages.20 The shortage was particularly marked in the province of Behera, where the company had its lands. The company had explained that, at the time of their complaint, there were six working days and twelve days of stoppage. On 30 March, which was the last of the six working days, the manager cabled that no water had arrived within 5km of the tail of the canals. The land would be without water for at least 30 days.21 The result, it was thought, was that thousands of feddans would have to go out of cultivation. In this water scarcity situation, as the High Commissioner was sitting down at Easter time to write a telegram to the Foreign Secretary in London about how water had arrived five miles from the tail of the canals that gave life to the cotton seed in the province of Behera, the importance of breaking the deadlock on Nile control was evident. The Nile Waters Agreement, consisting of an Exchange of Notes in May 1929 between the British High Commissioner in Egypt and the Egyptian Government, provided a legal framework for water use and allocation in the whole basin. It came to have a profound impact not only on Anglo–Egyptian relations and relations between Egypt and the Sudan, but also on economic development in Uganda, the Southern Sudan and Ethiopia. An intriguing aspect of the Agreement was that the exchange itself did not define the water rights in quantitative terms. It was accompanied by the 1920 Nile Projects Commission report. This suggested that Egypt should be guaranteed sufficient water to irrigate the maximum acreage cultivated up to that time, 5 million feddans. On that basis quantitative estimates were derived that gave Egypt acquired rights to 48 billion cubic metres. The other Nile valley countries were left out of the picture. The entire flow of the main Nile was reserved for Egypt during the dry season. Egypt was further guaranteed that no works that might prejudice its interests could be executed on the river or any of its tributaries upstream.22 After 15 July, the Sudan was entitled to take water for the Gezira Scheme up to certain maximum daily rates, in order to fill the Sennar reservoir, and to flood the area developed under basin irrigation downstream of Khartoum. Although this paltry increase was a far cry from the maximum demands from the Sudan,23 it was a step in the right direction for Khartoum. The Agreement broke what they called Egypt’s ‘monopolistic’ attitude to the Nile waters. London

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was to facilitate the establishment of waterworks upstream for the benefit of Egypt; the share of the Sudan in the Blue Nile was dependent upon the amount of water Egypt could draw from other tributaries. The Agreement has been characterised as being ‘solely for the benefit of Egypt’.24 It was obviously strongly biased in favour of Egypt, but this assessment ignores the intricacy of Nile diplomacy and regional hydropolitics. To London it was seen as a necessary stepping-stone towards a new general treaty with Egypt, and it was far less biased than the water policies of Salisbury, Cromer and Garstin. London succeeded in allocating more water to the Sudan, and this was formally acknowledged by Egypt. A very important aspect of the Agreement was that any extension of large-scale irrigation in either the Northern Sudan or Egypt was regarded as presupposing the exploitation, conservation or damming of upstream waters. By giving the Sudan a legal role in Nile development, London also hoped to realise its role as the key which held Egypt at its mercy. After all, only two years before, a leading British water expert could still justifiably write that the Sudan Branch’s main object was to collect hydrological information and study projects for the increase of the Egyptian water supply, while the Inspector-General of Irrigation in the Sudan with his headquarters at Khartoum was responsible to the Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Public Works in Cairo.25 The Exchange of Notes was silent on what has been called in the literature ‘the real issue’ – a plan for hydrological development of the entire Nile basin. It has therefore been described as a testimony to ‘a lost opportunity, a tragedy’, and the 1929 Agreement’s ‘limited achievements’ are reflected in the scant subsequent enthusiasm for more ‘cement and stone for conservancy projects’.26 But it was unrealistic at the time that the parties should agree to such a plan – both on technological and economic grounds and especially for political reasons. Britain wanted Egypt to implement projects upstream, while Egypt feared such projects and favoured, instead, the heightening of the Aswan Dam because it was within Egypt’s borders. The Egyptian nationalists were definitely not in the mood to join hands with their British foe to develop their life artery, although they grudgingly accepted the Jabal Auliya reservoir. The Tana Dam could not be part of an official agreement since it would be in Ethiopian territory, and on the Upper White Nile still more research had to be done. ‘Black Thursday’ on Wall Street, just a few months after the Exchange of Notes, made investors less enthusiastic for more cement and stone anywhere in the world. One long-term impact was that the Agreement established the Nile basin and Nile waters de jure as more than Egypt’s backyard. One clause declared that, in the case of the Egyptian Government’s deciding to construct any works on the river in the Sudan, they had to agree beforehand with the local authorities on the measures to be taken for safeguarding local interests.27 Sir John Maffey, the Governor-General, immediately interpreted the Agreement to the effect that no waterworks could be undertaken in the Sudan without the Government’s consent and that such consent must be withheld unless the Sudan Government was satisfied that the work would be carried out efficiently and with its co-operation. Maffey thus thought that the Sudan had been

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given an effective veto on any work, unless arrangements which, in its opinion, were adequate were made to safeguard local interests. The British in Khartoum, Cairo and London privately discussed this interpretation. The Foreign Office argued that Maffey overestimated the strength of the Sudan Government, since there was nothing in the Agreement that forced Egypt to seek consent from the Sudan, although in most cases this would be a reasonable interpretation of ‘local authorities’. The Government of Uganda protested and ‘expressed uneasiness’, as did the Colonial Office, because the Agreement deprived Uganda of any right to exploit the Nile waters in the country (the same was the case for Tanganyika and Kenya). The Foreign Office knew but accepted that the freedom of Uganda would be ‘restricted’.28 The Government of Uganda hoped that the Agreement would lapse when the projects described in the Nile Commission’s report of 1925 had been implemented (the Jabal Auliya Dam and Nag Hammadi Barrage). They were resting their hope on an illusion: that ‘any obligations which it entails on the Government of Uganda will thereby be abrogated’.29 They grudgingly accepted the limitations put on their development in the short run, since they thought the Agreement would be renegotiated rather soon.30 No one asked Ethiopia its opinion at the time, and London insisted that the 1902 Exchange of Notes was legally binding and still in force. The poor and illiterate peoples of the Southern Sudan, living in areas where extra water was to be harvested for downstream use, were ignorant of the plans and of the implications of the Nile Waters Agreement for their economy. The Colonial Office in London was very sceptical about the Agreement, because it hindered development in Uganda. The Foreign Office had given a verbal assurance to the Colonial Office that the Nile Agreement would be effective only until works contemplated in the Nile Commission’s report had been completed,31 knowing full well that the final sentence of Lord Lloyd’s letter of 7 May gave the most positive assurances that the Agreement would be observed at all times and under any circumstances that might arise. The Foreign Office could not completely go back on what it had told the Colonial Office, and Murray subsequently wrote a proposed text to the Governor of Uganda to be sent from the Colonial Office, in which it was emphasised that the Agreement was meant to be temporary: ‘on the completion of the works contemplated in the Agreement it will be possible to re-examine the situation as it then exists, and to take into account any requirements of Uganda and other British territories concerned which may then call for special consideration’.32 The Upper Nile region was still conceived of by both parties as a barrel filled with water. Although Egypt was given the lion’s share of the Nile water, the allocation system formulated in the 1929 Agreement was basically in line with overall British strategy in the valley. It turned planning conceptions of the past into a binding diplomatic agreement with important implications for the future: London favoured the central riverine Sudan over the Southern periphery, and their relations with Egypt over those with the Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia. London hoped that the Exchange of Notes on Nile water allocation would improve the general political atmosphere so that a comprehensive Anglo–Egyptian Treaty could be reached, while it could continue to maintain strategic control over the river.

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Egypt refused to accept any treaty agreement that did not include the Sudan question. Britain hoped that by guaranteeing the flow of the Nile, Egypt could accept the status quo in the Sudan. The Nile Waters Agreement can partly be seen as an expression of Britain’s weakened position as compared to the years before the Egyptian revolution, and partly as a reflection of the convergence of Egyptian perceptions of the Nile as basically an Egyptian river and British strategic thinking.

A H Y D RO P OW E R S C H E M E I N E G Y P T

While the Governments of Britain and Egypt were negotiating a Nile Waters Agreement and a new Treaty of Alliance, the water-planners, the public and the politicians were also debating a number of projects for using the Nile. The role and importance of each of these must be seen in relation to the others, as Nile development in Egypt cannot be understood except in relation to water development in the Sudan and Ethiopia. The history of the Aswan power scheme will be related first, although secret diplomacy in the period focused on the Blue Nile. But this project was modest compared to the Upper Nile projects: it played an important role in Anglo–Egyptian relations in the mid-war years. But, even more important, it was an overture to the fight over the big Aswan project in the 1950s. The building of the first Aswan Dam in 1902 was a demonstration of British imperial and technological power at its zenith. The Aswan High Dam after World War II involved an imperial power at the verge of defeat, unable to control the Nile scene. The story of the Aswan scheme in the 1930s demonstrates the emergence of different lines of conflict that eventually toppled the British Nile regime. It is also a story of missed opportunities. If this hydropower scheme had been implemented, the plans for the Aswan High Dam would most likely not have been drawn up the way they were after World War II, and the Suez question and the history of Africa, the Middle East and the British Empire would have developed differently. The idea of generating electricity from the River Nile at Aswan in order to produce nitrates had been considered on several occasions since 1904, and was first discussed by the Egyptian Government in 1912. The plan was once again raised in 1919. The content of the idea changed over time, but its fundamental rationale remained the same: Egypt needed hydroelectric power to industrialise and to produce fertilisers. Since Egypt possessed no important coal deposits and oil had not yet been discovered, all plans for power-based industry were directed towards the river. And, just as the agricultural revolution of the country had centred on the Aswan Dam, so the industrialisation of the country centred on it. To establish a national industry was a rallying cry for Egyptian nationalists and they criticised British imperialism for hindering industrialisation. In the mid-1930s, experts estimated that Egypt consumed more than 300,000 tons of azotic fertilisers annually, at a cost of no less than E£1.5 million, so to find a substitute was important to the economy. The technological problem was that the large heads suitable for power schemes could only be obtained during the period when the Aswan reservoir was nearly full and

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could continue only until the first stage of emptying it was finished. Electricity generation required an all-year supply of water. The Egyptian Council of Ministers declared unanimously in the wake of the 1919 Revolution that the Nile was, above all, a special part of the patrimony of the country, and that its use in any form should not be alienated. Therefore it would be most impolitic to allow any foreign company to obtain a concession that gave it direct rights to exploit the water-power available at Aswan. This ‘Nile language’ hit a chord in the Egyptian official mind at the time. The Egyptian nationalists wanted to industrialise, but only if non-British firms implemented the project. The British were unenthusiastic, not because they objected to industrialisation, but because this might encourage Egypt to postpone works upstream. On the other hand they did not openly try to block it, because that would raise further suspicions about their overall intentions. Economic arguments also made Britain hesitate. On the one hand the project would bring orders for machinery from Britain. But on the other the manufacture of nitrate fertilisers in Egypt would take away an approximately equivalent amount of custom from the producers of Chilean nitrates, an essential British interest involving large amounts of British capital in Chile, and from British shipping, which transported a large percentage of Chilean nitrates to all parts of the world.33 But the British Government was in no doubt that, if and when the Egyptian Government decided to execute the project, it would press the Egyptians to entrust the execution of the scheme to a British company or group. This would give London both access to more knowledge of and potential leverage on Egyptian intentions and plans. To ‘let in competitors’, as the imperial language of the day described market competition, would mean loss of contracts to British industry and loss of political power and prestige. When the Egyptian Government called for tenders, the two British firms, English Electric and Imperial Chemical Industries, indicated that they were prepared to combine for the contract. In the same month, an Anglo–American group entered the arena, a group that included the British Thomson Houston Company.34 The British Government objected to the incoming American firm and decided that English Electric and its partners were the horse to back.35 The Council of Ministers, in May 1935, authorised the Committee appointed to consider the plans for the Aswan scheme to negotiate with the English Electric group with the object of arriving at terms of agreement. On 5 June the Minister of Finance addressed a letter to the English Electric group to this effect. This decision met with very positive reactions in London. During the course of negotiations, the Council further stated, ‘no discussions will take place with the other groups or firms who may have made offers on the same subject’. Egypt was heading for a treaty with Britain and knew how to please. London said that it regarded this decision by the Egyptian Government as binding on Cairo, and made this Egyptian ‘promise’ one of the keystones of diplomatic efforts to maintain British influence over Nile control and developments in Egypt. The British Government regarded the Egyptian Government as ‘morally bound’ to give the contract to the English Electric Group, if and when they decided to proceed with the scheme.36

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A N E W T R E AT Y A N D M O R E WAT E R

When the Egyptian Treaty Delegation came to London in August 1936, Anthony Eden optimistically suggested that the scheme might be proceeded with. The atmosphere should be excellent. Fifty-four years after bombarding Alexandria, Britain declared the occupation of Egypt by British forces to be over and accepted Egypt as a sovereign state. The Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 26 August 1936 represented an important concession by London, and was regarded as such,37 partly made necessary because of the growing strength of the Axis threat and Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia.38 In Egypt the British High Commissioner, Miles Lampson,39 was now symbolically redesignated His Majesty’s Ambassador to Egypt. The Egyptian authorities hailed the Agreement as a victory.40 The leaders of the National Party on their side argued that the Sudan article was flexible enough to bring the Sudan under complete British or Sudanese – but never Egyptian – dominance.41 They regarded the Sudan article as a complete surrender of Egypt’s historic rights. The Sudanese intelligentsia responded to the Treaty with stronger demands for a voice in the settlement of what they considered to be their own affairs and their own future. Both the British and Egyptian flags would continue to fly side by side at Khartoum. In Britain the Treaty was generally regarded as a triumph for British diplomacy. The Government hailed it as a victory for both countries. Eden, the British negotiator and the new Foreign Secretary, got his portrait on Egyptian stamps. In this atmosphere the British Government believed that the Aswan project now would be theirs.42 It soon became clear, however, that the new Treaty did not give the British the green light that Eden had hoped for. The Egyptian Parliament was opposed to anything approaching monopoly, and the proposed terms of finance were questioned. In 1936, English Electric and Imperial Chemical Industries drew up a project for the annual production of some 300,000 tons of nitrates, but the Egyptian nationalists objected to it on political grounds. Of course there were also technical difficulties: there were seasonal head variations, while turbines were normally designed to work under a constant head; the extra cost of installing two generating sets, to work alternately, was regarded as a problem, as was the dam’s probable interference with irrigation requirements. The Egyptian Government had reassured London that the contract would go to English Electric, but it did not. This was the first of many disappointments that Eden was to experience in relation to Aswan and water projects there. The Foreign Office had to convince the Egyptian Government and opposition. and also to accommodate conflicting points of view within the British Government and the imperial administrative system. The notion of the imperial system as an entity with a single will and representing one interest is untenable, and this was clearly shown in the case of the Aswan scheme. London’s ability to carry out a policy of long-term imperial interests was curtailed by external forces but also eroded by conflicts in its own camp. The Department of Overseas Trade generally desired that pressure should be put upon the Egyptian Government to adopt the scheme in the

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interest of British businesses. For wider, strategic reasons, the Foreign Office had been against any such activism. Foreign Office bureaucrats urged patience, while Trade officials wanted contracts and money immediately. The High Commissioner (later Ambassador) in Cairo generally pushed the issue more than the Foreign Office, for he was less concerned with Chilean nitrates or British overall strategy than with Britain’s position in Egypt. The competing British firm disliked the monopolistic behaviour of English Electric, and criticised it in Egypt and complained to the Foreign Office, but were not aware that it worked closely with the British Government. Hitler at Aswan? In January 1939, a new proposal was put on the table in Egypt; the nitrate project should be replaced or complemented by an iron-ore project at Aswan, since ore had just been discovered.43 The English Electric Group regarded this as a nationalistic attempt to put it on the sidelines. It continued to lobby for the nitrate project ‘in view of its great economic and defence value to Egypt’.44 It also sent a letter to the Foreign Office, enclosing an extract from Akher Saa, translated from Le Journal d’Egypte of 21 February 1939. This dealt with Hitler’s plans for carrying out the Aswan scheme free of charge! The German Otto-Wolff/Siemens Group was pressing the Ministries of Finance and of Commerce and Industry in Cairo to give it the green light. King Farouk had also expressed a direct wish that the ore discovery should be exploited. The Foreign Office realised that the Egyptian Government was not now interested in executing the Aswan scheme without combining it with development of iron-ore deposits.45 London also had to bar German participation. Then, in April 1939, the Egyptian Government decided that it was impossible to proceed with any part of the proposed Aswan scheme. They didn’t have the resources. In April the Government opted instead for a cheaper, Hungarian nitrogen project in the Delta.46 Representatives of English Electric saw a big contract disappearing. They protested strongly and asked the British Government to intervene. In London the big nitrate scheme was regarded as being important. Egypt’s economy was entirely dependent upon agriculture and Egyptian agriculture was dependent on chemical fertilisers, with annual consumption in 1939 estimated at more than 400,000 tons. All these nitrates were imported by sea, much of them all the way from Chile. The British and Egyptians had experienced during World War I an almost complete cut-off of the supply of sea-borne fertilisers. In view of the international situation in the late 1930s it was regarded as crucial for Egypt to produce its own nitrate. Egypt’s agricultural production should not be hampered at a time when exceptional demands could be made on it for food by the Allies and their armies. What brought a new dimension to the scheme was the potential of the nitrate scheme for manufacturing high explosives, which was of ‘great importance both to Egypt and the Empire’.47

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T H E WA R , T H E S C H E M E A N D ‘ C R E E P I N G F L E S H ’ I N LO N D O N

Lord Halifax,48 the Foreign Secretary, who had taken up the post after Eden resigned owing to the Chamberlain Government’s appeasement policy, instructed Britain’s Ambassador to Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, to raise again with the Prime Minister of Egypt the Aswan Dam power and nitrate scheme. Lampson reported that he had spoken very strongly to the Prime Minister and left no doubt as to the feeling of ‘exasperation and resentment’ in London.49 He also informed Halifax that the Hungarian group, having failed in their search for capital in London, now had turned to the U.S. The British Ambassador was instructed to protest. He also promised more official British support, including for the iron-ore project, in an attempt to change the decision of the Egyptian Government. Lampson suggested that the cost of £15 million for the hydroelectric, nitrate and iron-industry projects could be secured with the help of London. This move was criticised at the Foreign Office. For where would the Ambassador get the money? With the outbreak of war, the Foreign Office soon realised that ‘very formidable obstacles’ stood in the way of the Aswan project.50 It was estimated that the raw materials required for the scheme would include approximately 50,000 tons of iron and steel and 1,400 tons of copper – essential materials in times of war. There was also the question of financial priorities. For example, should London take on three huge contracts in Argentina instead of the potential contracts in Egypt? 51 In January 1940 there was general agreement in London that ‘considerations of supply and finance made the full execution of this scheme quite impossible’. The best course would be to try to come to an agreement with Egypt to suspend the work until after the war. If this did not succeed, the British Government should accept blame for the breakdown in negotiations while at the same time attempting to secure the position of the English Electric Company.52 The Foreign Office clearly saw the conflict between overall British strategic interests and the more narrow perspective and agenda of the British Ambassador in Egypt and British companies, and how the latter might negatively affect the formulation and execution of the former. The Ambassador in Cairo objected to this shift in policy. He reminded the Foreign Office of British commitments. He also asked them to think concretely; since it would take at least 18 months and probably two years to make the excavations, foundations and buildings based on material obtainable locally, before the main plant would need to be sent from the UK, a contract could still be signed without undertaking a date of completion, and local work put in hand immediately on signature.53 The Foreign Office summarised the crux of the imperial problem: ‘We are confronted here with another example of relative priorities, a problem which (as much other correspondence in our files shows clearly) the Ambassador cannot, or will not, grasp’. The Ambassador would, as soon as he had heard the hard facts of the situation that had developed, in fact protest and try and make ‘our flesh creep with warnings about the political consequences’.54 In the Foreign Office it was minuted on the one hand that strong diplomatic activity in Egypt on behalf of British

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business interests was not wise. This or that financial or industrial group should not be allowed to exploit London’s ‘unique position in Egypt’,55 even as the British Government had come close to promising support to English Electric.

T H E C O N T R AC T T H ROW N I N TO T H E ‘ M E LT I N G P OT ’

The Foreign Office was appalled by what it called the ‘wrecking tactics’ of the leaders of the rival British Thomson-Houston Company.56 The company, part of an Anglo– American initiative, complained to the Treasury that English Electric had tried to persuade the Egyptian Government that their electrical and hydraulic plant had such a special character technically and that part of it was covered by patents or included such secret features that it was not practicable to secure competitive tenders, ‘a contention which would of course be regarded as ridiculous by anyone at all familiar’ with such issues.57 The company had to counter the arguments used by English Electric in order to win the contract, but that in turn implied countering the arguments of the British Government as well. The President of the Board of Trade stressed to the representatives of the competing British firm that they ought to behave themselves in view of the support their company received from the Government in other parts of the world. They should not ‘muscle against’ English Electric over the Aswan Dam, and the company was asked to ‘withdraw from the field’.58 London realised that since 1935 Egyptian ministers had, in the jargon of the Foreign Office, been trying ‘to wriggle out of the pledge’, to English Electric, which the letter of 5 June 1935 was thought to constitute. The problem was that another British company was helping the Wafd Government to do so, thus undermining what was considered by the British Foreign Office an important diplomatic asset. In February 1940 Lampson informed London that the Egyptian Prime Minister had assured the representative of English Electric in Cairo that he was determined to put through the Aswan scheme; that he expected the Parliamentary Committee to agree in principle; and that he hoped to submit the matter to Parliament for approval in March.59 But now London was clear; the British Government could not give the necessary support. A few days later, a further meeting was held at the Treasury, which concluded that Britain could not ‘release supplies of steel or copper or make funds available while the war lasts’.60 English Electric was disappointed but not surprised, and asked the Government to promise support – after the war. On that basis it could approach the Egyptian Government and try to win finance for the preliminary work. If not, the Company stated, ‘the whole contract is again thrown into the melting pot’.61 The British Government thereafter informed English Electric of the generous terms that it was offering. A representative of the company left with Foreign Office support for Cairo. He held a number of meetings with Lampson and the Egyptian Government in 1940. The tactics for retaining English Electric as the future executor of the project, via a modest start-up effort during the war, met resentment from the Egyptian Government. The Finance Minister thought it unwise to start work during the war, since technical improvements in turbines might well

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show that the work done had become obsolete by the time the war ended.62 The Egyptian Government also objected to the British version that English Electric had been promised the contract for the scheme. Even so, in 1940, the Egyptian Government was almost on the point of signing an agreement with the English Electric Group, but at the last moment it was decided in London that the Company had to undertake more urgent war manufacture. The Battle of Britain temporarily ended the struggle over the Aswan scheme. It was to re-emerge with devastating consequences for the British Empire after the war.

U P P E R W H I T E N I L E P RO J E C T S

Jabal Auliya On the White Nile in the Sudan, the plans for and the construction of the Jabal Auliya Dam, north of the sudd, which had been advanced by MacDonald during the Egyptian revolution, were implemented with some modification amidst criticism – not only by Egyptian nationalists, who feared the dam would give Britain more power over Egypt. Willcocks had opposed it strongly and argued that it would drown out some 125,000 people and obliterate islands, villages, fields and forests on 550km of the White Nile; spread mosquitoes and malaria annually over tracts that were afflicted naturally once in forty years; wipe out the whole White Nile Province; and sweep away a progressive part of the Sudan. The width of the reservoir would be so great that no human beings, except pure nomads, would be able to settle, and the rest would have to migrate. According to Willcocks, the one point about which everybody agreed was that the project would force the drowned-out agriculturists of the White Nile to seek work in the Gezira, where the labour difficulty would otherwise be acute.63 In April 1921, political problems and financial difficulties closed down work on the dam.64 A modified version of the project was proposed by the Nile Projects Commission in 1925. It was this plan that was implemented in the 1930s and stood ready in 1937. The project was regarded by many as premature and extravagant in the financial circumstances of the time, and was seen by nationalists as kowtowing to the wishes of London. According to reports sent to the Foreign Office as late as March 1933, the Minister of Public Works would have preferred to postpone the project, had it not been for the fear of displeasing London in the treaty negotiations. However, the Egyptian Government ridiculed nationalist opposition to this project. Prime Minister Ismail Sidky Pasha made a strong defence of the dam in an interview in Al Ahram.65 He said that those who feared that Britain might divert the Nile flood in the Sudan away from Egypt had forgotten that ‘foreign interests in Egypt are so huge’ that he could not understand ‘how the owners of them could remain quiescent in face of this ruin’. The British would not ruin British or European capital interests in Egypt. The dam should rather be seen as the promised compensation for water taken at Sennar. The water experts Butcher and MacGregor managed to convince British political strategists that it would be very unwise to

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raise the question of the Sudan’s water rights in relation to this dam, since to do so would solidify Egyptian opposition to the scheme.66 In June 1932, the contract for building this Egyptian dam on Sudanese territory was given to a British firm, Messrs Gibson and Pauling, and construction started in 1933. For the first time in the Nile valley, this project raised the question of compensation. Now, on the diplomatic level, it was acknowledged that the character of rivers and the way they are controlled affect people. Egyptian nationalists suggested that the Egyptian Government should not pay the Sudan Government. Instead Egypt should directly pay the inhabitants concerned, because they were considered Egyptian citizens. Eventually Egypt paid the Sudan Government E£750,000 as compensation for local repercussions of the dam, including the costs of protection of towns and the railway at Kosti and alternative means of livelihood for the riverine population who lived where the dam was to be built. In 1937, the dam was completed and was holding back the steady flow of the White Nile for summer cultivation in Egypt.67

Too Much Water, Too Little Development – a New History of the Southern Sudan The Southern Sudan had, since the 1890s, been considered an aqueduct for irrigation water to the north. It was in this remote region that the Nile yield was to be increased on a tremendous scale. This section will discuss the consequences of this water idea, of this conceptualisation of the Nile system. The whole literature on the modern history of the Southern Sudan agrees that the region is one of the least developed areas in the world.68 In general this situation is explained by the arguments that the central British authorities had no economic policy in the Southern Sudan; and since the policy-making corps has been described as being uninterested in the South, the history of the region has been perceived as revolving around the local British administrators. Since these men, often called ‘bog barons’ in the colonial literature so as to emphasise the impression that the South was a useless swamp, were not particularly interested in economic development, nothing really happened. The dominant school of thought describes British policies and motives as mirroring what is characterised as a general British assessment of the Southern Sudan; they regarded the region as an ‘unpropitious country’,69 or as ‘the bottom of the barrel’.70 Hence, the British were ‘not prompted by the economic interests of the region’,71 nor was it ever ‘seriously supposed that the region would prove an asset to the British economy’.72 As a result, there ‘was a general resentment of having to deal with the southern regions at all’, and the British Government was in doubt as to ‘what to do with the conquered territories …’ 73 Thus, the Southern Sudan became ‘an ignored and forgotten region’,74 whence ‘little was expected’.75 Since Khartoum and Cairo were uninterested, the history of the Southern Sudan in this period revolved around the local district commissioners. These administrators have consequently been seen as people whose importance was ‘magnified beyond their individuality’.76 Methodologically this tradition naturally

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puts the focus of study on the man on the spot, that is, the local province governor or district commissioner. A reconstruction of the motives and actions of these administrators has thus been regarded as the key to understanding British policy and its general socio-economic impact in the Southern Sudan. But the history of the region revolved less around the local district commissioners than most places in the British Empire. It revolved primarily around distant and unknown water-planners in Cairo, and British political strategists in Cairo and London. Far from being a forgotten or neglected region, few other parts of the Sudan, or of the British African Empire for that matter, were the subject of so much planning as the Southern Sudan, owing to the physical and economic role of flowing water and the special characteristics of the Nile. The viability of permanent settlements and the pattern of seasonal movement in the region are strictly dependent on the distribution of water, a fact that has most often been overlooked or underestimated in the historical literature.77 London’s policy for the Nile fundamentally influenced the roles and opportunities of British administrators working in the Southern Sudan and, even more importantly, the potentials of Nile use fundamentally influenced the British approach to and conceptualisation of the Southern Sudan as a whole. In fact, the British who determined Nile valley policy formulated and intended to implement plans and policies that threatened traditional lifestyles in the Southern Sudan more radically than in many other places in Africa. The argument that the local British administrators ‘would never have tolerated exploitative practices in the Southern Sudan for the profit of their fellow countrymen’ might be true as far as their individual intentions and convictions are concerned.78 But in this connection the argument is irrelevant and therefore not valid; the bog barons were usually neither heard nor consulted, but were simply ignored when British Nile policy was formulated. In order to outline and analyse this policy, the perspective should be broadened with regard to both geographical areas and administrative levels within the British colonial system. Our focus must be shifted from bog barons in Nasir and Rumbek several thousand kilometres north – to Khartoum and Cairo, eastwards to the Ethiopian plateau and southwards to the inter-lacustrine region, as well as to government offices on the banks of the Thames. In order to understand the history and character of Britain’s economic rule in the Southern Sudan, it is more rewarding to study British plans for and reports on the Upper Nile drawn up in the Public Works Department in Cairo by men such as Garstin, Willcocks, MacDonald, Tottenham, Dupuis, Butcher and Hurst, and complicated notes on Nile-sharing agreements authorised by a long series of British Foreign Secretaries in Whitehall, than to study the monthly reports submitted by ‘Tiger’ Wylde, Captain King or C.A. Willis from their ‘bush-stations’ in the Southern Sudan. Given this much broader perspective, the very opposite conclusion from the one that dominates the literature is unavoidable: both actual and potential economic development in the South was fundamentally threatened and affected by two persistent strategic features of British economic policy in the inter-war years – the use and allocation of Nile waters.

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The Water Link between the Gezira and the South The Nile Waters Agreement prohibited any form of artificial irrigation in the South. Even fifteen years after the Agreement, when the Governor of the Upper Nile Province wrote in 1943 to the Director of Irrigation about a possible development of free-flow irrigation along the Bahr al-Ghazal, Sobat, Baro, Pibor and Bahr alZaraf,79 he received an answer that ‘here we get into difficult ground in view of the principles underlying the Nile Waters Agreement’. If irrigation were to be developed in the Southern Sudan, the ‘usual procedure’ had to be followed, and the Sudan Government would have to ‘compensate for the volumes used in the restricted period…(the timely season)… from her…(the Sudan’s)…own treasury, the Sennar Reservoir, the total capacity of which, however, already is earmarked’.80 The British favoured the riverain north. It was illegal to withdraw water artificially from the rivers, anywhere in the Southern Sudan, during the so-called ‘timely’ season. This objection halted any local schemes that required artificial irrigation, whether by free flow or pumping, a constraint that would shelve any plan for agricultural development in the Upper Nile. The enormous water schemes to increase discharges of the Bahr al-Jabal and the Bahr al-Zaraf constituted the structural frame of British economic policy in the Southern Sudan. Reports were published in 1920 (MacDonald), 1925, 1929 (Newhouse), 1934 (Parker), 1936 (Butcher), 1938 (two, both by the Director General, Southern Nile, Butcher).81 These plans had some of their strongest supporters in the Sudan Government, because more water in the White Nile would enable the Sudan to take out more water from the Blue Nile.82 These schemes would dramatically alter the discharge and alignment of the main river courses, destroy almost all grazing land during the dry season, change migration routes, dry up the watering places and the fishing ponds, and alter the very foundations of existing economic practice in the riverine South. All the plans would have resulted in the drying up of almost the whole sudd, and they would have dealt, if implemented, a death blow to the local economic system. Until the mid-1930s, the Upper Nile water project was the only development project contemplated by the British in the Southern Sudan. The prevailing uncertainty as to whether and when the project should be executed and how and where the canal would be dug, made economic planning and implementation of other projects very difficult indeed. Local British administrators did not know where canals should be excavated, how much water they should carry, future variations in seasonal fluctuations, etc. The comparative affluence of the Malakal headquarters of the irrigation services, with its many brick buildings and its tennis court, reminded the local administrators about the schemes and the big plans that were being considered. When the DCs, with almost no budgets for development, came in from the bush to the dusty streets of Malakal to meet fellow Europeans or other British officials, they entered the power centre of the region – and they knew it. The conflict of interest between canal plans and local economic development was understood by the local British administrators and Khartoum. In 1928 the Sudan

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Government asked W.D. Roberts to evaluate local consequences of the irrigation projects. His task was not to suggest alternative project designs, but to propose the best ‘method of meeting any difficulties that may arise’.83 At the same time it acknowledged that a conflict of interest between Egypt and the peoples of the Southern Sudan was ‘bound to arise’. The Governor of the Upper Nile Province, Charles Armine Willis, famous for crushing the so-called Nuer uprising in 1929,84 expressed the crux of the matter as early as 1925. He wrote that a permanent waterway, cutting through the Zeraf valley, ‘must alter the whole centre of gravity of the country’.85 His handing-over notes stated that ‘the schemes will all affect large areas of grazing land and possibly cultivation and the best way to make use of the new conditions entailed by the irrigation schemes will be a matter for the Sudan Government to decide’.86 Willis could not do very much about the actual plans. He feared the impact that rumours about them would have on his effort to pacify the Nuer (according to his own estimates they were more than 600,000) and reach a settlement with them. They were the last remaining ethnic group in the Southern Sudan over whom the British had not yet taken firm control. Willis identified a contradiction that had been manifest since Cromer’s support of the Garstin plans. One of the few European companies that wished to invest in the Sudd Region, during British rule, was the Sudd Fuel Company Limited. In 1912 it came up with plans to produce sudd briquettes for fuel. The idea was to harvest the sudd from a strip of 5km on each side of the Bahr al-Jabal for a distance of 150km south of Lake No. At the end of World War I the scheme was revived and extended to include the growing of cotton as well as the production of fuel.87 The draft agreement signed by Wingate on behalf of the Sudan Government and Sudan Industries Limited read that nothing therein should ‘preclude the Government from making any new water ways or channels in such areas… (where the company was to operate), or from maintaining, widening, or straightening any existing or new waterways or channels’.88 Naturally, this project did not get off the ground, and administrators knew very well that this, like all other projects, had to be subordinated to the aims of the great water projects. The development of the physical infrastructure of the Southern Sudan was also affected.89 The Government was reluctant to invest in road projects that might well be submerged or end up in the middle of nowhere, since new waterways and the cessation of seasonal fluctuations in river levels would dramatically alter dwelling patterns, migration routes and administrative divisions and set-ups. Since budgets for local administration and investments were very meagre, local plans for roads and railways were directly linked to anticipated plans of the Irrigation Division so that the Egyptians could finance and partly build them. The requirements of local trade and general administration did not, of course, necessarily coincide with those of the water engineers. There were also obvious consequences for the commercial infrastructure. For example, the Governor of Equatoria wrote in 1941 to the Civil Secretary that the Jonglei scheme would probably destroy the port of Shambe, the main trading port for the whole Bahr al-Ghazal province.90 This prevailing

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uncertainty was definitely not conducive to economic planning of any sort in the central riverine area. The plans for the river made it rational to postpone initiatives regarding road and railway building. The Governor of the Upper Nile Province pointed to the core issue in 1943: any advance in communications and agriculture was ‘closely bound up with the uses to which I hope we can put our waterways’.91 And the General Manager of the Sudan Railways was doubtless aware that nothing could be done in the affected area regarding his sector before the Jonglei Project was implemented and its effects had been ascertained.92 He also noted that ‘the development of the Marchar Marshes to provide alternative livelihood for the displaced tribes due to the Jonglei Canal’ necessitated a new alignment of a possible railway line from Sennar to Malakal.93 Some years previously, the Civil Secretary had made it clear that ‘East Africa’s plans regarding better communication with the Southern Sudan… were also contingent on the Lake Albert Dam’,94 while the Juba–Nimule road had been built ‘expressly for the purpose of the dam’.95 When the Governor of Upper Nile Province, the Civil Secretary and Director of Irrigation discussed economic development in the Upper Nile Province in 1943, the last declared what all seemed to agree on: ‘For practical purposes I should imagine any major scheme for economic development will be wrapped up with, and a corollary to, the extensive engineering works Egypt proposes to carry out in the neighbourhood’.96 And in a meeting held the following year in the Financial Secretary’s Office in Khartoum, it was made clear that agricultural development in the South would depend on the ‘proposed Jonglei cut’.97 The argument here is not counterfactual; had it not been for the dominant ‘water perspective’ and plans for major water projects, the South would have been much more developed. It was typical of the prevailing attitude that, when the governors of the Southern provinces met in 1925, they had 19 different subjects on the agenda, but none of them was related to economic development.98 But when a few modest initiatives for local development were put forward, they were usually dropped. The canal plans were either a direct obstacle or a factor that contributed to permanent uncertainty about the future economic environment and thus discouraged investments in the future. After World War II, London and Khartoum put more focus on Southern development in relation to the Jonglei Canal project, partly to strengthen their cards in the imperial game over Suez (chapter 5), but this came too late to have any real impact on economic structures in the Southern Sudan. When Garstin put forward his plan for harnessing the waters of the Southern Sudan at the beginning of the twentieth century, he could not know that his visions would bar local development there into the twenty-first century. But since water is so ingrained in human society, even more so than other elements in nature – in daily life and economic activities, in transport and production, in defining migration routes and deciding the location of settlements – these plans to alter fundamentally the way in which water performed locally had a tremendous regional impact. In the mid-1930s, at the same time as the economy on the Gezira plain was undergoing a fundamental transformation under the centralised authority of the

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Khartoum Government and British cotton businesses, the British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard was in Nuer land, in the heart of the Southern Sudan, describing a people and a society that he conceived of as unchanging, continuously recreating their past relationship to the Nile environment.99 The Sudan Government had sent him there to study the administrative set-up of a people without chiefs, a king or state institutions, so that it could maintain law and order in the easiest and cheapest way. In the meantime little happened – while the British and the Egyptians were waiting for implementation of the enormous water project, the cattle nomads migrated through the bush as they had done for centuries, ignorant of the drawings of canal structures eagerly studied at office desks in London, Cairo and Khartoum.

B R I TA I N, M U S S O L I N I A N D L A K E TA NA A S WO R L D H I S TO RY

The sequence of events in the history of Lake Tana diplomacy is not only important in the context of Nile valley history, but is also a central issue in world history. Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia, and the League of Nations’ complete failure to support a member state against aggression, has been described in the literature as ‘the death blow to the League’.100 The real death of the League, it has been argued, was in 1935, not in 1939 or 1945.101 It was then that it lost all credibility and became, in many people’s eyes, a sham. Mussolini’s African imperialism became the ‘test case’ of the collective security provisions of the League of Nations. They did not stand the test. Ethiopia was on the front page of newspapers all over the world. Mussolini bombarded the highlands with nerve gas, while the Emperor of Ethiopia was named Man of the Year by Time magazine. The League’s failure had immediate worldwide consequences. Aggressors had learned that aggression paid off. Mussolini and Hitler were encouraged. A main reason for the collapse of the League was the secret plans of the Conservative Government in Britain and Fascist Italy for the Nile and Ethiopia. While the literature agrees on the global historic importance of the ‘Abyssinian question’ and the death of the League of Nations, the voluminous literature shares another assumption. The Italian conquest of Ethiopia did ‘not affect Great Britain’s imperial interests’. This quotation is from A.J.P.Taylor’s influential book The Origins of the Second World War.102 Other parts of this work have been severely criticised by historians, but its analysis of British policy towards Ethiopia sums up conventional wisdom to the present: the causes and motivations of British policy towards Italian expansionism cannot be seen as the result of British imperial or material interests in Ethiopia. The argument has been: ‘No one knows why the British Government took the line they did; probably they did not know themselves’,103 because no concrete ‘interest’ was at stake in Ethiopia.104 Britain’s policy was, it was claimed, irrational (as historians have argued that British policy was irrational during the Sudan campaign in the 1890s).105 But the literature has it wrong; the British did indeed have vital interests in Ethiopia and interests closely linked both to their entire Middle East strategy and to their policy of defending the British Empire. The dominant analysis of British

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and Italian interests overlooks the long-standing Anglo–Italian rivalry over the country and the very ‘concrete interests’ that Britain had there – the headwaters of the Blue Nile.106 London first tried to enlist Italian support in giving them the right to build the dam, and then to appease Mussolini so that Italy itself would not build the dam to threaten Britain in Egypt and away from Suez. The British knew what they were doing in these years and their policy was neither irrational nor incomprehensible, although it was based on false hopes and partly wrong assumptions. The historical literature has completely neglected the Nile factor. The dominant perspective has therefore not only overlooked the volumes of historical documents on the issue, but also misinterpreted the few primary sources that were used.

‘Eliminating’ American Interests In the early 1930s, the troublesome characters on the Blue Nile, in the view of British foreign policy, were not only the Italian Fascists but also an American engineering firm, the White Engineering Corporation. In 1930, MacGregor, vice-president of White, and the Director General of Foreign Affairs in Ethiopia, Belatingeta Heroui, met to discuss the Tana Dam.107 They agreed on only one thing: the White Engineering Corporation should, as soon as possible, begin detailed investigations of all the engineering problems of the dam.108 The Ethiopian Government preferred the White Corporation to build the dam, while the Sudan Government wanted to get rid of the White Corporation or to buy it up. Neither London nor Khartoum could afford to relegate the Sudan Government to the position of a third party in this vital matter.109 There was no agreement on the financing of the dam or on payment for the water. The Ethiopians were concerned about the money that Britain had promised to Menelik on behalf of the Sudan Government but had never paid.110 And finally there was the unresolved question of Egypt’s role.111 How should London handle the White Corporation? MacGregor was privately in close touch with Dunn of the firm. MacGregor’s efforts paid off. Dunn informed him confidentially that Ethiopians were visiting America on behalf of the Emperor, with the object of raising loans and securing the services of an American Financial Advisor. Dunn also informed MacGregor that he had been approached by the Commercial Councillor of the Italian Embassy in Washington. Dunn thought that the Italians wanted a share in the financing and probably the control of the dam. He now said that if it were necessary and feasible, he would sacrifice profits and take on the job in the ordinary way of business as an agent, ‘working directly for the British authorities’.112 Dunn thought that the dam could not be built without British consent. In September MacGregor again wrote to the Foreign Office and suggested that the White Corporation should become British ‘agents’,113 and that the British should not, as had been suggested, try to ‘eliminate’ the Corporation. The Embassy in Washington commented on these letters and their terminology, and argued that, in the first place, care should be taken in London, in Cairo and Khartoum always to avoid the term ‘eliminate’. People would then say that the British used the White

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Corporation ‘as a stalking horse for two or three years and then squeezed them out, leaving them with nothing but a lemon’. Dunn, the Ambassador wrote, was ‘thoroughly Anglophile’ but the scheme was not as big and exciting as Dunn had thought. In America, building dams in out-of-the way places had great glamour, conveying a certain appeal to the public, so the main attraction of the project to Dunn, the British Ambassador wrote, was the ‘advertising value of doing an irrigation work in the wilds of Abyssinia’.114 The British Embassy in Washington thought it best to get rid of the White Corporation, but it should be done ‘with a great deal of care and at the right moment and not yet’. The Foreign Office agreed with their Ambassador and subsequently instructed R.M. MacGregor and the GovernorGeneral of the Sudan, Sir Hubert Jervoise Huddleston.115

Rebellion and Water Sale The Tana Dam was still a very touchy issue in Ethiopia. The Government and the Emperor had strengthened their hand, but Ras Gugsa Welle’s rebellion had been partly fomented by rumours that the lake had ‘been sold to England’.116 The Empress’s husband was shot and his army of ten thousand men put to flight by an attack by the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force in March 1931. The ras and priests around the Lake area could not accept what was seen as a sell-out to foreign interests. They were also against any changes in lake levels that might affect monasteries on the islands. In 1930, as a move to block the Americans, the British policy-makers therefore discussed the possibility of publishing the notes exchanged between White and the Emperor. They would rather cause a rebellion than let dam plans go ahead without their control.117 Two other issues complicated Anglo–Ethiopian relations over the dam. London and Khartoum wanted very much to improve links between the Sudan and the Lake region. London pressured Addis Ababa to allow the Tana survey team to return from the Lake via the Sudan. This policy was dropped as unrealistic by the end of 1930.118 The Emperor denied the team permission to leave via the Sudan. The survey party left Addis Ababa without permits even to go to the lake. The Emperor distrusted British aims. He particularly objected to Khartoum’s claim that it was necessary to build a road from the Sudan to Lake Tana. The road issue was not only regarded as a technical question, but one of military strategy and national development. The irrigation expert, MacGregor, stressed that ‘the road should be the quid pro quo for the Lake’. He reported to London that his Egyptian counterpart, Abdul Hamid, agreed. The Egyptian representatives foresaw that ‘internal disturbances in Abyssinia might necessitate military measures to protect the dam; and that any such operation would have to be conducted from the Sudan’.119 Secondly, for decades the Ethiopian Government had been complaining that London had violated commitments given to Emperor Menelik in 1907. When officials in the US State Department, in late 1930, discovered in their archives a letter to Menelik from Harrington, signed by the latter in both English and Amharic versions,

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according to which His Majesty’s Government promised to pay £10,000 a year to Menelik and his heirs for an unspecified period,120 this complicated British Nile diplomacy, since the British now knew that the Americans were aware that London had not complied with the Agreement. If the Ethiopian Government were told of this interpretation, the Emperor’s hand would be strengthened and the Americans could more readily disregard British legal objections to their unilateral plans for the dam.

Cold Storage British diplomats felt that they were gradually losing control over the secret water game. The Foreign Office argued that they should now abandon the Lake Tana scheme ‘for a considerable number of years, if not entirely’.121 The slump in cotton production, particularly Sakel, which was weighed down further by the great block of the world market that had been acquired by the Egyptian Government in their attempt to support the price, robbed the Tana scheme of much of its economic attraction for the Sudan, and for the British cotton industry.122 But even if the Sudan Government had wanted to at the time, they could not; Khartoum lacked sufficient investment capital. London saw the dam robbed of political attraction, since demand for water in Egypt and the Sudan had fallen so drastically. Its hydropolitical importance was diminished, but an American firm upstream, outside British control, was still regarded as something like a nightmare. In Ethiopia, on the other hand, political changes made the plans for a dam more realistic. On 1 April 1930, Zauditu, who had named Tafari King in 1928, died. Tafari declared himself Emperor and on 2 November was crowned Haile Selassie I (‘Strength of the Trinity’), the King of Kings, the Conquering Lion of Judah. Haile Selassie soon enjoyed a unique position in Ethiopian history: his authority was, by and large, unchallenged. He created a central government that was totally dependent on the Crown. An administrative system was developed. The imperial policy was supported by an increasingly effective army and air force. The aristocracy supported this Emperor to an unusual extent. The promise of prosperity changed the allegiances of most of them. Revenues increased, partly owing to higher tariffs on increasing coffee exports. The Emperor also controlled and manipulated the flow of information. He was completely in charge of foreign policy and diplomacy, including Nile diplomacy. An internal political situation had been created where the regional opposition was not crushed, but strategically weakened. The Emperor had a freer hand to act on the Nile scene than he had had as a Ras in the early 1920s – and now the hands of the British seemed tied. The roles of London and the Emperor of Ethiopia regarding the dam were reversed. While London was now dragging its feet over the dam, the Emperor was impatient. In October 1931 he proposed a conference on Lake Tana. He realised that his great diplomatic card might be slipping away, since ‘nobody’ seemed really interested in a dam. He wanted the plans ‘alive’ again, and the scheme was described

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in very positive terms.123 London and Khartoum were unprepared for this change of policy.124 London formulated its own policy as a ‘cold-storage scheme’. Britain should go forward with the dam when the Sudan and Gezira needed it, and if they could obtain the scheme they wanted. London’s representative in Egypt, Sir Percy Lyham Loraine, argued that the dam was now ‘urgent only in the eyes of the Emperor’.125 In this situation the plan was to ‘obtain a definite option’ on Tana and then to ‘delay the actual start of the work for some years’, until the British were ready.126 It became important to stop all American or Ethiopian plans to build and control the dam.127 The time had come to play the Egyptian card, or to enlist Egypt against the Americans, or the downstream power against upstream developments that London could no longer orchestrate. On the one hand, Egypt’s legitimate interests could block possible American initiatives with Ethiopia. On the other hand, London could once more try to persuade the Egyptians that London was a friend they dearly needed, and therefore ought not to alienate. The Foreign Office argued in favour of bringing Egypt ‘into our confidence’ about the White Corporation’s activities,128 while not bringing them into the negotiations officially since this would only serve as a ‘spectacular affirmation of Egypt’s rights and interests in upper waters’.129 About a year later, Loraine presented Ismail Sidky Pasha with a confidential aidememoire on the Lake Tana question. It referred to and reaffirmed commitments from 1929, that the Egyptian Government ‘would be informed of all developments’ related to the Nile. The memorandum stressed that Egypt and the Sudan were full partners in the same enterprise and that their mutual co-operation would be essential if the scheme was to be carried out. Since the Sudan had very few funds at the time, Loraine suggested that Egypt might be able to shoulder the cost. The note did not mention British interests in the scheme at all. Loraine ended by suggesting that the whole scheme should ‘be put into cold storage for the time being’. In the meantime, the Sudan and Egypt should keep in touch, in a spirit of ‘loyal co-operation’. London, begging for time in relation to the Ethiopian–American initiative, suggested that a further study should be undertaken, and asked Cairo for money to finance the survey.130 Some months later the report was finished, written by MacGregor, Irrigation Advisor, Sudan Government and Butcher, Director General of the Southern Nile, Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. It discussed and emphasised the need for further studies after the submission of the J.G. White report, especially regarding the important proposal for a slight raising of the level of the reservoir. It also suggested a basis for water-sharing between Egypt and the Sudan.131 The Egyptian Government replied in the summer of 1932. They did not want the project put into cold storage. The amount of water the Sudan would receive should never in any case exceed 50 per cent of the net profit from the dam. The suggestion for water-sharing arrangements in the MacGregor-Butcher report was turned down. Loraine noted in one of his top-secret telegrams on the issue that the extent to which the reply from Egypt should be considered unsatisfactory depended on the ‘nature of the objective’.132 Cairo’s reaction made it clear that the White

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Corporation and Addis Ababa would not be able to act alone. That was a relief, and the most important thing to London in the short run. On the other hand the Egyptian position represented a danger to the Sudan and to the Gezira’s future expansion of irrigation. Officially Loraine wrote to the Egyptian Government, on 29 July, expressing a positive attitude to proceeding with the Tana scheme together with the Egyptians.133 He could do this because he and London doubted Egypt’s financial capacity to carry out such a programme. The aim was achieved; the Egyptian Government agreed to hold a conference in the US Legation in Addis Ababa, in January 1933. In early January 1933, Loraine reported that the Egyptians had become ‘much more cautious’ about the project. Egyptian opposition parties saw the proposal as a wily scheme by which the British were inveigling Egypt into paying for work that would principally benefit British cotton interests in the Sudan.134 The Prime Minister indicated to Loraine that they were not prepared to negotiate for a concession or even an option for the construction of the dam that would involve the Egyptian Government in ‘any payments on account for possible future benefits’.135 There had been violent press campaigns against the scheme. The Foreign Office minuted, obviously with relief, that the Egyptian Government was having difficulty in gaining acceptance for its proposals.136 The Egyptian nationalists came to the rescue of Britain, as London had hoped. London supported a Tana conference with limited objectives and playing down the position of Egypt. Cairo should not be allowed to call the tune about their rights to the Nile. The ‘plea of further studies’ was therefore what Egypt was to have,137 if the conference ever took place. The Emperor told the British that he did not want this conference to be ‘sterilised by a plea of further studies’,138 and again he embarrassed the British by asking for the payment of the money he thought had been promised to Menelik. The Emperor wanted to discuss that issue at the conference. It never took place.139

Italian Assistance In October 1932, Captain Erskine, His Majesty’s Consul at Gore, had been told by Ras Mulugeta that the Italians were claiming the right to build the Lake Tana Dam, instead of the Americans, and that Ras Imaru had suddenly left for Europe.140 In 1933, the Italian Ambassador in London, Leonardo Vitetti, unexpectedly asked the Foreign Office for a copy of the secret White report, finished earlier the same year. He was told that he could not have it because it was the property of the Ethiopian Government.141 The Ambassador left a note with the Foreign Office complaining about British secrecy in Tana matters, but the Foreign Office brushed this off and insisted that the Italians had been kept informed throughout. Nevertheless, London sent a reminder to Sir Sidney Barton (the new British Minister in Addis Ababa) that he should keep the Italian Government informed of major developments, without giving ‘reasonable cause of complaint from the Ethiopian Government’.142

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The following year the Italian Government told the British Ambassador in Rome in confidence that Tana ‘was about the most important political question in Africa’. John Murray, sent to Rome as Counsellor at the British Embassy after being involved in Nile policies at the Foreign Office since 1919, reported to London on the discussion he had had with the head of the African Department in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Murray told the Italian that the British had been thinking about abandoning the project altogether, the Italian representative waved aside the argument. He did not believe it and was convinced ‘beyond persuasion’ that the British interest in the Tana Dam was still there, and that the project was ‘almost purely political’.143 At the same time, British personnel in the Nile valley argued in favour of bringing the Tana scheme out of ‘cold storage’, without knowing anything about the diplomatic encounter in Rome. MacGregor in the Sudan urged that the time for reopening the discussions would be when the White Corporation produced the final plan and estimate for the project. For the Sudan it was important to get the project implemented, because it would obviate the danger that the storage at Jabal Auliya would establish an Egyptian priority of water right as against Lake Tana.144 There was no looming water crisis – the unused balance in the Sennar reservoir was growing; in 1935 it was 236 million cubic metres – but it was important to build the dam soon because, otherwise, by referring to the Nile Waters Agreement, Egypt could claim more of the water. Sir Sidney Barton, the British representative in Addis Ababa, argued that Britain lacked further pretexts for not proceeding to negotiations.145 To prolong the policy of cold storage would be fraught with grave risks, and he informed London that the Emperor had been ‘greatly disappointed at the last postponement’. Owing to political developments, especially the Italian threat, the Emperor wanted the ‘stabilising advantages’ he hoped to derive from such a dam agreement. By granting the dam concession he was hoping to gain support against Italy. The Emperor would, if no agreement was reached, ‘remain exposed to Italian pressure without any hope of such mitigating neutral influence’. If the project could not now be rescued, Barton proposed that Britain should seriously consider freeing itself from the commitments to Italy, under the 1925 Notes, and forget about the dam. For eight years they had observed, with the ‘strictest loyalty’, their commitments in favour of Italy’s economic zone in Western Abyssinia, while waiting for Italy to put pressure on the Ethiopian Government so that they could have their dam, but whatever may have been the value of Italy’s wished-for assistance in 1925, Barton argued, it was now certain that it was represented by a ‘minus quantity’.146 But in the Foreign Office they disagreed with Barton and still sought help from Mussolini. The feeling was that the 1925 Agreement should therefore be honoured. In early 1934 it was noted that, if & when we do want to press for Tsana, we can obtain Italian assistance & point to our loyal fulfilment of our side of the 1925 bargain…Tsana is so much our largest potential interest in Ethiopia in the near future, that consideration of its abandonment seems at least premature.147

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In September 1934, the Italians and the British had again talked about the Tana Dam in Rome. Guarnaschelli remarked that now was a favourable moment for the three powers to arrive at ‘an entente in regard to Abyssinian problems’.148 While the British Government was discussing Italian assistance in Ethiopia, the Embassy in Rome informed London that the ‘forward school of Italians’ were on the lookout for an incident in Ethiopia that could provoke aggression and occupation.149 The officials in British Foreign Service were in less doubt about Italian intentions at the time than historians have been since.150 Mussolini found his excuse in the Walwal incident a couple of months later – a fight over some 300 wells indispensable to human life (and troops) in the desert. The Ethiopians and Italians fought for these wells for days, facing each other at a distance in places no more than two metres apart, and 160 people were killed. Italy gave a virtual ultimatum to Ethiopia, demanding apologies and monetary compensation for what the Italians described as an unprovoked attack on Italian Somaliland. On 14 December 1934, when Mussolini refused arbitration, Haile Selassie appealed to the League.151 The British were in no doubt: Mussolini was bent on taking Ethiopia, and he would succeed; but they did not denounce Italy. In January 1935, the Foreign Office produced a Memorandum respecting the policy of the British Government towards Ethiopia.152 At the same time the Government was engaged in complicated negotiations with Egypt, for a new treaty that required concessions the British knew would weaken London’s position at Suez; in the Sudan, cotton production had regained some of its pre-1929 profitability. There were more reasons for taking the dam out of ‘cold storage’, but the most important was Italy’s forward policy in the area. Italy might help to obtain the dam the Emperor had denied them. This Memorandum on policies in Ethiopia in general, discussed one issue: the Tana Dam and the Nile waters. It recounted the 1906 Agreement, and the Exchange of Notes with Italy in December 1925, and repeated the commitment of the 1925 Notes. London would further promise to support, with the Ethiopian Government, all Italian requests for economic concessions in the requested zone. But such acts were subject to the proviso that the Italian Government recognised ‘the prior hydraulic rights of Egypt and the Sudan’ and ‘will engage not to construct on the head waters of the Blue or White Niles, or their tributaries or affluents, any work which might sensibly modify their flow into the main river’.153 In the same month John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, told the British Minister in Addis Ababa that it was becoming increasingly important that the Emperor ‘should appreciate the necessity in his own interest of doing everything to conclude an agreement with Italy at the earliest possible date…His Majesty should face facts in a spirit of realism.’ 154 The Cabinet discussed the Ethiopian issue in a broader context, later the same month, and they were in no doubt: Italian aggression could be seen everywhere. They received news that the number of ships chartered by the Italian Government was being increased, while more than 70 ships had already been chartered for troop deployment. When Mussolini chose the same general to lead Italian forces on the Horn of Africa who had, with great force, suppressed dissent and uprising in Libya,

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this also caused concern. The Foreign Secretary said the situation had deteriorated and that London’s answer should be, in the ‘friendliest manner’, to argue their ‘misgivings at the present turn of events’.155 The Ethiopian Emperor now realised that he was fighting against time.156 He saw the change in British tactics. For 15 years he had been sceptical of British motives in the Lake area. In the 1920s the Ethiopian Government had countered London’s initiatives with procrastination. Now Haile Selassie wanted to provide London with a material interest in the independence and integrity of Ethiopia. He supported a dam that was no different from the earlier proposals, but that could play a different political role.157 The dam could also further strengthen the authority of the central government in the regions of Gojjam and Begemdir. The projected road in connection with the reservoir work could be a highway for British imperial influence, but it could also be used to check centrifugal forces. The Emperor sent out invitations to another conference in Addis Ababa for 1 June 1935. But the British Government now gave him the cold shoulder. The Sudan Government informed Ethiopia that it would not be able to attend the planned conference. June was too early; they had to study the White Report first.158 The Egyptian Minister sent a similar message to the Emperor, saying that it had discussed ‘proposing another date’ with the British Government.159 The Egyptian Government instead proposed a preliminary conference in Cairo, between the Sudan and Egypt. London warned against a conference in Cairo, because of what London called the ‘Italo–Ethiopian tension’. The argument was that such a conference about a dam situated in what the Italians considered their zone in Ethiopia could tempt the Italians to throw all caution aside and decide upon war. The Foreign Office did not want to upset the Italians at a time when they regarded Haile Selassie as a weak and temporary leader of a state soon to be overrun. In addition, the proposed scheme would not give London the necessary control of the dam or dam site. The Emperor’s conference was postponed, and it never did convene.

Geopolitics and Water Blindness The literature on Anglo–Italian relations supports the assessment that Britain had no ‘concrete interests’ in Ethiopia, by referring to a Foreign Office committee set up in 1935 to consider implications of various Italian scenarios in Abyssinia.160 All seem to agree that the report of the Maffey Committee, as it was called in Foreign Office correspondence, was the guiding document for Cabinet policy. This interdepartmental committee was established after a Foreign Office initiative on 6 March 1935. Their secret report,161 handed to the Foreign Secretary on 18 June 1935, and later in the same month discussed at length by the Cabinet,162 concluded that Britain had important strategic interests in Ethiopia. The report stated, in straightforward language, that the most vital British interest remained Lake Tana and the Nile basin. Historical narratives, analysing and defining economic interests in a conventional way, has naturally concluded that British economic interests in the country were

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marginal. But this perspective does not grasp the regional geopolitical particularities shaped by the Nile basin and its hydrological system. Speculating on future Italian policy, the Maffey report declared, ‘In the event of the disappearance of Ethiopia as an independent state, His Majesty’s Government should aim at securing territorial control over Lake Tana and a suitable corridor linking it to the Sudan’. Britain should also take steps to secure the ‘safeguarding of British interests in the other tributaries of the Nile, especially the Sobat’. An Italian occupation was not at this juncture regarded as a serious blow to British interests. The report concluded that Britain had no reason to ‘resist an Italian occupation of Ethiopia’. It had both its ‘advantages’ and ‘disadvantages’, although in the perspective of imperial defence an independent Ethiopia would be preferable. The dam could be realised by invoking past agreements with Italy, and insisting on Italy’s commitments to British interests.163 London hoped that Italy would stand by its Treaty obligations from 1906 and 1925, and support British plans for Lake Tana. Mussolini should give them what Haile Selassie had refused during the negotiations that had started before 1920 and were still in progress. If it proved to be impossible to secure British territorial control over Lake Tana and adjacent areas, Britain should take all possible steps to safeguard its interests with regard to the lake, and ‘should use the opportunity to secure less onerous terms in the event of the construction of a barrage on the lake’.164 The Foreign Office formulated the British main strategy again and again, to bring the point home to the Cabinet. In a new note from the Foreign Office to the Secretary of State during June 1935, it was once more stressed that the Tana Dam was ‘the most important interest in Abyssinia’.165 The note emphasised, not entirely correctly, that Italy had so far ‘shown no desire to contest British rights over the development of Lake Tsana’. This claim was regarded by the Foreign Office as firmly based on the Anglo–Italian Exchange of Notes of 1925. What worried London and the Foreign Office was therefore information about a ‘scurrilous and unscrupulous press campaign’ in Italy, obviously supported by the Government, against Britain and its involvement in Lake Tana.166 In particular the Italian press protested at what it described as an agreement of Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Britain on the Lake (that is the 1935 conference), and that E£100,000 had been earmarked for preparatory work in connection with the barrage. The Italians argued that the Emperor’s ‘sudden acquiescence’ was owed to promises of large payments that would enable him to arm Ethiopia. To the British it was ‘urgently necessary’ to try to ‘remove these suspicions from the minds of the Italians’;167 eventually the Italian Government ordered the campaign to be stopped, but London had already got the message.

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A Finger in the ‘Tana Pie’ The Cabinet in London was in no doubt about Italian aims in Ethiopia.168 It was decided that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs should initiate a study of problems that would arise in the event of war between Italy and Ethiopia, and that Britain should protest to the Italian Government about misrepresentations of British policy in the Italian press. In preparing a note for the Cabinet, the Foreign Office made it clear that the Italians wanted to ‘have a finger in the Lake Tsana pie’.169 The British Government now thought it impossible to deter the Italians, and in London, Khartoum and Cairo there was growing anxiety over the military-political future of the Tana region.170 The main line was to follow a policy that would not enrage the Italians. This also implied appeasing them on the military front. When the Cabinet discussed the ‘Abyssinian question’ again on 24 July, they had before them a new Memorandum prepared by the Foreign Secretary.171 The Treaty of 3 August 1930 was set aside when, in an effort to reduce Ethiopian suspicion, Britain promised to help the Emperor obtain ‘all the arms and munitions necessary for the defence of his territories from external aggression’. Britain and France banned the passage of arms to Ethiopia through their territories, and the Cabinet decided not to issue licences for the export of arms and munitions of war, either to Italy or Ethiopia. Samuel Hoare, who had replaced Sir John Simon as Britain’s Foreign Secretary in June, stated this officially in the House of Commons – partly to please Mussolini – and in order to encourage a peaceful settlement.172 At the same time, the British controlled the Suez Canal, through which Italian troops and weapons continued to be brought to Massawa and Mogadishu. The British chose the floor of the League of Nations to declare their policies to the world. Eden spoke there on the ‘Abyssinian question’ during the 87th extraordinary session of the Council of the League, held on 3 August 1935. He talked of ‘bringing about a peaceful solution of the differences between Italy and Abyssinia’ and supported the proposal that Britain, France and Italy should meet separately, outside the League’s proceedings, with a view to ‘finding a solution acceptable to all for the difficulties of a more general nature which have unfortunately arisen between Italy and Abyssinia’. While the Conservative Government in London was secretly discussing initiatives to secure its interests when Italy occupied Ethiopia, it publicly played the role of arbiter. In reality Britain prepared to take part in what amounted to the partition of Ethiopia, not because it preferred this solution, but because strategic interests there made this the most rational policy. In August the British Government reassessed the situation in the Horn of Africa in general and in Ethiopia and the Nile basin in particular.173 The new element was that Italy now claimed that its interest in the Nile waters in Ethiopia was no less important than the interests of Egypt and the Sudan. The Italian Government had been ‘desiring to induce HMG to work with them, on the basis of a change in the status quo in Abyssinia’. If Italy were to take over the role of the Ethiopians as rulers of the lake area, it was argued, it would clearly be necessary that it should be

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‘associated’ with the Nile scheme. The Foreign Office minute ridiculed as absurd the Italian talk of interests in the waters. But, nonetheless, it was now political reality. London thought it impossible to have the dam on Lake Tana without direct cooperation with Mussolini, and if Britain did not co-operate, they feared, Italy might build it itself. On 6 August, Stanley Baldwin (who had also been Prime Minister during the negotiations with Mussolini on Lake Tana in 1925), Hoare, Eden and Sir Robert Gilbert Vansittart, the influential Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and M.P.A. Hankey, Secretary to the Cabinet, met to discuss the line Eden should take at forthcoming meetings of the three powers that had been signatories to the 1906 Treaty.174 They decided to enforce the partition of Abyssinia in order to ‘bring Italy to an accommodation’. And should the Three-Power Conference not achieve a satisfactory result, Eden should tell the Italian representative that Lake Tana was an important British interest and also repeat the warning given by Sir Edward Grey in 1913.175 In the meantime the Foreign Office should examine the question of Lake Tana in its political and technical aspects. The British Government was well aware of the damage that would result if they repudiated their obligations under Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. A conference of ministers on 21 August 1935 produced a record, which was to be ‘kept under lock and key’. Baldwin, Chamberlain, Eden, Simon and Hoare were present, in addition to the Legal Advisor to the Foreign Office and the Counsellor at the Foreign Office.176 Hoare thought that ‘Italy would probably go to war within two or three weeks of September 4th’, and that Mussolini in his ‘present frame of mind was not a normal man’. It was therefore conceivable that some ‘apparently innocuous action’ on the part of the British, for example in connection with the Mediterranean or with Lake Tana, might be taken as a casus belli. The Cabinet decided the following day that the Government was ‘most anxious to avoid a war with Italy which it was generally recognised would be a grave calamity’.177 The official British line was to keep in step with the policy of the French Government, while they secretly prepared themselves for what they knew would be an Italian war of aggression against Ethiopia.178 The Government was particularly on guard against adoption of any form of economic sanctions that might turn Italian resentment especially strongly against the UK. It worked for an understanding with France as to the action it would take in the event of an Italian attack on British interests,179 an understanding later reached in the infamous Hoare-Laval Pact. In public, the British Government maintained support for the League. On 11 September 1935, Hoare affirmed in a speech to the League that Britain, in spite of all difficulties, would ‘be second to none’ in its intention to fulfil, within the means of its capacity, the obligations which the Covenant laid upon it. Hoare declared that the British Government believed that small nations were entitled to a life of their own and such protection as could collectively be afforded them. On 12 September, Hoare, in a broadcast from Geneva, said that he would find a settlement that would do ‘justice alike to Abyssinia’s national rights and Italy’s claims for expansion’.180 The official British line should be that British Ministers, in

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their speeches, should continue to make clear that the ‘Italo-Abyssinian Dispute was not a British concern but a League of Nations matter’, and that the future of the League depended on the handling of this question.181

Fascist Occupation and London’s Tactics During the morning of 3 October 1935, Italian forces invaded Abyssinia from Eritrea by crossing the Marib river. A force of about 200,000 soldiers (along with 200 Italian journalists) had been for some time in Eritrea and Somalia, ready for war at the orders of the Duce. This was Mussolini’s war. He was Prime Minister and head of government, chief of the Fascist militia, leader of Italy’s only political party and, since 1933, simultaneously Minister of War, Navy, Air, Colonies and Foreign Affairs. He was a soldier and a statesman, and had followed closely and personally the Tana negotiations since 1925. The 127,500 Italian and 83,000 Eritrean troops had orders for the swift and complete conquest of Ethiopia and, at the same time as Italian planes were bombing Adwa, the Italian Ambassador in London proposed negotiations with Britain. The Foreign Secretary replied that London could not negotiate while Italy was bombing women and children, a theatrical bombing campaign aimed at symbolising revenge for the Italian defeat in 1895. The British Government also stated that the farther Italy penetrated into Abyssinia the harder negotiations would become.182 While the British Government sought diplomatic solutions from a very weak position on the Upper Blue Nile, reports of the bombardment of missionary stations and Red Cross units and the use of poison gas turned British and world opinion against the Italians. Democrats and anti-fascists all over the world protested strongly and Time magazine named Haile Selassie Man of the Year. Britain and France, the two most powerful states in the League of Nations, had to protest against the invasion in some form. After all, the League was founded on the principle of collective security, conceived as global in scope. Its signatories had pledged to seek peaceful solutions to disputes and to assist each other against aggression. The means envisaged were sanctions – and economic boycott authorised under Article 16 of the Covenant. On 14 October the League condemned Italy as the aggressor by fifty votes to four. The Committee of Eighteen met the same day to discuss the imposition of sanctions. Sanctions were invoked on 15 October. However, the League excluded oil, iron and steel from the boycott, making the sanctions completely ineffective. Within a year they were lifted. Both Britain and France wanted a finger in the ‘Abyssinian pie’ rather than to enrage Mussolini with sanctions. Eden, who had been appointed Minister for the League of Nations in June 1935, called on Pierre Laval in Paris, the French Premier and Foreign Minister,183 on his way to Geneva for the October meeting. There Laval showed him a map he had drawn up to stop the war: Mussolini was to be bought off with a mandate over all parts of Abyssinia not originally inhabited by the Amhara, which meant three-quarters of the country. Then, in early December, Hoare and Laval decided on a plan that would hand over to Mussolini the greater

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part of Tigray, where the Italian armies at that moment were making no progress; the Danakil country as far south as Awsa; and the Ogaden, together with an economic monopoly over the country south of Addis Ababa. In return Ethiopia would be given the port of Assab, but on the understanding that it would not build a railway there, which would have competed with the French railway from Djibouti. Britain was to take control over the Lake Tana area and the Nile watershed. When the Hoare-Laval Pact was leaked to the press and an accurate version appeared in the New York Times, there was an immediate public outcry, including Britain. Prime Minister Baldwin first said that the plan had been endorsed by the Government. Then, under mounting pressure, he repudiated it and blamed Hoare, who was forced to resign, sacrificed to save the rest of the Cabinet. The Hoare-Laval Pact of 8 December killed the League of Nations, but not London’s Tana policy, which continued to be pursued in deep secrecy. Later in the spring, the Cabinet in London decided to put the question of the recognition of the Italian position in Ethiopia on the agenda of the forthcoming meeting of the Council. They aimed at a ‘liberating resolution’ by freeing British hands in the area.184 This eventually led to a de facto recognition of the Italian occupation. The sanctions were soon lifted altogether. But the Tana issue did not disappear, and although Hoare was forced to leave the Government, British strategy remained more or less the same. The Tana question continued to influence Anglo– Italian relations, British attitudes to the Fascist invasion, Ethiopia’s struggle for independence, and the Emperor’s plea for international support. Then, on 2 May 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie fled Ethiopia. A special train brought him to Djibouti, and two days later he and his family boarded a British war vessel – and left the country for five years of exile in the UK. According to his own account, Haile Selassie had left Ethiopia to appeal personally to the League of Nations for a multi-million dollar loan to fight Italy.185 When the vote at the League was taken, one nation voted in favour (Ethiopia), 25 voted against and 25 abstained. A week later Mussolini proclaimed a new Roman Empire, in reality already recognised in Ethiopia by both Paris and London. What should Britain’s regional strategy and Nile policy now look like – when Mussolini controlled Addis Ababa and Haile Selassie lived in exile in Bath? A note dated 2 August 1936, which the Foreign Office staff prepared for the Secretary of State, entitled ‘The Consequences of an Italian–Abyssinian War’, took a broad view of the general consequences for the British Empire. The note definitely objected to the Ethiopian struggle against Italy. The last part of the document was entirely devoted to the Tana question. It stressed the need to give serious attention to the direct threat to British and Egyptian interests that would occur in the event of Italy’s occupying the whole of Abyssinia ‘including Lake Tsana, and thereby putting herself in a position to control, or largely to control, or to threaten, the flow to Egypt and the Sudan of the waters of the Nile’. It continued, but it is only fair to recognise that Signor Mussolini has in the past expressed himself as willing to admit special British interests in that region; and it is to be hoped that he will not in any case go to the length of occupying, or abusing the occupation of,

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territory regarded by the both His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and the Egyptian Government as vital to the security of Egypt.186

The guiding principle was clear: as long as Mussolini would accept London’s rights and interests in the Lake Tana area, the British would do nothing, or stop at rhetoric. When Haile Selassie came to Britain as a refugee but still widely regarded as the rightful Emperor of Ethiopia, he was consequently given no official welcome or support. The ‘Midsummer of Madness’ But very soon devastating reports started to arrive from Ethiopia. The Times and Daily Telegraph reported that Italian missions had surveyed the Tana area in January 1937 in order to assess the potentials of Lake Tana. The Commission consisted of a number of scientists who were experts in hydrology, anthropology and botany. In 1938 they published their study, declaring for the whole world Italian ambitions on the Nile.187 The Foreign Office discussed Italian plans to build a water tunnel from the Blue Nile basin to the dry lands in Ethiopia. The plan was already foreseen by MacGregor in the annex to the Maffey report, which ‘came of course into the Italians’ hands!’ 188 In October 1937 the Foreign Office was informed that a number of Italian artisans (mechanics etc., thirty in all) had recently left for Gambeila in order to work on the Tana Dam. They said that they had been asked to do this secretly; officially they were to work in connection with the coffee trade. This information was not thought very trustworthy, but still, it was an indication of what the British strategists knew could happen.189 Alarm bells rang. Discouraging reports were written by the former British representative in Ethiopia. Bentinck minuted in early 1938 that, for the time being, the Italians were too occupied to start engineering works on the lake. But he knew that they regarded the principal value of Lake Tana and its waters as important bargaining counters in any negotiations with Britain and the Egyptians.190 Italian control of the outlet as it existed at the time had an ‘immense nuisance value’; control of the outlet when a dam had been built ‘would put Italy in an immensely strong position vis-à-vis Egypt’. Instead, he suggested that, provided the Italian Government agreed, British interests should construct the dam and ‘pay rent for the waters to the Italian Government (the interest concerned being refunded by Egypt and the Sudan)’. This would presumably be a welcome source of revenue from foreign quarters, which would ‘dispose the Italians favourably towards Great Britain, Egypt and the Sudan as regards Lake Tsana’. If the Italian side interfered with the dam or the waters to the detriment of those three countries, that would deprive the Italian Government of that particular source of revenue. Foreign Office naïveté apparently knew no limits here; they discussed whether ‘the dam should be constructed by British interests because it appears unlikely (though it is admittedly not beyond the bounds of possibility) that the Italian Government would be willing to sanction expenditure upon the construction of a dam from which they themselves would derive no

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tangible advantage’.191 After this internal discussion on British policy regarding Tana and Italy, Eden minuted: ‘It might be possible, on this and other points, to get some assurances, at least, that the Italian Government were ready to discuss these matters in accordance with certain principles. If the atmosphere were favourable, we might eventually get more that way than by trying to extract a detailed agreement before recognising de jure.’ 192 Chamberlain’s Cabinet was formed in May 1937,193 and appeasement of Mussolini was one of his clear aims from the first day in office.194 He thought it would be, he said, ‘the very midsummer of madness’ to continue sanctions against Italy.195 On the military front Britain gave Italy permission to use the Sudan. London allowed Italian military aircraft to fly over Sudanese territory in 1938; when the Italians sought permission for their naval vessel Tigre to call at Port Sudan to refuel, the Governor-General gave permission.196 In early 1938 Chamberlain rejected Roosevelt’s proposal for a conference on safeguarding existing frontiers. Chamberlain opened a direct line to Mussolini behind Eden’s back. Eden, who had become Foreign Secretary in December 1935, resigned in February 1938 in protest at Chamberlain’s foreign policy. During the spring and summer of 1938 the Foreign Policy Committee met regularly, and Lord Halifax was now the new Foreign Secretary. Britain now pressed for an agreement with Mussolini. A new Anglo–Italian Agreement was publicly announced on 16 April 1938. This Perth–Ciano Pact settled two important problems: British recognition of Italian sovereignty over Ethiopia and Italian recognition of British interests in the Nile and promises of help for the British Lake Tana project.197 One protocol included a separate declaration regarding Lake Tana (Annex 5) and was signed by Lord Perth and Count Ciano the same day. The Italian Government confirm to the Government of the United Kingdom the assurance given by them to the Government of the United Kingdom on the 3rd April, 1936, and reiterated by the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs to His Majesty’s Ambassador at Rome on the 31st December 1936, to the effect that the Italian Government were fully conscious of their obligations toward the Government of the United Kingdom in the matter of Lake Tsana and had no intention whatever of overlooking or repudiating them.198

Chamberlain met Mussolini the same day, saying that this Agreement would make firm again the ‘confidence and friendship which so long [between Italy and the United Kingdom] existed in the past’.199 Britain had ‘fulfilled their side of the bargain by taking the lead in recognising Italian sovereignty over Abyssinia’.200 London had sought and finally thought it had won co-operation over the Lake Tana Dam. But it turned out that they were mistaken, yet again. In July an article in Nineteenth Century suggested that the Italians would sell Lake Tana water to Egypt and the Sudan for sterling.201 The Foreign Office saw the article, and sneered, ‘a paid Italian propaganda agent’.202 In spite of these developments Chamberlain wrote to Mussolini after their meeting in Rome in January that their friendship had been ‘fortified’ and the hopes of peace strengthened.203 In Ethiopia Italy immediately implemented a policy of

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segregation, making the occupation more brutal. On 17 September 1938, the Governor of Addis Ababa issued orders forbidding Italians and foreigners to use public motor vehicles driven by natives; establishing a separate native town at Addis Ababa, and forbidding Italians to enter, work or live there, without permission from the police; forbidding native chiefs to shake hands with Italian officials; and prohibiting mixed marriages. White prostitutes were brought in and allocated to different cities. The Indians were denied access to the special European section of post offices, restaurants and cinemas, and were sometimes not allowed to travel in European taxis. What really worried the British Government was the discovery, by the end of January 1939, that the Italians insisted on building the Tana Dam themselves and would also try to charge a heavy rate on water.204 Italy had finally broken its side of the Agreements of 1906, 1925, 1936 and 1938.

The Plan for an Ethiopian Protectorate Haile Selassie, who had fled Ethiopia and settled in southwest England, had since 1936 received no support from the British Government, although he had approached them for financial aid. Now described as ‘a lion at bay in Bath’, he was invoked by his British hosts and brought back to Ethiopia by the British Government. On 23 June 1940, he embarked on the train at Paddington to start his journey back to liberate his country. With the entry of Italy into the war on Germany’s side, however, the Ethiopian question took on a new aspect. The Abyssinian Association and vocal parts of public opinion in Britain argued for a British alliance with Ethiopia, pointing out that a considerable Ethiopian army could be raised in Western Abyssinia with British help and that large areas of the country, especially in the northwest, were not under Italian control. One of the most prominent activists, Sylvia Pankhurst, wrote to Ernest Bevin, in Prime Minister Churchill’s War Cabinet, in June 1940 and complained that no contact had yet been made by the British Government with the Emperor of Ethiopia. She wrote that Italian propaganda claimed that the British were fighting Italy only to take Ethiopia as a colony for themselves, and if contact was not speedily made by the British Government with the Ethiopians, they would believe this was true and they would fight ‘against us instead of with us’.205 Bevin acknowledged the letter and sent it to the Foreign Office. The action London planned to take ‘vis-àvis Abyssinia and its Emperor’ was ‘impossible to explain’ to Pankhurst,206 because the plan was not to bring him back as Emperor of a sovereign Ethiopia, but to use him to establish a British protectorate over Ethiopia. London was still reluctant to support Haile Selassie. They were not sure that he enjoyed enough support in his country. Did the other Rases support him and what about the oppressed people in the Southwest? They also feared that he knew too much about British aims and policies in the region. Sitting forgotten and poor in this English spa town, Haile Selassie wrote a Christmas greeting to Eden and his family (the Emperor held Eden in higher

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esteem than he did other British ministers because Eden had resigned over the appeasement policies). But Eden was no more in favour of supporting the Emperor’s cause than was the Cabinet.207 London did not denounce the Anglo–Italian Treaty, and they did not recognise Ethiopia as an ally. The British refused to play Ethiopia’s national anthem with those of other allied countries.208 On the way to Ethiopia from Cairo to Khartoum, Haile Selassie’s British plane was ordered to land at Wadi Halfa. The Sudan Government resented his coming. While staying at the Grand Hotel in Wadi Halfa, awaiting a message from the Government to allow him to proceed to Khartoum, Haile Selassie went for a walk with the British advisor, Edwin Chapman-Andrews. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘We reached…[the] river that emerges from Our country.209 We were moved by deep feeling of nostalgia. We cupped Our hands, scooped up some water, and sipped a little.’ 210 When the Emperor knelt on the banks of the Nile, he knew that this was the most decisive geopolitical factor in the destiny of his country. His past and future acts regarding the Nile question reveal a man who was very clear about being the ruler of the water tower of northeastern Africa, and that this position had been and would be both an asset and a liability for his country. Now, returning from exile, a new page in the Ethiopian Nile history was about to be written. But instead of an army waiting for him, as he had hoped, the Emperor found himself isolated in the Sudan, housed outside the capital. He felt insulted by the Sudan Government and protested that he was being used as a pawn.211 London’s plans overruled the sentiments of British administrators in the Sudan. Ethiopian and British Commonwealth forces, under Brigadier Sandford and Colonel Orde Wingate, quite easily defeated the Italian occupiers. Thus, on 5 May 1941 the Emperor led his troops into the capital, five years to the day that Marshal Badoglio and the Italian army had taken Addis Ababa. Wingate rode a white horse, while Haile Selassie sat in the back of the old car that Ras Hailu had owned. It was a bittersweet moment for Haile Selassie, filled with symbolism, pomp and powerlessness. He was back in his royal palace, but the British were in charge. When the War Cabinet, later in the same year, discussed the Ethiopian question, they welcomed the ‘reappearance of Ethiopia as an Independent State’. But apart from official phrases, there were disagreements over policy towards Ethiopia. The War Cabinet wanted a protectorate, under Sir Philip Mitchell, ex-Governor of Uganda, ‘pending return of Abyssinia to Foreign Office tutelage’.212 In line with a general policy at the time, the War Cabinet and many British officials hoped to restore the Empire and, in the case of Ethiopia, to enlarge it. Mitchell presented the Emperor with a telegraphed summary of British desiderata for an agreement in August 1941, including stringent measures of financial control. Eden felt that Mitchell’s demands were too strict, unwise and dangerous. The War Office also thought Mitchell too heavy-handed in his dealings with the Emperor.213 But on the other hand they issued secret instructions to the British military chief in Ethiopia which, if accepted by the Emperor, would render the status of Ethiopia indistinguishable from that of a protectorate.214 The assumption that Mitchell the

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pro-imperialist played solo misses the general attitude in British policies at the time, and how it quickly changed. The War Office gradually came to realise that London could not afford to garrison Ethiopia. The previous aim turned out to be unrealistic owing to the lack of resources and to opposition, from the United States and from Ethiopia itself. Haile Selassie regarded British policy as an insult, since he considered Ethiopia a free, sovereign country. The Emperor had acted swiftly in establishing his own Government, thereby presenting the British with a fait accompli, and London accepted that Ethiopia should be treated as an independent state, subject to what were considered necessary safeguards and provisions.215 The Anglo–Ethiopian Agreement was signed on 31 January 1942. It was a victory for Haile Selassie. He was therein described as Head of State in a free and independent Ethiopia, which would be given financial and military aid and help from British advisors, while the British Minister, to the dismay of the Americans, still had precedence over any other foreign representative. With Italy defeated and the Emperor back in Addis Ababa, London’s strategic concern in Ethiopia remained focused on Lake Tana. Now any British move to secure the Nile waters and the dam at the lake would require the consent of the Emperor, and of him alone. The Foreign Office prepared documents and texts that were almost identical to those produced forty years before, when Cromer and Harrington had first approached Emperor Menelik II.216

The Dam as Gratitude Changes in regional politics did not make London less interested in the Tana dam. From an engineering point of view the Italian occupation had made the dam more realisable. The Italians had built the road from Addis Ababa to the Gojjam. Estimates of project cost could be roughly halved. On the other hand, London considered that the fact that the road was now in existence made the Emperor less interested in allowing the implementation of the Tana project. And more importantly, based on his recent experience of British imperial ambitions towards Ethiopia in general, he would most likely be even more sceptical about British insistence on a road to the Lake from the Sudan. Economically, the situation had also changed. The Sudan had become independent of Egyptian subventions, and Egypt was on a much stronger economic footing. Britain, on the other hand, could not afford to take on new responsibilities – its hands were full, but its larder was bare. The need for water was growing fast in both downstream countries. The Sudan’s need for more water was believed to be felt before that of Egypt. It was estimated that a half share in the waters of the planned reservoir would enable the Sudan to increase the irrigated area in the Gezira by some 200 per cent over a period of about thirty or forty years. The Governments of the Sudan and Egypt put forward suggestions for a fresh approach to the question of Lake Tana. The economic crisis of the Great Depression had reduced the Sudan’s interest in the project in the early1930s. In 1935 the unused

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balance in the Sennar reservoir was 236 million cubic metres. By the end of the war it would shrink to 70 million. Egypt was not experiencing the same water problem, but time and again the country confirmed its interest in a Tana Dam under Egyptian control. Egypt pressed for participation in negotiations, while the Sudan administration proposed that the concession should be granted directly to the Sudan. Egypt was becoming increasingly assertive about its own rights to the dam.217 The Egyptian Prime Minister had told Eden that if Britain succeeded in conquering the whole of Ethiopia, it was vital for both Egypt and the Sudan that Lake Tana and its waters should be, as he put it, under ‘our joint control’. In order to ensure this, he suggested that the Lake Tana area should be given to the Sudan ‘at the cost of a swop [sic] of territory with Abyssinia’. Eden indicated that this might be difficult,218 since both he and his predecessor had made public declarations renouncing any intention of making territorial gains, if and when the Emperor was restored. Khartoum realised that the Tana question once again bristled with complications, and urged London to make up its mind about which policy to pursue, in order to block the Egyptians from gaining a tactical advantage.219 Hussein Sirri Pasha’s proposal that the Sudan should exchange territory for the Lake Tana area was rejected out of hand and denounced as fantastic by the Civil Secretary in Khartoum, Douglas Newbold.220 To trade a bit of Sudanese territory for Lake Tana was regarded in Khartoum as a shrewd Egyptian tactic, in order to put the Emperor under an obligation to Egypt as well as to the Sudan. The Foreign Office bureaucrats described this rigid attitude in Khartoum as not very helpful. Although Eden had rejected Sirri’s proposal, the Foreign Office continued to consider the idea.221 In the autumn of 1941, London saw the need for a new policy.222 London should still conduct negotiations with the Emperor, but now assisted by what were described as Sudanese and Egyptian consultants (that is British consultants working in Egypt and the Sudan). The idea was that Sudan should construct the dam, provide the initial money for it and ‘operate it (with Egyptian observers present)’. It was also considered what they called the ‘quid pro quo’ to be offered to the Emperor when the request for a concession was made. The alternatives were: money, including rent in perpetuity (not for the water itself) for the land on which the works were constructed and for the exercise of various rights necessary to their operation; or land, or territorial compensation, since by British and Sudanese assistance he had been restored to his throne. It was eventually decided that the initial approach should be made by the British Minister in Addis Ababa on this latter basis.223 The Sudan Government would wish to avoid a continuing financial obligation, and territorial compensation could not be offered now. First it was necessary to know the fate of the ex-Italian colonies. In July 1942 the Foreign Office declared that a new start was necessary with regard to the Lake Tana dam. The considerations examined in the past were no longer relevant. The idea was to eliminate at a stroke the enormous mass of correspondence, memoranda and despatches of the past 40 years, which were described as confusing both the mind and the issue. Only one exception was made, and that was Article III in what was carefully called the Treaty between Great Britain and Abyssinia

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to regulate the waters of the Nile. This point had now become very important. It appeared that Haile Selassie planned to build the dam and the regulator himself. Thereafter he would sell the water to the Sudan and Egypt. London had earlier managed to beat off Washington by referring to what was called the 1902 Agreement. The Foreign Office now realised that they would have to come up with some new offers to the Emperor. One idea was to start on an entirely new basis and get away from the old idea of acquiring the concession against cash payments and rentals. In relation to Egypt the policy would also have to change. After forty years of adamant rejection of Cairo’s claims, it was decided that Egypt should be an equal participant in the concession, but only, it was maintained, if Britain could conclude ‘our agreement alone’.224 The Foreign Office asked the Ambassador in Cairo to inform the Egyptian Prime Minister of these new ideas. Lampson should point out to the Egyptians that Egypt would ‘in due course benefit from an agreement on terms made possible only by the assistance rendered to the Emperor and his country by British and Sudanese forces’. Only the British Government was in a position to acquire the concession from Addis Ababa, because the Ethiopian Government had no moral obligation towards Egypt, but only towards Britain.225 London planned to use what it regarded as its new strong position in Ethiopia as a means of enlisting Egyptian money for the dam building and to secure control of the reservoir discharge for themselves. London’s Minister in Addis Ababa, later Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir Robert George Howe, presented the Emperor on London’s behalf with an outline for an agreement containing the following points, as listed in the note from the Foreign Office to Howe: ‘(i) the concession of an area, to be defined later, in the region of Lake Tsana, on which His Majesty’s Government will be free to construct and operate hydraulic works. No fixed terms of years should be mentioned; (ii) The free use of roads in existence or to be constructed at our expense to the Lake from the Sudan and from the interior of Ethiopia; (iii) Right of access to the area by air and the construction at our expense of an airfield and a marine landing place’. London stated that, owing to the high rainfall in the Blue Nile basin, it was hardly conceivable that irrigation projects within such an area could ever become necessary or economically practicable. The Foreign Office objected to Howe’s suggestion that an Ethiopian should sit on a Board of Control. However, there could be an Ethiopian observer at the regulator, just as there was an Egyptian observer at the Sennar Dam.226 This proposal went much further than any earlier proposal when it came to British control. The main object in the conversation with the Emperor was to convince him that the Tana concession should be considered as equivalent to repayment of his debt to the British for the restoration of his throne and to argue strongly against any proposal about payment of rent for the dam. The Emperor should be told that the most fitting and practical expression of gratitude was to grant facilities at Lake Tana, and that London had taken the generous action of ‘making no claim for the millions of pounds’ it had employed in restoring Ethiopia’s independence. Howe wrote that in order to obtain the concession as a sign of gratitude from Ethiopia, London should also return a measure of praise: they could declare that ‘the Ethiopian

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patriots made at least an equal contribution to the joint Anglo–Ethiopian cause’, a contribution ‘by which the Sudan itself was saved from invasion’.227 In the Foreign Office the reaction to this analysis was stiff upper lip: it was said that Howe had seriously swallowed the fallacy that Ethiopian irredentism saved the Sudan from an invasion. The Foreign Office wanted a wide-ranging agreement, and armed, as they said, with the local expertise of Colonel Cheesman and the report of the White Corporation in the Legation’s library, it would be entirely superfluous to undertake further surveys at this stage. Howe wrote that he thought it most unlikely that the Emperor would grant a Tana concession without monetary or other compensation. If the British decided not to offer this, he said, it might lead to foreign accusations that they had obtained it by coercion.228 The Foreign Office stated again in April that ‘the most important of our desiderata is the Lake Tsana regulator’, but it hoped to obtain this by demonstrating its new power in Addis Ababa. Once again, however, they miscalculated the political agility of Emperor Haile Selassie.229

A ‘New’ Project and a Shrewd Emperor The British now wanted overall command of a Tana plan that had grown in ambition, and had to convince the Emperor. To secure the latter, Huddleston in Khartoum proposed that MacGregor and Butcher (who had been called back to Cairo to advise on Nile matters) should be the representatives of both the Egyptian and Sudan Governments in negotiations with Addis Ababa. Regarding the first issue, Huddleston stated that past assurances to the Ethiopians about local repercussions had been based on the low-level scheme. In upcoming preliminary negotiations he argued that ‘no reference should be made of the high-level scheme with its attendant problems of compensations’.230 It was obvious to all that the war had affected current water needs and the future sharing of Nile waters. The British Ambassador in Cairo urged the Sudan Government to put forward the Sudan’s future water requirements as soon as possible. He argued that it was necessary to inform the Egyptian Government from the very start of the negotiations that the division both of ‘expenses and of water’ would have to be quite different from what had been agreed in Cairo in 1935.231 Egypt should be told that the Sudan’s water demand was much higher now than before the war.232 Another complicating factor was that the financial situation in Egypt in the meantime had become very strong. The country now had more resources and surplus funds. The Egyptian Minister of Public Works reminded the British Ambassador that in previous negotiations all parties had accepted that Egypt should have ‘first call’ on water stored, and that the same principle should be followed now.233 So tricky had this Nile-sharing issue become that, in May, Lampson was instructed by his Government in London not to discuss the Tana question with the Egyptian Government, especially not the question of ‘division of waters’.234 These were two ‘of the most ticklish questions where Egyptian public opinion was

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concerned’,235 and here the Foreign Office was speaking on the basis of thorny experience. So when the Egyptian press raised the Tana issue in September, the British wanted no public debate. The British Embassy immediately spoke to Osman Pasha of the continued importance of ‘preventing all publicity in this matter’.236 Two days earlier, the Prime Minister, Mustafa el Nahas, had written to Lord Killearn (previously Sir Miles Lampson, British High Commissioner and Ambassador in Cairo) expressing Egyptian interest in the project and in new negotiations.237 His opinion was that Egypt would construct and manage the reservoir. On this background Killearn wrote to Eden, emphasising the need for continued secrecy. It was crucial that the Egyptian Government should not yet be informed about Howe’s discussions with the Emperor in Addis Ababa.238 In the meantime Howe had informed Eden from Ethiopia of his talks with the Emperor on Lake Tana. Echoing the first reports on the same issue by previous British representatives in Addis Ababa, Howe was optimistic: Haile Selassie would answer in some days, he wrote in early June.239 Three weeks later Howe requested an audience with the Emperor to press for the promised answer, but Haile Selassie answered, that owing to the importance of the matter, more time was required.240 Howe had a new meeting with the Emperor in August, then informed the Foreign Office that the Emperor was still not prepared to give a definite answer, but that he would do so when he went to London.241 At the end of October 1943, in a more pessimistic and realistic vein, Howe informed Eden of the problems of pressing the Emperor for a concession. He wondered whether it would be possible to ‘represent to His Majesty that this assistance [a request for armed assistance in putting down internal resistance] or at least any possibility of future assistance on the same lines, was dependent on the adoption by His Majesty of a more forthcoming attitude with regard to our concrete requirements, such as the Tsana scheme’. Howe reported that the Emperor was going to use the Tana concession as a bargaining weapon for which he would endeavour to get the best possible return, not necessarily in money but more probably in political or territorial concessions. It might therefore, he wrote, be desirable to postpone the discussion of the subject until the end of the war.242 The concessions in question related especially to Eritrea, the Reserved Areas and the Danakil coast. In October 1943 the British discussed the cession to Ethiopia of the Danakil coast including the port of Assab and the Northern Tigray, including perhaps the town of Asmara.243 Nevertheless, until a peace settlement with Italy had been signed, it was argued, such territorial adjustments should be postponed. Establishment of a Lake Tana Commission was mentioned as an important part of such an initial agreement with Ethiopia. For its part, the Government in Addis Ababa tried to put pressure on London in order to obtain more support in terms of both money and territory. During the negotiations for a new Anglo–Ethiopian Agreement in 1941–42 the Emperor drew attention to the fact that the Italian Government had had a budget for Ethiopia that amounted to £15 million per annum. The £2 million per annum that the British were willing or able to give was, in comparison, almost offensive. The War Cabinet conceded that additional money might be necessary for an interim period. They

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subsequently placed £1 million at the disposal of the British Minister in Addis Ababa. This was known as the Cushion grant. It was still considered far from sufficient, and to understand the Ethiopian reactions, the offer should be explained in more detail. The first year the following grants had been made or promised from the Cushion: £1000 towards the expenses of the Ethiopian Women’s Association, a promise of £12,700 towards the cost of setting up and operating a handicraft school and a sum not exceeding £40,000 towards the cost of pacifying the Wajerat tribes in 1942. The Ethiopians wanted more money for maintenance of the road system, but the British refused. The British Middle East Office argued that it would be folly to encourage the Ethiopian Government to keep up the Italian road system beyond the minimum essential requirements of the economy and on a basis that Ethiopian resources could ‘no longer bear when they ceased to receive the financial aid provided by the agreement’.244 Britain had not much to offer, in financial terms, for the Tana concession. The British discussed how to link support for the Emperor to the Tana concession. Howe told Eden in 1943 that if it were decided ‘to accede to the Emperor’s requests for armed assistance in putting down trouble’, he thought that such support should be made explicitly conditional upon a more ‘forthcoming attitude’ regarding the Tana scheme. Howe reminded London that the Emperor was likely to use the Lake Tana concession as a bargaining counter, not only for money but also for political and territorial gains.245 The potential role of the American J.G. White Corporation was regarded as an issue in the Anglo–American rivalry in the whole region. In late 1943 the British had to confront renewed American interest in the Tana scheme. Howe argued that this interest could only be of help to London and proposed that they should participate in the new Lake Tana mission with a view to ‘sharing the burden of development of Ethiopia’.246 Opinions differed. The War Cabinet wanted to know about American interests in Ethiopia, and asked the Foreign Office for information.247 A recurring worry surfaced – Washington. These were omens of what would take place in the years ahead in the Nile basin. The Sudan Government’s main concern was that Nile policy adhere as closely as possible to Article III of what was described as the Treaty of 15 May 1902. If renegotiations were to take place, Khartoum stressed that water rights should be covered at greater length, including the Sobat and Atbara rivers.248 The Sudan Government, with the full support of the Foreign Office, argued for a more careful approach: they thought it very unwise to open up new negotiations about the 1902 exchange at a time when the Ethiopian Government had become stronger and US influence was on the rise. It was important not to create the impression that the 1902 Treaty ‘needed re-affirmation’. Therefore the Sudan Government settled for two policy aims: negotiations over Lake Tana should be reopened and its ‘independent position’ under the 1902 Treaty should be safeguarded.249 The discussions ended in nothing, since negotiations did not take place. In the new Anglo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1944, almost all exclusive British privileges were eliminated. The monopoly of air services was relinquished. The railway from Djibouti was handed back, and only part of the Ogaden remained under British

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control. Britain still controlled the Tigrinia-speaking region of Eritrea and the harbours of Massawa and Assab. In order to regain these territories, to which the Ethiopian Government laid claim, London thought that Lake Tana was considered by the Emperor his most ‘useful bargaining counter’.250 This opened up a new chapter in the history of Lake Tana after the war – mostly a strange repetition of the past – but a new war was looming in the distance.

O N E BA S I N B U T N O U N I F I E D C O N T RO L

Hydropolitically, during the 1930s, the Nile game involved a growing number of players, gradually becoming more difficult to control from one centre of authority. This was also the view in London: the British dominance in the Nile valley was being challenged by Italy and by the Americans, but also from many regional quarters. The British Nile of 1940 was a very different Nile from that of the Cromer-Garstin era, when Cromer was the real King of the Nile waters. The British were also constrained by nature itself. It proved to be much more difficult than anticipated to use the Nile as a diplomatic weapon. Owing to the very character of flowing water, the use of water in international river basins will always impact potential water use in other parts of the basin. The Makwar Dam, the Tana Reservoir, Jabal Auliya and the sudd project had, or would have, different consequences for each area under British control. The British knew the pervasive power of nationalism as a power against them during the Egyptian revolution, but had used the Nile weapon to kindle it in the Sudan, to win over pro-Egyptian forces and to develop the Sudan separately from Egypt. The signing of the Nile Waters Agreement in May 1929 further separated the Sudan from Egypt in the long run, while placating Egyptian public opinion in the short run, but at the cost of water and irrigation developments along the White Nile. In Ethiopia, Britain had found itself in a sort of alliance with Mussolini, partly as a result of its economic and strategic obsession with the Tana Dam. The great plans on the Equatorial Lakes and in the swamps were unrealistic at the time and were not even worth much as a diplomatic card. The British Nile policy and the Nile scene had become so full of contradictions and so complex that the Foreign Office in London was unable to fill its self-conceived role as General Staff of Nile development. Political disagreements deepened within the Empire itself. There was pressure from the cotton industry in the UK, whose representatives argued primarily on the basis of short-term economic interests. Conflicting attitudes and visions about Nile control developed among the British in Egypt and the Sudan. Some British officials in Egypt were more pro-Egyptian than London was and much more proEgyptian than the Sudan Political Service; the Government in Uganda was very much opposed to what they regarded as the pro-Egyptian policy of the Foreign Office. For its part, the Foreign Office complained that many people did not realise the tremendous difference in the whole position that had been brought about by Egyptian independence.

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The inter-war history of Nile control and the changes in the Nile environment should also be understood in a general technological context. In the first half of the twentieth century, dam-building underwent major developments the world over: dams became very much bigger in every sense; construction techniques were greatly improved; more elaborate methods of analysis led to better understanding of the structural behaviour of dams and better design procedures; and dam engineering in all its phases became subject to a greater degree of control and organisation than previously.251 It was not until the end of this period that the full impact of these changes was properly understood and became relevant for the Nile valley, especially in the wake of the Tennessee Valley project. The inter-war period (especially between 1920 and 1930) saw the failure of an appreciable number of dams, and three of them were in Great Britain. On the one hand this meant that the almost unlimited optimism on behalf of science and water control that marked the Garstin era was replaced by more caution and hesitation. On the other hand this meant that the British Nile policy would soon be challenged from another, more technological angle: plans to turn the whole Nile into an irrigation ditch. Just before the war ended the Foreign Secretary, Eden, the Ambassador to Egypt, Killearn, and Governor-General Huddleston in Khartoum discussed a post-war Nile strategy.252 Killearn proposed that, in the event of a serious dispute with Egypt, ‘our physical control of the Nile waters might be used as a means of persuasion’. If the Egyptian Government became sufficiently provocative, it might be necessary, he wrote, to alter the policy of non-interference with the water supply, ‘to which London at present was committed. Whilst it is true that the agreed policy regarding Nile water must not be changed for the purpose of obtaining any advantage for the Sudan, it could nevertheless be changed for the purpose of compelling or punishing Egypt.’ But he underlined ‘that except in the most extreme conditions there would be grave political objections to the course proposed’.253 Huddleston argued that it would not be practical and it would be harmful to the Sudan. He said, From a purely practical point whereas it would be physically possible to divert the summer waters of the Nile to a considerable extent to the detriment of Egypt, the diversion would take time. New canalisation, dams and other works would have to be undertaken to render it effective and the time lag alone between the threatened sanction and its enforcement would rob it of all coercive value. During the intervening period the situation, if it had not improved would have inevitably so deteriorated as to necessitate the application of military or naval sanctions of a more immediate forceful kind.254

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The Nile and Imperial Collapse

The latter [Churchill] was in a rage against A.E. [Anthony Eden] speaking of ‘appeasement’ and saying he never knew before that Munich was situated on the Nile. He described A.E. as being a failure as Foreign Secretary and being ‘tired, sick and bound up in detail’. He positively desired the talks on the Sudan to fail, just as he positively hoped we should not succeed in getting into conversations with the Egyptians on defence which might lead to our abandonment of the Canal Zone.1 (Shuckburgh, 1986)

When, on 19 July 1956, the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,2 with no prior warning and in a brisk language, told the Egyptian Ambassador that the US offer to finance the Aswan High Dam was revoked, he knew this would have worldwide historic repercussions. The decision almost immediately initiated a chain reaction that changed the map of Middle Eastern politics and led to the collapse of British imperial power in the Nile valley. The process of imperial disintegration was speeded up, exacerbated and disclosed by the subsequent Suez war, spelling the end of traditional Western colonialism. This meeting in Washington on the most ambitious Nile project ever, between an American politician and an Egyptian diplomat, showed to the whole world that the days when the British had the upper hand in questions relating to Nile control were over. London was onlooker to an event that, with one stroke, ended the very long and complicated history of British involvement in the Aswan Dam. While the British Government and British engineers had taken the Nile in hand fifty years 189

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before, Eisenhower and Dulles now had the power to act, while Eden and Selwyn Lloyd (Eden’s Foreign Secretary) were bystanders. The Suez war was a dramatic, noisy war instigated by anachronistic British imperialism. The meeting in Dulles’s office was a silent event, symbolising how weak the British Nile empire had become. What was brought to an end in the Suez war, with all its regional and global consequences, hinged on the Western decision to cancel the support for the dam. In spite of the voluminous literature on the Suez issue, no satisfactory explanation exists of why the Western offer by Britain, the US and the World Bank, made in December 1955 to finance the Aswan Dam, was withdrawn.

H Y D RO P O L I T I C S A N D S U E Z

The issues involved were far more complex than has generally been acknowledged. This chapter focuses on 1955 and 1956,3 but analyses developments from 1945 onwards. Without a clear understanding of the detailed chronology of Nile development and Nile diplomacy one cannot reconstruct or understand the policies of the main actors in this ‘game’, as Harold Macmillan called it. The dominant explanation basically misunderstands the dual, strategic nature of the 1955 offer to finance and build the dam, and hence the reason for its withdrawal. Both the US and Great Britain wanted to use their involvement in the Aswan Dam for political blackmail and leverage to put pressure on Cairo, since they thought it would take decades to build and was a very prestigious project. They were also competing for regional influence and lucrative contracts. In general the history of what turned out to be the final decade of British imperialism has been seen as largely determined by the course of the Cold War, and the whole Suez question has largely been interpreted in a perspective from which its strategic importance in a future war against the Soviet Union has been the main focus. But these perspectives are too narrow: in the Nile valley the end of the British Nile empire should be seen as determined by Anglo–American rivalry. The idea behind the first Aswan Dam offer by Britain and the US in December 1955 was not, as has been suggested, simply to demonstrate a dramatic example of the West’s ability and willingness to undertake major developments for the improvements of standards of living in what was then called the undeveloped world. Dulles had aims that had less to do with the Soviets or with Nasser 4 than with weakening old European imperial powers, especially Washington’s most cherished political friend and ally, Great Britain. He wanted to get rid of what he considered to be archaic remnants of European imperialism. For its part, Britain aimed to maintain its position at Suez, trying to enlist American financial and political support for shouldering its burden in the area. At the same time Britain regarded the US as a dangerous force undermining its position in the Nile valley. Interpretation of the policy of Eden’s Government has been affected by the fact that London publicly and immediately supported Dulles’s decision, as if the West were acting as ‘one man’ in this case,5 perpetuating the view of a harmonious relationship between the US and Britain,

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standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against communism.6 We will see that disagreements developed and how top-secret telegrams sent between London and the British Embassy in Washington in the days before Dulles met the Egyptian Ambassador contrast with retrospective efforts to front Western unity and cover up important conflicts of interests. It is necessary to analyse the developments in the whole basin, including the plans for water storage in the African lakes and the canal through the Southern Sudan, so as to grasp the context of Nasser’s Aswan plan and the Anglo–American Aswan offer. It is also necessary to understand the project history and the diplomatic history of the Aswan Dam and to analyse its changing role according to a conscious periodisation: here the first part deals with the Anglo– American offer up to December 1955; the second analyses the character and content of the offer, while the third deals with its history between the making of the offer in December 1955 and its withdrawal in July 1956. In the historical literature this decision to withdraw the offer has been interpreted as a complete reversal of a former ‘pro-Egyptian policy’. The offer was not revoked because Washington and London suddenly realised that Egypt’s economy was in sharp decline, or that Egypt was not managing to solve the riparian issue, or because the American cotton lobby forced Dulles to back down. The official justification at the time centred on two issues: Egypt’s economic situation and the riparian issue. The argument about the Egyptian economy was used by both Dulles and the British Government: the West could not support Egypt’s effort to build the dam because Egypt’s economy was too weak, and the Nasser Government did not prioritise the project sufficiently. Although this argument has often been repeated by historians, Cairo’s ability to devote adequate resources to the project was no less than when the offer was first made seven months before. For example, Egypt’s foreign exchange deficit in the first five months of 1956 had dropped to E£6,694,000 compared with E£8,614,000 in the same period in 1955, and the 1956–57 budget had registered an increase in the surplus of more than E£42,000,000. The economic situation had improved in Egypt since December 1955, when the offer was first made, and both London and Washington knew it. The Foreign Office noted – for internal use only – that the economic justification was not very convincing: it was ‘wearing thin’. The second most important public justification for the withdrawal dealt with the riparian issue. Washington and London publicly stated that since the Nile riparian states had not been involved in any water-sharing agreements, and had not agreed to the project, they could not support it either. Historians have since put forward other explanations. One popular theory is that Dulles withdrew the offer because of the cotton lobby in the US. There can be no doubt that the cotton lobby in the American Congress disliked spending US money to help Egypt grow more cotton, which would compete with US cotton. But this was not a more pressing issue to Dulles in July 1956 than it had been in December 1955. And the cotton issue in the American south cannot explain British policies, because Eden was not particularly concerned with cotton farmers there. Another explanation argues that the decision was an irrational one, based on ignorance about Soviet motives. Had Washington and London known about

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Moscow’s offer regarding the dam, they would not have withdrawn their offer, the story goes. But in July 1956 both British and American politicians knew very well that the Soviet Union had offered to finance the dam. As early as January 1956 the West had learned about the Soviet (and Hungarian) proposals. There were rumours that the Communist bloc was about to set up a consortium. The Foreign Office was informed on 30 June 1956 that Foreign Minister Shepilov had offered to finance the entire Aswan High Dam at the attractive interest rate of 2.5 per cent. In addition to secret intelligence about the issue, the press reported at the end of June that a Soviet Economic Mission would be visiting Egypt shortly to discuss details of the Soviet offer to finance the Aswan Dam. London and Washington also knew that the late Soviet Ambassador to Egypt had already made such an offer in 1955. The argument that the decision was based on ignorance about Soviet intentions can therefore not be sustained. Others have argued that the withdrawal was most rational, because it was based on a complete reversal of the assessment of Nasser and his policies. What this school of thought needs, therefore, is to demonstrate such a shift in attitudes, and to discover whether Dulles and Eden suddenly came to regard Nasser as nothing but a ‘tin-horn Hitler’, as Dulles publicly called him, because he had purchased arms from the Soviet bloc and turned decisively against the US. It is difficult, however, to sustain an analysis that is based upon the assumption that Washington and London fundamentally changed their view on Nasser between December 1955 and July 1956. The Suez affair and the withdrawal of the Aswan offer have been analysed almost solely within a short and narrow Middle Eastern perspective, but they should be related to a much broader scene – the defined place in this analysis is the Nile basin, and the socio-political context is the hydropolitical struggle over the Nile river. The narrative starts in 1946 with the publication of a new water plan, the Century Storage Scheme in Vol. VII of the Nile Basin series.7 This shift in focus and scene is necessary if we are to obtain a better understanding of Anglo–Egyptian relations, as these went from bad to worse in the 1940s and 1950s, and of how upstream developments in Uganda, the Sudan and Ethiopia were impacted by this conflict. Analyses that overlook the waters of the Nile disregard the power of nature to structure patterns of human actions and the reality of the atlas as a geopolitical actor and context. Furthermore, the plans and projects for taming the Nile that were published and discussed after World War II were not only important aspects of the history of the river and the river landscape in itself. The way the river was conceived of and the problems conceptualised by the different actors in the Nile basin had crucial but neglected consequences for the history of the whole of northeast Africa up to the present day, as well as being at the heart of the Anglo–Egyptian dispute in the 1950s. To analyse British policy regarding the Aswan Dam as if Britain was not a Nile empire is unhelpful, because the political struggle about the new High Dam crystallised the twentieth-century history of the Nile river and the Nile basin. While Nasser and Churchill, Foster Dulles and Eden, Neguib in Egypt and Sadiq in the Sudan, Haile Selassie in Ethiopia and Governor Hall in Uganda were at loggerheads in drawing up a new political map of the Nile valley, the water experts

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continued their scientific mapping of the Nile basin: its rainfall, evaporation patterns, topography, geology etc. In 1946 the Ministry of Public Works had published its seminal volume of the Nile basin study by Hurst, Black and Simaika: Nile Basin, Vol. VII, The Future Conservation of the Nile. It drew on the enormous amount of data that had been collected during more than four decades. Basically the ideas remained the same as those suggested by Garstin at the turn of the century, with one important exception; it was more ambitious. The report combined the theory of probability with an analysis of meteorological and climatological phenomena, to calculate the storage capacity that would be required to maintain, every year, an outflow from the reservoirs equal to the average outflow over 100 years. This required reservoirs with exceptional capacity to accommodate the exception, and a bigger and longer canal in the Southern Sudan. The comprehensive Century Storage scheme consisted of building a number of dams along the entire length of the river, including the Central African Lakes and Lake Tana, digging a new ‘river’ in the sudd, and building dams in the Northern Sudan. The publication of this plan set in motion and deepened the political, economic and cultural contradictions in the Nile valley, and it turned out that it was wholly unrealistic, both because of the altered political context but also because it was too ambitious on the part of man. These projects brought out contradictions, not only between the Egyptian Government and the colonial authorities in Uganda, Egypt and the Sudan, between the Northern Sudan and Southern Sudan and between Ethiopia and the rest, but also within the British Empire itself, where the Foreign Office and the Government in London found themselves in the position of arbiters. One of the most profound conflicts in all central Africa revolved around the reservoirs and dams planned on Lake Victoria and Lake Albert. These had far-reaching consequences for developments in Uganda, and both London and Cairo drew lessons from this long diplomatic struggle, lessons that formed part of the context of the turbulent history of the Aswan Dam and that were one of the main reasons that Nasser went in for his High Dam in Egypt. Although Hurst thought of his plan as comprehensive and integrated, the political situation had made it unrealistic. Each and every one of the projects became part of political struggles between and within the various states. In order to grasp the complexities of this hydropolitical history, the individual projects should be treated individually, but in the context of the other Nile control projects in the overall analysis. But first, the political context needs to be set out: the Anglo– American rivalry for influence and industrial contracts, the Anglo–Egyptian dispute, and the strategic role of the Sudan after World War II.

A ‘ B RO K E ’ N I L E E M P I R E

In 1944, when Churchill and Roosevelt stood shoulder to shoulder in their fight against Hitler, Killearn, the British Ambassador in Cairo, wrote a number of letters and memos about the danger caused by US economic activities in Egypt.8 He admitted that his whole instinct was to say politely to the Americans, ‘Hands off ’

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Egypt and the Suez Canal. The new realities had as yet not dawned upon him. Although Britain, since 1941, had been mortgaged to the US, the Ambassador suggested that London should endeavour to come to some agreement with the US on the basis of British predominant interests, but giving America a reasonable share of the economic cake. But what was most important, and most politically naïve, given the new circumstances, was that this should not have an adverse effect on London’s ‘political predominance in Egypt’ or on imperial communications.9 In October 1945, the new Labour Government’s (1945–51) Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, gave a speech to British diplomats in the Middle East, personnel of the Foreign Office and other relevant departments, in which he outlined post-war policy for the region. Bevin was concerned about Britain’s weakened economic position and the growing competition from the US. While Britain could see that France maintained its privileged position in the Levant, it feared the newcomer. Bevin described the US as ‘being commercially on the offensive’; the British and the Americans would therefore ‘enter a period of commercial rivalry’. In fact, Britain had already been indebted to the US for many years. It also owed Egypt £400 million, while at the same time controlling Egypt’s main economic asset, the Suez Canal. In the region, Britain was also a much weaker power than it had been before the war. The Labour Government withdrew from India but could not simultaneously propose further abdications in the Middle East and Egypt. Bevin on the one hand foresaw a new social and economic order in the Middle East, and on the other he acted as a dedicated imperialist when trying to negotiate new treaties in the region. The draft treaties accepted by Sidki Pasha and Salih Jabr in Iraq were rejected by both parliaments, mainly because they did not provide for complete British withdrawal. The British faced a battle on at least two fronts: they were meeting growing resentment from the Arab world, and they faced strong competition from the anti-imperialistic US Government. On the economic front, in this secret document Bevin employed the language of the development-aid era, adapted to Britain’s strategic aims and economic situation. They should give the countries ‘wise guidance’ in mobilising and spending their existing ample sterling resources by offering to place at their disposal technical and specialist assistance to help them in formulating their schemes, and to ‘steer their plans along lines in conformity with the limitations imposed on the British by their own financial and supply situation and with the needs of the region as a whole’.10 This was in line with British public policy: British colonial government was humane, just and unselfish; it was not tyrannical but acted in the best interest of the people ruled. The Americans saw this as propaganda, and the anti-colonial opposition in the Nile valley ridiculed it. In 1946, a secret report to the Cabinet in London stated the harsh economic reality: Our resources have disappeared; our external resources have been dissipated to pay for the war; looking round the world, it is hard to find a country to which we are not in debt. We can only pay our way over the next five years if we get some further external help. This is forthcoming in the new Canadian loan; and we hope, in the American credit.11

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It would be hard to pose as an altruist with no money for aid. In May 1947, the Middle East Committee, established by Bevin in 1945 to promote social and economic development, assessed, away from the public eye, Anglo– American relations in the area. The policy of 1945, when Britain still aimed to continue ‘to assert her predominance in the area’, had proved to be wishful thinking. The American Loan Agreement did not help, as London had hoped in 1946, but restricted their freedom of manoeuvring still further.12 They gradually realised the strength of anti-colonialism in the US and its consequences. In no country was the British position under greater pressure than in Egypt, the Committee argued, and in no country was the need for American support greater. They noted that Egypt had great plans for Nile control, and that in this field London had ‘a significant part to play’, but the assistance they could give was limited. The immediate aim was to retain ‘on a new basis the influence which we have hitherto exerted through the presence of our troops’.13 One such basis was British control of the Upper Nile and its expertise in regional water management. But the dilemma was obvious: how to maintain the Nile basin as a British sphere of influence without funds for investments in the water sector? The very important and growing gap between the strategic importance of waterworks to British interests, and the helplessness of British rule to do something about it, are detected in trivial matters – as in the story of providing excavators for irrigation canals. The Middle East Official Committee stated that one of the most important items in the Five Year Development Plan 1945–50 in the Sudan was excavators for irrigation works. The problem was: Britain had no money to provide what was needed. The Committee stated, with deep frustration, that the Sudan had been forced to place orders for this, amounting to £250,000 – in the US! But the Sudan was too important for London to let this happen. They suggested that the Board of Trade should examine the possibilities of expediting the orders placed under the Five Year Plan.14 But the Government acknowledged that they were ‘compelled to surrender’; they could not stand by commitments previously undertaken.15 The British in Khartoum had managed towards the end of 1945 to place an order with Messrs Ruston Bucyrus Works, Lincoln, for a large dragline excavator; it was being assembled at Lincoln, and had been promised to the Sudan by March 1947. But then, out of the blue, it was allocated by the Ministry of Fuel and Power for use in England. This policy was in accordance with a Cabinet directive of 1946, whereby all large excavators scheduled for delivery in the latter half of 1946 were diverted to open-cast coal-mining in Britain. The Governor-General of the Sudan protested. The original role of the excavator was cotton production. It was very important for the construction of canals in the Gezira Irrigation Scheme, since 100,000 new acres were to be irrigated. If it did not get the excavator, there would be ‘a loss of income of E£750,000 added to which is the loss of prospective 10,000 tons of food crops (millet)’,16 and, of course, a damaging blow to political credibility and British standing in the country. The Ministry of Supply answered that it was not a question of will, but of possibilities; owing to the position of coal production, all machines were diverted to open-cast coal.17 Obtaining the excavator for the Sudan became important for the Foreign Service. In July, Bevin wrote to the Lord President of the Council

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to ask them to make an exception for this excavator, since his policy depended on it: ‘From the political point of view it would be damaging, at this juncture when the whole question of the future status of the Condominium is about to be examined by the United Nations, that we could not carry out our development programme.’ 18 The Minister of Fuel and Power replied that he was not prepared to sacrifice a monthly production of 7000 tons of open-cast coal for these distant gains. Bevin did not yield, asking the Ministry of Fuel and Power whether it would be possible for them to look for other excavators, since the Sudan depended on one of this type.19 The Ministry of Fuel and Power then informed the Foreign Office on 11 September that a mission in the US had been offered a second-hand excavator from Baron Iron and Equipment Company.20 But the Foreign Office knew that this was not suitable for Sudanese conditions, since it was mounted on four-wheeled trucks and not on tracks. The Foreign Office thought this issue so important that no stone was left unturned.21 They ‘combed’ the US for an excavator which Britain could present to the Sudan.22 But finally, on 2 October, the Ministry of Fuel and Power informed the Foreign Office that it had relinquished its claim on the Ruston machine.23 The waterworks on the Nile were given their excavator in the end.

ON THE DEFENSIVE

In Egypt, the opposition to the British presence grew day by day. As Zaghlul, after the armistice of World War I, had asked for a delegation to negotiate the end of the British protectorate, just after the end of World War II, an Egyptian state delegation went to London – this time to negotiate the final withdrawal of British troops from Egyptian soil. Britain was forced into speeding up renegotiation of its treaty relations with Egypt. The 1936 Treaty, which provided for the termination of British military occupation of Egypt, recognised that the special British interest in the Canal Zone was to last for 20 years, but that it could be reconsidered in 1946. It was clear to everyone, except to diehard imperialists, that Britain would have to renegotiate these agreements from a position of fundamental weakness. When, on 6 August 1945, the Egyptian Prime Minister raised the question of a new treaty with Britain in the Egyptian Parliament, this started the final countdown of European colonialism in the area. The Prime Minister argued that the time for a British army of occupation in Egypt had passed and that the position of Egypt vis-à-vis the Sudan should be reconsidered. At the opening of Parliament on 12 November, the Egyptian King made a speech that set out Egypt’s case even more strongly. In December, the Government bowed to popular opinion and made a formal request that the Treaty should be revised. The dominant popular mood in Egypt was growing anti-British sentiment, coupled with regional Egyptian expansionism. For example, Egypt proposed that after being freed from Italian rule Libya should either be granted its independence or be placed under an Egyptian mandate. It also claimed the port of Massawa on the Red Sea, arguing that it had been Egyptian before the Italian occupation.24

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Egypt’s role in the British scheme of things had changed, but the country’s strategic importance was still great. Cotton was no longer so important, and the days were over when Lancashire’s interests decided foreign policies. The decision in 1947 to leave Palestine, which had previously been seen as essential for the British position in the Middle East, made Egypt more important strategically.25 The importance of the Suez Canal had changed, but was ever-growing. Britain’s Suez base was one of the largest military bases in the world. In 1903 there had been 3000 British troops in Egypt. The 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty had permitted a garrison of 10,000. By the 1950s there were about 88,000 troops in the Canal Zone, among them more than 20,000 British servicemen. The British base comprised all the depots and installations necessary for the support of forces in the whole Middle East region. In addition to workshops, storage depots and installations for supply, repair and administration, it contained airfields, power stations, hospitals and other amenities required by the armed forces. By the end of 1952, the British estimated that it included 700,000 tons of stores and 14,000 vehicles, at a total original cost of £200 million.26 The Suez Canal was again and again called the ‘swing-door to the Empire’, and the Attlee, Churchill and Eden Governments regarded control of the Suez Canal base as one of their most important foreign-policy goals. While Egypt pressed for revision of the 1936 Treaty, the British leaders circulated top-secret papers wherein the decision was clear: to make no concession whatever to the Egyptians that might reduce the effectiveness of their defences in the Middle East and, as important, Britain’s status and prestige as a world power. This policy was also influenced by new strategic assessments from the military establishment; they regarded the base as absolutely crucial in any future policy in the Middle East, and they were not prepared to evacuate.27 British forces were withdrawn from the Nile Delta to the Canal Zone, hesitantly and tardily. The Government proposed to stay in Egypt whether the Egyptians liked it or not.28 The Cabinet and military leaders regarded Egypt as the only possible location for their Middle East base and, in line with this, they drew up secret military plans to counter any Egyptian decision to abrogate the 1936 Treaty.29

‘ DY I N G O F T H I R S T I N T H E D E S E RT ’

As in the 1890s and in the 1920s, the British looked to the Sudan when problems arose in Egypt. For decades British strategists had thought that the power that held the Sudan had ‘Egypt at its mercy’, and through Egypt could dominate the Suez Canal.30 The positions were clear: Egypt wanted ‘unity in the Nile valley’ under Egyptian rule. Cairo wanted the King of Egypt also to be the King of the Sudan. The British favoured a policy of self-government under British influence (as strong as global and regional power relationships would permit). Since the turn of the century a pro-British Sudan, and a Sudan that could be used as leverage against the downstream state Egypt, had been a central goal in British Middle Eastern and African strategy. For decades the British had worked in that direction,31 while Egypt

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in the Sudan had tried to mobilise an anti-British movement aiming at unity with Egypt. In July 1947, Egypt brought the Sudan question before the UN Security Council, denouncing British imperialism and blaming Britain for not developing the country sufficiently. The deadlock continued, however, and the question of the Sudan became even more central in the forthcoming negotiations between the co-domini. Water again resurfaced and was exploited as a divisive issue and a means for legitimising power by all actors in the Nile game. In the Sudan there was a clear demand for more water, and the limit put on development was easy to condemn. In the proceedings of the First Session of the Advisory Council for the Northern Sudan in May 1944, Mekki Eff. Abbas protested strongly, condemning the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929. The people of the Gezira likened themselves to ‘a camel laden with skins of water dying of thirst in the desert’, and the Northern Provinces could draw their water only at the expense of the Sennar reservoir. The process of application for a pump licence was too long and cumbersome. The Province was full of potential cultivators. There were about 200,000 of them in Dueim District alone, it was reported. Sheikh Surur Muhammed Ramli, Muhammed Eff. Ali Shawki and Mirghani Eff. Hamza all spoke of the need for more government pump schemes in the Khartoum area, and Sheikh Ayub Abd El Magid, Sheikh Zubeir Hamad El Malik and Sheikh Osman El-Gader highlighted the need for pump schemes in the Northern Province.32 The Governor-General noted with interest in his diary that all the delegates stressed the water issue.33 The Gezira Scheme was as important economically and politically for the development of the country as ever before. 23,000 tenants and their families cultivated cotton on a share-cropping basis. In addition, 140,000 to 150,000 people were picking from the end of December to the end of March, 70,000 in April, May and June, and at least 100,000 worked from mid-July to the end of October in clearing and preparing the land and sowing the cotton and other crops. The irrigation works alone employed a large amount of labour. At the end of the war about 25,000 men were engaged in clearing silt from the canals (a number of draglines were out of action owing to lack of spare parts).34 Shifting climatic conditions helped to maintain a focus on the water question, and hence impacted regional geopolitics. In 1950 a rich harvest coupled with phenomenally high prices for cotton created an extraordinarily favourable climate for British Sudan policy, and raised the pressure for more water. The cotton yield was 30 per cent higher than had ever been achieved, and prices were eight and nine times as high as pre-war levels. The Governor-General made it clear wherever he went; the ‘need for more water for irrigations is becoming increasingly urgent’.35 The export value of the Gezira crop in 1951 was estimated at E£50 million, E£30 million more than the value in 1950, which was itself a record. Pump schemes increased very fast in those years. The pump schemes would have about 40 per cent of the available water in 1951. The number of licensed schemes increased from 606 in December 1949 to 708 in June 1951.36 The consumption of water by the Gezira was the highest since the four-rotation cycle had started in 1933. The Sudan exported cotton, gum arabic (of which it at the time provided four-fifths of world

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supplies), millet, oil seeds, hides and skins. India and the UK bought almost all the cotton. Then in 1951 the Nile flood was considerably below normal. In 1951 the level of the Sennar Dam was raised 30 centimetres by agreement with Egypt, impounding an additional 45 million cubic metres of water. The pump schemes were affected when the emptying of the Jabal Auliya reservoir started on 1 February 1951, the earliest date since 1945. The basin area in the Northern Province, totalling 38,500 feddans, was little more than half the average of recent years. At the same time the British firm of Alexander Gibb & Partners was commissioned to survey the Blue Nile and the White Nile for new irrigation areas. Their report, submitted in 1953, stated that the irrigable area in the Blue Nile, White Nile and Rahad and Dinder area was 1,220,000 feddans by gravity and 551,000 feddans by pumping, while the irrigable area on the Main Nile between Khartoum and Wadi Halfa was said to be 1,187,000 feddans if commanded by a 15-metre lift.37 No wonder the water issue was conceived as being at the heart of the Sudanese economy and the Sudan question. After a lull, caused by the war, control of the Nile was again at the top of the agenda in Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda. General social developments, industrialisation and population pressure meant that Egypt needed much more water, while the Sudan saw the potential for enormous profits if more crops could be irrigated in the Sudan. In Uganda, development was seen as identical to hydropower development. In the other East African territories, plans were being drawn up for both industrial and agricultural use of Nile waters. In Ethiopia the Emperor was discussing plans to dam Lake Tana and lead waters in tunnels to dry, but potentially fruitful areas through tunnels away from the Nile basin. Important economic and political changes had taken place that impacted Nile strategy in general. Ethiopia had achieved independence but its economy was developing at a slow pace.38 The prospect of using the Nile became more important, and technology increased the options available. On the Upper White Nile, Britain was still in firm control. The East African governments became gradually more interested in use of the Nile for hydropower and irrigation purposes. In the Sudan the need for water rapidly rose, according to British assessments. In 1945 the British had decided that 7.1 billion cubic metres was the water requirement of the Sudan.39 In 1948 Allan, the Sudan Agent and Khartoum’s man in charge of international Nile issues, wrote that the ultimate demand would not be less than 7.5 billion cubic metres and might be as much as 9.6 billion cubic metres.40 The figure was steadily increased, so that in 1957 Allan estimated the ultimate requirements to be 21 billion cubic metres.41 The weaker the British Government regarded its position at Suez as being, the relatively more important, they thought, the Nile became as a political weapon. The growing gap between demand and supply that could be heard from most corners of the Nile valley in these years made Nile diplomacy a delicate and difficult issue.

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‘ T H E AG E O F E M P I R E S I S D E A D ’

In the early 1950s, the US Government employed an anti-imperialistic rhetoric. The American Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, declared publicly that ‘the age of empires is dead’. In the new world order no country should expect the right to rule others without consent. When Dulles assumed office as Secretary of State in 1953, the rhetoric became even worse for Britain. He was a strong anticommunist but he loathed old European imperialism, since this blocked American economic and political expansionism. The new Vice-President, Richard Nixon, toured Asia in 1953, and on returning to Washington said that three centuries of European imperialism was on its deathbed. He expressed American opinion: Americans had won victories over Japan in Asia, not to see Britain back as master of Burma and Malaya. All empires, Japanese and European, were regarded and denounced as parasitic tyrannies. This policy by the new superpower was regarded as a deadly threat to British rule and its position in the Nile valley. The growing Anglo–American rivalry over the oil resources of the Middle East and the struggle for supremacy made the area even more important geopolitically. London was still the dominant power throughout the area, and had a huge military base on the Suez Canal, a naval base at Aden, air squadrons stationed in Iraq and rear bases in Cyprus and Malta; Britain paid for and provided the Commander of the Arab Legion in Jordan, held protectorates over the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, whose foreign relations the British conducted through a Political Resident in Bahrain, and governed Uganda, Kenya and the Sudan. Britain had oil investments in Iran and a growing interest in the oil in the Persian Gulf. Washington on the one hand usurped Britain’s presence in the area, but on the other hand felt obliged to distance itself from London’s policies. The US Government was allied with London, but careful not to be seen in the same bed as the British. From the peoples in the area the British Empire, like French colonial policies, faced growing opposition. In 1945 the Syrians revolted against French domination, and in April 1946 France left the country. In June 1946 there was a Jewish revolt against the British in Palestine, and in May 1948 Britain evacuated. By weakening the British position at Suez, considered to be the main stronghold of European imperialism, Washington could enhance its own position. The British Government clearly saw the US as a most dangerous competitor, with even more muscle now than in the 1930s, when American interests had undermined British commercial interests in the Tana and Aswan schemes. Its weak post-war position left London with few options: they hoped to co-operate with the Americans while at same time trying to enlist American support for initiatives aimed at bolstering British interests. The US Government had its own plans, and one main aim was to weaken Britain in the region while maintaining good relations with London as a Western ally. The story of the Aswan project is a detailed example, therefore, of US–British rivalry in the Middle East and the Nile basin, fought on a hydropolitical scene. In Egypt, opposition to Britain only deepened. In 1950 the Wafd under Nahas Pasha came to power, with over half the popular vote.42 Their platform was an end to

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the British military presence in Egypt and the restoration of Egyptian sovereignty over the Sudan. National shame at the humiliating defeat in the war against Israel in 1948–49 was directed at the British; how could a war be won when Britain prevented the Egyptian army from getting modern weapons? An American emissary reported in 1951 that the hatred against the British was intense – shared by everyone in the country.43 On 5 October 1951 Britain decided to dissolve the Egyptian Parliament. This caused Nahas Pasha, the Prime Minister, to act immediately. He seized the opportunity and, on 8 October, put three decrees to Parliament: the first abrogated the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 1936 (which still had five years to run) and the Condominium Agreement of 1899; Egypt and the Sudan were declared one country and the King of Egypt as King of Egypt and the Sudan; the third decree gave the King the right to dismiss Sudanese Ministers and dissolve the Parliament and give Egypt control of the Sudan’s foreign affairs.44 Within a few weeks, the 70,000strong Egyptian labour force left the Canal Zone. When the British Parliament met again after the general election, on 6 November 1951, the British Government declared that it regarded the abrogation of these treaties ‘illegal’ and ‘without validity’.45 Churchill, now Prime Minister again, was furious. On 15 December he told Eden: ‘Tell them [the Egyptians] if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged’.46 The British subsequently reinforced their military presence in the Canal base, and drew up a plan called Operation Rodeo. Forces from the Canal Zone, reinforced by units from Libya, Cyprus and Malta, were to occupy Cairo, the Nile Delta and Alexandria. The coup’s main objectives should be achieved within a day. Anti-British unrest broke out in Egypt. In January 1952 British troops in the Canal Zone moved along the Canal into Ismailia, surrounded the police barracks and gave the 800 or so Egyptian policemen there one hour to surrender. The Daily Express wrote that Britain was now ‘making a mighty affirmation of its Imperial Destiny’. The Egyptian police were given orders to resist by the Minister of Interior, Fuad Serag el-Din, also Secretary-General of the Wafd party. By the end of the day, 41 policemen had died. The Minister accused British forces of committing ‘atrocities beyond human imagination’. The following day, 26 January, became known as Black Saturday in British circles. The Turf Club, Shepherd’s Hotel and various British commercial premises were burnt down and people were murdered. Churchill minuted: ‘The horrible behaviour of the mob puts them lower than the most degraded savage now known. Unless the Egyptian Government can purge themselves by the condign punishment of the offenders and by the most abject and complete regrets and reparations I doubt whether any relationship is possible with them.’ 47 Eden asked the American Ambassador whether his Government would take over the protection of British interests in Egypt should the Egyptian Government break off diplomatic relations.48 Churchill, who some years before had said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the disintegration of the British Empire, was very worried. In March 1952 he wrote to Eden asking him to explain what would happen if the Treaty was revised. Who was then ‘to protect the international waterway of the canal, the three

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hundred million pounds’ worth of stores, etc., accumulated in the base, the British Air Force and airfields, and indeed his own Headquarters?’ He said he was most anxious to see British forces in Egypt reduced, but the British should not place themselves at the mercy of the Egyptians. He also urged Eden not to hurry; because urgency in concluding an agreement would sacrifice their work for so many years and ‘our power of discharging our international duty’.49 Eden answered that Churchill had overlooked a crucial point: the British were due to leave the Canal Zone anyway in 1956 in the absence of some new form of agreement. Eden’s purpose, he informed Churchill, was therefore ‘to make a new agreement while we can’.50 Churchill continued to complain; the British Government was ‘giving everything into Egypt’s power and have nothing in return, nor any means of securing the fulfilment of any understanding’.51 Churchill told his Foreign Secretary that what he called the ‘volley’ they had fired at Ismailia was the right line, and that they should continue to sit still ‘on the safety valve’ and show ‘no weariness’. Then London gradually would get ‘them into submission’. He encouraged Eden: ‘You are playing a winning hand in the larger interests of the whole world. Whatever happens, do not let us be in a hurry.’ 52 But Churchill could not force developments to adapt to his plans.

T H E E G Y P T I A N ‘ K I N G O F T H E N I L E WAT E R S ’

In January 1952 the Foreign Office received even more alarming news. In Egypt almost daily demonstrations demanded that the British should leave Suez, but now their days in the Sudan seemed numbered. They learned that the American Ambassador in Cairo had recommended that his Government recognise the Egyptian King’s new title as King of the Sudan.53 A more direct rebuff of British strategy could hardly have been conceived. On 23 May, Britain’s closest ally, Nuri Pasha of Iraq, informed the British Government that, owing to political pressure, he would instruct his Minister in Cairo to make an oral communication to the Egyptian Government to the effect that the new title was recognised. All the Arab Governments recognised the title. The Italian, Greek and Spanish Governments planned to follow suit, while Britain objected as strongly as it could. Egypt had made recognition of the King’s title a prerequisite for granting credentials to new ambassadors. The Foreign Office also received alarming reports that the Dutch, the Pakistanis and the Indians were considering recognition. In June the King’s title was recognised by Italy and Greece, as it had already been recognised by Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. Similar action by Spain, Brazil, Portugal and West Germany was predicted, it was reported to the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office minuted: could Britain ‘hold out much longer’? What made things worse was that they were sure that recognition by Italy and Greece must have been acknowledged in advance by the US Government, since they were NATO members.

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This was all the more nightmarish, for the Sudan was ‘really the critical issue’ in Anglo–Egyptian relations, as Anthony Eden told the French Ambassador on 24 January 1952.54 When he in secrecy discussed the King’s title with the Americans, Eden proposed a sort of compromise; perhaps the King might be called by his preCondominium title (Lord of Darfur, Kordofan and the Sudan).55 The American Ambassador argued quite frankly that ‘no one in Egypt now would contemplate the possibility that King Farouk’s title to the Sudan should not be recognised’.56 London realised its case was weak. The issue of the King’s title also had a difficult juridical aspect. In 1946 British legal experts had given an opinion that sovereignty over the Sudan resided with the Egyptian crown, and that the Governors-General had been appointed by the Egyptian King in accordance with the 1898 Agreements. They also knew that the Egyptian Government was very weak, and that the weakness of Ali Maher’s position might soon lead to a coup by army officers who had experienced the failures of the Palestine campaign.57 Eden argued that the situation had changed after Egypt itself had torn up the Agreement, and that he now could not admit even symbolic suzerainty of the Egyptian crown over the Sudan without riots and troubles in that country.58 In April, Eden summoned his experts. The British Embassy in Cairo had suggested that London should recognise the King’s title because, otherwise, the British might find it necessary to isolate the Canal Zone from Egypt. The military position there would be of no use with a ‘hostile population’. The meeting clearly concluded that no agreement could be reached with the Egyptian Government unless London got around the difficulty of recognising King Farouk’s title ‘King of Egypt and the Sudan’. It was thought that the Egyptian plan would be to guarantee self-determination for the Sudan, but at the same time assert that the King of Egypt is King of the Sudan. Eden argued that the happiest solution for the British at this point would be to go back to the Condominium, and perhaps suggest that the Governor-General’s title should be changed to Viceroy.59 At one point he considered making the Queen joint sovereign with Farouk over the Sudan, but this was, as he said, ruled out on psychological grounds.60 Eden sought to bring an end to the diplomatic deadlock without giving up British Sudan policy.

A Role in Search of a Hero Meanwhile the British Imperial General Staff was planning military intervention in Egypt. Less than three weeks before the Free Officers’ Coup, the Defence Committee in London, on 2 July 1952, approved the Chief of the Imperial General Staff ’s proposal for military action to secure the Canal Zone. Ministers would be asked to delegate powers to the Commanders-in-Chief Middle East, to enable them to carry out these tasks expeditiously. If they found themselves ‘forced to enter Cairo and Alexandria to rescue British nationals, we might be faced with a difficult and enduring commitment’.61 The General Staff regarded it a grave error to withdraw troops at that juncture, since this would be interpreted as a weakening of British determination

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to stand by their treaty rights. The Foreign Office admitted that there was little the Foreign Office could do to secure the support of world opinion if military action was deemed necessary, but they would, of course, inform the Americans in advance.62 With the knowledge of the Americans, a group calling themselves the Free Officers engineered an almost bloodless coup d’état and overthrew King Farouk on 23 July 1952. Neguib became President, but Gamal Abdel Nasser was the strong man behind the scene. Nasser wrote in his book Revolution: ‘Within the Arab circle, there is a role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero’.63 He himself came closer than anyone else in the twentieth century to filling this role. When this group of nationalistic military officers took power, the situation was dramatically changed. The new Government had what the former Government had sought but lacked – strong public support, and secret American backing. When the new Government had as its main aim to get the British out of Egypt and the Canal Zone, this implied business as unusual.

Nasser and Eisenhower against Churchill What was especially worrying to London was the strong impression they got that the US was on very good terms with the new Government in Egypt. The US Government had come to the conclusion that the British Empire could be written off as a loser in the region, but without telling this to their friends in London. One of Churchill’s first acts as Prime Minister had been to visit Washington in aiming to repair what he regarded as damage to Anglo–American co-operation. The visit helped to check US fears that the British would withdraw from the Korean War,64 and Churchill very reluctantly accepted a US naval Commander in Chief of the Eastern Atlantic. Churchill on his side asked for a token American force to join the British in holding the Canal, but the Americans rejected the request out of hand. A diplomatic gift made things even worse. When, on his tour of Egypt in the spring of 1953, Foster Dulles presented Neguib with a gift from Eisenhower – a revolver – Churchill was furious; he, Churchill, saw this as an omen of the differences between Britain and the US that were to develop in the near future. The British Government became increasingly worried about American intentions, attitudes and policies in Egypt and the Nile valley – their Nile valley.65 Dulles had left the Egyptians with the impression that he would take some initiative over the Suez Canal Zone base, and London feared that Dulles might advance a solution unfavourable to British interests. Selwyn Lloyd told Churchill that it was important to ‘try to keep the Americans up to the mark’,66 and Churchill wrote a personal letter to Eisenhower as a brief before their meeting at Bermuda,67 at which the Egyptian problem was to be raised. Churchill said that the British object in their discussions ‘was not to obtain military or financial aid from the US, but only their moral support in what we hoped would be a joint approach to the Egyptian dictatorship’. In a draft he also wrote, but crossed out, that the American Ambassador in Cairo was having an adverse effect on Anglo–Egyptian relations.68 Hankey in Cairo

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reported that the US supported the Egyptian point of view with regard to Egypt’s sovereignty over the Canal Zone and that it was expected that ‘my American colleague will use his good offices to secure the resumption of negotiations’.69 Churchill replied: ‘I am sure you will not be deceived by these mendacious reports’.70 But it was he who was mistaken; the US wanted Britain to leave the Canal Zone. Dulles regarded Britain’s presence on Egyptian soil as the ‘psychological block’ that prevented the new regime from befriending the US. While the Nasser regime was adamant about British troops at Suez, it was more flexible over the status of the Sudan. The new regime and Nasser in particular were immensely popular all over the Arab world. As the British could clearly envisage a situation in which a nationalistic Egypt aimed to chase them out of Suez, and Nasser and Neguib instead of a top-down approach tried to convince the people of the Sudan that they should join in with Egypt for unity in the Nile valley, developments in the Sudan became even more central. The forced abdication of King Farouk had made royal claims on the Sudan obsolete. The Neguib Government announced a change in policy: the Sudanese should have the right to self-determination. Churchill was furious at Neguib’s expression that the Sudan and Egypt should work together ‘against the common enemy’.71 Eden tried to calm him down by noting a number of ‘reassuring signs’.72 The new regime also published very ambitious plans for social and economic development in Egypt. Agricultural expansion and industrialisation both hinged on water development. Harnessing of Nile waters would immediately involve the Sudan and the other upstream countries. The huge projects the regime contemplated also required large amounts of foreign aid. But most centred on a new high dam on the Nile within the borders of Egypt.

F O R E I G N A I D F O R NA S S E R ’ S N I L E P RO J E C T

The history of the Western offer and the Aswan Dam is not only a story of the last years of the British era in the Nile valley, it is also a story of the first years of the international development-aid system. The Aswan Dam was the biggest development project to date anywhere in the world, and the World Bank’s president, Eugene Black, regarded it personally as very important. The offer of aid to Egypt for the dam constitutes also a history of how relationships developed among the World Bank, the US Government, the British Government, the French and German Governments and the Egyptian Government, within the framework of a new international system - the development-aid system. The British were worried about American intentions, since Britain had few resources and overstretched commitments. In London it was the Americans who were regarded as intruders, both economically and politically, with their bags of dollars for development projects and their slogans denouncing colonialism. The British needed their money, but disliked their policies. At the end of 1953, Dulles wrote to Eden arguing that it was now very important to announce economic aid to

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the Arab world so as to counter recent announcements of economic aid to Israel.73 Dulles said that the US had been holding up all assistance to Egypt, which he regarded as the only country in the Arab world capable of absorbing large amounts of aid, in order to help settle the Suez matter. But in October London informed the Cairo Embassy, secretly, that it had set up interdepartmental machinery for economic assistance in conjunction with the Americans, in the event of a Defence Agreement.74 The British realised that the Americans would provide the lion’s share of economic aid and thus also, potentially, reap the political benefits from it. They noted, however, that it was London which had most need of Egyptian goodwill, since it was their technicians and installations that would be exposed to the possibility of what was termed Egyptian misbehaviour. The British aid had to be substantial enough to bear comparison with the American aid, they wrote. Any gift or release should be provided in instalments, not as a lump sum, in order that London should have ‘some hold over the Egyptians to ensure that they carry out the Agreement faithfully’,75 but there should be no strings attached about protecting British exports or trade. Eden hit upon what he must have seen as a quick fix: let the US provide economic aid to Egypt and ‘leave arms aid to us, Egypt’s normal source’.76 This type of aid in instalments might help to ensure continued British economic influence.77 Although the British Government could never match the US Government, it had an amount to offer sufficiently large to ‘excite Egypt’s imagination’.78 The Embassy in Cairo, experiencing the gradual deterioration of Britain’s position, begged the Treasury in London to allow British aid packages. But the Treasury was reluctant owing to more pressing worries than how to provide aid to a man the British public was learning to loathe. The Foreign Office in turn disliked the attitude that economic assistance should be made conditional upon how Egyptian measures impacted British commerce. While the Overseas Negotiations Committee was preoccupied with the promotion of exports, the Foreign Office wanted economic aid to Egypt, in connection with a defence agreement, ‘free from any strings’.79 Britain’s general policy and its disarray on the aid question did not help its standing in Egypt. On 10 November, Nasser made a speech to university students in Cairo, linking foreign aid to the Aswan Dam, declaring Britain as Egypt’s enemy. The regime, he said, had tried to reach an understanding with the British, ‘but in vain’.80 He detailed the finance of the High Dam scheme, estimated at E£80 million. About this time Dulles told the British that the Americans could not withhold economic aid to Nasser much longer. British opposition threatened to have grave effects upon US–Arab relations. Eden was furious.81 He minuted: ‘We must enter the strongest possible protest against this’.82 Renewed information came from the Americans that the British should be in no doubt; Mr Dulles had been ‘in deadly earnest’ when he said that it would be impossible for the Americans to hold up economic aid to Egypt beyond 1 January.83 Eden scribbled on the note, ‘it will be “deadly” to Anglo–American relations’,84 and, he continued, ‘This is about as bad as it could be’.85 A new Foreign Office minute summed up the British standpoint:

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One of our strongest means of pressure on the Egyptian Government at present is the fact that they are unable to obtain any foreign investment in Egypt, so long as conditions remain unsettled there owing to their failure to come to terms with us. This means that they cannot get on with any of the economic reforms, or schemes on which they have set their hearts, such as the new Aswan. This of course affects their popularity in Egypt and makes their position uncomfortable. Economic aid from the United States would thus relieve them of one of their major anxieties and remove an incentive to reach settlement with us.86

While London tried to stop US aid to Egypt, the Americans’ pressure on Churchill continued. On 21 December Eisenhower sent him a long personal telegram, reminding him, in an almost fatherly way, of their recent conversation in Bermuda. Eisenhower asked for Churchill’s commitment to agreement with Egypt if the Americans helped to press the Egyptians on two of the outstanding points with Britain; the question of what uniforms to wear on the base and the availability of the base in case of war.87 The Americans wanted to give aid to Egypt to balance their allotment to Israel, and Eisenhower also repeated that it was a costly policy for the US in the Middle East to be too closely allied with the British. What they did should be appreciated, he wrote.88 Churchill replied that the Egyptian issue might well cause a deep and serious setback to the relations between America and Great Britain,89 and roared rather quietly that if Eisenhower did not support Britain in Egypt it would make it more difficult for ‘Anthony and me to help you in the Far East’.90 Churchill’s dream of an Anglophone alliance turned out to be unrealistic – and it was splintered precisely where and when he did not want it to fall apart. The setback in Egypt did not come alone,91 and now the Americans seemed to be supporting Egypt rather than Britain! From 10 Downing Street a top-secret letter was sent to Ambassador Makins in Washington: Churchill was very worried by the idea of the grant of American economic aid to Egypt ‘at a time when our differences with them are so acute’.92 But Makins met a deaf ear in Washington. The US Government saw clearly the difficulties the British leadership had in adapting to new power realities. Eisenhower wrote to his aides about Churchill, in 1953, that he ‘fixed in his mind’ a certain international relationship he was trying to establish – that Britain and the British Commonwealth were not to be treated just as other nations would be treated by the US. Churchill had, Eisenhower wrote, the enjoyable feeling that he and the President of the US were sitting on some rather Olympian platform with respect to the rest of the world, and directing world affairs.93 Churchill either did not accept or shut his eyes to the obvious: the Americans and his wartime ally, Eisenhower, were deliberately aiming to weaken the Empire. While Churchill was looking for a united Anglo–American front, the reality was different. Churchill and Eden were shocked by a report from their Ambassador in Washington, on 19 June 1954, to the effect that Dulles had been telling friends that American policy in the oil-rich Middle East and in Asia had been badly handicapped by a tendency to support British and French colonial views. This had caused the US to be identified in the minds of the people of those areas ‘as a colonial power despite its long tradition as a champion of freedom and independence’.94 Churchill

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wrote to Eisenhower many times, suggesting that now was the time a Middle East front should be formed by the US and Britain, and denouncing the Nasser regime as a military dictatorship. In late June 1954, Eisenhower, Churchill and Eden met in Washington. Eisenhower refused to be a signatory to the Base Agreement, although he was willing to tell the Egyptians that the US would give Egypt arms and loans if the Agreement was fulfilled. With this carrot, the Agreement was signed on 26 July. The Base Agreement, arms and aid were interlinked from the very beginning, and it was made clear to everyone, as Eden had feared, that Britain could not settle the Egyptian issue without American assistance.

‘MUNICH ON THE NILE!’

Faced with growing opposition in Egypt, the old Nile valley strategy was revoked. Churchill himself had likened Egypt to a deep-sea diver whose air was provided by the long and vulnerable tube of the Nile. But in itself this weapon was not very valuable, especially since the British had no funds to stimulate really large-scale hydraulic works upstream.95 The Cabinet disagreed about what to do. Churchill was the hardliner, moderated by Eden. The most effective British answer to Egyptian moves in the Sudan, he thought, was to encourage the Sudanese to fight for independence from Cairo. The best available guarantee against Egyptian encroachment was to make sure that the pro-independence party in the Sudan came into power.96 On 12 February 1953, Eden announced the signing of an Agreement between Britain and Egypt over the Sudan. This provided for a transitional period of three years, during which the Sudanese were to govern themselves. The issue of sovereignty would be reserved. At the end of the three-year period they were to decide on their future. There were special provisions for the Southern provinces. The powers of the Governor-General were stated. For some matters he would require approval of a Commission with a Pakistani chairman. There was to be an Electoral Commission with an Indian chairman, and a Sudanisation Committee to deal with the administration and defence forces. Eden saw this Agreement as a recognition of realities. London hoped that, by giving in to American pressure and agreeing with the Egyptian Government regarding the Sudan’s future status, the way would be cleared for a new and more positive agreement on the withdrawal of British forces from the Suez Canal Zone. If Britain tried to maintain its position in the Sudan, it would drive Sudanese nationalism into the arms of the Egyptians, but if they extricated themselves, Sudanese nationalism would, hopefully, be too strong for Egypt. Neguib addressed the Sudanese people triumphantly in Al Ahram on 17 February. He argued that Egypt had given them everything they could want, in order to ensure that they could choose in full freedom between independence and unity with Egypt. For the next few years, both the British and the Egyptians would fight for the minds and hearts of the Sudanese people. Many in the (British) Sudan Political Service felt betrayed by the British Government. The Civil Secretary, James Robertson, in Khartoum was personally left

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breathless by news of the Agreement: he thought they had been defeated by Egypt, his own Foreign Office and Embassy, and by America – helped by the folly and short-sightedness of Sudanese leaders. Unless a miracle happened, he thought, the Sudan would be swallowed up by Egypt. On the following day, on a peaceful Friday the 13th, he went through the dusty streets of Khartoum to a flower show, before the news broke. He saw a mass of happy-looking people – Sudanese, British, foreigners of all sorts. This was what London had just given up and given away, he wrote. The Sidky-Bevin protocol of 1947 had staggered many Sudanese and British in the Sudan. The new Agreement was regarded as a complete volte-face from the earlier assertion of joint sovereignty. Many in the Sudan Political Service, especially those in the Southern Sudan, feared that London had made a new deal at their expense. They deeply distrusted secret negotiations. Sudanese rioters had been shot with British bullets before to serve Egyptian ends, they argued. What would happen now? The Civil Secretary regarded the South as the difficulty and he would go there and patch up the trouble between the north and the south. The problem was partly the fault of the British officials, he argued, with whom he said he had the greatest sympathy. Robertson feared that the British DCs in the South themselves would be getting restive. The British Government thought that aid to the Sudan was very important to guide it on its way to independence and British contracts, but they did not have the necessary funds. In the Northern Sudan the British continued to try to build alliances.97 In March 1953 Howe, the Governor-General, wrote a personal letter to the Secretary of State in which he suggested in very general terms the various lines along which the British Government could implement its policy of maintaining British influence in the future Sudan.98 Howe stated that the first major extension of the Gezira Scheme contemplated would probably require E£5–E£10 million from foreign sources, and a loan from the Government in London would have very great political value. But the Treasury was again reluctant, and informed the Foreign Office that, given the present financial circumstances, capital investment abroad by the UK was limited to the Commonwealth area.99 The Foreign Office would prefer that the finance for Sudanese economic development came entirely from British sources, but on the other hand the imperative was: ‘By all means let us do so as cheaply as we can – by giving good advice and by helping them to obtain what they need in money from international sources’.100 The role of the fate of the Southern Sudan in influencing the coming elections resurfaced. In July, D.M.H. Riches presented a report to the Foreign Office on the Southern Sudan.101 Supported by the Foreign Office, he recommended that delay in holding the elections in the South was on the whole a good thing, since this would give the South time to adjust itself after the shock of 12 February. On the other hand, in any event London should avoid the danger of encouraging and supporting the Southerners to such an extent as to develop in them an intransigence precluding any arrangement at all, and perhaps lead the British Government into a position difficult to sustain and which could not be abandoned without a serious loss of prestige.102 The report described the South at the time as an area of development

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and change; everywhere building was going on, towns were expanding, schools and public buildings were being erected. In a letter Riches commented on the attitudes of the British DCs and the prospects if these jacks-of-all-trades left too quickly: Just hand the poor innocents over to the brutes and the first slave caravans will roll out of Omdurman on the way South (the modern Zubeir will have an air-conditioned coach of course), Dinka will cut Dinka, Nuer will cut Dinka, Zande will eat Jur, etc. Finally, the world will be unsafe for Greek grocers.103

But since such a development would hardly be a threat to international peace unless the British made it so, what could London do? The report concluded that the surest way of losing what ‘we hope to get out of the Northern Sudanese would be to give a sort of “Polish” unimplementable guarantee to the Southerners’. The elections took place in November. The result was a victory for those parties that looked to Egypt rather than Britain. Ismail al-Azhari, leader of the National Unionist Party (NUP), became Prime Minister. Officially the British encouraged the pro-independence Umma Party to form an active opposition but meanwhile started to build bridges with Azhari and the NUP.104 This defeat caused friction within the British Government. Churchill on his side argued for a kind of reoccupation of the Sudan. He proposed what he called an ‘Operation Re-deployment’. The solution to all the British troubles about Egypt, the Sudan and the Southern Sudan and later on in the Middle East would be ‘found in deeds not words, in action not treaties’. Therefore, he argued, it was important to ‘find some reason to send two battalions of infantry and three or four squadrons, RAF, by air to Khartoum’.105 The Governor could perhaps claim that ‘public order required it as a protection and of course make it clear that there is no going back on our bargain of self-government for the Sudan’. Churchill argued that the important thing was not to talk about it but, after close, secret, intimate study among a few, ‘to do it [Churchill’s italics]’.106 Eden tried to caution his chief. He answered that a deployment of forces to Khartoum would strengthen Egypt’s position and also the unionists in the Sudan.107 Instead Eden proposed a scheme using increased forces in Cyprus and in Libya, a brigade in Jordan to which Israel might make no objection and, not least important, forces in the Persian Gulf.108 On balance, he argued, disagreeable as all this undoubtedly was, to go for the Treaty was the only available course. Eden was well aware that the British were overstretched. He was committed to reducing British commitments worldwide, but he met with opposition. He faced a Tory party in which powerful forces were against such withdrawal and a Prime Minister to whom the idea of withdrawal by agreement from any exposed position was ‘tantamount to treason and derided as a policy of “scuttle”’.109 In January Churchill was in a rage with Eden, the ‘Golden Boy’ of the Conservative Party, who had ‘basked in the sunshine’ of Churchill’s admiration.110 Churchill described the policy as ‘appeasement’, saying he never knew before that ‘Munich was situated on the Nile.’ He described Eden as a failure as Foreign Secretary, and as ‘tired, sick and bound up in detail’. Churchill desired the talks on the Sudan to fail, just as he hoped the British would not succeed in getting into conversations with

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the Egyptians on defence, which might ‘lead to British abandonment of the Canal Zone’.111 London noted that the Egyptians were working hard to mobilise the Southern Sudanese to support their viewpoints. In January 1954, Churchill asked Eden about a visit of 16 Egyptian propagandists to the South and whether there was anything they could do to prevent it.112 Eden answered in the negative.113 Meanwhile Churchill and the Government had to swallow one bitter pill after another in the negotiations between Egypt and Britain for a new base agreement. The problem was to reach an agreement without admitting that the Egyptians had been too strong for them.114 The Embassy in Cairo reported that it was daily becoming more desirable to break the deadlock in the negotiations,115 especially in the wake of proposals put forward by Nasser to the US Ambassador. The Americans were putting pressure on London, and Nasser and the Egyptians, London knew, felt that time was on their side and that it was of no advantage to them to conclude an agreement. Agreement on the Canal Zone was reached in July 1954,116 and a Treaty signed in October the same year. It stipulated that the British would depart in twenty months but would have the right to return if any member of the Arab League or Turkey were attacked by any outside power except Israel. The Treaty involved great concessions on the part of the British.117 For Churchill this meant the end of 80 years of history – it would finally end the British occupation of Egyptian soil, an occupation he had seen at first hand in the 1890s and ever since had sought to preserve.

OLD AND NEW PLANS ON THE UPPER NILE

Dams for Whom – Egypt or Uganda? After World War II, ‘development’ was on everyone’s lips. In the Nile valley this was regarded as implying more and better water control, and water supply for a diverse set of purposes. Egypt’s need for more water was obvious, and it was looking upstream for new projects. All assessments concluded that Egypt could absorb much more water in the agricultural sector and everyone realised that industrialisation meant using the Nile for hydropower. The disastrous flood of 1947 underlined in a dramatic way the need for improved flood control. The best sites for the Century Storage Scheme on the White Nile were regarded as being in Uganda, mainly owing to the large surface areas of Lake Victoria (67,000 square km) and Lake Albert (5300 square km). A onemetre rise in the level of Lake Albert would mean 5.3 billion cubic metres, or about the same as was stored in the Aswan Dam at the time, and a one-metre rise in Lake Victoria would dam 12.5 times as much. Evaporation and rainfall in the lake area are almost equal, an increase in lake surface would not lead to increased evaporation, and dams there would be of optimal efficiency. When the Egyptian Government asked the views of the Uganda Government on these plans, it confronted development ambitions in Uganda. The Uganda

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Government rejected Egyptian plans out of hand. The Governor, Sir John Hall, said that the planned project would be detrimental to Ugandan interests; it would flood 1,000 square miles of Ugandan territory, back up the Victoria Nile and neutralise about half of the Murchison Falls for the potential generation of power.118 In order to strengthen its bargaining position and to put its own house in order, the Uganda Government engaged an Irrigation Advisor, Mr Hawes. Almost 75 years after Cromer brought the first British water-planners to Cairo, and more that 25 years after the Sudan Government established its own irrigation service, Uganda employed its first water expert.119

A Hydropower Plant for Ugandan Development Governor Hall had already put forth an alternative to Egyptian proposals regarding the use of the lakes. London had urged the colonies to devise such development plans. Since Britain legitimised colonial rule internationally by its ability to produce welfare and development in the colonies, it had to deliver results. The Uganda Government had its eyes fixed on hydropower development, echoing Churchill’s visions from the beginning of the century (see chapter 2). Hall likened the role that electric power would play to that of coal in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Uganda must aim at producing ‘not copper ore but electrolytic copper, not bauxite but aluminium, not lime but cement, not raw cotton but piece goods, not oil seeds but soap, not grass or pulp but finished paper’. Uganda should supply itself with many of those commodities it had to import from Britain and which imposed a drain on the strained resources of the UK.120 Hall argued that, if fully developed, the Nile between the two great lakes could generate as much power as would have met the whole of the electricity requirements of the UK in 1937. The river should produce power for sawmills, brickworks, sugar factories, cotton ginneries, textile and cigarette factories. The best site was considered to be at Owen Falls, just downstream of Lake Victoria. They should dam up the water to the level of Lake Victoria and submerge the Ripon Falls, producing a head of about 18 metres on which the turbines would operate. This would require a constant discharge in the Nile of 632 cubic metres of water a second and would have an installed capacity of 150,000kW and a generating capacity of 155,000kW. Uganda wanted primarily hydroelectric works at the Owen Falls, with subsidiary storage on Lake Albert, controlled by a weir at Mutir within Uganda’s borders. The Governor realised that Egypt’s and his own plans would become an important issue in Nile basin politics. Hall raised three concerns, all conceived as being in conflict with Egyptian plans. He and his Government wanted to protect Uganda against the consequences of the flooding of land caused by the planned reservoirs, especially Lake Albert,121 or at least ask for proper compensation from Egypt. It was, he said, a heavy responsibility in the light of future population pressure in the country and especially at the lakeshores. They were also sceptical of letting the Egyptians build dams in Uganda. They feared that this would enliven

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demands for Egyptian control of former Egyptian territories, describing the probable aim of the Egyptian Government as to ‘control completely the headwaters of the Nile’. If the request for permission to construct a dam at Nimule were granted, other demands would follow, and control of the water would gradually lead to demands for a greater measure of political control, which might well extend to the whole of the area surrounding Lake Victoria. Finally, power production requires a maximum constant flow all year, while irrigation requires a seasonal discharge of water. The Government in Uganda wanted the highest constant flow for generating electricity, while Egypt wanted a big reservoir to release more water when water was needed in Egypt. Hall expected that such a dam in Ugandan British territory would create an outcry in Egypt.

Britain – the Mediator Rhetorically the British Government claimed to represent an overall, basin-wide approach to Nile control. However, in accordance with its Nile basin strategy, London was adamantly opposed to anything like an Egyptian dam on British colonial territory. Egyptian claims of ‘historical rights’ to the lake area were ridiculed. But the British Government could not or would not object to the project as such. On the contrary, for decades it had been working to enlist Egyptian interests in the African lakes as a lever to obtain Egyptian support for the Blue Nile schemes that were regarded as more important, both as a potential political weapon against Egypt in the Treaty negotiations and as a means of supporting the Sudan’s independent development path. Hurst’s plan had the general support of the Foreign Office. The British Government wanted a reservoir, but it had to be controlled by the colonial government although, if possible, financed by Egypt. Britain could neither support Hall’s plan nor object. They were considered inflexible and narrowly Uganda-based. The British Government therefore tried to work out a compromise, in line with what they considered to be their overall interests in the region, partly by putting pressure on Entebbe, Cairo and Khartoum. The Uganda Government then employed British consultants (Messrs Alexander Gibb & Partners on the civil engineering side and Messrs Kennedy and Donnie on the electrical engineering side), who put forth proposals for a combined dam and powerhouse at the Owen Falls. The range of water level in Lake Victoria would be increased from 1.7 to 3 metres, involving a maximum level 1.3 metres higher than the current maximum. The powerhouse should have an installed capacity of 120,000kW, or 30,000kW less than the maximum project, and a generating capacity of 105,000kW. It would operate on a constant discharge of 505 cubic metres of water a second instead of the 632 originally proposed. Hall argued that this version of an Owen Falls Dam would not only be of great benefit to Uganda, where it would provide electricity at a suitable site and avoid flooding of large areas. The benefits for the Egyptians were, he argued, that it cost half as much as their Lake Albert Scheme and would provide their country with substantially more water rather soon, because

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of the relative simplicity of the scheme. He also underlined a political advantage that Egypt should consider: it had the support of East African governments. The East African governments examined the plan’s regional consequences at a meeting in Nairobi in November 1947, and agreed that it was possible to increase the range of Lake Victoria to three metres. The Uganda Government pointed out that the problem of the Kano Plain was much simpler than had been thought, the railway and harbour authorities saw no difficulty in modifying the existing navigational and port facilities on Lake Victoria and the more even discharge would improve navigation on Lake Kyoga, while the air force argued that the Kisumu landing-strip had to be improved anyway to comply with future international conventions. In Tanganyika the chief works that were required were protection of the foreshore, the raising of certain roads and the reconstruction of piers and other harbour installations, and only Ukara Island with its unique system of agriculture needed extensive protection. Since it would take five years from the start of work on the dam until the level of the lake was affected, the studies need not prevent finalising agreement immediately, and the project could be implemented, provided Egypt paid proper compensation.122 The Uganda Government insisted that Lake Albert should be used purely for regulation and not for storage, contrary to the Egyptian plan for Century Storage for lean years in Egypt. The Egyptian Government proposed a modified scheme for both Lake Albert and Lake Victoria. The lowest possible level of the Albert reservoir capable of meeting what were called the ‘reasonable requirements’ of Egypt was regarded as being 17.3 metres at Butiaba gauge. The Egyptians obtained support from what in most other contexts would have been regarded as an unexpected quarter. The British leaders of the Sudan Government sided with independent Egypt against the British colony of Uganda. The Sudan delegation asked for additional storage of five billion cubic metres in Lake Albert. Situated downstream, they wanted flood discharges to be held back also in abnormal years, reducing the maximum untimely season flood discharge from 27 to 22 billion cubic metres at Mongalla. Should this be guaranteed, it would be necessary to allow the level of the lake to rise to 18.3 metres on the Butiaba gauge. The extra metre for which they asked, over and above the gauge desired by Egypt, involved the flooding of an additional 35 square miles of Ugandan land, but in the Sudan this would save about 3000 square miles of land from inundation. Why should the flooding of Sudanese land count less than flooding Ugandan land, Khartoum asked. London was thus faced with an insoluble dilemma, partly stemming from the character of the river itself. If it listened too much to Egypt’s demands, Uganda would be negatively affected. If it supported the Government of one of the colonies, this would estrange Egypt and could also negatively affect the position in the Sudan. The technical question of the gauge at Butiaba was therefore an issue of high-level diplomacy, demonstrating both the inherent difficulty of and the necessity for basinwide water planning.

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A Dam in Enemy Territory Hall expected that the opposition in Egypt would criticise their Government’s support for a dam in Uganda as the ‘handing over of the source of Egypt’s agricultural life to a potential enemy’. If protests became too strong, Uganda would suspend negotiations and embark on a more modest project to which Egypt could take no possible exception. The power station at the Owen Falls would be built with an installed capacity of 90,000kW and a generating capacity of 75,000kW.123 It would operate on the minimum natural flow of the Nile, 424 cubic metres of water a second, and could be so constructed as to have no effect on the level of Lake Victoria. In Entebbe they described the power project as a matter of immediate urgency for Uganda, while the storage project was of no such urgency to Egypt.124 In view of the urgency of the matter and doubting whether Egypt would participate at the end of the day, the Uganda Government proposed a flexible dam in which machinery of any capacity from 90,000 to 150,000kW could be installed.125 Uganda could then go it alone, but leaving the door open for later participation from Egypt. If Egypt did not come in at once, the dam would be constructed one metre lower than designed but so that it could easily be raised without interfering with the operation of the powerhouse.126 But, surprisingly to the Government in Uganda, it then turned out that the Egyptian technicians accepted the figure of £980,000 as compensation payable by Egypt in the event of the prosecution of the 120,000kW Lake Victoria Scheme. The Colonial Office saw this as strengthening the case for an approach to Egypt on the Lake Victoria proposals only. The Egyptians should be informed about Uganda’s attitude immediately, because if not, a vigorous protest would most certainly be made on the grounds that Uganda was about to infringe the Nile Waters Agreement.

The Equatorial Nile Project Meanwhile the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt put forward another plan called the Equatorial Nile Project. This was intended to make possible the storage and conservation of waters of the Equatorial Nile for the purposes of irrigation and the generation of electric power. The project aimed to control the levels of Lake Victoria and Lake Albert by regulating their discharge; develop hydroelectric power on the Victoria Nile; if found to be necessary or desirable, control the level of Lake Kyoga by discharge regulation and conserve water by reducing losses in the Southern Sudan. The works needed to achieve these ambitions were a dam across the Nile at or near Owen Falls, combined in one structure with a hydroelectric power station; a dam across the Albert Nile, at or near Mutir, for the control of Lake Albert; if found necessary or desirable, a regulator across the Victoria Nile at or near Masindi Port for the control of Lake Kyoga; and a canal system, with auxiliary works, to bypass the swamps in the Southern Sudan. According to the plan, the design and construction of the dam and hydropower station at Owen Falls would

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be the responsibility of the Uganda Government, while the dam and construction of the works at Mutir, if any, would be the responsibility of the Egyptian Government. The design and construction of the Jonglei Canal would also be the responsibility of the Egyptian Government under arrangements to be agreed upon between Egypt and the Sudan. Egypt should bear all the capital costs and costs of compensation both in Uganda and the Sudan, and the Uganda Government should pay parts of the cost for the Owen Falls Dam and for those parts of the works at Mutir that were necessitated by provision of a bridge for road traffic across the dam.127 This grandiose plan also implied that Egypt was prepared to allow Uganda to have a hydropower plant on the Nile – in British enemy territory – but as part of a comprehensive Nile scheme for the benefit of Egypt. The so-called Egyptian Committee of Three, including the Prime Minister and the Minister of Works, supported the Equatorial Nile Project with some minor modifications. But even these projects were seen as insufficient to meet the water demands. There would still be 2.5 million acres that could be irrigated after they had been completed. The Committee of Three therefore also seconded Hurst’s proposals to harness the Bahr al-Ghazal and the Sobat.128

Power and Water The British Government favoured a comprehensive Nile scheme, but was worried about the danger of allowing Egyptians the administration and maintenance of works to be constructed in Uganda. Although it made sense from a technical and financial point of view, it was described as politically undesirable to permit the Egyptian Government to have representatives under its direct control in a British protectorate where it had ‘from time to time made territorial claims (though admittedly far-fetched ones)’. These agents, as they were called by the Foreign Office, could be used as the focus of anti-British propaganda whenever Anglo–Egyptian relations were particularly strained. The British Government knew on the other hand that Egypt had to deliver on the water issue, which might make it more willing to cooperate with the British. In August 1948, the main British Nile protagonists gathered in London to try to decide on a policy on which the British in Uganda, the Sudan, Egypt and London could agree.129 The catchword was a ‘comprehensive’ approach. London and Khartoum wanted, as before, to tie the projects on the Upper White Nile with the dam on Lake Tana. Agreement to the Equatorial Nile Project should be made conditional on Egyptian consent to desisting from their current attitude, which had led to a deadlock on the Lake Tana scheme, although the prospects of the Egyptian Government consenting to the full Equatorial Nile Project were not rated very highly in the political circumstances of the day. Nonetheless, it was argued that, in order to obtain Egypt’s agreement with a minimum of delay, it would be necessary to offer the Egyptians various concessions, for example control by Egyptian officials of stations in Ugandan territory. Hall also now saw such arrangements as inevitable.

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The scheme was, after all, to be constructed by and at the expense of Egypt, though via the agency of British contractors.130 The works would therefore be Egyptian works, though situated in another country. A new draft letter was written to the Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs. It declared that the Government of Uganda would be happy, when the works were completed, to receive an Egyptian irrigation expert in order that he might satisfy himself by personal observation that the operation of this scheme would leave ‘unaffected the flow of the river’.131 Although Hall accepted this tactical retreat, the Uganda Government objected to what emerged as London’s Nile policy. Hall could not accept that London should pay so much more attention to broader regional issues than to Uganda’s future. In London the main priorities were clear: Britain could not alienate Egypt more than had already been the case, and Egypt and the Sudan were of much greater strategic importance than Uganda. The electrification and industrialisation of Uganda were regarded as very important by the Colonial Office, but at the Foreign Office these were approached as a minor aspect of the much broader issue of Nile development and Nile diplomacy. Governor Hall wrote a series of letters and travelled to London, trying to rally support from the Colonial Office against the Foreign Office. He questioned the policy of treating Lake Tana and the Equatorial Nile Project as a comprehensive, interrelated scheme. Since Egypt was most sceptical of the Tana project, particularly regarding the role of the Sudan representation, the chance of securing Egyptian support for the Equatorial Project was close to nil. The Equatorial Nile Project, Hall argued, did not constitute an inducement to basinwide Anglo–Egyptian co-operation, because it would revive Egyptian fears that ‘action in Uganda might prevent vital supplies of water reaching Egypt’.132 The Colonial Office also wanted the policy reconsidered. The Foreign Secretary minuted angrily on the basis of these discussions, ‘I trust the Colonial Office will not continue to teach us how to run Egyptian Affairs’.133 The line was upheld: the various Nile schemes ‘naturally’ formed a whole, Bevin said, and could not be dealt with piecemeal if full development of the Nile Waters was to be achieved.134 Not long afterwards the British Foreign Secretary met the Egyptian Ambassador and appealed for a new spirit in Anglo–Egyptian relations, specifically mentioning the Nile Waters question. He said that the development of the Blue Nile was being held up by Egypt for purely political reasons and that the Equatorial Nile plan was similarly hanging fire. He informed Egypt that London could not wait forever and asked whether it was not a grave injustice that millions of poor people should be penalised because politicians wanted to score a point. Why could not political issues be left alone, he said, so that they could get down to what would be of practical benefit for all mankind? The Egyptian Ambassador replied that problems such as these would solve themselves automatically if the major question, that is the Treaty question between Britain and Egypt, was solved.135 The British Ambassador in Cairo was instructed by Bevin to talk to the King. He should draw his attention to a new danger; the spread of communism in the Middle East and the role of the Nile. The river could, as it were, dampen the flames of unrest. Its taming and its economic benefits could reduce political discontent. The Egyptian King should realise that

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he had ‘a weapon’ with which he could combat communism. Bevin also promised the King that he could ‘associate his name forever with one of the greatest irrigation and water development schemes the world has so far known’.136 At the end of November 1948, the Governor of Uganda was informed that London had finally decided that the approach to Egypt should be on the basis of both the Equatorial and Tana schemes. London knew that Hall would be furious, so he was told that the decision had been reached after the fullest discussion between Ministers.137 He accepted, but under protest.138 In late 1948 there followed an exchange of letters about Nile tactics that would have been unthinkable in the Cromer-Garstin era. Soon after they had told Hall about their decision, the Foreign Office was informed that Uganda could not deal with comments on the summary of the Nile project as expeditiously as London wanted. London saw this as a tactical ploy by the colonial administration in Entebbe. Hall informed London that his Irrigation Advisor was on tour in Western Uganda, and that the copy of the suggested terms of agreement regarding the Equatorial scheme had never reached Kampala. One of the Foreign Office staff described this as ‘exasperating, but there is little we can do about it’.139 Another expert wanted a tougher line: ‘Ring up the CO…and make their life hell’.140

British Tactics Apparently the Foreign Office’s tactics succeeded. On 5 February 1949, the Egyptian Prime Minister intimated to the British Ambassador in Cairo that the Egyptian Government might agree to participate in schemes for use of Nile waters for irrigation and hydroelectric power. This scheme had been discussed in April 1948. It consisted of a dam across the Victoria Nile in the area of Owen Falls, combined in a single structure with a hydroelectric power station for the control of the level of Lake Victoria and the generation of electricity, the construction of a dam across the Albert Nile in the area of Mutir for the control of the level of Lake Albert, the construction of a regulator across the Victoria Nile in the area of Masindi port for the control of the level of Lake Kyoga, the construction of canal systems in the Southern Sudan and the construction of a dam and hydroelectric station at the outlet of Lake Tana for the control of the level of the lake and the generation of electricity. It was estimated that, as a result of this comprehensive scheme, the area under cultivation in Egypt would be increased by about 1 million acres. In the Sudan the increase in the irrigable area would make possible a great expansion of the Gezira Scheme. The Jonglei Canal scheme would, it was said, in the long run lead to a new era of prosperity in the sudd. Uganda and Ethiopia would benefit by the provision of a great quantity of hydroelectric power.141 On 28 February 1949 the Egyptian House of Representatives debated the Nile Waters projects. The House unanimously approved the contribution of E£4.5 million to the Owen Falls scheme. Finally, the British Government claimed, after so many years, a comprehensive Nile project had the support of Egypt. Now the difficulties came from another corner. The Sudan Government declined to take part in the discussions on the Owen Falls scheme. One excuse was that the

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Civil Secretary was on holiday. London did not believe it, and Bevin minuted, ‘This attitude by the Sudan is very bad. It should be followed vigorously’.142 Later he wrote to Khartoum and expressed disappointment at the Governor-General’s decision. These negotiations could easily go beyond the technical discussion about the Owen Falls and it was important to take the opportunity of emphasising to the Egyptian Government the importance which Britain attached to any aspect of Nile Waters projects.143 Khartoum then agreed to send a representative, mainly in view of the change of date for the discussions, and not because they had changed their minds.144 By the end of March it became clear that the Egyptians desired a joint call for tenders and joint signature of the contract for the Owen Falls Dam with the Government of Uganda. The fate of the Owen Falls Dam now hung on two main issues: joint tender and ownership, and once again the Foreign Office and Egypt were siding against the British Colonial Office and Governor Hall of Uganda. Campbell informed London that if Egypt was regarded by Egyptian public opinion as a junior partner to Uganda in this costly undertaking, opposition to the whole scheme would be intensified.145 Campbell also asked what the line would be if Egypt would not join; would the Uganda Electricity Board then go ahead on its own, as previously indicated? Hall told London on 23 March that any suggestion that Egypt was paying for the Owen Falls Dam would be most damaging, and that the Owen Falls scheme should be constructed entirely by Uganda.146 On 6 April the Egyptian Prime Minister appealed to the British Ambassador for agreement that invitation for tenders and placing of contracts for the Owen Falls Dam should be performed in the joint names of Uganda and Egypt.147 Otherwise, the ‘whole complexion of this matter as an example of Anglo–Egyptian friendship would be seriously damaged’.148 The Foreign Office, pressed with Treaty negotiations and other outstanding issues with Egypt, favoured allowing the weak Egyptian Government, under mounting internal pressure from nationalists and anti-British movements, a share in the ownership of the Owen Falls Dam. London would thus prefer to see them associated, nominally at least, with the invitation to tender and the placing of contracts.149 On the same day the Foreign Office informed its Embassy in Cairo of this general policy,150 and urged the Colonial Office to side with it, and not with Hall. The Colonial Office did as it was told, and sent a letter to Hall the same day, declaring that a communiqué should make it clear that the Uganda Electricity Board and the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works would collaborate to the fullest possible extent in the preparation of the designs, specifications, contract documents, etc.’.151 Hall objected, saying that rather than ‘subject Uganda to such a deprivation’, he would ‘indefinitely prefer to forego Egyptian participation in the project which is of little intrinsic value to Uganda’.152 Only a couple of days later, on 9 April, the British Ambassador to Egypt raised some second thoughts, stressing the need to safeguard the Sudan’s interests in the Nile waters projects. Taking a basin-wide perspective, he saw the water plans as nothing less than the solution to the Sudan question. Campbell argued that the question had to be raised now, because this bargaining weapon would become increasingly difficult to use as the projects progressed, unless Britain were to lay

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itself open to charges of bad faith and of breaking international law. He argued that, by allowing Egypt to participate in the Owen Falls Dam without any commitment to share benefits with the Sudan, they had already lost bargaining power.153 The Governor of Uganda continued to argue that the Egyptian position was ‘wholly untenable’, and that the proposal for co-operation was impossible. If Egypt did not agree to this interpretation, Uganda should proceed on its own. The tender would not be further delayed. The Foreign Office complained again about ‘the intransigent attitude’ of Governor Hall.154 Meanwhile nationalist opposition to the scheme in Egypt was growing, spearheaded by engineers.155 The British Ambassador thought that Egypt had a legitimate case in asking for ownership and participation in the tender and contract. He therefore suggested that some of the letters about the project should be published, so as to demonstrate the joint aspect. On 22 April Bevin sent a telegram of particular secrecy to Cairo, Khartoum and Entebbe (it was to be retained by the authorised recipient and not passed on),156 stressing that he had been giving ‘special consideration to the Nile Waters problem’, and that on one point he felt ‘most emphatically’ that there must be ‘no (repeat no) question of joint ownership of any of the three dams’. Regarding the Lake Albert and Lake Kyoga dams, for which the Egyptian Government was to meet the whole cost, London was willing that the invitation for tenders and the signing of the contract should be undertaken by the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works alone, ‘subject to approval of the Government of Uganda (perhaps expressed by the British Government)’.157

The Owen Falls Dam – ‘the beginning of Uganda’ During the middle of May 1949, negotiations over the dam came to a head. The Egyptian Government knew that the water need was pressing and that it would have to deliver if it were to stay in power, but on the other hand it also knew that the opposition would cause an outcry if it became public knowledge that Britain was to have a stake in the dam. On 13 May Campbell reported two conversations he had had with the Egyptian Prime Minister during two parties they had attended.158 The Prime Minister had begged London not to mention this issue at all in public, at least not in a way that could further weaken his Government’s position.159 London subsequently played down its own role, to the dismay of Bevin, who had wanted to cash in on what he described as a triumph of British foreign policy. At the same time Campbell and the Foreign Office were preparing a new draft announcement with a slightly different text to be issued jointly by Egypt and Britain.160 Khartoum vigorously pushed its own line, complaining that London, by choosing Anglo– Egyptian co-operation in Nile water development, might be sacrificing necessary safeguards for the Sudan.161 Hall accepted the text and also reported that the Uganda Electricity Board raised no objection to the resident engineer proposal, which had a kind of precedent; 162 he maintained opposition to playing the Sudan card at this late stage of negotiations. On 17 May the Under-Secretary of State of the Egyptian

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Ministry of Foreign Affairs met Campbell and said that the new text was satisfactory.163 The next day the Egyptian Ambassador in London stated that the Egyptian Government had agreed to the text of the announcement contained in the telegram of 17 May. The Egyptian Government had agreed to pay for raising the dam by 1.3 metres to allow additional storage in Lake Victoria, to be released according to an agreed-upon pattern (agreed curve), for ‘consequential loss of hydroelectric power’ and for unspecified damage below the Owen Falls Dam, and also to pay compensation for any incredation resulting from increased water storage in Lake Victoria. Bevin announced the plan in triumph in the House of Commons on 19 May.164 Al Kotla protested immediately; the whole Agreement on Lake Victoria was based on documents and agreements that were null and void, since it was based on the 1929 Agreement that again was based on the 1899 Agreement, placing Great Britain in a position that neither international law nor Egypt could accept. The Egyptian Gazette of 25 May quotes Al Balagh, which criticised the Owen Falls Agreement vehemently. Egypt had surrendered. The editorial concluded, ‘The British were certainly right when they applauded their Foreign Minister after his Commons speech announcing the conclusion of the agreement, but as far as the Egyptians are concerned, well, God help them!’ Bevin’s speech on foreign policy, at the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool on 9 June, dealt with the Middle East and also with the success of the Nile water policies. He argued that London had now decided to try and stimulate great economic development in the Middle East. If the Nile plans were developed, he continued, ‘they will be the largest T.V.A. schemes ever attempted in any part of the world’.165 Bevin’s ideas did not have the support of the Foreign Service. The British Ambassador to Cairo criticised Bevin’s proposal for a Nile Valley Board for a number of reasons. Campbell argued that, regarding the solution of social problems, the countries ‘differ immensely, varying as they do between the people of Uganda and of the Congo, the Ethiopians and primitive people of the Southern Sudan, those of the area between Khartoum and (roughly) the Delta. All these peoples, in varying degrees and ways, are so backward that, as it seems to me, the first and main object must be for each to get things done in its own area individually.’ The various social problems did not, he thought, have enough in common for any co-ordination of treatment. The Nile valley was not ‘comparable with Tennessee Valley’.166 Maitland in the Foreign Office proposed another more modest solution: something called the Nile Waters Information Office. It should serve as a library of technical reports and documents, a meeting place for technical consultants working with the Nile; models and plans might be on public view at the Office, meetings could be arranged there, and it should be situated in Cairo.167 A couple of days later, Campbell and the Africa Committee discussed Bevin’s proposal for an International Board to co-ordinate the social and economic development of the Nile valley. They objected to the idea: the Colonial Office wished to separate the affairs of Africa south of Sahara from those of the Mediterranean. A single body might encourage Egyptian claims to the headwaters of the Nile, and there already existed an East African region for co-operation. They also argued that the only common interest among the countries of the Nile valley

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was the river itself. The Foreign Office now saw that a TVA plan for the Nile valley was both unrealistic and would only play into the hands of Egypt. In June, Bevin took the initiative to make special arrangements for maximum publicity for the laying of the foundation stone of the Owen Dam. The Foreign Office immediately saw problems with this publicity stunt. Who should be present at the ceremony? If the Duke of Edinburgh attended alone, it would not look like a joint Anglo–Egyptian venture. If both he and King Farouk went, Farouk would have to lay the stone, and that would give the impression of Egyptian ownership, or represent a revival of ancient Egyptian claims to the areas around the headwaters of the Nile.168 What put a damper on Bevin’s idea was primarily the decision of the Governor of Uganda to play down the opening ceremony as much as possible,169 with the help of the bureaucrats in the Foreign Office. The Uganda Government had decided that, in order to avoid political considerations influencing the choice of guests, they themselves would not issue the invitation, which instead would be sent by the Uganda Electricity Board to a few selected ‘technical’ representatives.170 The Foreign Office experts argued, after Bevin had asked for a re-examination of past decisions, that it would not be of any use to urge ‘a big publicity splash for the Owen Falls ceremony’. Bevin thought in particular that the ceremony might be televised and preceded by a series of explanatory talks on the radio, giving details of the Owen Falls scheme and the various stages of the Nile Waters schemes. He thought that his ideas for the foundation stone ceremony had been rejected on insufficient grounds.171 In the event, when the dam was opened, the political situation had changed, and the British Government under Churchill’s leadership showed their hand. The main political significance of the Agreement on Owen Falls, according to the British Government’s optimistic and unrealistic assessment, was that the Egyptian Government had committed itself to a scheme regarded as ‘valueless unless the other schemes are executed and to sharing the benefits of the Projects with the Sudan’.172 Hall and his Government had got a dam for hydropower production in Uganda, while the Egyptians had secured their rights to monitor its management (this became an important issue six years later, when Eden’s Government discussed the possibility of diverting summer water away from Egypt so as to put pressure upon Nasser – see chapter 7). Hall complained in a secret and urgent letter to London about one feature of the settlement that caused him considerable anxiety, namely the omission of any reference to ownership of the dam.173 He quoted the only public announcement on the subject, made by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in his speech to the Anglo–Egyptian Society on 10 February, when he had said, ‘It will also be a magnificent enterprise in international co-operation. For example, the sluices, the works, the plant on the Equatorial Nile will be in Uganda, but they will be owned by Egypt, they will be operated by Egyptians, although I have no doubt that much local Uganda labour will find employment on them.’ This meant, according to Hall, that Egypt would be in a strong position when at some future time it suited it to proffer a claim to ownership. Such a claim was made on 4 April. Hall argued that the Legislative Assembly in Uganda would not accept this, because they were well aware of both the Minister’s speech and Egypt’s request of 4 April. At the same

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time the Uganda Electricity Board would be very happy to go it alone, while the inclusion of Egypt was a political move by London and not necessary from the economic point of view. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office tried to calm down Hall, saying that the Minister of State’s speech could be ‘repudiated if necessary’; the speech was unofficial and ownership had not been discussed in the negotiations preceding the Agreement.174 Hall was subsequently instructed to explain London’s real position privately to members of the Uganda Electricity Board and the Legislative Councillors, in order to forestall awkward questions. To raise the issue of ownership again would be counterproductive, and would only increase Egyptian suspicions. The Foreign Office argued that if it were ever necessary for practical reasons to determine the ownership of the dam ‘(and we doubt whether it ever will be), this could only be done by agreement between the parties concerned or by arbitration’.175 London and Khartoum had not managed to use the dam as a lever to secure Egypt’s support of the Blue Nile scheme. Importantly, the whole diplomatic struggle about the dam had helped to strengthen the conviction of the Egyptian nationalists that Egypt would have to tame the Nile within its own borders. It was also very clear that this dam on the African lake was far from meeting Egypt’s growing water needs. From one point of view the history of the Owen Falls Dam is a prologue to the more dramatic history of the Aswan High Dam. This had not yet been designed, but the political atmosphere was ripening for such a dramatic solution to Egypt’s Nile problem. The weakness of the British Government’s position had become clearer. At the same time, British imperial power was playing a historically important role in securing a hydropower plant in Uganda and in protecting land in Uganda from being inundated. The Government in London acted as a kind of mediator, not only among countries, but also among different British centres of power in the Nile valley and ministerial interests in London. The negotiations for the dam demonstrated that the days of a unified corps of engineers bent on a comprehensive solution for the entire river basin was a thing of the past. In the Sudan the irrigation experts were mostly concerned with the Gezira Scheme and thus with Lake Tana, the Egyptian experts were considering Egyptian interests, and the Ugandan irrigation experts were preoccupied with the projects and their repercussions and potentials in Uganda. The water needs and water use in the three countries conflicted with each other. Hall’s Government wanted a dam for power and the Egyptian Government one for irrigation in Uganda, while Khartoum was concerned with flooding and another dam in Ethiopia. On 23 January 1954 commercial electricity generation began.176 About fifty years after Winston Churchill, on his voyage down the Nile, had watched the water flowing from Lake Victoria through the Owen Falls, and in his visionary prose had claimed that the Nile falls in Uganda could be a fantastic place for power production, Queen Elizabeth II opened the Owen Falls Dam in April 1954. At the same time as Churchill, now Prime Minister, was fighting to maintain Britain’s position at Suez against mounting Egyptian opposition, the British Government, with all the ceremonial power it possessed, inaugurated an upstream dam.

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Seen from Uganda it was as if the life of the country had started anew. Not only had Egypt won, on 22 April, £980,000 in compensation for loss of hydroelectric power, but the £16 million hydroelectric project had transformed Lake Victoria into the largest reservoir in the world. Although this seemed to mark the death of the original British concept of the Nile basin, as a physical unit existing for the benefit of Egypt, almost fifty years to the day after Garstin published his vision of the Nile, in the words of an African journalist, this was ‘the beginning of Uganda’.177

A N A RT I F I C I A L R I V E R T H RO U G H T H E S O U T H E R N S U DA N

British administrators in Egypt and the Northern Sudan had predominantly conceived of the Bahr al-Jabal, the Bahr al-Zaraf and the Bahr al-Ghazal, and the other Upper White Nile tributaries, in the same perspective as that of Garstin. This part of the Nile was regarded as ‘solely…the carrying channel which supplies Egypt with summer water’. The British Nile was seen in this period as a river that existed for the benefit of the north. A one-liner summarising the dominant attitude was MacDonald’s assessment of the region in 1920, as a place ‘where nothing flourishes except mosquitoes and papyrus’.178 The Nile environment in the Southern Sudan was conceived of as being synonymous with the sudd or the ‘swamp region’.179 It was typical of this Nile discourse that, in government offices in the desert city of Khartoum, the British administrators in the South were nicknamed ‘bog barons’.180 Seen from the veranda of the Grand Hotel on the southern bank of the Blue Nile in Khartoum, where officers of the Sudan Civil Service met for their afternoon tea, the South was regarded as a bog and assignment there as a punishment. But British thinking on the Southern Sudan, as well as on the plans for harnessing the waters of the area, underwent a paradigmatic change after 1945. Gone were the ideas of Garstin and Cromer, MacDonald and Allenby, of the Southern Sudan as a ‘no man’s land’ or as solely an aqueduct for northern drylands. The Sudan Government, which had supported Garstin’s and MacDonald’s plans for the Upper Nile, now changed its policy. While Kitchener, Wingate and Symes had worked actively for a water project along Garstin’s lines, their successors now objected to similar plans on the Upper Nile in the Sudan. The plan that was put forward in Nile Basin, Vol. VII was grandiose, explicitly inspired by Garstin’s visions for a tamed Nile. The primary objective of the Upper White Nile project was to hold back the flood of the White Nile until the water was required in the north. A totally controlled Bahr al-Jabal was anticipated to have a discharge during the season of water excess in Egypt of only 8 billion cubic metres, while 15 million cubic metres a day would be passed down the excavated canal, a quantity believed to be sufficient for navigation and the prevention of weed growth. However, 16 billion cubic metres would flow down during the summer when the water was needed in Egypt. The impact locally would be a complete reversal of the natural seasons and fluctuations of the river, to which the local economies had been adapted over the years. In the months when irrigation water was needed in the

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northern drylands, the canal would carry 55 million cubic metres a day, while the remodelled Bahr al-Jabal would carry 40 million cubic metres a day. Since the river south of Jonglei was unable to take 95 million cubic metres a day without heavy losses, the plan suggested that the off-take of the new canal should be moved further to the south (Terakeka) and from there it should run due north to the Sobat junction. The project would radically alter the regime of the Nile from the Sudan– Uganda frontier all the way down to Kosti. The repercussions on the life of the people who lived in this riverain belt would be dramatic indeed. The plan, which bore the stamp of Garstin and Cromer, Allenby and MacDonald, Selwyn Lloyd and Eden, was now not accepted by London or by the Government in Khartoum. The marginalised and previously neglected peoples of the Jonglei area very abruptly became a target population for British water planning. Why this happened needs an explanation, not least since most other plans for large river basins in the world at the time - especially in countries that a French scholar in the beginning of the 1950s termed Tiers Monde or the Third World – neglected the interests of similarly marginalised population groups.

The Colonial Order in the Southern Sudan To understand the fundamental change in how the sudd and the Nilotic peoples were conceived and described in British Nile discourse in the 1950s, the colonial order in the Southern Sudan has to be understood. British colonialism had brought a ‘Pax Britannica’. This was quite an achievement, compared to the inter-ethnic conflicts in the past and the almost permanent wars that have raged since independence. But apart from bringing peace and order with a relatively limited use of violence,181 the building of a few roads, and support for the establishment of some schools, not very much was achieved. A common generalisation about the British colonial bureaucracy is that its prime concern was to provide conditions for capitalist production to take place as well as to be profitable, or that it was essentially a mechanism for establishing viable macro-economic structures and flows. This description might be valid in Egypt and in the Gezira and in some other African countries, but definitely does not apply to the Southern Sudan. A study of the Nile basin countries in the age of the British therefore also contradicts superficial generalisations about colonial administrations and state formations.182 As long as the Southern Sudan primarily was regarded as a wasteful but important aqueduct within the Nile basin, it made logical a local economic and administrative policy that was basically restricted to the maintenance of the regional status quo. The 1919 Egyptian revolution revealed the importance of the region as an upstream area, and Lord Milner recommended the greater use of tribal organisations in the Sudan as a way of counteracting modern nationalism and thus Egyptian influence. This policy had been gradually strengthened and carried further when Maffey came to the Sudan in 1926 as Governor-General, and made ‘devolution’ his policy. Tribal organisation, weakened by the Khalifa and long neglected by

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the Condominium powers, quickened under the active leadership of London and Khartoum. The so-called Southern Policy, initiated in the 1920s and followed with some modifications until the 1950s (Newbold wrote as late as 1943 that ‘I feel sure we should aim at a Nuer federation of some sort which might one day – who knows? – evolve a tough dynasty or a Soviet or a House of Elders which would form a valuable buffer between the bastard fringe of Islam North of Malakal & Equatoria’ 183) aimed at blocking or minimising Northern influence and anti-British feelings in the South. Different policies were followed, but all aimed at shielding the South from Northern influence. In 1925 the goal was said to be elimination of Mamurs and Sub-Mamurs in the southern administration. During the 1920s and the early 1930s, Egyptian administrators were expelled from the South and a gradual reduction in the Northern Sudanese presence was attempted. The British wanted to minimise the danger of Arab-inspired nationalism and discouraged development of an educated elite of Southern administrators, since they feared a detribalised and discontented intelligentsia. This policy made the administrative apparatus extremely rudimentary. This policy had also some unintended consequences. When Willis, then Governor of Upper Nile Province, was discussing the problems of the Garstin Cut in the 1920s, this was one of his main concerns. He did not trust the Southerners to build the canal, describing them as ‘intellectually incapable of doing semi-skilled work and physically and temperamentally incapable of unskilled work’; the temptation to remove the steel marking poles required by survey parties was one the Nuer were ‘liable to find too much for them’. He did not want to go to the extreme of putting northerners into a barbed-wire enclosure, but he opted for a kind of enclave for each labour settlement.184 The British supported Chiefs’ Courts and gave some judicial powers to cooperating tribal leaders. The aim was to facilitate administration as well as to awaken and strengthen tribal consciousness. As has been stated, these courts came to be ‘bastions of local loyalties, not the citadel of nationhood’.185 The result was an administrative apparatus that depended on the individual capabilities of British DCs and that counteracted development of a more centrally organised bureaucracy with political, administrative and economic institutions. This centrifugal policy was followed in a region that came under unified rule only at the end of the 1920s. The administration was by and large military, weak and with limited control and functions. Until the 1920s, troops behaved as if in enemy country, and it was regarded as impossible to visit a Shilluk village without a guard of at least a dozen armed men, while no one moved into Nuer and Dinka villages without far more.186 Although the South came under one state organisation, it was never really administered by a central government, foreign or national. Any form of efficient rule when the forces of government consisted of at most a few dozen district commissioners and a few police, in this enormous area with extremely poor communications, was seen as both impossible and counterproductive. The DCs were ‘jacks-of-all-trades’ and represented, in one person, all government functions in regions that might be the size of an average European country. Moreover, the formative years of British

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state-building in the South took place comparatively late, during the Great Depression in 1929 onwards. Support from London for the southern administration was therefore even less than there was in most other places in Africa. British overall strategy and the economic situation left British administrators on the spot with no other alternative than ‘devolution’ of power to ‘tribal leaders’, with the official ‘determination to interfere as little as possible’. The British followed an economic policy that discouraged the formation of a class of agriculturalists or capitalists with a need for an efficient supra-ethnic state, contrary to what they were doing with comparative success in the northern riverain Sudan. Unlike in Kenya, the British discouraged foreigners from settling in the region, and unlike in Uganda, for example, the British also discouraged European capitalists from investing. Furthermore, by trying to expel Arab merchants as part of this southern policy, Khartoum suppressed a force the British themselves rightly considered as one of the most instrumental in creating economic change and development. The British opposed urbanisation (Juba, the biggest town in the region, had only approximately 8000 people as late as 1956) and built no railways (the Kosti– Wau line was constructed in 1962). The few roads were mainly for administrative purposes, partly because of uncertainty owing to the Nile plans and partly because there were no funds available and no investment plans in other sectors that made such infrastructural projects rational. The overall impact of this economic policy only managed to create an ‘African Zoo’ for anthropologists to study, as a DC aptly put it in the 1940s. The South was maintained as an undeveloped and isolated periphery, sealed off from contamination by modern economic and political influence, awaiting the modernising attack of the huge Nile works. The ‘Bog’ as Stakeholder To travel through the sudd in the 1950s could therefore give the same impression of desolation as Garstin had at the beginning of the century. The sight from the boat roof was the same – millions of acres of swamp and endless papyrus growing more than one and a half metres high, in the dry season naked Dinka and Nuer herdsmen with their cattle on the banks of the river, some grass fires in the distance and clouds of smoke against the sky. The captain on the steamer struggling through the swamps would have the same difficulties in finding the correct bend as in the 1920s. Developments in the Southern Sudan, or the lack of change in economic activities and social structures, would rather suggest continuity in British approaches to the region’s future and modernisation potentials than a paradigmatic change in Southern water policy. Since hard-headed mixed subsistence farmers, in a context of high environmental risk, are unlikely to experiment with new practices, there was no push for change from within the communities either. The change of opinion regarding Southern Nile development was a radical shift that took place in London, Cairo and Khartoum more or less at the same time. Willis’s opposition to the project in the late 1920s had been futile because, at that time, Britain wanted to repair the damage done to its public image in Egypt, damaged

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by the Allenby ultimatum, and wanted to be seen as the guarantor of Egyptian water. The changing views of MacMichael, one of the most influential inter-war administrators in the Sudan, can help to illustrate a transformation of how the Nile was understood and diplomatically constructed in the British Nile strategy. The changing political landscape changed the elements of the Nile discourse, and the Upper Nile ceased to be simply a wasteful viaduct to northern drylands. The Southern Sudan had not become a Nile environment of its own. In 1934 MacMichael wrote a book in which he favoured the Upper Nile projects because these would increase the amount of water available for Egypt.187 Twenty years later he published a new book on the Sudan, in which he opposed the project that was now called ‘Egyptian’ on the grounds that it could ‘never be a light matter in any circumstances to persuade a primitive people that alterations in their ancestral way of life, made for the sake of others, are justifiable or desirable, even if hopes of alternative advantages can be held out’.188 MacMichael had been Civil Secretary during the Nuer Settlement and, in Malakal, together with Governor Willis had decided to use RAF planes to bombard Nuer homesteads in the late 1920s. In the mid-1920s he had asked for reports about the local consequences of the Jonglei Project so as to minimise the administrative difficulties they knew would be the result of the scheme. In 1954, MacMichael raised in public critical arguments against the project, even if remedies could be held out for the ‘primitive people’.189 He now supported the Southerners against Egypt, and very bluntly stated that Egypt had been the bane of the Sudan for more than a century. If it had not the wisdom to accept with good grace whatever the Sudan might offer, the risk the country would run would be immeasurable, he wrote, evoking the rhetoric of the upstream power.190 MacMichael’s change of heart fitted well with the reorientation of imperial policy in the valley.191 In the Foreign Office and in the Governor-General’s Palace in Khartoum, the plan was regarded within the same basic framework: the Jonglei Project was part of a strategy to exert pressure upon Egypt, to have Egypt pay for the Southern Sudan’s development, as Cairo in the early decades of British rule had paid for improved communications in the Northern Sudan, and as leverage to get the Tana Dam built.192 The Jonglei area and the people living there had once again became a card in the Nile valley game, but the area was no longer only the land of aquatic bounty and a paradise for mosquitoes. For the first time it had become a potential diplomatic stick against Egypt and Egyptian nationalism. Or to put it differently: by safeguarding the interests of the Equatorians, the Nuer, the Dinka, the Shilluk and all the other ethnic groups adversely affected by the project, they could mobilise both sympathy and African political forces against what they regarded as mobs and dictators downstream.193 This new concern for development potential of the Southern Sudan came all too late to bridge the gaps that had emerged between the South and the North and that came to have such a devastating impact during the remaining years of the century. The uneven development between the North and South, the ethnic and religious contradictions and conflicts between the peoples and regions existed long before the arrival of the British Empire, but some rifts were widened by British policy, not least by British Nile policies. But the change in water policy in the

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swamps came in time to save the Southerners, and the Southern environment, from a water project that would have completely altered both the peoples’ way of life and the regional ecology.

The Jonglei Investigation Team Just before World War II, the Egyptian Government had asked Khartoum for comments on the Jonglei Project proposal. The Sudan Government decided that the Financial Secretary should deal with this. What mattered at the time were financial assessments of remedial issues.194 British officials in the area knew the general aspects of likely consequences of the project. It was noted that all fluctuations would cease, as the river would run at its optimum level from the point of view of the maximum supply of water in Egypt, wells would ‘stop giving water’ and the diminution of the toich grassland would be ‘catastrophic’.195 But discussions with the Egyptian irrigation authorities were postponed because of the ‘delicately balanced relationship’ between the Sudan and Egypt at the time.196 Just after World War II, the Government in Khartoum set up a team to study local consequences and potential compensation to be paid by Egypt because of the implementation of the canal project. At the beginning of 1946 the Team was established, with H.A. Morrice and John Winder as chairman and deputy. The Foreign Office helped to initiate it and was kept informed of its activities from 1946 to 1954. The Jonglei Investigation Team was first to examine Butcher’s Jonglei Canal diversion scheme, then the Terakeka-Sobat scheme suggested in Nile Basin, Vol. VII, and lastly the direct line proposed by Amin and Bambridge in 1948. The Team was to make such investigations and surveys as were desirable regarding the effects of the proposals on the interests of the Sudan, and make recommendations as to the compensation required. The Team should also investigate and consider possible alternative alignments for the canal and their effects. It was also mentioned in the terms of reference that one such local interest was considered to be agriculture and – most importantly in a Nile perspective – irrigation.197 The British had several goals in establishing the Team. They did not object to the Jonglei plan as such. This had less to do with a ‘fatalistic attitude’ in Khartoum 198 than with a proactive policy for securing the Tana Dam and at the same time making Egypt pay for development in the Southern Sudan. The British wanted more development in the region, but they had no money to pay for it. By stressing the needs of the Jonglei area, the British also attempted to remind Egyptian nationalists about the downstream position of their country. The Jonglei Team was seen in London as a means of tightening the ‘vulnerable tube’ that Churchill had described. Britain hoped to use scientifically based charges against the Jonglei Project, in an effort to put political pressure on Egypt in general, and to achieve co-operation in implementing the Lake Tana project in particular, since Egypt was still hesitating with the latter. The Governor-General realised this, stating that the Jonglei Project

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‘provided the only (if not very adequate) weapon the Sudan Government had for obtaining co-operation in the Lake Tana project’.199 In the Sudan, the leading British strategists discussed a balancing act between accepting the ‘reversal of seasons’ and loss of toich, and agreement with Egypt on Lake Tana. The district commissioners in the South were more ‘one-sided’ – they saw things primarily from a local perspective and regarded the project as a catastrophe. To P.P. Howell, the later leader of the Team, it was clear that the British must do something constructive in the economic sphere. The Jonglei work should be seen as an element of this overall idea. What was important was to conduct experiments in artificial irrigation. The logic was simple. If the area was deprived of its natural floodwaters, then the pastures must depend upon rainfall. But at best the rain falls from May to October and at worst there is no rain for the other six months of the year. One central goal was to inform Egypt that its Government would have to pay for local repercussions caused by the planned project. This would both put pressure on Cairo and give the Southern Sudan money it needed for development. The more concretely the detrimental effects could be described and the more precisely the cost of remedial measures could be assessed, the more money could be asked for as compensation. Already the Second Interim Report suggested various remedial measures as a basis for a claim for compensation.200 Some of the Team members wanted to do more research on the development aspect, but the Jonglei Committee did not advocate this because the more pressing task was determining the cost of the remedial measures. Therefore they supported the research priorities that had been laid down when the Team started its work, and approved the separation between ‘Remedial Measures’ and ‘New Developments’ as applied in the Second Interim Report of the Team.201 The three interim reports established beyond doubt that these water-saving projects would have enormous consequences for local life. They also discussed, for the first time, the potential for artificial irrigation in the Southern Sudan, and in Parliament in London the Foreign Secretary stated that the Jonglei Team had started to ‘examine the possibility of inland water supplies’.202 While previous reports on the Nile had been written by hydraulic engineers or physicists, the Jonglei Team was multi-disciplinary from the start. In 1948 the Team was given two more members. Its longest-serving chairman and main author of the final report, P.P. Howell,203 had been a District Commissioner in the Nuer District, educated at Cambridge with a Ph.D. in anthropology. His Nuer language was fluent and he was an expert on aspects of Nuer and Nilotic culture and law. Among the other British members of the Team were five experts from the Irrigation Department, two from the Sudan Veterinary Service, one from the Ministry of Agriculture and three from the Sudan Survey Department.204 The team was an autonomous body, working with full support from Khartoum 205 and, most importantly, from Whitehall.

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‘Jonglei without Tears’ 206 On 14 April 1947, at the same time as the British Government was discussing the grand issues of imperial strategy, Assistant District Commissioner John Winder started on a trek from Mopair to Khor Bilnyang in the heart of the swamp land. Although it was the dry season he had to wade a great deal because some of the watercourses were quite deep. He wanted detailed knowledge; he wanted to see for himself what happened to the spill water from the left bank of the Bahr al-Jabal and the water of a number of rivers which, rising on the Nile-Congo Divide, were largely lost in the marshes. It was an important area for the Nuer and the Dinka for dry-weather grazing, but he was the first government official to visit the area.207 Wading around, under the powerful sun, in a very malarial area, seeing a village here and a group of tukuls there, Winder, like many other district commissioners, was most and genuinely concerned about local developments. The pressing question was: what would happen when the canal project was imposed on the Nilotics? Winder, among others, underlined that the threat of such an inundation ‘perpetually over the heads of the people would be intolerable’, and that the ‘the ladder of their prosperity might at intervals be knocked from under them and the higher they have climbed the greater must be their fall’.208 In a letter called ‘Jonglei without Tears’ he underlined that, from a local point of view, the British could arrive at no long-term policy for development in the Upper Nile region until the question for or against Jonglei had been settled.209 When the Jonglei Committee held its fifth meeting on 28 February 1949, they approved the Jonglei Canal scheme as part of the Equatorial Nile Project, but supported further research. It was also concluded that, from now on, the reports should not be written for despatch to Egypt, but for the information of the Sudan Government only.210 This autonomous body was spending more money a year on research than whole provinces had for development budgets, and was met with suspicion from some British quarters in the Sudan. They sarcastically referred to the Team as ‘four gentlemen writing about fish’,211 but overlooked its political importance. What was at stake was not the canal as such, but how to provide alternative livelihoods and alternative development routes, and the scheme’s role in regional hydropolitics. While working for the Team, P.P. Howell now and then sent rather depressed letters to friends, being pessimistic about the future of the Southern Sudan as well as about his and his own ‘age group’s’ career possibilities. If the Sudan became independent, and the Southern Sudan was part of it, what would happen to those rather young men who had been determined to work in the Sudan Political Service? Howell and his fellow DCs were worried about their future, and the type of compensation that the ‘change of masters’ from British to Sudanese would bring. Howell speculated in favour of ‘some semi-independent governing authority’ in the Southern provinces. The objective should be to do ‘without outside assistance’, by which he meant Egypt and the Northern Sudan.212 Howell thought that his proposal of a Southern Development Board could institutionalise this redirection of policies. His idea was that the Ministry for the Co-ordination of Southern

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Although the south Sudan is almost a floating island during the rainy season, there is a lack of water during the long dry season. As the rains come to an end and the floods subside, the cattle and their herders move towards the rivers and the intermediate land, where the grass is naturally irrigated. At low water and during the long dry season the previously flooded land dries out and produces excellent grazing when it has elsewhere become scarce or disappeared. This picture shows Nuer carriers drinking water during a British-led trek.

Development would ‘in fact, though not in name, become a form of “Scottish Office” ’. The Minister might have two or three Southern Under-Secretaries in the Government, for Health, Agriculture and Education. He would need a Permanent Secretary, who should be British, and who should also be chairman of the Southern Development Board. This Board should be empowered to engage foreign experts for research, although it might be necessary, because of the 1929 Agreement, to have an Egyptian Irrigation Expert on this Board. The Jonglei Team should be taken over by this Southern Development Board. Khartoum disagreed on the concrete proposal, but agreed on the fundamental reasoning behind it; that the British had to do more for the development of the Southern Sudan. Some, with a certain capacity for self-deception, were against a special Development Board; as long as the paternal type of British Governor and district commissioner remained in the southern Provinces, there should be no need for a ‘Social Specialist’, they argued.213 Howell was characterised as suffering from ‘examination fever’, and the team feeling sorry for itself as a result of the combination of realisation of the size of the Southern problem, ‘the end of their chapter and the future without a “development team’’’.214 Those opposed to the idea realised its political potential, however, and it was strongly supported by the Upper Nile Development Committee. In March 1953, about one month after the Sudan Agreement that shocked the British in the Sudan, it went through, with London’s support. Howell regarded it as a kind of nucleus in the social development of the Southern Sudan. In the meantime the Jonglei Committee had asked Howell to finish his final report by 31 December 1953.

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The Southern DCs and Howell argued strongly that London’s and Khartoum’s policy should emphasise that integration in the Sudan should be ‘on equal terms’. At the same time, they discussed separation or secession as an option for the South. In any case, the Jonglei issue would be at the centre. They were also concerned about security, which they thought was maintained by confidence in and loyalty to British leaders. If the British lost out – as they now seemed to be doing – what would happen? Would the people of the South be safe? Would they themselves be safe? Who would then be in control? They thought London’s strategy to be too biased towards Egypt, too much concerned with Middle Eastern strategy. They also thought that the Egyptians held the trump card. Cairo had announced a date and a programme, while the British Government had a programme, perhaps, but no date. The Team knew very well that their work had some potential leverage in this context. The Daily Telegraph published an article on 4 February 1953, entitled ‘Britons plan economy for South Sudan. Five-Year Study’. This described the work of the Team and ended by listing the proposals that were to be put forth: for dams at Nimule on the Uganda border and at Bedden, 15 miles from Juba; a barrage at Jonglei; and a canal from Jonglei to the Malakal area. Hydroelectric plants at Nimule and Bedden would provide power to run a railway from Mongalla to Nimule through Juba and thus link up with Rhodes’s old vision of the Cape-to-Cairo railway. If this article was meant to put pressure on Nasser and the Egyptian Government, if anything it had the opposite effect. At about the same time, Nasser decided to opt for the High Dam; British visions for water usage in the Southern Sudan became less of a worry to the Egyptian leadership. The Sudan Agreement met strong criticism from the British in the Southern Sudan. Not long after it was announced, Howell received a letter telling him that the Egyptians were now focusing on the Greater Aswan project.215 He knew that if this were implemented, the whole Jonglei issue would have to be addressed anew. The Team continued to work, however, gradually becoming less concerned with the compensation issue with Egypt. Their project was seen more and more as a kind of testimony to the British DCs’ concern for the area where they worked, and as a basis for the Development Division Howell had argued for setting up. On New Year’s Eve, Howell was sitting in his temporary home at Malakal, in one of the least developed areas of the world, with his wife who had just suffered a malaria attack followed by mumps, summarising the situation and prophesying the future. While he was working to finalise his voluminous report, he wrote to Khartoum that anti-northern feelings where strong in the South.216

A Masterly Report without Influence After more than fifty man-years of research, the final report of the Jonglei Investigation Team in four volumes was completed in 1954, under the title The Equatorial Nile Project and its Effects in the Anglo–Egyptian Sudan. Volume 1 offered an extensive survey of the area affected, Volume 2 assessed the effects and remedies of the

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Equatorial Nile Project, Volume 3 consisted of special investigations and experimental data, while the last volume contained maps and charts. The Team had produced one of the most remarkable research efforts ever about the relationship between man and water in Africa and how a particular water project would impact the lot of man, but in the short term its consequences were limited. The report’s main message confirmed what was generally known: most of the central Southern Sudan, from Juba northwards, would be affected, but especially the area of the Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk. This was an environment that was unpredictable and capricious. The huge central plains contained four main types of land: areas of marginally higher, better-drained and sometimes sandier ground (‘high land’ is a relative term, since the areas in question, though usually better drained, are rarely more than a metre or so above the surrounding country); intermediate land or rainflooded grassland; toich; and permanent swamp. The first three types were regarded as essential for maintenance of the rural subsistence economy, while the fourth was of marginal economic value, except for some fishing communities of the central and southern parts of the sudd. The most significant climatic and topographical aspect noted was the extreme contrast between the wet and dry months of the year. The peak in rainfall is from July to September, while from December to April there is drought. Rainfall is extremely variable, not only from year to year but from month to month and place to place. Since such variations influence the availability of rain-fed grazing grasses and the success or failure of crop production, the rise and fall of the river becomes extremely important, since it determines the inundation and extent of the floodplain and the natural production of river-flooded grasses. This, it was empirically proved, was the main feature of the hydrological and hence ecological regime that would be most affected by the operation of the canal project. Since the economies of the Dinka and Nuer, to different degrees, involved transhumant animal husbandry, in which cattle and people move according to the seasons over high land, intermediate land and toich, while the Shilluk were more sedentary (Howell called them a ‘nation of fishermen’), the Team documented in detail how the reversal of the seasons would dramatically impact local life. It would deprive the local pastoral and agro-pastoral economies of important resources for both crop cultivation and cattle-keeping. It would cause the drying up of fishponds, especially in the latter half of the dry season when these resources were most needed. The plan still envisaged using the area as a flood-escape during the rainy season, which would increase the dangers for high floods in the South, and because of the alteration of dwelling patterns resulting from the reversal of seasons, even relatively modest floods could have catastrophic consequences. The Jonglei Investigation Team summarised the local consequences of the project, categorising the areas affected into three different zones.217 The Team ended up estimating the cost of remedial measures at a ‘capital sum of not more than £11.7 million plus 170 million cubic metres of water nor less than £5.5 million plus 400 million cubic metres of water’.218 In comparison with the limited amount of money the British had spent in this region, this was impressive. They had put a monetary value on what some of them saw as a way of life. The funds and the

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water would be more than the most ambitious ‘reformer-district-commissioner’ could ever have dreamed of. And if the Egyptian Government showed an unwillingness to pay for or acknowledge the need for remedies, London would have a scapegoat for the lack of development of the region. Present River high in the untimely season, low in the timely season

Future River low in the untimely season, high in the timely season

Central Zone

Rivers, including both the Bahr al-Jabal and the Bahr Al-Zaraf, high in the untimely season and low in the timely season

Rivers permanently low to prevent spilling

Northern Zone

River high in untimely season, low in timely season

River permanently high with only small variations

Southern Zone

The Jonglei Investigation Team pointed out that it would be idle to deny that the matters it dealt with had the widest political implications. The report introduced a new partner in the actual sharing of the Nile waters. It proposed a revised project based on assessment of local consequences, which, in addition to the cost of the remedies, made the harnessing of the Upper Nile waters more expensive. It focused on the livelihood and needs of pastoral semi-nomads, a population hitherto ignored in discussions and plans for the taming of the Nile. The political implications of the report were clear but the Team emphasised in the published report that these were of ‘no concern’ to them and that it was not written with any political motives in mind. The Team obviously could not openly criticise Egypt, or the ‘flood of Egyptians’ that Howell thought would follow a Jonglei Project. They hoped that their report would furnish arguments in the struggle to protect Southerners from Northern Arab expansionism. Privately they argued that Southerners had to ‘decide their own future’, while on the other hand the Team was concerned that the ‘special powers of the Governor-General for the safe-guards of the South must remain’.219 When the report was finally finished it had become redundant in the Nile game, and was largely ignored. In Foreign Office correspondence it was described as a ‘mere pamphlet of a thing about as long as the Holy Bible’.220 The Aswan High Dam plan had changed the Nile discourse and Nile planning. The British strategists clearly saw that the Jonglei Project at this stage was only a paper scheme, and was not helped when the Egyptian Government announced that it would be completed in three stages, giving 1963, 1967 and 1971 as possible dates of completion.221 Even in Khartoum the report was by and large ignored. From the Southern Sudan, Howell and his Team fought for the report and the ideas in it, and partly succeeded when the plan for a new Southern Development Team was accepted. As Howell gradually realised that he and his Team had been fighting against time, he decided he would not spend the rest of his life ‘banging up against a brick wall’. But with the Southern Development Team in the offing, with Howell

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as its leader and his original Team more or less transformed into the new one, he decided to stay on. Meanwhile the political struggle for the hearts and minds of the Southerners continued. The Juba Political Committee was very clear and typical of the sentiments of many educated Southerners. They stated that the people of the South had come to doubt the ‘good faith of the Northern political leaders’. The people were ‘anxious to co-operate with their brothers in the North in the Self Government of the Sudan’, but the statement also emphasised that the British Civil Service had contributed mainly to the development of the standard of living reached in the North, and that they should remain to guide the Southern people towards the same goal. There should therefore not be a fixed period for self-government. The representatives of the South held a quarter of the seats in the Parliament in Khartoum. Some of them argued that the South was not yet ready for selfdetermination, and demanded federation in place of union with the North. ‘We are a backward people of different race; we need development, economic and cultural,’ the argument ran, ‘and if the North will not provide the money to pay for it, we will not follow the lead of the North.’ Arguments were also heard to the effect that the threat of Jonglei lay in its interference with the ancient grazing rights of the Nilotics, and that this would be a gross and wanton act of tyranny. Whether or not people thought this a catastrophe, most realised that the introduction of a novel regime of life would be a colossal task from an administrative point of view. If the project materialised, this responsibility would fall upon the Government of the Sudan. Southern anger at the Arab presence was also noted in the Foreign Office, which was informed that a crowd of about 100 merchants and other Juba inhabitants had arrived at the District Commissioner’s Office, complaining of an unsatisfactory state of security. They alleged that the Bari tribe were preparing to invade Juba and sack the market,222 apparently in protest against the Agreement. In September, London received encouraging information from Wadi Halfa also. When 150 soldiers of the Egyptian army had arrived there on draft to the Sudan, 220 Sudanese workers, returning from Egypt, started to shout slogans against the Egyptian military dictatorship while both parties were boarding the boat train.223 At the same time the Egyptian propaganda machine was hammering the British in the Southern Sudan. Saleh Salem said that the only way open for the British to escape from a hopeless situation was fomenting trouble and promoting sedition among the tribes of the South. He said that what took place in the South following the Agreement was not Sudanisation but Anglicisation.224 In August 1955 the Cabinet discussed the disturbances in the Southern Sudan. Selwyn Lloyd stated that there had always been some doubt as to whether the country could remain united without external rule; and, if it appeared that a division between North and South was inevitable, London’s policy ‘might have to be reconsidered’. Meanwhile, it should continue to support the Government in Khartoum. The Governor-General should do his utmost to restore order with the troops already available in, or earmarked for, the Sudan. It was important to avoid bringing Egyptian troops to the Sudan. The Governor in Uganda had offered suggestions for dealing

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with the situation. But London thought that the issue, in the first instance at least, was the responsibility of the Governor-General.225 The British policy with regard to the Jonglei Project had had no great success. In spite of Garstin’s visions from the beginning of the century and Cromer’s willingness to have the project implemented, it now went back to the drawing board, to remain there until the 1970s. Gauges had been established and read in their hundreds after the sudd-clearing operations in 1902–4, experiments had been made by dredgers and excavators on the flat plains of the Southern Sudan, years had been spent on research and report-writing and kilos of letters and memoranda produced, but to no avail. The British Jonglei Project was dead. Goals had conflicted, and the Egyptians took the British by surprise. The Aswan Dam meant that Cairo temporarily turned its backs on Jonglei.

L A K E TA NA A F T E R WO R L D WA R I I

Independent Ethiopia under the leadership of Haile Selassie gradually became, like Uganda under Governor Hall, more and more bent on using the Nile for generating hydropower. So committed was the Emperor to this idea at the beginning of the 1950s, that he thought of moving the capital from Addis Ababa to the new town of Bahir Dar, planned as a centre for hydropower development, on the shores of Lake Tana. But most of all he wanted Eritrea to be part of Ethiopia, and he hoped to use the plans for the dam as a leverage to achieve this regional, imperial dream. The Sudan Government, for its part, dreamt of a dam on Lake Tana in order to supply more irrigation water to the ever more prosperous Gezira Scheme – in the years after World War II the scheme was more profitable than ever. Egypt also wanted a dam on Lake Tana, under Cairo’s control, and as part of its basin-wide ambitions: unity with the Sudan under the Egyptian King and restoration of Egyptian influence at Massawa on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea. The Cairo Government did not want the Sudan to be a formal partner in a future agreement on the Lake, because Egypt regarded the Sudan as part of Egypt, and to allow it representation in such a scheme would only encourage those political forces in the Sudan that opted for full independence. The British wanted the dam for many conflicting reasons, but very soon they found themselves in competition not only with the Egyptians but, far worse, with the Americans, over influence in the ‘water tower’ of the Nile basin. In the post-war history of the Tana Dam all these conflicting interests collided, with important consequences for the relationships between Eritrea and Ethiopia, between Britain and the US, and among the traditional protagonists in the Nile valley; Cairo, London and Khartoum. Hurst, Black and Simaika had proposed in Nile Basin, Vol. VII a multi-year storage at Lake Tana as part of their basin-wide scheme. The main idea was that a fixed quota of water should be drawn off from the lake each year. They also discussed a bigger reservoir than had previously been suggested. Lake Tana should have the capacity to counterbalance shortages of water in other tributaries, especially

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on the White Nile, so as to enable control of the entire water flow of the river system. But most players on the scene considered this plan far too ambitious at the time. The size of the dam alone made it unrealistic; the Emperor could not accept it because of religious opposition to the flooding of monasteries on the islands in the lake; London, as well as Cairo and Khartoum, realised that if progress was to be made, new ideas and new negotiations would have to be launched.

A Top-Secret Hydroelectric Plan The same year as the seminal Nile Basin, Vol. VII was published, the British Foreign Secretary took a secret initiative for a new Nile study in Ethiopia. While Hurst and his colleagues dealt only with irrigation needs downstream, London now focused on the Nile as an electric power producer in Ethiopia. By the end of the war, Lake Tana and the Blue Nile tributaries were still untamed. The river and the lake, situated in the northwest part of the highlands of Ethiopia, at a height of nearly 1800 metres above sea level and more than 1200 metres above the level of the Sudan plain, were naturally very attractive to hydropower planners. The principal watershed of the highlands encircled the lake from the northeast to the south at a radius of 200–300km, separated from the lake region by valleys and ravines that drain into the Blue Nile and the Atbara. Hence, all the run-off from this region, including the lake discharge, flows via these tributaries into the Nile basin. The area of the catchment basin was calculated to be about 16,800 square km and the area of the lake itself about 3100 square km. The natural outlet at the southern end of the lake, where the water spills over a rock bar into the channel of the Blue Nile, issues from the lake basin in a southeasterly direction. At 27km from the lake there is a fall of six metres and at Tisisat, 30km from the outlet, is a further fall of 34 metres, the famous Blue Nile Falls. Just below these impressive falls, the river enters an immense ravine, to which it is confined for about 500km in its winding course through Ethiopia. It reaches the Sudan plain at Roseiris, 330km west of the lake outlet, having followed a circuitous course of about 930km. The British Government asked E. R. Wilkinson, Commercial Manager of the Central Electricity Board in Britain, to write the report on the hydroelectric potential of Ethiopia. This was submitted in October 1946. The report stated that the country had enormous hydroelectric potential in the Blue Nile basin. At Tisisat Falls alone, the total power available was equivalent to a continuous supply of 58 MW. An alternative scheme – a tunnel, or tunnels, near Gibgebit, discharging into the River Belas – would enable a much larger difference of level to be used, the total power available being equivalent to a continuous supply of about 240MW. Although the report noted that by present-day standards it was improbable that the whole of this power would ever be developed, it was ‘impossible to set a limit to future requirements’. The conflict between dams for downstream irrigation and Ethiopian power production was pointed out at the very outset. A perennial supply of electricity required that some water be discharged into the river during the high

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season when it was not required for irrigation. The amount of this reduction in available water for irrigation could be ascertained by physical measurement and would increase with the demand for electricity. Wilkinson thought, in line with Hurst’s ideas, that a reduction of the amount available for downstream irrigation could be compensated for by increasing the supply received from the equatorial catchment via the White Nile.226 The report was treated with the utmost secrecy. The Khartoum Government objected strongly to the report being made at all, fearing that it would delay the continuing negotiations. If that happened it would be ‘a tragedy for the Sudan’. In Egypt this report, if known, would raise violent protests, Khartoum argued. And if the report ‘came to the ears of Ethiopia’ it would make bargaining for a concession extremely difficult.227 The Sudan Agent in London sounded the same alarm.228 The Foreign Office subsequently ordered that the report should ‘on no account be mentioned to the Ethiopian authorities’.229 But although they tried to keep the Bevininitiated report secret from the Ethiopian authorities, the Government in Addis Ababa knew very well the general potential of the Nile system for power production and that some of these plans might conflict with downstream needs. They did not need a British consultancy to tell them what everybody could see with their own eyes.

A ‘Reservoir in Being’ At the same time, the British and representatives of the Sudan and Egyptian Governments continued to work on the old reservoir idea. As the hydropower report was written up in secrecy, Allan, the representative of the Sudan Government in London, held a number of meetings in October and November 1946 with Kamel Pasha Nabih, the Under-Secretary of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. During these meetings, the scope and design of the reservoir and control works, the resulting benefit to be expected, the terms proposed to be offered to Ethiopia and the most suitable methods of operating and constructing the works and controlling the reservoir were discussed. The final project design agreed upon was modest compared to that proposed by Hurst and his colleagues. The idea was to construct a dam that on the one hand could be accepted by Ethiopia, but on the other could be enlarged ‘later when circumstances permitted’.230 The two aims were century storage for a guaranteed quota and flood protection, both of which depended fundamentally upon securing agreement with Ethiopia. Without agreement with Ethiopia nothing could be done, as almost fifty years of negotiations had proved beyond doubt, and therefore this plan had been redrawn partly to suit Ethiopian feelings. The plan was to obtain a concession to raise the level by no more than 1.5 metres, but the ‘possibility of greater raisings in the future should not be excluded even if not mentioned at present to Ethiopians’.231 Governor-General Huddleston in Khartoum argued, as an echo of the Foreign Office language of the early 1930s, that the aim was ‘to obtain a reservoir in being’. After some time, the Ethiopians would see that an enlarged reservoir was in their

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interests and it could consequently be enlarged with their consent. The project was estimated to cost £4.5 million, of which, at ‘a rough guess, about £1.5-2 million would be required in dollars’.232 In order to convince Addis Ababa, it was now considered necessary to pay double the amount of what had been envisaged in 1935: £60,000 on signature of the Agreement and a rental of £20,000 a year from the year the works were finished, and build the all-weather road from Addis Ababa to the Lake,233 and a road from the Sudan to the Lake, either from Gallabat or Roseiris. What was important to Khartoum was that the concession should be granted without any terms being set to the use of the waters of the Lake. Then they might accept that some provision should be made for raising rental at some future point. The GovernorGeneral hoped for a conference in Addis Ababa during 1947 and argued that the Sudan should be represented by a delegate with the same powers as the delegates from Egypt.234

Regional Power Politics and the Sudan’s Stubbornness The most difficult points still to be settled were those closely linked with the overall British and Egyptian strategies. General politics intervened in Nile politics and the very intricate hydropolitical process affected the general political process, and none of this can be properly understood if not analysed in detail. The question of the Sudan’s representation at the Addis Ababa Conference on Tana was central to the diplomacy of the dam, and, of course, closely related to the even more important question: the political future of the Sudan, and Britain’s immediate position in Egypt. Egypt held the opinion that the Sidky–Bevin protocol had given it the right to represent the Sudan. The Governor-General and his staff in Khartoum thought that if they were not separately represented, Egypt would sell out the Sudan’s interest in the Nile waters for decades to come, and also fundamentally weaken the position of those political forces in the Sudan that objected to unity with Egypt. London was again caught in a trap: whatever it did, Britain’s interests could be harmed. The British could not support the Sudan Government’s position, since that would alienate Egypt and make treaty negotiations even more difficult. It could not overlook the Sudan’s position, because that would be regarded as betrayal in the Sudan. The reservoir could not be built without money and backing by Egypt. There was no use erecting the dam if the Sudan Government was not a partner to it. In 1946 and 1947, the Foreign Office saw Khartoum’s attitude regarding both representation and water demands as too inflexible and self-centred. They suggested that the discussions in Addis Ababa should be between Ethiopia on the one hand and Egypt and Britain on the other.235 The Governor-General in Khartoum, sensing defeat, argued that Egypt at least should be asked to agree to the Sudan as a full partner in negotiations. If Egypt refused, the Sudan would ‘accept’ negotiation by Britain and Egypt, while the Sudan should be represented only by a technical advisor.236 The Foreign Office had already rejected the idea of asking Egypt and

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courting a rebuff. London’s freedom of action was limited by what was seen as Khartoum’s stubbornness. Foreign Office officials were furious at the tone of the Governor-General’s letter: Now there are many matters where we cannot give orders to the Governor-General of the Sudan, but when it is a question of discussions with Ethiopia the GovernorGeneral has to accept whatever arrangements the co-domini make and it is not for him to tell us that the Sudan will accept this or can only accept that. This is a point where he would have to accept what he is told … and we do not want to hear anything more about what the Sudan can only accept etc.237

So frustrated were Foreign Office staff (they had already had to fight Governor Hall’s attitude on the Ugandan dams; see above) that after having tried to undermine the Condominium with Egypt over the Sudan more or less continuously since 1898, they were now talking about mobilising ‘the co-domini’ against their own man in Khartoum! A week later, harsh instructions were sent to the recalcitrant GovernorGeneral. But then the British representative in Addis Ababa sent the Foreign Office a letter, suggesting that the Sudan should have an official delegation at the negotiations. The reason, he said, was that the Ethiopians now trusted the Sudan more than Egypt; that is that the hope for an agreement would be improved if London sided more strongly with Khartoum. But to follow this line was out of the question in the light of Anglo–Egyptian relations. As always the Ethiopian leadership were sceptical and difficult to deal with. The Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs asked why London now appeared to be in such a hurry – after 40 years of stalled negotiations! London’s answer was conciliatory, but it did not convince Addis Ababa.238 Apparently the Ethiopians thought that Britain was looking for a quick hydropolitical advantage over Egypt and for a stronger Sudan, but the Vice-Minister argued that the moment was not the best for negotiations with Egypt. The reason , he said, was Cairo’s claim to Massawa, which ‘sticks in the Ethiopians’ throats’. Campbell, the British Ambassador in Cairo, also raised doubts about the timing of the negotiations with Egypt.239 These should not, he thought, start immediately or on the eve of the Egyptian appeal to the Security Council about the Sudan. Following the declaration of British intentions to take an equal part with them in international discussions over the management of Egypt’s life-blood, the Egyptians might ‘exploit our action as a further evidence for the UN of our ulterior designs in the Nile valley’.240 The deadlock in the Security Council left the Egyptians even less co-operative over the Sudan. The Foreign Secretary said that the time was exceptionally unpropitious for Tana negotiations,241 but nevertheless these would continue because of their importance in British strategy. Then rumours reached London that Egypt was negotiating secretly with Ethiopia.242 The Egyptian newspaper Al Balagh, on 15 December 1947, carried a report to the effect that the Egyptian–Sudanese Committee proposed to grant the Ethiopian Government the sum of E£60,000 every year in addition to E£20,000 per annum as rent for the reservoir, and that the Ethiopian Government would receive a further £250,000 when the construction of the reservoir was completed.243

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At the end of January, London was informed that Haile Selassie had let the British Legation know that the Egyptian Vice-Minister of Public Works was about to visit Addis, presumably in order to talk about Lake Tana. The Emperor asked for British reaction. Haile Selassie told the British, somewhat acidly, that the Egyptians were making a mistake in thinking that ‘Lake Tana already belonged to them’.244 London replied that Britain was as interested as ever, but that they had not been able to arrange ‘for his government to be approached afresh…owing to our differences with Egypt in regard to the Sudan’. The Sudan had to be represented by its codomini. That was London’s firm line. In the spring of 1948 the British strategists agreed that it was no use waiting for a better time – ‘otherwise we may postpone until the Greek Kalends [indefinitely]!’ 245

Nile Waters against Communism II As we have already seen, on 1 March 1949 Campbell, on London’s instructions, met King Farouk and raised the danger of communism in relation to the Nile waters question. Since the communists, the argument went, tried to prevent improvement of social and economic conditions, the spectacular water scheme – one of the greatest water schemes the world had so far known – would not only promote social and economic improvements for their own sake, but would also forestall communism. The King pointed out that the scheme would take many years to complete, and that the communists would be active in the meantime. Campbell answered that the prospect of an extra one million acres ‘must make people less amenable to the attempts of the communists’. But this common foe did not remove the differences between London and Cairo or the internal contradictions of the British Empire. The question of representation of the Sudan in the Tana negotiations was still unsolved. The Egyptians were cautious of accepting a procedure that implied formal acceptance of the equal status of the co-domini or the equal status of Egypt and the Sudan.246 Another problem was division of the Tana waters between Egypt and the Sudan. Execution of the Egyptian–Sudan Technical Agreement on the division of benefits of the Tana scheme, by altering the amounts of water to which they were entitled, ipso facto required an amendment of the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement. In any case, the technical Agreement did not provide a year-round entitlement for the Sudan. It was regarded as an open question, how and when a revision of the 1929 Agreement ought to be tackled. In Uganda, Governor Hall was not willing to submit to British priorities on the Blue Nile. The Foreign Office and the British in Khartoum were continuously under pressure from the increasingly independent-minded Sudanese Legislative Assembly about the negotiations and the eventual signing of agreements on Lake Tana. London’s political ‘creation’ was no longer willing to dance to the master’s tune. The Executive Council in Khartoum would not accept any formula that excluded attachment of the Sudanese advisor to both delegations.247 Britain in 1949 objected to this proposal,

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arguing that ‘the omission of their explicit agreement is a small price to pay for Egyptian cooperation’.248 The Egyptian official position was that Sudan and Egypt were a unit under the sole sovereignty of the Egyptian crown, while Great Britain had, by right of conquest, no share of sovereignty but a right to administer. For Britain, on the other hand, to accept this formula – which Egypt signed on behalf of the Sudan – would imply giving up its position upstream and giving the Sudan to the King of Egypt. The Foreign Office concluded that the best formula for the Lake Tana Dam would be an agreement signed by Egypt, Ethiopia and the UK.249 The Sudan would have to be represented by advisors at the disposal of the Egyptian and British delegations, in the same way as it had been at regional meetings of the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agricultural Organisation earlier the same year. In Cairo, the Government discussed how to approach Ethiopia and the White Corporation, which had re-entered the scene.250 On 22 July the British Embassy in Addis Ababa sent the Ethiopian Government an aide-memoire seeking agreement to the construction and operation of a reservoir on Lake Tana, at the ‘joint cost and joint benefit of Egypt and the Sudan’.251 Already in June, Bevin had written to Cairo that he was ‘anxious that the negotiations on the Lake Tana Project should begin as soon as possible’.252 But caution and patience were regarded as necessary. At the Foreign Office, previous unfounded optimism was ridiculed.253 But present optimism was, as ever, regarded as realism; the British Embassy was optimistic because the traditional ‘sluggishness’ of the Egyptian Government was less important since the present Egyptian Prime Minister was one of the leading Egyptian experts on the subject.254 The Foreign Secretary was correct when he complained that everything that had happened had been caused by British pressure and action. Now he wished that the Egyptians ‘should appear to be taking the initiative at all stages’ – the British role seemed to be ‘more and more to show them the way’. He repeated that he was very anxious that negotiations should begin without delay. The Egyptian Government should ‘be responsible for approaching the Ethiopian and Belgian Governments’ about Lake Tana, but had not yet done so. It was important to ‘encourage the Egyptian Government to believe they were taking the initiative in the Nile Waters Scheme’.255

The Eritrean Question and the Dam Now the Eritrean question resurfaced as an important part of Nile hydropolitics. Ethiopia wanted British and Egyptian support for its claim to Eritrea as compensation or payment for the dam. The Emperor thought it right that Britain and Egypt support his claim to Eritrea, if he accepted their plans for the dam. Egypt wanted both a dam and its territorial outposts in the area restored. It could not accept Ethiopian demands, especially for Massawa, which the Emperor considered part of Ethiopia. Britain was willing to support Ethiopian claims, at least partly, in order to get a dam built where Sudanese and British interests were served. Eventually the

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Emperor partly succeeded in his tactics, while Cairo, Khartoum and London failed to get their dam. In late July Aklilou sent the British an aide-memoire that emphasised that Ethiopia was most directly concerned in the Lake Tana project, and ‘the State whose prior approval would be requisite’.256 Neither Egypt nor anyone else could proceed with the project before discussions had taken place. Britain now repeated its support for Ethiopian claims to Eritrea, except the predominantly Muslim Western province, partly because of what was called the ‘religious and racial kinship between the inhabitants of Ethiopia and those of the Coptic Highlands of Eritrea’.257 Their official line, however, was not to tell Ethiopia about this yet. That would have meant a tooearly disclosure of a bargaining card. In a new brief before a probable meeting on 10 June with Aklilou, it was stated that the Foreign Secretary should inform him that Britain, after the failure of the UN to reach a decision regarding the Italian colonies, had ‘not yet considered any fresh proposals for the disposal of Eritrea’. At the same time he should stress the importance which Britain attached to the Ethiopian Government’s co-operation in the Nile Waters schemes.258 Less than a fortnight later, London informed Cairo that the Ethiopian Government was prepared to undertake the project whenever London wanted. Britain argued that it, after all, was Ethiopia’s only active friend among the Great Powers. In 1949 the British Foreign Office discussed the most likely scenario. The UN would most probably despatch a Commission of Enquiry consisting of representatives of South Africa, Guatemala, Burma, Norway and Pakistan.259 Italy would voice its strong opposition to Eritrea’s joining Ethiopia, while Ethiopia would try to mobilise its allies in Eritrea. The best course of action would be to impress upon the Ethiopians the necessity for a very speedy agreement on the subject. Even as late as January 1950, optimism regarding agreement of Cairo, Addis Ababa, Khartoum and London was great in British circles. The atmosphere was good; the Egyptians had just agreed formally to the Owen Falls Dam and, in principle, to the other three proposals conceived as part of the big scheme on the Upper White Nile. But once again they underrated the obstacles, not least the fact that Ethiopia had not as yet given formal consent to the construction of the dam.260 The British representative in Addis Ababa, Lascelles, proposed a new line: bluff. At the moment the Ethiopian Government was, he said, almost exclusively preoccupied with Eritrea. The idea, which the Foreign Office later asked both Khartoum and Cairo to consider, was that Lascelles should ask Allan and Seyyid Abdoun to come to Addis Ababa and stay with Lascelles ‘ostensibly on a private visit or “holiday”’. He then should contrive to get his Egyptian colleague ‘thoroughly excited and suspicious about such a visit, while telling him blandly that nothing whatever was going on’. This should take place immediately after the official Ethiopian invitation for negotiations, but before the Egyptian Government had answered officially. The British thinking was thus: the Egyptians were unwilling to have official talks with Sudanese experts, but they were so interested in the dam that they might be willing to receive Sudanese experts unofficially. The bluff should therefore also be an ‘undercover’ measure relieving the Egyptians from the burden

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of making an official answer to the request. The Egyptian leadership could thus ignore internal public opinion. However, Lascelles saw that the Egyptians might ignore this plan, owing to their financial position.261 But why, at this stage, did Britain or the Sudan not instead try to negotiate bilaterally with Ethiopia, without involving Egypt? The reasons were many. Howe in Khartoum argued that Egypt showed a positive attitude towards the Sudan’s participation in this and other Nile water projects. Bilateral negotiations with Ethiopia would be inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1929 Agreement and the Lake Tana Agreement of 1935. It would put an end to Egyptian–Sudanese cooperation in irrigation and, very importantly, the Sudan would find it difficult to obtain Egypt’s concurrence in the revision of existing Nile waters arrangements. And finally, the Sudan Government could not bear the cost of the dam project alone. It needed Egyptian money. On 4 April the Foreign Office concurred with Khartoum’s point of view. But still they asked for Howe’s advice about Lascelles’s bluff.262 One problem was that the British Government had no competent technical representative of its own in the area, and Allan could not be disguised as one.263 At the beginning of February, London found itself in the same corner it had occupied a year earlier. The Foreign Office thought Egypt was to blame. The Egyptian Minister at Addis Ababa had confidently reported that the Ethiopians wished to deal with Egypt alone. The new Egyptian Government also adopted a completely uncompromising line on the Sudanese constitutional issue. And the new Wafdist Minister of Public Works was described by a Foreign Office official as having a character ‘difficult to deal with; there is lunacy in the family; and he holds highly individualistic views on a number of engineering subjects’.264 Britain could not accept Egypt’s claims implying a right to speak alone on behalf of the Sudan. Rather than Britain’s acting alone with Ethiopia, it were forced to criticise Egypt’s plans of going alone with Ethiopia. This made British unilateral action even less feasible an option. London wanted a decision as soon as possible, just as Wingate and Thesiger had during World War I, and had most British Foreign Secretaries thereafter, realising that their position was weakening day by day. At the same time they acknowledged that the new Wafd Government could not be expected to make any substantial concessions. Bevin therefore sent a new telegram to Cairo, suggesting that London was willing to accept that the Egyptian Government should send a ‘purely Egyptian delegation to Addis Ababa to present the joint memorandum to the Ethiopian Government’. Lascelles was instructed to tell the Ethiopian Government why London was doing it this way, so as to convince the Emperor that it signalled no change in British attitudes, only in tactics regarding the Egyptians.265 This telegram was sent with a covering letter to Khartoum, which admitted that the approach was ‘not wholly satisfactory’ from its point of view. But Bevin saw no alternative.266 A letter of ‘particular secrecy’ was sent on 15 February by Lascelles to the Foreign Office, reporting that Aklilou had informed him that he and the Emperor had no wish to ‘to keep either party out at any stage’.267 London devised an elaborate plan to show the Egyptians that they could not secure their water without co-operating with Britain. Lascelles informed London

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that he was considering advising the Ethiopian Government to receive the Egyptian delegate who was to present the memorandum on Lake Tana ‘politely but quite negatively’; the Ethiopians should say that they wished to study the ‘memorandum at leisure with their own experts’.268 Then London could square the circle. The Egyptians had been allowed to take the initiative, but they would themselves realise that they could not proceed without support from Britain. Lascelles thought there was no appreciable risk of the Ethiopian Government’s revealing to the Egyptians that London had prompted it on these lines – they were ‘much too sore’ about Egyptian misrepresentations. Lascelles was ‘very anxious to cash in on the favourable mood’ London’s revelations had created.269 Khartoum protested to the Foreign Office and asked to be represented in discussions in Addis Ababa. The British Embassy in Cairo thought the GovernorGeneral’s proposal unconstitutional; representation had to be by the co-domini jointly. Khartoum had no ‘technical expert’ and it had already been agreed it would be ‘unsuitable to disguise Mr. Allan as one’.270 Campbell agreed to Egypt’s taking the initiative, and it should alone present its proposal for stage one. The following day, however, Campbell reported that the Egyptian Government was thinking in terms of Egypt’s acting alone at the second stage of negotiations, too.271 This attitude led Campbell to advise against the decided policy. He proposed that London should protest openly against this direction in Egyptian tactics. Bevin agreed and instructed Campbell to inform the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs that London could no longer agree, ‘in these circumstances’, to the Egyptian Government’s sending a delegation to Addis Ababa to present a memorandum on the Sudan Government’s behalf.272 The Ambassador in Addis was instructed to ask Aklilou to send out an invitation for negotiations, inviting both Egypt and Britain, while Khartoum immediately reminded London that it should not overlook the Sudan’s representation on the technical level.273 In April 1950, the Emperor met the British representatives in Addis Ababa, to discuss British overall policies in the area: the future of Eritrea; British judges in Eritrea; and the Lake Tana project. Haile Selassie was not satisfied with what he was told. He asked for firmer British support, since not even a wholly honest Commission under the UN would be ‘likely to recommend inclusion of the 500,000 Moslems of Western province within Ethiopia’s frontier’. The British, for their part, pressed the Lake Tana issue, and emphasised that progress had been held up by the Egyptian Government’s attitude. The Emperor tried to calm the British. He restated that he would never open negotiations on this question without British participation.274 British Eritrean–Ethiopian policy differed from British policy elsewhere at the same time. In this case, London was willing to disregard principles. It needed the Emperor’s support if the dam was to be built, and needed the Emperor’s support to block a dam built by the Egyptians alone. If that happened, the whole point of the project for the Sudan and for British regional strategy would be undermined. On 11 April Lascelles again discussed Egyptian–Ethiopian relations in a secret letter to his British co-strategists. He referred to what he had been told by the

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Egyptian Ambassador in Addis Ababa. The rumours were that Britain planned to partition the Sudan, retaining the non-Muslim South as a strategic base, handing over the Muslim North to Egypt and creating a Beja state which would comprise the current Sudanese seaboard plus the Western Province of Eritrea. This state would remain under British control. Lascelles suggested that the rumour originated with the Pakistani Delegate on the UN Eritrean Commission. There were alarming signs of better relations between Cairo and Addis Ababa. The Egyptian Legation had been raised to embassy status. But according to Lascelles, the Ethiopians were merely making one last bid for Egyptian support over Eritrea the following autumn.275 On 6 May, Lascelles sent another letter of ‘particular secrecy’ to Bevin. He wrote that the Emperor was incensed with the Egyptians because of their long trail of broken promises with regard to Eritrea, culminating in the resurrection of claims to Massawa, and that there was a serious danger of the Emperor’s refusing to receive representations from them about the Lake Tana project, even if they should now agree to full British participation in the talks. Lascelles protested that this would, in effect, be punishing the Sudan for the sins of Egypt. Lascelles reported that the Ethiopians had such a strong will to link the Eritrean question with Lake Tana that they most probably would make repeated attempts to conclude ‘actual bargains behind our back’.276 For his part, the Emperor wanted London to channel Ethiopian grievances against Egypt; that is to persuade Egypt to change its policy.277 In June 1950, Lascelles again repeated that the Ethiopians would not take a ‘firm and satisfactory line with the Egyptians or anybody else until the Eritrean question has been settled’.278 Aklilou told the British representative that he had taken a ‘a strong line’ with the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs over Eritrea. Cairo had gone back on the promise to support Ethiopia, and the Emperor and his government were offended. They had made it clear to Cairo that this would be regarded as ‘an unfriendly act’, and would mean that the Lake Tana discussions would be ‘postponed indefinitely – “filed away” was the expression he used’. Aklilou said that he ‘used much the same language to King Farouk’. According to Aklilou, this had frightened the Egyptians and he had obtained a firm promise that Egypt would support him over Eritrea. The Egyptian Minister, Aklilou reported, had gone so far as to say that Egypt would endeavour to persuade Pakistan to do the same.279 Egypt’s attitude was made public in Egyptian newspapers at the end of June. Egypt should support Ethiopia’s claims in the UN in reciprocity for a positive attitude on Lake Tana.280 In the text to the Ethiopian Government, the Egyptian Government also argued that Egypt enjoyed sovereignty over the Sudan, as this was the way they interpreted the Bevin–Sidky Protocol. The British answer was to block progress on the Egyptian plan to build the Merowe Dam, unless Egypt was willing to yield on the Lake Tana issue. By the end of 1950 it was clear that the previous optimism in British circles once again had been unfounded. One change had taken place – but for the worse. What worried the Foreign Office and Lascelles was their fear of the ‘Ethiopians and Egyptians getting together behind our backs’.281

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An Anglo–American ‘Ganging-Up’ Britain tried in 1951, although hesitantly, to enlist American support to put pressure on Ethiopia, hoping that another Western power would help them, now that the Italian option was dead and buried. On the other hand, of course, they feared that American power and prestige and open anti-colonialism would do them more harm than good in the long run. Bevin had sounded the alarm bell years earlier. But as long as London thought or argued that it had legal rights to control the waterworks, no matter who built them, even if it turned out to be Americans, it felt rather confident. They also played with the ‘American fire’ in Egypt, hoping to use the fear of American presence on the headwaters of the Blue Nile, possibly in co-operation with Sudanese interests, to put pressure on Egypt to participate in the project, in line with the wishes of the Government in Khartoum. London decided to leak ‘secrets’ to the Egyptians about the Americans, as the British in the Sudan had also suggested, as a means to pressure Egypt to act.282 At the end of January, a British representative in Cairo mentioned to the Egyptian Government that as part of the Point Four programme, the Americans were to make a survey in the Gondar area, and that the Ethiopian price for the dam was in consequence ‘quite likely to go up’. The Egyptians’ response was reported to be as hoped: they wanted to press on for negotiations. What the Ethiopians feared more than a ‘ganging-up’ of Egypt and Britain was an Anglo–American ‘ganging-up’, since the Ethiopians did not regard Britain and the Americans as natural partners in the matter of Lake Tana.283 What all British strategists seemed to agree on, as even a quick glance at the enormous amount of documents on this issue in the Foreign Office will show, from almost every year of the whole first part of the twentieth century, was testimony to this: to wait until the Ethiopians felt themselves prepared might mean postponing the opening of these negotiations indefinitely.284 At the same time they argued that an Ethiopian invitation provided the ‘only way out of ’ the impasse.285 London wanted both Ethiopia and Egypt to act, but not behind Britain’s back. The challenge was to get Ethiopia to invite both Britain and Egypt. The Foreign Office suggested that their proposal for a new private Corporation scheme was compatible with the 1929 Agreement. The only flaw in this plan, however, was a serious one: the Egyptians might become so enraged at the proposal that they would put an end to all co-operation over irrigation matters, and perhaps in other fields also.286 Stevenson in Cairo thought that a purely Sudanese Corporation would contravene, either in spirit or in the letter, the Nile Waters Agreement, but that it was an ‘excellent stick with which to prod’ the Egyptians and that it might well be used if and when they knew the Ethiopians would agree to issue invitations to Egypt and Great Britain to go to Addis Ababa.287 The Governor-General and his staff in Khartoum were critical of the Corporation scheme. In the Foreign Office these objections were discounted as simple rationalisations of Khartoum’s perennial worry: they did not at this stage want to do anything that would enrage the Egyptians and make collaboration with them over the Nile waters more difficult. London

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should not be more pro-Sudanese than the Sudan Government. The Sudan Government might be well advised not to abandon altogether the idea of a Corporation, but to continue to examine it, bearing in mind the possibility that relations with Egypt might deteriorate still further, and that the Sudan Government might in any case run into difficulties with the Egyptians over any alternative scheme.288 The Foreign Office knew very well that the Corporation proposal contravened Nile agreements, but they were ‘not so sure that to do so would not be to the Sudan’s interest’.289 General political relations between Egypt and Britain went from bad to worse. London now said it wanted Ethiopia to go ahead with the Lake Tana Dam under President Truman’s Point Four. This implied a ‘veiled threat’ – if the Egyptians, together with the British, did not produce concrete proposals soon, the Ethiopians might go ahead on hydroelectric or other schemes in connection with Point Four, which had nothing to do with irrigation and would thus interfere with what the Egyptians considered their historic rights.290 The thought was that this threat would possibly ‘provoke the Egyptians into accepting [an] invitation’ from the Emperor.291 The same day London sent the text of the suggested Ethiopian note, starting with ‘The Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents its compliments to the Royal Egyptian Embassy…’, and concluded that ‘a similar invitation was being issued to his Majesty’s Government in the UK, as co-dominus of the Sudan’.292 Lascelles informed London on 18 June that he would approach the Ethiopian Government according to the laid-down procedures. No wonder the whole correspondence quoted above was marked as being of ‘particular secrecy’. Khartoum gave in to pressure. The Sudan Government upheld, however, critical remarks about the draft agreement (‘Sudan administration’ was still the term used and the equal status of the Sudan was not formally acknowledged, although the Sudan was to pay half the cost), but accepted that the most important thing now was to reach an agreement.293 But while Khartoum wanted the dam, the Foreign Office wanted both the dam and a potential political stick in order to achieve broader aims, as they noted in a telegram also marked as being of particular secrecy.294 On 20 July the British and Egypt reached agreement on composition and terms of reference of a joint Egypto–Sudanese delegation, under an Egyptian chairman, to discuss the technical aspects of the project with the Ethiopians. At the same time London had tried to hasten the conclusion of this agreement and the starting of discussions with Ethiopia by prompting the Ethiopians to issue an invitation to both governments for a conference on the subject in Addis Ababa. Eventually Ethiopia sent out invitations for the conference on 13 October, but the British thought the two notes very unsatisfactory. The Ethiopian Government had ignored the text written in London. The notes were drawn up by Spencer, an American official in the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry. The Ethiopians wanted a delay of six weeks to study the potentials of Lake Tana for Ethiopia. They declared themselves totally unprepared for technical discussions. They wanted to assess irrigation and hydropower potential and to drive as hard a financial bargain as possible. One reason the Ethiopian Government acted was the impact of a new protagonist

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on the scene: they had been informed that the Egyptian Government had approached the World Bank in May 1950, with a detailed proposal for the Bank to carry out the Lake Tana scheme as part of its general plan for Ethiopia.295 The Foreign Office sent a letter of particular secrecy to Addis Ababa some days later, mentioning that a representative of the Bank had called at the Foreign Office and said that the Egyptians had asked inter alia for a line for Nile Waters development, including the Lake Tana project. London believed that this proposal was unlikely to produce any action in the near future. Lascelles should therefore tell the Ethiopian Government how long it would take before action would be taken, without disclosing that the Bank had called on the Foreign Office.296 Later, the Foreign Office said that the Bank had contemplated providing some financial assistance for the Lake Tana scheme, though this was not yet revealed to the Egyptians.297 The idea of a dam at Roseiris was made public in a speech by Sayed Abdurahman Abdun in the Sudanese Legislative Assembly on 17 May 1951, and immediately became a factor in the hydropolitical play of the Nile basin. This plan was regarded as a diplomatic card, described as a ‘threat’ at the back of the Egyptians’ minds if and when they received the Ethiopian invitation. It might even take the place of the Sudan Corporation scheme as a ‘stick for prodding’ them into accepting the invitation.298 The Sudanese plan for a Roseiris dam was regarded in London as a diplomatic rather than an engineering proposition. Khartoum even felt obliged to point out that the Roseiris scheme was, from their point of view, ‘by no means a bluff ’. The storage idea had been explored briefly in 1938, when Khartoum was seeking minor improvements to the country’s water supplies, while the Tana project was being reconsidered in the light of the Italian invasion. At that time they had hesitated in pursuing the dam owing to silting problems, but new technologies had made silting no longer such a problem. Khartoum also thought it most likely that Ethiopia would demand hydroelectric power in relation to the Tana scheme. This would call for a steady flow of water, conflicting with irrigation storage and seasonal release. Roseiris would then function as a complement to an eventual Tana Dam. The Kenana plain between the White and the Blue Niles was especially promising, where something over a million and a half acres could be watered by the Blue Nile. Khartoum thought that real progress would come from ‘working with, rather than against the power proposals’. The British in the Sudan did not ‘want more delay – we want more water’, while the Egyptian Government regarded the hydropower plans as a ‘price booster which could be brushed aside’.299 The Governor-General of the Sudan could not match the resources of the Egyptians. Khartoum feared that Egypt would try to bring the delegation to a conference in Addis Ababa with such a staff ‘that the Sudan delegation would be lost in the crush’. While they knew that Egypt was preparing to bring in engineers and other experts, Khartoum complained that they were ‘thin on the ground’, and could not compete in ‘providing extras for crowd scenes’. Things were so bad that they had to rely on the Embassy in Addis Ababa for clerical help and so forth.300 On 11 September, Lascelles wrote to the Foreign Office saying that, at his own party, he had managed to corner Aklilou firmly, and ‘kept him waiting for his dinner until

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he had told me what the delay in reaching a decision was due to’. His explanation was ‘not very satisfactory’, according to Lascelles, and was that the Egyptians had told Addis Ababa that the conference was to be a bipartite Egyptian–Ethiopian one.301 The question of British participation was crucial, but increasingly doubtful. In late September, the Foreign Office emphasised that Britain should be invited and that, owing to the present political climate between Cairo and London, there was some doubt whether such a conference would now serve any useful purpose at all.302 In the middle of October London concluded that clearly nothing could be done at the moment.303 A year later nothing had happened, and in December 1952 the Embassy in Cairo reported to the Foreign Office on discussions on Lake Tana. It concluded that it was no longer Britain’s duty to hasten negotiations, since the Egyptians could now turn their proposal down, on the grounds that London no longer had any ‘locus standi’ in Sudanese affairs and that they would refuse to sit around the same table as British members of the ‘Sudan Administration’. London now acknowledged that it might also be difficult to revive the project at a later date. The Gash water issue complicated matters even further. In 1952 there existed an ad hoc agreement that should continue, according to the Foreign Office. Should a formal agreement be negotiated, it would of course require the approval of both co-domini. The only thing that worried London was that the Ethiopians, knowing the history of the issue, would ask that payments by the Sudan to Eritrea should be resumed. The Agreement between the UK and Italy in 1924 was contained in an Exchange of Notes published in Treaty Series No. 33 in 1925 and was referred to in the Italian Decree No. 1192 of 18 April 1927. It was maintained until the outbreak of war with Italy. The divisions of water continued unchanged, but the Sudan Government discontinued the payment of 20 per cent of the profits in excess of £50,000 per annum. There was a long argument about this after the War but it was finally agreed that no payment should be made by the Government of the Sudan to the British Administration in Eritrea. In April 1951 it was decided to treat the subject as an administrative matter and the waters of the Gash were regulated in accordance with an exchange of letters between the Director of Irrigation to the Sudan Government (R.J. Smith) and the Controller of Agriculture in the British administration (W.C. Young). This ad hoc arrangement was made on the date of federation of Eritrea with Ethiopia. Downstream relations and world politics affected the fate of the Tana Dam again. Anglo–Egyptian relations were at a new low point. In Egypt, demonstrations against British imperialism could be seen almost daily. What made things worse, in a hydropolitical perspective, was that the Egyptian nationalists, as well as the Egyptian Government, now showed less interest in the Lake Tana scheme. They might, the British strategists thought at the time, decide to go ahead with the new Wadi Rayan scheme (an enlarged project compared to the Wadi Rayan scheme proposed in 1890; see chapter 1) before they embarked on projects in the Sudan or elsewhere.304 In the Sudan, the politicians and the religious sects quarrelled about the country’s future; should it be an independent state or unite with Egypt? The

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Governor-General and his staff regarded more secure water for the irrigation sector as an investment in the Sudan’s independent future under British influence, and for both Khartoum and London it was important how the Sudan was represented in all questions dealing with the Nile. A future Sudan with no independent say in Nile matters would be under the thumb of Egypt, whether formally independent or not. Owing to the Agreement on the Sudan with Egypt, the British role and authority were seriously weakened there among the pro-independence forces, and elements in the Sudan Civil Service were very critical of the policy of the Foreign Office.

American–British Rivalry In this situation, the US became an important player also on the upstream scene, this time invited to Addis Ababa by the independent Ethiopian Government. The British were alarmed by the way this happened, and by the relatively strong interest shown by the Americans in Ethiopia. London learned that Washington planned to open negotiations with the Ethiopian Government on 15 March 1952 regarding a military agreement, and that reference would be made to US military installations in Eritrea. Rent would be offered to the Ethiopian Government for the Eritrean installations against which the cost of equipment for two Ethiopian tank battalions would be charged, when the equipment was supplied.305 The US Government now became a major participant also in Ethiopian–Eritrean relations, a factor British strategists could not disregard. The World Bank also became involved, but the Bank had legal problems with the Tana Dam, since it was an upstream dam on an international waterway. When they heard that the Americans were also considering renewing their interest in the waters of the Blue Nile, the British Embassy in Addis Ababa did not know what to do. One of the initiatives was to propose that Allan, the Irrigation Consultant to the Sudan Government, should come unofficially to Ethiopia to talk to the American experts, meeting ‘privately at the Ambassador’s home’. (Allan could stay with the Ambassador ‘on holiday’, or he could meet the Americans ‘at the lake’.306) Khartoum insisted that it was ‘most important’ for the American experts to meet the Sudan Government experts both before they went to Addis Ababa and afterwards, but objected to a private visit in Addis Ababa by a Sudanese expert and even more to a visit at the lake, because it ‘would surely raise Ethiopian suspicion as well as Egyptian’.307 The Foreign Office then asked for such a meeting in London between Allen and the American experts, Clark and Greenhalgh, but the American Embassy answered that their staff were not travelling via London owing to shortage of time.308 The British Ambassador in Ethiopia had been given another version by the American Embassy there; they did not want to pass through London because they feared that this might make ‘their visit more important than it is’.309 Khartoum sent a new telegram and begged the Foreign Office to arrange for a meeting between Allan and the Americans.310

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Only slowly did the new political realities affect British thinking. The days of their representative in Cairo being the ‘King of Nile Waters’ were of course long since gone but, until recently, they had had the upper hand when it came to influence and potential power upstream. In 1952 Britain asked for a meeting between some American experts and their man on the Nile, but the Americans declined. In spite of these setbacks the British continued to act as if they were the real masters of the Nile scheme. On International Labour Day in 1952, Busk sat down to write another report on the Americans’ visit to Ethiopia. Their terms of reference were rather vague; they were to see whether it would be worthwhile sending out a larger, higherpowered Commission, to investigate irrigation prospects in Ethiopia with a view to providing ‘Point Four aid’. Busk described the Americans as ‘rather elusive’. The American representative, Clark, said that their main interest was irrigation, which at first was a relief to the British. The Americans also said that the Ethiopian Minister of Commerce had spoken to them of the Blue Nile valley ‘as a sort of potential TVA with immense hydro-electric schemes’. The Americans were of the opinion that the country did not need this power at present, since there was no industry. After more pressure, the Americans finally met the British in London. One of them said that he had put forth ‘one proposal’ that might come as a surprise to the British: he suggested that ‘an investigation should be made of the possibility of diverting water from the Nile watershed to the eastern part of the country’. The British were shocked or, in the words of the Foreign Office official, ‘We sat up at this remark’. But the Americans made it clear that nothing was likely to come of the proposal. The only part that Clark thought was suitable for irrigation was the area near the mouth of the Dedessa. There were also some possibilities for irrigation on the shores of Lake Tana itself, but the people there were herdsmen. Clark suggested that the Ethiopians should concentrate on the Awash, and forget their ‘far more ambitious but totally impracticable day dreams about the development of the West’, that is the Blue Nile valley. The Americans said that they thought the Blue Nile itself to be useless, partly because Ethiopia at the time did not have any need for the power, and partly because the river itself runs in a precipitous gorge. On the other hand, there were many tributaries of the Blue Nile between Debra Markos and Lake Tana that were regarded as potentially very valuable, but even these required roads if they were to be made profitable. Clark said that he knew his report would be unpopular with the Ethiopians, who ‘have such large and visionary ideas’.311 Clark also stated that he saw no conflict of interest between Ethiopia and Egypt– Sudan regarding hydropower developments, since ‘no hydro-electric plant likely to be built would require a flow greater than that obtaining at low water’.312 The British representative in Addis Ababa told the same story. Based on a conversation he had had with the American Ambassador in Addis Ababa about the report of the Americans, he concluded that the Clark–Greenhalgh report had indicated that Lake Tana ‘itself was not important to Egypt and the Sudan’; it was the waters that entered the Blue Nile below Lake Tana that were invaluable. There would therefore

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be no disadvantage to Egypt and the Sudan, he argued, if some of the Lake Tana waters were used to irrigate Ethiopian lands.313 The Ambassador also asked the Foreign Office to take up with the US State Department that the Americans should be open to the British about their plans. He wrote to London stating that the American Ambassador was ‘inclined to be reticent on the subject’.314 At the same time Busk wrote that the British and Americans in Ethiopia would have to play the role of primary school teachers to a backward and difficult race.315 He suggested the need for co-ordination of aid, and an Ethiopian Planning Board similar to the Development Board of Iraq. Later in the year the anti-British activity of Bennet, Governor of the State Bank, frustrated the British. He had told the Ethiopian Government to divest itself of the majority of its sterling investments because sterling would be further devalued. At the Foreign Office they discussed the influx of American technicians, experts and specialists under Point Four aid and also in connection with the various loans made by the International Bank. In addition the Ethiopian Government was employing an American legal and political advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, John Spencer, who was described as being the Minister’s right-hand man. It was no wonder, therefore, that the Foreign Office still worked hard for a conference on Lake Tana. They thought spring 1953 would be most suitable for calling it.316 They thought that Egypt, if interested at all, would wait for the result of the American Point Four assessments in Ethiopia. On 17 October Creswell reported that the Egyptians were now interested in going along with further Nile works, ‘with the exception of the Lake Tsana scheme’.317 In the Foreign Office they filed an article from the Glasgow Herald of 27 October 1954, stating that ‘the spread of what is called for want of a better term, “Americanism”, is nowhere more evident to-day than in Ethiopia’. The aid was modest but in the context of the day it had a revolutionary effect, perhaps not so much on Ethiopian society as on the British position in the area. In January 1953, eight months after the first US Point Four personnel arrived in Addis Ababa, the American Technical Co-operation Service was involved in seven projects: development of an Agricultural College, a survey of the nation’s water resources and planning for their development, improvement of technical and science education at the elementary and secondary levels, development and operation of agricultural secondary schools, expansion of handicraft training, locust control through air spraying and extension of the technical cooperation programme to the territory of Eritrea. In March 1953, T.A. Clark returned together with four other engineers, to study the Awash River and to study the plans for a multipurpose dam at Coca, and irrigation surveys in the Awash valley, and the potential for energy production for an area extending from Dire Dawa to Addis Ababa.318 The British Ambassador wrote that they had been ‘much alarmed by the general policy of Point Four’, which was under the direction of an ‘over-enthusiastic and highly ambitious young man’, Marcus Gordon. He seems to be filled, the Ambassador wrote, with the ‘most visionary ideas and he is bringing in enormous crowds of Americans to do work which could easily be accomplished by half their number’.

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What most of all worried the Ambassador was that he had become increasingly alarmed by the American sentiments towards the British.319 In May the Foreign Office suggested that, as far as Point Four was concerned, the Lake Tana scheme had ‘become somewhat academic’.320 The British were delighted that ‘their’ American, Mr Clark, was back in Addis Ababa. Busk asked the Foreign Office to put him in touch with ‘the Sudan people in London’.321 In July the Ambassador made another observation: since the American projects might be worthwhile (in July four new agreements were signed), we must admit to some concern at Mr. Gordon’s painful anxiety to use all the money he has in the kitty’.322 In January 1954, about 50 years after Cromer urged that any plans on the Nile should be under British control, the Treasury in London pressed for an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) survey of the whole Nile basin, because that would certainly ‘seem to be in the interest of the Sudan’. And moreover, if the dam was eventually built with IBRD assistance, there should be ‘opportunities for getting some of the work for British concerns’.323 London also pressed for British surveys, although to a limited scale, in Ethiopia. The Ambassador in Addis Ababa proposed that London should concentrate on three schemes: Addis Ababa and surroundings, the Awash River including the Coca Dam site, and the Blue Nile basin from the lake to the frontier. The move was to counteract the Americans and not the Egyptians any more; the Ambassador wrote: ‘American danger certainly still exists but we shall do everything possible’.324 The firm involved was Hunting Aerosurveys Ltd. So concerned was the Foreign Office that it arranged for the Emperor to meet the General Manager of Hunting when the Emperor visited London in October 1954.325 The British Embassy in Addis wrote that the time and expense incurred by Hunting in trying to establish a foothold in Ethiopia ‘justifies every encouragement being given to them on our part’.326

Ethiopian Developments At this time, frenetic activities took place in the Lake Tana area. Ethiopia and its Emperor planned to move the capital from the highlands to the lake shore! The history of Ethiopian urbanisation is therefore linked to the Nile and to Nile diplomacy in these years. The Ethiopian Government thought that a town at Lake Tana could replace Addis Ababa as the capital of the country, provided the area became a centre for hydropower development and industry. Busk reported that the Americans were also considering the Emperor’s idea that a new and thriving city should be built at the exit to the Lake, where factories ‘would spring up like mushrooms’. Rich Ethiopians had been feverishly buying land in the area in the hope of making a lot of money, among them the Emperor’s own family.327 One of the main infrastructural features would be a good road to Gondar and the Lake. The Americans, of course, also knew very well that Ethiopia wanted Eritrea to become part of Ethiopia

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and orient its economy and communications towards Massawa, thus avoiding the bottleneck of Djibouti and the railway. It was a British town-planning firm, Messrs Harris & Gard of Birmingham,328 that developed plans for the new capital on the Emperor’s behalf. Mr Harris’s party numbered about 16 people, who were to start work in the autumn of 1952. The Foreign Office was critical of the idea of a new capital on the Lake shore, because it thought that town planning would mean that irrigation downstream would be catered for only as far as this could be fitted in with hydropower development, industrialisation and urbanisation processes in Ethiopia. It was thought that this would tend ‘to stiffen’ the Ethiopian attitude in ensuing discussions on Lake Tana as a reservoir for irrigation water.329 Some saw the whole issue as nothing but a tactical move in order to put Ethiopia in a better bargaining position over the construction of the reservoir.330 Harris called at the Foreign Office in January 1953, soon after his firm had asked the Ethiopian Government for information on the proposed maximum and minimum levels of Lake Tana. Any variation in lake levels would automatically result in exposing or submerging land, creating or eliminating ponds and swamps, which in turn would affect the incidence of tropical disease (issues of importance in establishing a new capital). The site of the proposed outfall channel would effect the Debra Mariam, Ifwadda and Shimabbo Islands and Chara Chara rapids. The bridge across the river would affect the main road layout, and the rate of the proposed discharge from the Lake would also affect the availability of electric power, etc. The Foreign Office minuted that it was most unlikely that any definite information on these points would be ‘forthcoming for many years’; the last three words were crossed out, substituting ‘in the foreseeable future’.331 But assessment studies continued. Busk proposed once again that the British should put ‘to the Emperor a general child’s guide to knowledge on the subject’, once again underrating him, as they had in the early 1920s. The aim now was to propose to him a ‘firm of British consultants’ to be ‘engaged to work on the problem in its entirety’. Busk urged, as if the project had no past in the country’s political history, ‘If we are to get a British firm in, we should start now’.332 On 10 April Harris informed the Foreign Office that the Minister of Public Works had given a definite green light to drawing up a report on water levels in Lake Tana and to preparing a report on the proposed city. He planned to take both reports to Addis Ababa at the beginning of October.333 Several times during 1953, Harris and the Foreign Office approached the American Embassy to ask the State Department about aerial photographs Harris needed to make his survey. The town at Bahir Dar could be constructed without consulting foreign powers. The Emperor authorised a survey of 7000 square km of country around Lake Tana. The main purpose was to discover mineral resources, access routes, etc. What the Emperor was hoping to find was lignite. He also proposed another scheme: a railway from Agordat to Gondar.334 Harris produced two reports (of which he left copies in the Foreign Office), one on Lake Tana and one on the town project. Harris was in close contact with the Ambassador in Addis Ababa, kept him ‘constantly

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informed’ and gave him records of two audiences he had had with the Emperor, which made ‘extremely interesting reading’. It was clear, the Ambassador wrote, that ‘in view of the confidence that Mr Harris has built up with the Emperor and Ethiopian officials, he represents a short cut to the problem of British involvement in Lake Tsana. They should probably need all the shots in our locker to fend off the French, German, Dutch and (I am convinced in big projects of this kind) American competition.’ 335 Eden was also given records of Harris’s conversation with Haile Selassie. On the Nile question, Harris argued that the interests of the Sudan and Egypt would best be served by allowing discharge of the waters from Lake Tana only during the ‘timely season’ (January–June). This would not, however, fit in with Ethiopian plans for development of the area, since it would affect the hydroelectric scheme, the health of inhabitants through the formation of malarial swamps, the water and drainage schemes, and local irrigation requirements. Harris therefore proposed that the average discharge during the timely period should be 20 per cent greater than during the ‘untimely period’ (July–December). In addition, 0.5 billion cubic feet would be spread over the months November to June. Egypt and the Sudan would thus, in the timely period, receive a total of 1.636 (1.136 more than they did at that time). In 1954 Busk was still waiting for the Nile guide for the Emperor,336 while the Foreign Office still waited for comments from Khartoum.337 On 18 January Khartoum commented on the guide, emphasising more strongly than London had done that any presentation of this matter should contain a scheme of development no less beneficial to Ethiopia than to Egypt and the Sudan. The scheme should give as much right to hydroelectric development for Ethiopia as to storage of irrigation water for Egypt and the Sudan. Even if the Emperor himself, Khartoum argued, was simple-minded enough to consider giving away irrigation water without demanding hydroelectric power in exchange, his American advisor would no doubt soon make clear to him the real strength of his bargaining position. It therefore seemed better, in the long run, to direct the Emperor’s thoughts towards a reasonable agreement whereby he got hydroelectric power and the Sudan got irrigation water. In the same letter, Morrice proposed to drive a tunnel under the watershed to connect the southwestern corner of Lake Tana with the deep gorge that carries the headwaters of the Balas river. The very large fall from the surface of the lake to the bed of the river would make it possible to generate large quantities of power with relatively small amounts of water. For the dam he endorsed the project suggested by White in 1935: local repercussions would require the rebuilding on other sites of a small number of churches around the lake, and to compensate for the exposure to occasional flooding of certain limited areas of agriculture.338 Meanwhile London restated that the Anglo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1902 was still in force, in spite of the fact that Britain had accepted the Italian invasion. Harris commented that he thought the 1902 Treaty should be stressed less than in the draft. He said that while from an Egyptian–Sudanese point of view it was highly desirable to use the lake as an over-year storage, the amount of such storage should nevertheless ‘be limited to that necessary to ensure a usual annual discharge’.

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The saucer-like shape of the Tana Basin precluded, in his opinion, the use of this lake as a bulk reserve storage reservoir. He also objected to Morrice’s Balas scheme and to White’s and Morrice’s proposal for heightening the lake level, and he had already suggested in his report that the storage capacity of the dam should not exceed 11.80 billion cubic feet. The increased rate of control would create serious health and amenity problems for the Ethiopians.339 Harris’s arguments carried some weight since he had befriended the Emperor, and had visited him that summer on the French Riviera. In June the British thought the balance had shifted; the Emperor himself would be the organiser of future water works. He would take the initiative, particularly after he had visited various dams and hydrological projects in the US. The British thought that Ethiopia would act without Egyptian involvement, perhaps with an IBRD loan.340 Busk wrote to the Foreign Office on 2 July to say that the Egyptian Ambassador had told him that the Emperor was returning with immense sums of money in his luggage. He mentioned the sum of $500 million, in return for which the Americans were apparently going to take over the Eritrean ports as naval bases and build military aerodromes all over Ethiopia! 341 That, the Egyptian said, would easily enable the Ethiopians to build the waterworks, and in this situation it was important that Egypt and the Sudan should act in concert to defend their interests. During the summer it became even clearer: Ethiopia would go it alone. There was no longer any question of an Egyptian–Sudanese project under a concession from the Ethiopian Government. The Ethiopians would certainly not be content with nominal control. Representatives of Egypt and the Sudan would not be in charge, if allowed to take part at all. Neither would it be a question of paying annual rent or lump sums. London would also drop the road plans from Roseiris to the Lake.342 In May 1956, just before Dulles revoked the Aswan offer, Ethiopia published Petridis’s proposal,343 which amounted to the first national plan for Nile development in Ethiopia. What gave this added political importance was its submission exactly at a time when the Nile was an arena of intense conflict between the British Empire and Egypt. Petridis’s proposal was to implement one or more of the following projects: use of Lake Tana as a natural reservoir with a regulator and barrage at its exit and the construction of a hydroelectric station at Eggirbar hill; regulator at Tana, with barrage, reservoir and power station between Malko-Dibo and Shafartak; regulators at Tana, barrage reservoir and power station between Malka-Kakla and Satana (130 km from Addis); regulator at Tana, with barrage, reservoir and power station between Didessa and Babus and also two additional power stations on the River Didessa – mineral deposits in Wollega province could thus be exploited; regulator at Tana, with barrage, reservoir and power station between Berri Hill and Balas; tunnel 100km long between Lake Tana and Alafa with a power station situated some 600 metres from the main outlet.344 On 26 May, the US Government confirmed its interest in the development of the Nile in Ethiopia. Hoover had already discussed engineering projects with the Emperor in 1944 while on a visit to Addis Ababa. Now, as a leading member of the US Government, he confirmed that the Government had renewed its interest in

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development of the Nile in connection with proposals for construction of a high dam at Aswan, and that American participation would require a satisfactory settlement of the problem relating to the division of Nile Waters; meanwhile the US Government was ready to render technical assistance to Ethiopia in its efforts to determine the practical development possibilities of the Blue Nile basin.345 Once again, what took place downstream had political ramifications upstream and vice versa. The Nile locked the countries in the valley together in an eternal relationship. Developments that were of paramount importance for the modern history of Uganda, Ethiopia and the Sudan, as well as Egypt, therefore come to light through analysis of the history of Egypt’s Aswan Dam.

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Nasser’s Aswan High Dam – Hydropolitics as World History

The pamphlet criticised the 1929agreement for limiting Sudan’s share to 300,000 acres, and that the Sudan was not permitted to draw a drop of water, except for domestic purposes only, between April 1st and July 21st. The agreement had thus deprived Sudan of the all important summer cultivation, and the Sudan had been ‘used as an Egyptian reservoir’. It concluded that Egypt had been acting in the Sudan with ‘the sole motive of furthering her own economic interests’. (The Sudanese Independent Front: ‘Memorandum of the Nile Waters Distribution’)

The first person to suggest the breathtaking idea of the High Dam at Aswan was neither an engineer nor an irrigation expert, but an Egyptian agronomist of Alexandrine–Greek parentage, Adrien Daninos. One of the Nile experts in the Foreign Office described the idea upon first hearing it as ‘fantastic and not worthy of serious consideration’,1 and a British development expert in the Middle East characterised Daninos as a man ‘full of mad ideas for the Nile’.2 Daninos sent a two-page manuscript in Arabic to Nasser, headed: ‘Subject. The building of a huge dam on the rocky area south of Aswan’. Nasser passed the letter to Gamal Saleh, who met Daninos. This led to nothing. Daninos wrote Nasser another letter, the two met, and the proposal was passed on for serious study.3 The scheme’s great virtue, he pointed out, was that the whole project was within Egypt’s borders and that it therefore could be embarked upon without the lengthy and wearisome 260

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diplomatic negotiations that the Egyptians had recently experienced in connection with the Owen Falls Dam. It was the antithesis of the Equatorial Nile Project and the basin-wide concept that had dominated discourse and planning in the Ministry of Public Works since the time of William Garstin. It had taken an outsider to break away so radically from past Nile conceptions and planning conventions.

A NAT I O NA L I S E D N I L E !

This Aswan project came to be regarded as the cornerstone in the policy of the new regime, which saw it as no less than Egypt’s salvation. It should provide life-giving waters throughout the year and cheap electricity in abundance for industrial development and rural electrification, and protect the country from devastating floods. It would, Nasser declared, make Egypt the Japan of Africa. But most important – it would ‘nationalise’ the Nile. The Sadd el Ali, or the Nasser dam as it was also called, was a grand and potent symbol of national sovereignty and revolutionary zeal. The magnitude of the project caught the imagination of the army officers, and the publicity given to it suggested such great expectations that any subsequent modifications would be intolerable. Its realisation represented a political commitment of the first magnitude by which the regime would ‘stand or fall’.4 The officers’ proposal changed fundamentally the whole framework for Nile basin development. The old downstream conceptualisation of the White Nile as the tributary of the summer season or the ‘timely’ season and the Blue Nile, the river of the flood season, was made irrelevant, since Egypt now aimed at controlling the entire flow of the Nile within its own borders.5 Although it did not replace the schemes of the Equatorial Nile project, this over-year dam in Egypt postponed them indefinitely. At one enormous stroke, carved in stone across the Nile in Egypt, they hoped to liberate themselves from British intimidation and efforts to control their affairs. In a technological and historical perspective the decision to build the dam symbolises the final victory of perennial irrigation; while Muhammad Ali had built the Delta Barrage north of Cairo about one hundred years earlier, Nasser was now bent on turning the mighty Nile into what, for all practical purposes, was to become an irrigation ditch. The whole game of Nile politics changed. The British gradually came to realise that Aswan would deal a devastating blow to the Equatorial Nile Project and the Lake Tana Dam. A huge Egyptian dam north of the Sudan would jeopardise British plans to secure water for the Sudan economy, therefore boosting Sudanese independence vis-à-vis Egypt and reducing the potential power in upstream control. As late as October 1952, the Sudan and Egypt had agreed on a different line of Nile control; the Sudan could raise the water level of the Sennar reservoir by one metre subject to special conditions in the case of low Nile years (until the construction of the Tana Dam); Egypt could build the Fourth Cataract Dam and the Sudan would offer all possible help; and the Sudan would be given any available surplus floodwater, which could be stored.6 The British Government, the Sudan

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Government and the East African Territories had tried to draw attention to the advantages a series of dams would have over a single mammoth dam at Aswan. Now this vision became obsolete. In order to understand how the Nile’s physical character, the main participants, Nile perceptions, the changing hydropolitical map in the basin, Western political rivalry, and economic competition among the Western powers and firms were interlinked, it is necessary to provide a detailed empirical account of how the story of the Aswan Dam unfolded. Generalisations about upstream and downstream conflicts are too rigid, and models of social action based on such simplified notions are less than helpful in understanding what took place in the Nile valley. Likewise, generalisations about imperial decline are often too superficial, and too unilinear and abstract, to be helpful in explaining what happened to the British Empire in the Nile basin in the middle of the 1950s, just before Macmillan made his famous ‘wind of change’ speech. Empirical detail is necessary, not least because this aspect of the prelude to the Suez crisis is unknown, unfolding secretly behind a smokescreen of Allied anti-communist rhetoric. It is in details that this almost epic story of imperialism in disarray may emerge; a weakened British Government was losing control, but refusing to accept the fact, to a US Government full of confidence in the economic and political might of the US, and faced with a regime in Egypt which was nationalistic and opposed to British colonialism, cleverly exploiting contradictions among the Western powers. And as this narrative will demonstrate, history had left the Churchill and Eden Governments with a very complicated and conflicting agenda. Their former strategy, originally formulated when Cromer was ‘King of the Nile Waters’, and developed and refined over the years in the Foreign Office in London, haunted their discourse and deliberations in the mid-1950s.

C O M P E T I N G C O N C E P T S O F N I L E C O N T RO L

During the Middle East visit of the president of the World Bank, Eugene Black,7 in March 1953, the Egyptians took the opportunity to sound him out on the possibility of assistance for the dam.8 Cairo thought that approaching the Bank would both bring the project nearer and give Egypt more leverage in negotiations with other Western interests. The World Bank president informed El Emary, the Egyptian Minister of Finance, that, if a survey showed that the Dam was a sound project, he would then recommend the Bank lend money to Egypt up to the limit of its credit-worthiness as assessed by the IBRD.9 Black informed the Foreign Office in London that the Neguib regime had set its heart on the Aswan High Dam Project. The Egyptian Government wanted maximum freedom in relation to any particular Western donor. Cairo had therefore also asked the West Germans to work on the Nile project. Just before Black’s visit, on 25 February 1953, the Egyptian press announced that Mohrad Fahmi, the Egyptian Minister of Public Works, had invited a commission of experts from West Germany to examine the technical feasibility of the High Dam. In December, three German bankers arrived in Egypt to discuss,

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on an informal basis, possible financial arrangements, but without positive results for the Egyptians. A technical mission was led by the Director of the Association of Barrages of the Ruhr and engineering experts from two construction firms, Hochtief of Essen and Union Bruckenbau of Dortmund.10 In August 1953, the German engineers, who had been conducting test bores at the possible site, found a layer of sand of considerable depth. In addition to doubts that the rocks on either side of the Nile were strong enough to support the shoulders of the new dam, this led to reconsideration of the dam site. The German technicians lost credibility owing to some serious mistakes. The Egyptians called in another international group of consultants to assess the German study. When they reached the site, the American consultant on the team, a Mr Harza, noted that the foundation level was 85 feet above sea level. He asked how the German engineers had reached that conclusion, and was told that they had used a sounding lead and at 85 feet above sea level had heard ‘a good loud thump’ and concluded that they had met hard rock! The American consultant was not satisfied, and as there was a drilling barge in the neighbourhood he insisted that drilling should be undertaken. The drill did not strike rock until 135 feet below the level recommended by the German engineers. Down to this level there was little else but pure sand. Had the work proceeded on sandy foundations, the whole edifice might have collapsed under the enormous pressure of water; the foundations would have to have been lower than 235 feet below water level (that is, 110 feet of water and 125 feet of sand and silt). ‘Mr. Harza said there were many red faces among the Germans in charge when this discovery was made.’ 11 It shocked the Egyptians, and made the way more open for American money and advice, and for the Bank. The US Government soon demonstrated its supreme economic power and technological capabilities. The US Point Four Administration and the Egyptian Government had signed two subsidiary agreements, one of them dealing with an aerial survey of the area. A one-metre contour map was to be produced as soon as possible. This was regarded as the only safe and reliable way to determine whether the surrounding wadis and hills were suitable for the proposed new dam. The map would also show the ideal surface area of the dam and which particular wadis should be dammed, and where. Thereafter the task was to determine whether the Nubian sandstone foundation had any cracks or faults, which might cause the storedup water to disappear. To investigate this, trial borings were necessary. These, together with an extensive geological survey, would give clear enough indications of the qualities of the Nubian sandstone substratum. The Americans carried out these investigations and the experts in the Ministry of Public Works were impressed. The British were by and large onlookers to these developments. Apparently, they did not know that the US State Department was working to bring in the Bank. (This was a time when Dulles and Eden were described as ‘cat and dog watching each other’.12) Black was very interested, but also concerned to avoid having another Indus water dispute on his hands.13 In September 1953 the State Department and the Bank agreed: they wanted a survey of the whole basin before anything was done with the dam. Black confidently told the British Government that he favoured a

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study that would not be restricted to water-resource development, but that would cover the general economic development of the whole area.14 The US Government then informed Nasser that it would be prepared to finance an IBRD study of the Nile valley as a whole, which would take about one year to complete. The US Government hoped that this would delay the project, and serve to deflate political pressure in Egypt for the dam, so that the scheme could be evaluated on its engineering and economic merits alone.15 The British Government now came out with strong support for a study with a focus on the Nile valley as a whole.16 It sought to maintain the basin-wide planning perspective; a means of convincing Egypt of the virtues of co-operation with Britain that could give them an edge in the power struggle over the river in the north vis-à-vis the Americans. This vision was one of the few remaining cards in the almost empty hand that Britain possessed. Faced with Egypt’s attempts at nationalising the Nile, London played the role of benevolent, ‘holistic’ Nile power. The British Government noted that the new Aswan Dam, although ‘not necessarily unwelcome’, had serious implications for the Sudan: it would flood the Wadi Halfa, reduce hydroelectric potential and prejudice alternative schemes of possibly greater value to the Sudan. It would also ‘strengthen Egyptians’ hands’ in subsequent negotiations over water rights. Eden therefore stated that this US-financed survey of the dam site would ‘not be useful’ unless it had been preceded by a general study of all Nile water schemes.17 The old British idea of Nile control dovetailed with the requirement for an overall study of the river. London was informed that the State Department had now proposed that the IBRD should make a general study of all Nile water projects, simultaneously with the survey of the proposed Aswan Dam, and that the Egyptian Government should be urged to agree to both investigations. Since London was tactically in a weak position, the British Government let the US Government know that they were content with the procedure now suggested by the State Department.18 Almost a month later the US informed the British that the Egyptians had agreed to present a formal request to the IBRD for both a field survey at Aswan and a desk study of the Nile valley as a whole.19 The Bank put pressure on London not to create delays that would give Egypt the impression that the West was dragging its feet. The Nile study was described as a desk study, a simple preliminary to be considered by a few Bank specialists in Washington.20 The Governor-General in Khartoum now sounded the alarm: ‘this would lead us straight into the danger’. Because there now existed rival and mutually exclusive schemes for development of the main Nile. Khartoum wanted ‘to assure that both are given an equal chance’. The Bank should not be blinded by the fuss about the Aswan scheme, but undertake field surveys of both projects.21 The Sudan Government and London supported H.A. Morrice’s work, which led to his report for the Sudanese Ministry of Irrigation in January 1954, entitled The Development of the Main Nile for the Benefit of Egypt and the Sudan. The Foreign Office officials thought that the Bank was unaware of this Nile valley study, and London should therefore put pressure upon the Bank officials to visit Khartoum so as to learn more about the Nile debate in the Sudan.22 It was now seen as unrealistic to ask for a Nile

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study to precede the Aswan survey, but London emphasised that a field survey of the Nile simultaneously with the Aswan survey was of paramount importance. Shortly afterwards London was informed by the Embassy in Cairo that the World Bank was about to survey the new Aswan Dam and the local press carried a report that the Egyptian Finance Minister, Dr Emary, had discussed the question of a loan from the Bank during his recent visit to the US. Meanwhile the Embassy in Washington reported discussions with the State Department. The Egyptians had objected to the Nile survey, and the Embassy concluded that there was a great possibility that the Sudanese (and London’s) claim would eventually be overlooked.23 Six months later the IBRD board, supported by the American Government, finally decided to assist Egypt in the preparation and organisation of the Aswan project. The Bank would study the scheme itself, and would include what ‘could be called a desk or office study of the valley, a survey and evaluation of presently available material on the river and the projects for its control’. The Bank also said it would assist Egypt in ‘whatever ways it can to find sources of money for the project over and above the Bank’s possible participation’.24 When the British Ambassador in Washington, Makins, cabled Eden at the end of 19 November 1954, informing him that the Bank had now apparently withdrawn its demand for a full-scale ‘deskstudy’ of the Nile problem as a prerequisite for considering a loan to the Aswan High Dam, the British-sponsored plans for the Nile basin were finally put to rest. The political defeat was clear – the British Nile discourse had lost out, but London was slow to understand its implications. Makins proposed that the Embassy should ask the Bank at least to take a British expert onto their team.25 The Foreign Office agreed to Makins’s proposal, but the Bank did not.26

A S U DA N V E TO ?

Since the dam would drown Sudanese territory and that country had already developed plans for damming the river for irrigation and hydropower purposes, the Sudanese had both direct and legal interests in the High Dam. Would they try to stop it? Political development was taking place fast and the country was heading for its first parliamentary elections. British officials in the Sudan and London had long sought to introduce institutions to associate the Northern Sudanese more closely with the task of governing in some sort of co-operation with the British. An Advisory Council had been established for Northern Sudan, consisting of the GovernorGeneral and 28 Sudanese. Agitation to transform the Advisory Council into a legislative one that would include the Southern Sudan grew in strength. The decision to establish a legislative council forced the British to abandon their policy segregating the South from the North and, in 1947, southern participation in a legislative council was decided. The creation of this assembly produced a strong Egyptian reaction, and was one reason that, in October 1951, Cairo unilaterally abrogated the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 1936. Both Egypt and Britain sought to influence political developments in the Sudan. The Egyptians threw their support

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behind Ismail al-Azhari, leader of the National Unionist Party, who campaigned on the slogan ‘Unity of the Nile Valley’. This position was opposed by the Umma (Nation) Party – under the patronage of Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, the posthumous son of the Mahdi – which leaned towards the British in their fight for independence, and had the less vocal but pervasive support of British officials. To the shock of many British officials and the chagrin of the Umma, which had enjoyed power in the Legislative Assembly, the unionists won an overwhelming victory. Ismail al-Azhari, who had turned to Egypt for help in the battle against the British and who, by 1943, had won control together with his supporters of the Congress and organised the Ashiqqa’ (Brothers), the first genuine political party in the Sudan, became the country’s first Prime Minister. Sayyid ‘Ali al-Mirghani, leader of the Khatmiyah brotherhood, although personally remaining aloof from politics, had thrown his support behind Azhari. The Azhari-Khatmiyah faction – reorganised in 1951 as the National Unionist Party (NUP) – argued in favour of union with Egypt. While Egypt wanted unity with the Sudan, Eden conceived of the Sudan as it had been conceived of in British strategy since the 1890s, clearly reformulated in 1923: ‘the power which holds the Soudan has Egypt at its mercy, and through Egypt can dominate the Suez Canal’. He also understood that the High Dam would change all this. The Sudan, which the Foreign Office had described for decades as holding, on account of its geography, the key position for the whole northeastern corner of Africa, might still be holding the key. But it seemed as if the door it could lock had become impossible to close. What happened on the Upper Nile would no longer be of the same immediate concern to the Egyptians. British officers in the Sudan Government realised that projects benefiting the Sudan would end up in the backyard as a consequence of the High Dam Project. If the Egyptians pursued the Aswan Dam they would lose interest in, or be financially unable to co-operate in, building upstream dams that the Sudan preferred but was quite unable to finance alone. Therefore they favoured Morrice’s plan, which aimed at treating the whole Nile basin as a hydrological unity. The Governor-General’s office was critical of the High Dam, but did not reject it out of hand.27 It was feared that it had ‘completely caught the Egyptian fancy’ and that it therefore might be rushed through. The main disadvantage from a Sudanese point of view was that the project would make fulfilment of the Tana and Equatorial schemes even more remote; the paper on the Egyptian position did not mention Roseiris at all (the Sudan needed the consent of Egypt for the Roseiris Dam in accordance with the 1929 Agreement). The commitment to Egypt under the Nile Waters Agreement was contained in paragraph 4 (ii) of the exchange of covering letters: Save with the previous agreement of the Egyptian Government, no irrigation or power works or measures are to be constructed or taken on the River Nile and its branches, or on the lakes from which it flows, so far as all these are in the Sudan or in countries under British administration, which would, in such a manner as to entail any prejudice to the interests of Egypt, either reduce the quantity of water arriving in Egypt, or modify the date of its arrival, or lower its level.

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This Agreement of 1929, hailed as a diplomatic triumph by the British Government of the day, now hampered the diplomacy of the Churchill Government. At an early stage in the talks in 1954, the new Sudan Government, led by the pro-unity party, refused to give consent to the High Dam in exchange for Egypt’s acceptance of the Roseiris project. The Sudanese delegates in the negotiations with Egypt were not willing to compare the two projects in this way, because the Roseiris was a relatively modest annual storage scheme, while the High Dam was so large that it would have enormous consequences for both the affected region and for the water utilisation question; the estimates were too optimistic regarding both dates and cost; it would prevent effective use of hydroelectric power potential in the Sudan; the population of the Halfa province would have to be resettled; and finally, as soon as the Aswan Reservoir started to operate, the Egyptians would have established a claim to all the water necessary to fill it and the Sudan would not get any extra water until it was full. Accepting the plan would mean, Khartoum argued, accepting that Egypt had the right to ‘all the rest of the Nile flood, and an established right to use it to manipulate this high dam, with the Sudan left at the post’.28 In spite of these objections, for tactical political reasons, the Governor-General favoured showing a positive attitude to the proposal. Britain should not ‘appear to drag’ its feet.29 As it would be politically disastrous for Nasser to abandon the project, Khartoum thought it ‘most unwise’ to expose itself to accusations of obstruction. Instead, Sudan officials would support the idea of developing the Nile as a whole, while insisting that the proposed dam at Aswan did not seem to be the best way of doing so. They suggested a series of dams on the main Nile in the Northern Sudan,30 more or less in line with the proposal of Hurst et al.31 The British Government also decided not to lobby against the project, feeling that the risk was too high.32 London and Khartoum shared the opinion, however, that the Bank should make a proper study of the different projects on the Nile. During 1954, talks between Egypt and the Sudan continued, everybody regarding them as very difficult to bring to a fruitful conclusion.33 The Sudan Government finally offered to agree to the Dam on the following conditions. The Sudan’s ultimate share in the natural flow of the Nile would have to be determined before work was started. The Sudan would thereafter have the right to build on the Nile or on any of its tributaries such dams or control works as were in its opinion necessary for the effective use of its share in the natural flow of the Nile. Since Wadi Halfa, the gateway to Egypt, would be drowned, the population of the Halfa District must be moved to the proposed Butana irrigation scheme on the banks of the River Atbara, before the water in the river was raised above its existing maximum level, and Egypt would have to pay the entire cost of the new irrigation scheme and of the transfer of the population. This offer by the Sudan Government was regarded as blackmail by some quarters in Egypt, while the new regime addressed them, it turned out, in a much more constructive way than London had expected.

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A N G LO – A M E R I C A N R I VA L RY F O R T H E A S WA N C O N T R AC T

The British Government had lost out over the issue of the Nile study and was put under severe pressure by the intransigent attitude of the Sudan Government, while at the same time it wanted to join in the rush for the contract for the Aswan Dam. The question of who should build the dam was one of great economic and political importance. The dam was estimated to cost between $200 million and $450 million, depending on what alternative was finally chosen. The $450 million scheme would include $100 million for irrigation, a power plant and fertiliser factory (estimated at $100 million) and would take some ten years to complete. The government that financed it and built it would be able to exert profound influence on Egyptian policies, and would gain enormous political and technological prestige, which could be converted into political capital elsewhere in the world. The rivalry between European countries and the US to win the contract therefore became intense. London realised that the Aswan Dam project would go forward, so it had to find a way to influence its implementation without alienating the Sudan and without strengthening the hands of the Americans, who, it was clear to Anthony Eden, were trying to undermine British influence in the Middle East. From the very beginning the British Government put its weight behind English Electric, the British company that had worked so hard to get the contract for the Aswan scheme of the 1930s. The Foreign Secretary, Eden, had been an important backer. Twenty years later, and now Prime Minister, he saw the company as the only alternative to the Bank, which he regarded as an instrument of American interests. English Electric aimed to form a Consortium with Hochtief and Dortmund Union. A French group was also approached, headed by Monsieur Clement of Electricité de France, who claimed to have some 60 to 70 French companies behind him and, as a co-ordinator for the interests of Comptoir d’Escompte and the Crédit Lyonnais, was said to represent ‘90 per cent of the entire French industry’.34 Negotiations with the Egyptians were opened at the beginning of 1955. The scope of the project was enormous, but more modest than the one put forward by the IBRD later in the same year. Its total estimated cost was E£241 million, of which some E£209 million would be spent in the first ten years, and half of which would be in foreign exchange. Uncertainties about British economic might exposed disagreements among the ministries. At the beginning of February 1955, the Board of Trade was approached by representatives of English Electric, who asked urgently for a firmer Government commitment and for its views on the formation of a German–French–British group.35 The British partners in the Consortium formally requested the Government to provide a third of the investment needed in the form of a medium-term credit. The Treasury suggested that it was inclined to support the English Electric–Hochtief proposal, and the Embassy in Cairo was asked to undertake an investigation of Egypt’s economic situation. Clearly, assessments of creditworthiness depended on politics. First, the Treasury concluded in a draft that it was not satisfied with Egypt’s credit-worthiness and therefore could not cover English Electric’s participation. In the final version, written only four days later, the conclusion was the opposite and

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was now based on political arguments: given the interest that the Americans and the IBRD showed in Egypt, the US would most likely give Egypt enough development aid to make them creditworthy. The American aid, which the British Government had adamantly opposed a couple of years before, was now regarded as a main precondition for British support of the British firm. But for the Foreign Office, the issue of the British firm was much more complex and many-sided than it was in the eyes of the Board of Trade. The Foreign Office on the one hand urged the Consortium to continue negotiations with Egypt, but on the other hand tried to cool what was seen as the Treasury’s too positive policy towards the Consortium. In March the Foreign Office told the Treasury that it would be disastrous for Britain to support work on the dam before agreement had been reached with the Sudan.36 The Foreign Office had earlier informed Khartoum that the Foreign Office had been approached by English Electric and asked what the effects in the Sudan would be if the British Government gave financial support to the scheme.37 Khartoum had already urged London to tell the Egyptians that London would give no assistance to the Aswan project until agreement was reached with the Sudan, and that London also should try to persuade the World Bank to take a similar line.38 The British Government would therefore alienate the Sudan if they were seen as strong supporters of the Consortium’s activities. It was impossible to give the Consortium the go-ahead while at the same time pressing the Bank to pay proper attention to the Sudan’s demands. The Consortium tried to push the issue. Naturally it saw the contract as a golden opportunity and feared competition from other groups, both British and American, so the earlier work could start the better. They were against bringing in the Bank, because its intervention ‘would greatly complicate the negotiations of the contract’.39 The Egyptian Government gave the Consortium a positive response, according to the written and oral reports the Consortium’s representatives sent to the British Government. It exaggerated Egypt’s support, however, in order to strengthen its position in Westminster, and misread Egyptian politics. In June the Consortium came up with a plan that it hoped would meet many of the requirements of the British Government. It had devised a scheme for dividing the plan into two parts: first, a preliminary contract covering investigations in continuation of the work already done by the German party, and some contracting work – for example, construction of the subsidiary coffer dam to permit excavation at the mouth of the tunnels for the purpose of examining the rock and borings through the rock above the tunnels, which would eventually be incorporated in the ventilation shafts; second, and more importantly, the contract covering the main project. For the Consortium this scheme would serve two purposes: to forestall any possibility that the Egyptian Government would undertake the preliminary work itself, and to commit the Egyptian Government firmly to the Consortium by preventing any possibility of an alternative Consortium coming into the picture.40 Gradually, the Government in London seems to have faced up to some of the economic and political realities: it came to the conclusion that the Consortium and English Electric could not manage this project without the Bank, and the Americans

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playing a dominant financial role. English Electric was worried, and complained to the Government.41 In May, the Foreign Office gave the Embassy in Washington permission to give the president of the World Bank, personally and in confidence, a summary of the Hochtief–English Electric initiative and of the attitude of the British Government.42 London realised that the chances of the Consortium or English Electric obtaining the contract alone were vanishing, and that in order to regain some of the Bank’s confidence, the British Government would have to distance itself from the Consortium. On 30 August 1955, the Bank transmitted to the Egyptian Government a report on the economic development of Egypt which dealt with the High Dam. (It was also secretly given to the British and American Governments.) The Bank concluded that the project was of exceptional size, nature and cost, but was technically sound. In an aide-memoire the Bank stated that it was the largest single project the Bank had ever been asked to undertake, and ranked ‘among the major development projects in the world’.43 The project was magnificent: a dam 365 feet high and just over three miles long across the crest, with a reservoir able to store 155 billion cubic metres; a powerhouse with an initial capacity of 720,000kW – which could later be doubled; the potential to convert 700,000 acres to perennial irrigation and reclaim and settle another 1.3 million acres. A 500km-long lake would be created and it was estimated that some 70,000 people, 50,000 on the Sudanese side of the border and 20,000 in Egypt, would have to be resettled. The IBRD increased the total estimate of cost to £470 million, or about $1.2 billion. More irrigation and drainage works, power lines and other associated costs and larger compensation for the Sudan had been included. The plan contemplated that Egypt should pay for the full cost of the dam, except for $400 million in foreign exchange. The IBRD announced that it was willing, in principle, to lend Egypt $200 million. This was subject to certain preconditions; very importantly, the Nile water dispute between the Sudan and Egypt must be settled and the Governments of the US and Britain should undertake to see the project through. This implied that the remaining $200 million would have to come as gifts from governments. The Bank declared its willingness to assist in finding solutions to important technical and economic problems and the US offered its assistance in bringing about an agreement on Nile waters between Egypt and the Sudan. After years of planning and discussion, there existed in August 1955 two project proposals, presented by two groups, one European and one by the Bank, the first still supported by Britain and the second by the US. Britain was eager to press for an agreement with Egypt, based on the World Bank proposal, but implemented by the Consortium. The US Government wanted a project based on the World Bank proposal, but implemented by an American company. Egypt wanted the dam as soon as possible, while the Sudan Government opposed it until an agreement had been worked out for the sharing of the Nile waters.

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A RC H A I C I M P E R I A L I S M V E R S U S C A P I TA L I S T T E N D E R

The next couple of months was a period of a frantic activity, when the European Consortium, the World Bank and the British and American Governments fought for control of the project and for its contracts. This seemingly mundane issue played an important role in widening conflict between Washington and London, and between the Western allies and Egypt. The World Bank was committed to the principle of tender, and could therefore not say anything in advance. The US Government seemed to be sure that an American firm would win the tender, not least because the US Government planned to pay most of the bill. London had to try to secure the contract by political means, against a much stronger Western power, in an Egypt bent on ridding itself of British influence. These efforts were dealt devastating blows. For example, the British learned that the Bank had volunteered the whole ‘secret’ meeting about the project that had been held between the Bank and the Consortium, to the Egyptian Government. What made things worse was that the Bank representative had disclosed that the initiative for the meeting had come from the Consortium. By disclosing the secret story behind this meeting, the internal conflicts and distrust within the Consortium and among the European countries that supported them were deepened. (The German members of the Consortium were furious. They suspected a deliberate attempt by London to bring in American interests.) The representatives of English Electric had realised that it was inevitable that the Bank must be involved, because Egypt needed additional financial support and the British and the European Governments were unable to provide this. One problem with the World Bank, according to English Electric, was that it was insisting upon competition in placing the contract. Because of this demand by the Bank, the Egyptian Government would not sign the Letter of Intent proffered by the Consortium. Now the Soviet Union took its first really bold move on the Nile scene and jumped immediately onto centre stage. British and American newspapers published sensational stories. The Soviet Ambassador in Cairo had made a statement on economic aid for the High Dam. The press reported that Ahmed Selim of the High Dam Committee had said (on October 12) that the Egyptian Government would find it difficult to refuse the Soviet offer. The Financial Times wrote that the Soviet Union was willing to have the cost of all machinery and other materials provided, repaid in easy instalments over a 25-year period. The offer included the stipulation that an account in Egyptian currency should be opened in Egypt for machinery and other materials imported from Russia, the Soviet Union to draw upon this account to cover purchases in Egypt.44 On the same day the New York Times carried a story that the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington was about to inform Dulles of the Soviet offer.45 Black argued that it would be easy to beat the Russians on the political arena. On 26 October, when representatives of the British and American Governments met in Washington to discuss the Egyptian situation and the Aswan Dam, the Russian threat was not taken very seriously by the Americans.46 In this situation Eden decided to use the Soviet card against the threat, not of communism, but of capitalism. He told the US Ambassador in London that, in view

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of a renewed offer by the Soviet Union to finance the dam, it would be important to reach an agreement with Egypt as soon as possible:47 ‘If the Russians get the contract we have lost Africa’.48 There was no time, he argued, to wait for the Bank and its lengthy procedures of open tendering. The Consortium was ready, provided that Egypt’s obligations were guaranteed by Western governments. If the worst came to the worst, Britain might find itself responsible for more than $100 million, Eden said, and asked for American financial support. The World Bank had to be informed politely about this change of policy and afterwards it could perhaps be brought back in by the back door.49 Eden’s line was that the Soviet threat was now the only thing that could win the contract for the Consortium, although he had received a very different story about Egyptian–Russian relations from his Ambassador in Cairo: Trevelyan reported that ‘there are no signs that the Egyptians will want to switch in the immediate future to the Russian offer, whatever that offer may be’.50 On the same day as Eden spoke to the American Ambassador, the Foreign Secretary, Macmillan, wrote to Makins in Washington, on the subject of the dam: ‘We must get it one way or another’. The Consortium could not act alone with British guarantees, because, as he admitted, Britain did not have the money to support it. He also vetoed World Bank participation. The Ambassador should ask the American Government for more aid to Egypt, so that Egypt would be able to pay the Consortium.51 The main argument against the Bank was said to be time; that is, the need for prompt action to forestall any move by the Russians to build and finance the dam precluded time-consuming tenders. A few days later, Eden himself took the initiative for a meeting of the Treasury and the Board of Trade. If speed was essential, the Government should urge the British parties to the Consortium to try to get the contract concluded at once. If speed was not of the essence, there were still two alternatives. The first was to try to bring the Americans into the Consortium. That would not be easy, because the British were already the junior partner and the other partners in the Consortium and the Egyptians did not want the Americans.52 If the World Bank insisted on US participation in any contract that it financed, London’s choices were either to try to negotiate terms on that basis or for the Consortium to go ahead alone. If the Consortium was to go ahead alone, it must be on the assumption that the Americans would support the Egyptian economy during the period of the loan. But the meeting concluded on a more realistic note. The President of the Board of Trade would send a note to Eden: since they had now approached the Americans, there could be no question of the Consortium closing the deal immediately with the Egyptians. The best course was therefore to urge the International Bank to participate and to get them to agree that the contract should be let to the Anglo–French–German Consortium.53 The Cabinet meeting on Aswan on 25 October, however, stressed once again the need to move quickly – if not, ‘there would be a serious risk that the Egyptians would accept the offer of Russian assistance’.54 This was given as the only reason the British Government could not co-operate with the US. The Government did not, however, exclude the possibility of such participation at a later stage, if it proved possible to negotiate some workable arrangements with existing

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members of the Consortium. The Cabinet instructed the Embassy to do its best to convince Mr Black of the urgency of the matter and that tender, therefore, should not apply. If none of these alternatives were possible, the Cabinet would consider whether or not to authorise the Consortium to press their negotiations to a conclusion, even though there were no prospects of an International Bank loan or of further assistance from the US. The Embassy in Washington tried to bring some realism into the discussions of the Cabinet and the Foreign Office. It was, the Ambassador told London, impossible to ask the Americans for money while at the same time insisting that American firms should not take part. Some arrangement involving American firms with, or participating in, the Consortium was described as a sine qua non. The far-reaching political implications of this matter outweighed the Board of Trade’s view – that the Consortium had to kept to its present composition.55 Developments within the group made this sober realism even more appropriate. Since English Electric could not promise definite sums from its partners, the British group’s acceptance of the contract depended on the British Government’s willingness to give financial cover.56 It also became clear that the US Government did not accept the Bank’s view that Egypt would be able to finance one half of the foreign exchange component, because all Egypt’s foreign exchange resources would be swallowed up in meeting its balanceof-payments deficit exclusive of the foreign-exchange costs of the Dam. In addition, the Americans thought that, in practice, the Egyptians would be unable to enforce measures of fiscal restraint necessary to enable them to meet all local costs and that, in consequence, the Governments of the UK and the US would at some point have to meet part of this if the whole scheme was not ‘to collapse’.57 This put even greater pressure on the British, because what they lacked was, precisely, money. The British Government still upheld the Consortium solution. The Americans were disturbed by reports from Cairo. Hoover told Makins that if the Agreement with the Egyptian Government was signed, American aid would be ‘out of the window’.58 The British Government immediately sent two memoranda to the French and West German Governments, asking them whether they were prepared to give more assistance to Egypt so as to fill the gap that might be left by the Americans. But they either would not or could not provide the necessary guarantees. In midNovember English Electric, feeling that time was running out and that developments were going against it, called for a meeting with the Board of Trade. The first question was: why did the British Government no longer ‘express openly their support for the Consortium’? The answer was that it did have the ‘full support’ of the Government, but this position could not be taken publicly because other British groups in other consortia would most likely be formed in order to win contracts during the building period. The British Government sought what consolation it could at a time when the tide regarding Nile affairs seemed to be running strongly against it. London noted with optimism that some Egyptian politicians complained that they had been quite offended by the attitude of the Bank and that the Bank regarded the Egyptians as ‘not very capable or reliable’.59 London argued, on the other hand, that it was very

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important to avoid a situation in which the Egyptians, exasperated ‘by what they consider the dictatorial and unhelpful attitude of the Bank’, should fall back on a request to the Consortium to go ahead without Bank assistance’. The British Government now had to take on itself the duty to ‘educate’ the Bank. The Foreign Office also noted that the Egyptians were in a hurry, calling for the placing of contracts for at least four diversion tunnels and ancillary coffer dams by mid-1956, so that equipment could be assembled and work begun in mid-1957. London noted, however, that other considerations might make these targets unrealistic, especially the Nile waters issue. London stressed that it would be tactically preferable that the Egyptians not be ‘forced to admit this at this stage’.60 The Foreign Office informed Makins of London’s attitude. There was a ‘serious danger of deadlock’ between the Bank and the Egyptians, especially if the Bank continued to ‘insist on international tender and on splitting the contract’. The result could then be that the Egyptians would present the alternatives of backing the Consortium without the Bank or ‘letting the Russians in’.61

LO N D O N I N D I S A R R AY

The British were trying to attain numerous aims simultaneously, aims that contradicted each other, and two of which were incompatible with the Cabinet decision to take the Bank route and which also deprived them of any power of persuasion with the US Government. First, Egypt should seek funds from the IBRD and this should be additional to medium-term credits. Secondly, the US should put up the additional finance required. Thirdly, Britain should only put up sterling balance releases already granted for different reasons and some medium-term credit. Finally, the present British-sponsored Consortium should be given the contract to build the dam.62 This policy was unworkable, but Eden and his closest allies did not understand this, and apparently were still living in a world of diplomacy when imperial power was at hand. On 26 November Eden sent a top-secret telegram to Eisenhower.63 ‘I hate to trouble you with this, but I am convinced that on our joint success in excluding the Russians from this contract may depend the future of Africa.’ He claimed to understand that the main difficulty the International Bank had in helping the Egyptians was that they ‘should pay some regard’ to their usual rule of international tendering. ‘But,’ he continued, if this were insisted upon and the Egyptians left Washington without agreement, ‘I fear the Russians are certain to get the contract’.64 He went on to say that ‘we are prepared to do our small part in supporting our share of the Consortium and there is also the question of the two Governments involved, namely the French and the German. It would be invaluable to get the help of your Government, it being always understood that in that event an American firm would take part in the operation.’ The Eden Government was the representative of the leading advocate of free trade and capitalism at the time when the imperial system was founded, and was now fighting to get the biggest development contract in the colonial

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areas so far, trying to stop international competition by pointing to the Communist danger. Instead of through competition and free-market forces, they were to win it by wheeling and dealing. Eden’s over-ambitious aims on behalf of the Empire and his failure to come to grips with its diminishing power contrasted with the more realistic attitude of the British Ambassador in Washington. Makins wrote that there was one point on which all three were unanimous. Britain ‘cannot expect to get into the poker game unless they are willing to put up the ante. The sterling balance releases, which we have conceded anyhow, do not constitute an ante for this purpose.’ 65 Eden answered the following day, ‘We are certainly contemplating taking our share and we shall be telegraphing further about this’.66 The Board of Trade argued that Egypt was ‘blackmailing’ Britain, and that it was ‘therefore better to keep our money and put it down as late as possible’.67 Eden’s strategy, for the post-war period in the Middle East, of using American money to support British policy stumbled. Eden failed to realise the implications of the new political–strategic environment, and he did not draw the necessary conclusions. On 7 December Eden telegraphed Makins personally. He was disturbed about the American insistence on competitive tendering ‘even though this might lead to a breakdown’ in negotiations. Makins should aim at a settlement that would appeal to the Egyptians, commit the Bank to supporting the project as a whole, and not involve the British in financial commitments more onerous than those which at present they were contemplating.68 He went on, ‘If the Egyptians were prepared to agree to competitive tendering and the Americans insist on it we would not wish to make this a breaking point. Then it would be helpful if the contract could be arranged so as to enable the consortium to tender.’ 69 Makins reported on 14 December that the Bank had insisted that international bidding would not postpone the project and Eisenhower had decided that ‘it would be quite impossible for the US to participate in this scheme except on the basis of competitive bidding’.70 Makins said that there was no more to be done on the issue. Eden would still not accept defeat. He sent a telegram to Eisenhower, stating that ‘we must surely press home the agreement now we have got so far. The main outstanding point is the way in which the contract for the first phase of the work is to be placed.’ He said that ‘we do not ask for more than a fair field and no favour’.71 Makins argued that he would prefer not to deliver Eden’s message at all, because Eisenhower had already dealt with the issue. If the President was to ‘depart from the system of limited competitive bidding in this case, it might cause such a profound stir in Congressional circles as to jeopardise the whole of his foreign aid programme’. He concluded strongly, ‘I shall, therefore, not deliver your message unless you so instruct me by tomorrow morning’.72

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E D E N A N D E I S E N H OW E R ’ S A S WA N O F F E R

On 14 December 1955, the World Bank and the US and British Governments presented a joint offer to Egypt.73 Three documents were shortly thereafter handed to the Egyptian Government on 16 December: a letter of intent from the IBRD and aides-memoires from the Governments of Britain and the US.74 They had decided to support the building of the Aswan High Dam. Had Eisenhower, Dulles, Eden and Macmillan become supporters of Nasser, the hero of the Bandung conference, who publicly defied the West and fought to get rid of the visible and offending remnant of British imperialism – the Suez military base? Most accounts of the countdown to Suez are based on this supposition – the offer was genuine, but acts carried out by the Russians or by Nasser himself made it impossible to stand by the pledge. In order to understand the character of this Western offer and why it could be revoked only six months later with such stunning consequences, it must be put in a concrete technological, hydrological and hydropolitical context.

A Water Scheme in Two Stages The crux of the Western proposal was the division of the scheme into two parts.75 The two Governments would ‘consider sympathetically’ further support during the first phase, ‘in the light of the conditions then existing and of progress and performance’. London and Washington had informed Egypt, in diplomatic language, that necessary financial support for the final stage depended upon its behaviour. The two-stage project was a very clear example of ‘conditionality’, as it later would have been called in the language of the development era. The ‘first stage’ was itself in two parts. The first was work on the dam proper, to which the US and the UK Governments were contributing grants equivalent to the whole of the estimated foreign exchange cost: the US offered to provide $54.6 million and Britain £5.5 million as a grant.76 The total cost was estimated at $275 million, of which the equivalent of $100 million would represent expenditure in foreign currencies. The work during that period would include construction of diversion tunnels and permanent coffer dams, the consolidation and sealing of the dam and relocation of the population from the reservoir site, and conversion of 700,000 acres of land from basin to perennial irrigation and irrigation facilities for about 500,000 new acres, principally for food production. A second part of this stage consisted of ancillary work to be financed by the Government of Egypt, of which the foreign exchange cost was estimated at $38 million. The contributions of each government to the first stage were made conditional upon the following: (i) a corresponding commitment from the other, (ii) the Bank would disburse their contribution, (iii) a statement from the Bank that it intended to lend $200 million, (iv) Egypt would so conduct its affairs as to enable the project to be carried out quickly and economically, and (v) international competition, or tender, to selected American and British firms should be used. The first stage would take ‘approximately three years’ to complete and the

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two governments intended to lend their support toward financing ‘the later stages in connection with which the Egyptian Government is seeking substantial help from the West’.77 The second stage consisted of completion of the Dam and installation of the electrical plant, for which the foreign exchange cost was estimated at about $290 million. It was for this stage that the Bank loan was intended. It was thought that it would take between 10 and 15 years to complete the reservoir project. The letter of intent from the Bank was handed to the Egyptians at noon on 17 December. Its main features were: in light of the proposals of the two Governments, the Bank would ‘agree’ to lend $200 million. The loan was conditional on three factors: (i) the Bank should be reasonably satisfied with the additional foreign exchange and that local currency would be available; (ii) Egypt should review its investment programme so as to recognise the priority of the High Dam Project; and (iii) Egypt would not incur obligations in respect of foreign debt in excess of what the Bank regarded as prudent and would consult the Bank before undertaking any such obligations. The offer was a package deal. It was a case of all or nothing. The Bank would not lend money unless the two Governments gave grants and the Governments would give grants only on the conditions laid down in the aides-memoires. The Bank itself would supervise its own money and the capital provided by the US and Great Britain. The Egyptians would have to gear their entire economy for at least ten years to the construction of the dam – otherwise their ‘credit-worthiness’ would be impaired. The Bank intended to make its controlling position doubly certain by issuing the loan in instalments coinciding with various stages of the construction of the dam and ancillary works. Nasser welcomed the offer. He told the British Ambassador that he would prefer to deal with the West, but there were a number of points in the proposal that he did not like or could not accept. He was disappointed with the size of the grants offered. The procedure suggested by the Bank would delay the start of the work by a year. The Egyptians placed great emphasis on starting construction of the major parts of the project by the low-water season of 1957 for hydrological and economic reasons. Nasser could not accept external control of the works financed by the Egyptian Government from its own funds, and the conditions put forward by the Bank would compromise Egypt’s financial freedom. He could not give the Bank the right to veto individual projects or items of expenditure and thus to control Egypt’s economy in detail. Nasser wanted action, but not under the Bank’s control. International tender would delay the start-up. Nasser told the British that Egypt should have the right to place contracts as it chose for that part of the project to be paid out of its own resources, and argued that if the Egyptian Government were not allowed to negotiate a contract with the Consortium for the first part of the project, the Russians’ offer would need be to be brought up for fresh consideration. He told the American Ambassador in Cairo that he favoured American participation in the Consortium, but was against losing time. Nasser found the conditions of Black and his Bank politically unacceptable. Egyptian public opinion would interpret them as if Egypt

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had surrendered its sovereignty to the World Bank,78 repeating the mistakes of Ismai’l a century earlier and making the Bank a new Caisse de la Dette.79 The Foreign Office thought Nasser’s complaints were justified. Paradoxically Nasser and London agreed in their opposition to tender; the Egyptians wanted national control while Britain wanted imperial privilege. Why did the US and British Governments make their offer at all? The official justifications were the need to bar Russian influence and to demonstrate, as part of the ideological cold war, the superiority of Western technology and expertise. The Soviet threat was also London’s main excuse to the French and German Governments for not informing them about or involving them in the Washington talks.80 After all, London had worked for months to bring them into the Consortium idea in competition with the World Bank and American interests.81 London also tried to reduce their anger by drawing attention to the provision in the aide-memoire for participation by other Member Governments of the Bank, and hoped that France and Germany would still contribute at least in the second phase.82 When the French Government instructed the French members in the Consortium that ‘the West must stick together and that we must play along with the Americans’,83 the Soviet threat had at least helped the Consortium. It has been argued that Nasser’s contacts with the Soviet bloc forced Eden to complete the arrangements for building the High Dam.84 Such an analysis conforms with that of the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, who wrote in his book that it was the Czech arms deal that ‘convinced’ Eden of the vital necessity for the West to take over responsibility for the scheme,85 but is this explanation plausible? It makes it very difficult to understand why the offer was revoked in 1956, at a time when both the Americans and the British knew very well that the Russians both would and could build the dam, while in 1955 this was less certain. It also contradicts all the narratives that show that Eden, Selwyn Lloyd, Dulles and Eisenhower were no less concerned with Soviet intrusion in 1956 than in 1955. Others have argued that the British did not understand Nasser’s real agenda, that the offer was put forward by an old benevolent imperial power and the new superpower, both with naïve illusions about Nasser’s policies at the time the offer was made. But the British foreign service was in no doubt in 1955: Nasser was ‘dangerously committed to the Communists’, and it would be advantageous, in any event, to ‘overthrow him if possible’.86 In a passage deleted from a draft memorandum, a senior advisor to Eden wrote just before the offer was made: ‘It looks very much as if the only possible ways of disrupting the present course of the Egyptian regime are: (i) the death of Nasser; (ii) a free hand to the Israelis’.87 Another course, though not very efficient and far less dramatic, was the offer to finance and construct Nasser’s prestigious project. And at the very same time, Eden sent a sharp cable, ‘demanding, practically – it was a kind of half demand and half threat’ to the US Government – that ‘if we [the Americans] did not join them in the building of the Aswan Dam, that they [the British] would no longer restrict their [Egypt’s] trade [in weapons with the Soviet Union], and that the fat would be in the fire’.88 The Americans and the British saw the offer to build the dam as a political move to strengthen the West and as a weapon in the cold war. Both wanted to keep the Soviet

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Union out of Egypt. For the British Government to be a partner in building a dam that would take between 10 and 15 years to finish could act as a political shield in a country where there were almost daily protests against their presence. It held out possibilities of maintaining influence in the Suez Canal area, although they would have preferred that the Nile basin plans be implemented instead. London could not build the dam alone, nor guarantee the financing of it, and needed American support. The US Government saw things differently. It was, of course, not interested in boosting British prestige with American money at a time when Eisenhower and Dulles considered it necessary to distance themselves from what they saw as archaic imperialism. But it was diplomatically unthinkable to be involved in a dam project in Britain’s backyard without co-operating with their NATO ally. The US Government wanted to replace Britain as the dominant Western power in the Middle East, in line with its real economic might, but in a way that would not jeopardise British support in other areas of the world. The public front against communism shadowed Anglo–American rivalry as it developed in 1955 and 1956. The offer to help finance the Dam was a means, a tactical device, to weaken Nasser and eventually, if possible, remove him as the leader of Egypt. The offer to finance the dam was not an act of benign imperialism at its zenith. The idea was rather that the whole project should drag on for years and thus help London to maintain British influence in the area. One important factor, which could cause repeated delays and postponements in the project and weaken Nasser, according to the Foreign Office and Eden, was the apparently ‘unsolvable’ issue of how to share the Nile waters among the riparians. As long as the British built the dam, they could also hold the Americans at bay in the area. But on the other hand Eden and his Government thought it important that Egypt should start as soon as possible to implement Stage One. It was now, and not in five or ten years’ time, that the donors needed the project as a political weapon. The more the Egyptians invested in Stage One and the more the prestige of the Government in Cairo was bound up with the completion of the project, the more it could be squeezed in relation to Stage Two. The proposal to finance the project in two stages was a device to further longterm interests in the region. The contributions towards the later stages of the project was dependent upon ‘good behaviour’ by the Egyptians, which meant not only Egypt’s financial and economic behaviour but also the threat behind the mirror, the Nile question.89 Nasser reacted to what he saw as a ‘political condition or at least as a very wide loophole’ in the offer,90 but both the British and the US Governments answered that the whole offer was based on trust between governments. The British representatives in Egypt should say that the purpose of splitting the project into two parts was to enable work to start as soon as possible without compromising the Nile waters question, so that the Russians could not turn the delay to their advantage.91 Only two weeks after the offer was made, however, the Foreign Office informed its representative in Khartoum that he should make it clear ‘privately to responsible Sudanese, if opportunity offers’ that further financial assistance to Egypt from Britain and the US to complete the second and major portion of the project would be ‘dependent inter alia on a satisfactory solution of the Nile waters dispute’.92 The

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British aimed to exploit their hydropolitical leverage against what appeared to be Nasser’s hydropolitical triumph. It was a kind of last-ditch attempt to employ upstream pressure against a downstream state’s determined effort to liberate itself from the repercussions of its geopolitical position.

T H E DA M A N D T H E N I L E WAT E R S Q U E S T I O N

The plans for the Aswan High Dam naturally brought up again the question of the division of Nile waters, just as similar large man-made structures do in international river basins all around the globe. How should the stored water be shared among the riparians? The dam provided London with an opportunity for raising the question of water-sharing in the basin as a whole, both for the benefit of upstream countries and as a move in Suez diplomacy. Since Britain had been the architect of previous agreements and still controlled colonies upstream in the Nile basin, Eden, Macmillan and Selwyn Lloyd thought that by being a partner in the discussions and planning to tame the entire Nile, London was in a better position to influence the geopolitical map of the Nile basin and to maintain privileges at Suez. In November 1948 Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, had already asked the Foreign Office to prepare a memorandum for the Cabinet on the whole question of the Nile waters. It was clear to everyone that past policies had to be reconsidered, partly as a result of the Colonial Development Act, which urged the colonies to devise their own development plans, partly as a result of Egypt’s growing strength in the basin, and partly because of American ‘intrusion’ into the Nile basin of a seriously weakened empire. The Colonial Secretary had told him that, whenever the Colonial Office put forward development schemes for Uganda, he ‘always came up against the Foreign Office’s objections based on the existing Nile Agreement’.93 Bevin argued that the British could not ‘allow Egypt to hold up all development in this area’, and that Egypt would be in an impossible position as a result of its ‘obstinacy over the Nile Agreement’. Egypt held up not only rational development of the water supply but also ‘social reform throughout the whole Nile Valley’.94 The Sudan Independence Front had recently issued a ‘Memorandum on the Nile Waters Distribution’, signed by Miralai Abdullah Bey Khalil, Secretary-General of the Umma Party, and Ahmed Yousif Hashim, Secretary-General of the Front. The pamphlet criticised the 1929 Agreement for limiting the Sudan’s share to 300,000 acres, and the fact that the Sudan was not permitted to draw a drop of water, except for domestic purposes, between 1 April and 21 July. The Agreement had thus deprived the Sudan of all-important summer cultivation, and the Sudan had been ‘used as an Egyptian reservoir’. It concluded that Egypt had been acting in the Sudan with ‘the sole motive of furthering her own economic interests’. They demanded an International Commission to rule on this vital question. The Foreign Office minuted that this showed the interest the Sudanese ‘take in Nile waters and how careful we must be to protect Sudanese interests’.95 Bevin’s proposal for a Nile Valley Board came to nothing, as we have seen, and was regarded as both naïve and badly timed by the Foreign Office experts at the time.

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Egypt’s ‘Legitimate Fear’ After the officers’ coup and the plan for the Aswan High Dam, the situation changed, and an idea became urgent again that had been discussed time and again in Whitehall since the beginning of the 1920s. By the end of June 1953 Dodds-Parker, who had spent many years in the Sudan Political Service, sent a ‘very personal’ letter to Selwyn Lloyd about Nile waters. Dodds-Parker argued that fear of the Sudan Government’s actions over water control, ‘ever since Allenby’s action after Lee Stack’s murder, is the only legitimate fear Egypt has’. 1954 would see a new development: the new Sudanese Assembly which was to be elected on 15 October 1953 would demand a larger share in the waters. He proposed that Britain should suggest a conference with a view to establishing a Nile Valley Commission, to take place at the end of 1953 with Egypt, the new Sudan Government, Ethiopia and Uganda (or, better still, the East African High Commission).96 Selwyn Lloyd replied that he agreed in principle with a Nile Valley Commission, and reminded Dodds-Parker that London had suggested something of the sort to the Egyptians in October 1951, when the Egyptian Government had unilaterally abrogated the Anglo– Egyptian Treaty of 1936 and proclaimed Egyptian rule over the Sudan. London’s proposal had been rejected, and therefore the timing of presenting such a proposal was important.97 In the Sudan, opposition to the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929 hardened, and demands regarding the Aswan Dam escalated by the day. If the Sudan allowed the dam to be built on its own territory, how should it be compensated in water, for example regarding the new Roseiris scheme on the Blue Nile? On 1 September 1953 the Foreign Office obtained a copy of a report on the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ of 26 August between the Umma Party and Egypt. The report ended by emphasising that any attempt by an independent Sudan to tamper with established Egyptian rights ‘on Nile sharing was a matter that to the Egyptians was so sensitive that it would mean a first class row between the two countries’.98 Not long after they lost the election, El Umma, the Umma Party organ, declared that the party had decided to withdraw from the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’, one of the main reasons being the question of the Sudan’s full share in the Nile waters.99 Sudanese nationalism had grown under the gaze of the British-officered Sudan Political Service, and during the 1950s Nile policies had developed to a large degree under the strong influence of British advisors to the Sudan Government. The Sudan had developed its own visions for future exploitation of the Nile. The only concrete project, however, was the Roseiris Dam. The pro-Egyptian Government under Ismail al-Azhari’s leadership continued to issue pump licences, although Egypt had refused to make further advances of available water. Just after Neguib came to power in Egypt, Eden advised Khartoum and informed the Embassy in Cairo that in dealing with the new Government it would ‘seem best not to pull our punches’, but to make modest show of strength ‘in fields where Egypt is most vulnerable’; e.g. Nile waters. Eden noted that the Sudanese need for more water was undoubtedly urgent, and that moreover it was important for internal political

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reasons in the Sudan that the Sudan Government should go on record with a formal request to Egypt for more water. Formal refusal by the Egyptian Government would ‘court adverse reaction from Sudanese and world opinion’.100 In a letter to be presented to the Egyptian Government, Eden asked for at least 200 million cubic metres of additional water, and said that he was sure that Egypt would not wish the vital development of the Sudan to be ‘held up as is now threatened’.101 There was a one- or two-year time lag between when a licence was given and when a pump was installed, and in this way the Sudan Government, with London’s active support, implemented a water withdrawal policy, which was in conflict with Egypt and the 1929 Agreement. This placated the Sudanese elite in both political parties, as many of them were involved in irrigated agriculture. The Cairo Government had no clear line on the issue. Major Salah Salem’s initiatives did not improve things. He twice sent damaging and widely contradictory signals to the Sudan. In the heat of midsummer in Alexandria in 1953, Salem spoke on relations between Egypt and the Sudan and how these were tied to the Nile issue: Britain’s Nile policy was the main obstacle to unity of the Nile valley; the imperialists had convinced the Sudanese that their inability to obtain sufficient water was because of Egypt’s control over the Nile under the 1929 Agreement, a ‘fallacy’ exposed by the Army Movement. After the completion of the High Dam scheme Egypt ‘could supply the Sudan free of charge with 11 times as much Nile water as she was now obtaining’.102 Major Salem’s criticism of Britain struck a chord in the public mind, but his promise was so fantastic as to create backlash against Egypt. His further declarations on the issue during a visit to the Sudan in 1954 made things worse. According to press reports he now said that the Sudanese quota of the Nile waters had not so far been exhausted; that is, there was no water shortage at all. The British had misrepresented the facts. The Governor-General’s refusal to license new agricultural schemes was not only a hindrance to the country’s development, but was also aimed at destroying the relationship between Egypt and the Sudan, by blaming Egypt for the problems of the Sudan. One of the most vocal Umma politicians, Abdul Rahman Abdoun, former Under-Secretary in the Irrigation Department, immediately issued a counter-statement, trying to show that Salem’s statement was intended to mislead the Sudanese people.103 The British in Khartoum noted yet again, as they had done since 1900, that the Nile issue was a question of a vital conflict of interest between the two countries. At this crucial juncture in regional politics, the British should not let ‘Salem or any other Egyptian get away with propagating the specious idea that this conflict does not exist’.104 There can be no doubt that the British Government and British officials in the Sudan exaggerated the water crisis there at the time, but the Egyptian Government belittled it by saying that the whole issue of water shortage was an imperial plot. These positions did not hold out much promise for agreement. At the beginning of 1955, the gap between Egypt and the Sudan seemed impossible to bridge. The Sudan Government stated in a secret note, which was circulated among Sudanese politicians and eventually published in ‘order to put pressure on Egypt’, that the Sudan used only 4 billion while Egypt used 48 billion cubic metres

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of water annually. The total amount of water available from 1 January to 15 July was 1413 million cubic metres, and when allowances had been made for evaporation losses at Sennar the net amount remaining was said to be 1276 million. At the same time, the Government estimated the total irrigable area in the Sudan to be ‘undoubtedly’ very large (the note suggested ‘at least 5 million feddans in the Northern Sudan’). Water, not land, was described as the limiting factor. On this basis, the Sudanese representatives should in future Nile negotiations put forward a claim for a share of 35 billion cubic metres in the natural flow of the Nile as measured at Aswan. This would leave Egypt 49 billion instead of the 48 it used at the time. The Sudan was not prepared to ‘bear any part of the losses’ that resulted from the operation of the High Dam reservoir. Egypt’s offer was only 9.5 billion. Owing to this discrepancy – 35 versus 9.5 – talks with Egypt broke down. The note argued in favour of the Cory principle, stating that, if implemented in 1920, it would have given the Sudan 23 billion cubic metres. Since then the Sudan had developed ‘enormously’, and if 23 billion cubic metres was a reasonable share 34 years ago, it was beyond all dispute, the Government stated, that the Sudan was now entitled to a larger share. Therefore, the note concluded, the claim for 35 billion was ‘eminently reasonable’.105 London had to perform a balancing act: on the one hand it saw the water issue as dividing Egypt and the Sudan, but the Sudan should not seem so unreasonable as to jeopardise London’s negotiations with Egypt.106 The British Government showed sympathy with the demands of the Sudan Government, but it was impossible to adopt them all. What was important was to help the Sudan on its way to independence; in July 1955 Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi began actively to propagandise for a plebiscite to decide the Sudan’s future,107 and in November the leaders of the Khatmiyya and the Ansar met and agreed on full Sudanese independence under a national government. Throughout 1955 the British Governor-General was constantly sending reminders to London about Britain’s obligations. It would be ‘little short of disastrous’ if London supported the dam unless the Sudan had come to an agreement with Egypt beforehand. ‘It would be taken as the strongest possible evidence that H.M.G. have lost interest in the future of the Sudan and are prepared to support Egypt regardless of the harm done to the Sudanese.’ 108 Khartoum was worried that it would be overlooked. The Governor-General’s Office at the end of January asked London to put pressure on the World Bank to hear the Sudanese point of view.109 The contact was with Iliff, the senior British member of the permanent staff. Iliff told the British that it was ‘unthinkable’ that the Bank should lend money to Egypt for the High Aswan, unless it was quite satisfied that there existed a satisfactory agreement between Egypt and the Sudan on the use of Nile waters. After meetings in Britain with Black in February, London thought it certain that this assessment was correct.110 The Foreign Office again pointed out strongly that until an ‘amicable settlement’ of the Nile waters issue between Egypt and the Sudan had been reached, nothing should be done that might be regarded as ‘supporting the Egyptian case’, since to do so might weaken anti-Egyptian forces in the Sudan.

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In April 1955, new talks had begun in Cairo on Nile-sharing issues, but they made no progress.111 Egypt proposed using population as the basis for dividing the water, but the way in which it did so was not accepted by the Sudan’s representatives. Three factors were put forward: a) the crop factor, i.e. the amount of water necessary to produce a comparable crop, taking into account differences in rainfall, b) ‘consumptive use factor’, i.e. the amount of water ideally necessary to produce the best possible crop, taking into account the efficiency of field irrigation (if one assumed, as the Sudanese did, that irrigation was equally efficient in the two countries, the consumptive-use ration could be regarded as identical to the crop factor), c) gross factor, i.e. the amount of water normally applied to a given area of land, irrespective of the size or frequency of the crop produced. Of these, factors a) and b) would probably, it was thought, make very little difference to the ratio obtained by comparing population, but c) would give the Egyptians a big advantage because they irrigated far more extensively. For example they produced three crops in two years on much of their land, compared with the Gezira Scheme, where the Sudanese took an average of one crop every two years. The Egyptians offered the Sudanese eight billion cubic metres based on estimations that the Sudan’s population was about one-quarter of Egypt’s, the gross factor was one half of Egypt’s, therefore the Sudan should get one eighth of the surplus water; that is, four billion. This made a total of eight billion cubic metres of the natural flow as measured at Aswan, which was less than the 9.5 billion Egypt had offered in 1954. Khartoum’s demand was 36.5 billion. The negotiations broke down, and neither Morrice, the Sudan Government nor the Foreign Office could see any alternative to resorting to arbitration, Khartoum primarily with the aim of being allocated more water, while London saw it as a stalling device. That same month the Foreign Office received two notes on the April negotiations by the British irrigation expert in the Sudanese administration, which were thought useful. Morrice considered the prospects gloomy regarding a water agreement. Britain should therefore go to the World Bank as an arbiter, since their ‘impartiality is beyond doubt’. If the Egyptians refused to arbitration or the World Bank as arbiter, this would put them in the wrong in the eyes of the world and would ‘strengthen the position of Sudan correspondingly’. But where Morrice saw the interests of the Sudan and the British in the Sudan, London regarded the World Bank with distrust, and partly as an instrument for Washington’s efforts to enhance its position in Egypt. The Egyptian Government representative (Salah Hilal) reviewed Egyptian– Sudanese discussions on the distribution of Nile waters in a talk broadcast on Radio Cairo’s Sudan programme on 3 August, saying that it had become clear that the British would seize any opportunity to sow dissension between Egypt and the Sudan. The offer to share the waters on a fifty-fifty basis with the Sudan was repeated. Egypt wanted to ‘ward off the shadow’ of the British and stop ‘intriguers and misleading propaganda’. When the Egyptians accused the British of encouraging the Sudanese to put forth excessive water demands, London argued that, in the case of the Sudan, they had been ‘careful not to interfere in order that the Sudan Government might make its own choice about the future of the country

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and other matters’.112 According to newspaper reports al-Azhari agreed to the new Egyptian proposal, and stood up in Khartoum on the day of the Nile festival, accepting Egypt’s offer. But al-Azhari soon afterwards asked the editor of Al-Alam to deny the report of the Government’s approval, and banned the newspaper. The cause of all this, the Egyptians argued, was the influence of those who did not want an agreement: e.g. Britain and the US. The Egyptian also warned that the British wanted to bring in the East African territories and rhetorically asked: ‘What would happen if these countries infiltrated, through the Nile waters question, into the political scene?’ The Cairo Embassy asked the Foreign Office for the supply of the text of the Egyptian offer,113 and Khartoum sent it by diplomatic bag to London three days later, asking the Foreign Office to ‘treat it with utmost secrecy’.114 The Governor-General also sent a personal letter presenting the Sudanese position, and reported a meeting he had had with al-Azhari.115 He stated that al-Azhari was ‘severely critical of the High Aswan scheme altogether’ and preferred control works upstream. The Governor-General also said that he had ‘the feeling’ that the Prime Minister might settle for something between 14 billion and 20 billion cubic metres of Nile waters.116 Discussions broke down on 7 April and resumed in May between al-Azhari and Salem. The Agreement they reached provided that the net amount of surplus water (that is, the amount of water seen as running to waste in the sea) should, after deduction of the amount lost to evaporation, be divided equally between the Sudan and Egypt. Subsequently the British Ambassador told Fawzi, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, that the East African Territories, Ethiopia and the Belgian Congo could not be overlooked.117 Later in the summer al-Azhari told the British that they had decided to reject the Egyptian ‘fifty-fifty’ offer on the division, their motives being ‘mainly political’, according to the British: they had made ‘for themselves out of the Nile Waters issue a first-class grouse against the Egyptians and they are, understandably enough, unwilling to relinquish it’. This would raise the bitterest resentment in Egypt and drive Salah Salem into a frenzy.118 During the summer of 1955, London was approached by the US Government to put pressure upon the Sudanese in order to find some means of breaking the deadlock. Macmillan was against trying to persuade either party to accept a division of ‘whose fairness we cannot be sure’.119 He informed Cairo, but as yet not the US or the Bank, that they must also bring in the interests of the East African Territories.

The ‘Natural Force of Africa Ungripped’ The British colonial territories also had an interest in seeing that Egypt did not, by the construction of the High Dam, establish under international law a new practice of Nile sharing before the territories had stated their claim.120 The Colonial Office asked the Foreign Office to instruct the Ambassador in Cairo to approach the Egyptian Government (after discussions with P.P. Howell, the previous leader of the Jonglei Investigation Team) on the following carefully formulated line: ‘The Aswan High Dam, while clearly of immediate concern only to Egypt and the Sudan, will

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in fact be used to store natural surpluses of water originating in British East African territories’.121 The East African colonies now voiced strong opposition to the 1929 Agreement. The development of the region met an Anglo–Egyptian barrier imposed in the past, but a barrier, a limit on development, that Egypt allegedly sought to maintain and which, according to legal experts, it had a right to maintain. Even when obtaining water from draining swamps that would not otherwise have reached the Nile or Lake Victoria (and thus could not directly adversely affect Egypt’s interests), they might come up against an argument not easy to reject, a Foreign Office expert stated in 1955:122 the Egyptians might argue that draining swamps would lead to a reduction in rainfall over the lake catchment area. The British Government, wishing to be regarded as a benevolent imperialist that had come of age, could act as spokesman for these colonial territories, not against a European or Western ally, but against an Arab and African country with enormous and growing prestige in the anti-colonial struggle in the whole of Africa. The colonial administrators now demanded more water for the East African Territories.123 The Governor of Uganda was extremely critical of the commitment that London and Lord Lloyd had made to Egypt in 1929. Churchill’s My African Journey from 1908 was invoked. ‘So much power running to waste, such a coign of vantage unoccupied, such a level to control, the natural force of Africa ungripped?’ In Tanganyika press reports appeared, hammering at the Nile Agreement, and reporting on a ‘secret’ proposal for watering the whole Lake Province in Northern Tanganyika from Lake Victoria. The high level of secrecy over the project was because the whole scheme ‘hinged on the water agreement’.124 It was hoped this survey in northern Tanganyika would ‘eventually to lead to one of the largest irrigation schemes ever to be drawn up in the world’. Another article appeared on 1 August, expressing sympathy with those members of the Tanganyika Legislative Council from the Lake Province who worded their complaints with phrases such as ‘all that water at our doorsteps in the lake, but we cannot get any for our houses’. The article continued that Lake Victoria and the Nile were two of the biggest things in Africa, and highly important to East Africa but vital to Egypt and the Sudan – ‘matters in fact of life and death’. Therefore proper investigations and negotiations should take place. The Foreign Office regarded it as undesirable to approach the Egyptian Government at that time, partly because the East African Government had not yet completed an assessment of its needs and partly because it would reinforce Egyptian distrust of British intentions. The Egyptians would realise the effect such a claim might have on any arrangements for sharing Nile waters.125 Khartoum urged London not to bring up the question of the East African territories at this juncture.126 Since the Nile negotiations had broken down, the Foreign Office saw no reason to follow the Colonial Office’s advice. How to raise the water needs of the East African Territories gradually became a more central diplomatic issue. London recognised from the outset that the amounts of water required would be relatively small, and that it therefore ought not exaggerate the magnitude of the issue. The British Embassy in Cairo advised Macmillan to place less emphasis on the place of origin of the water in question than the Colonial Office had done in its note. The best moment to

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introduce it formally would be when the Royal Commission on Land and Population in East Africa published its report.127 During the autumn, the British in Khartoum and the Foreign Office discussed Nile waters tactics. Khartoum first advised against proposing talks on the wider Nile-sharing issue to the Sudan Government. When the issue of independence by plebiscite or more direct means was in the balance, it would be dangerous to raise this. The Sudan Government might fear reviving Egyptian suspicions and make Egypt more reluctant to accede to the Sudan’s decision without delay.128 In late September, Khartoum urged London not to open Nile waters talks with Egypt, lest Egypt grant Sudanese independence at a price that would include settlement over the Nile waters.129 A complete deadlock in negotiations was in line with British interests.130 Macmillan decided that Khartoum representations should be made ‘confidentially’ to the Sudanese Prime Minister, leaving with him a brief letter ‘reserving the rights of the East African territories’, at the same time as he would be handed a memorandum embodying British views on tripartite technical discussions. The Embassy in Cairo transmitted a copy of the Report of the Royal Commission on Land and Population in East Africa to the Egyptian and Sudanese Governments,131 which drew attention to the importance of irrigation developments for the next phase of agricultural expansion in the three territories, and referred explicitly to the inhibiting effect of the Nile Waters Agreement. On 22 November 1955 the British Ambassador in Cairo, in line with Macmillan’s instructions,132 presented a Note to the Egyptian Government stating that Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika needed additional Nile water in order to fulfil the irrigation projects they had in mind, and that their precise requirements were being calculated. Britain wished, therefore, to bring to the notice of the Egyptian Government the interest of these territories and formally to ‘reserve their rights to negotiate on their behalf with the Egyptian and Sudanese Governments at the appropriate time for an agreed share of the water’.133 At the time when this pledge was given, London and Washington thought that it would be very difficult to reach an agreement on the Nile waters. On 21 November the Foreign Office was informed secretly of the Sudan Government’s answer to Egypt’s proposal.134 The demands were such that the Egyptians could never accept them, just as the British Government had expected. The Washington Embassy was instructed to inform the US Government that London knew or understood that the Sudan Government had replied to the Egyptian Government’s offer on the division of Nile waters, but should ‘not reveal that we know what is in the reply’. The Ambassador should then repeat British willingness, if approached by both parties, to ‘assist in any way in our power towards an agreement’.135 To present water agreements as a precondition for Anglo–American support for Stage Two of the Aswan project would therefore either delay the project or put pressure on Egypt to renegotiate the Nile Agreement in favour of the upstream states. Nasser’s position would be weakened in either scenario. But just as importantly, London thought that Britain could exercise upstream leverage as a partner to these discussions. At this stage it would be unwise to put the solution of the Nile-water issue explicitly as a condition for support of Stage Two. And if the issue, against all odds, had been

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solved, what would be left in the diplomatic bag? In 1955 and early 1956 the question of overall management and the division of the Nile waters was not raised as a condition by London. It must wait because, as Bevin had experienced and Selwyn Lloyd noted in 1951, the main challenge was to find the right opportunity to bring it up.

N E G OT I AT I O N S B E T W E E N D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 5 A N D J U LY 1 9 5 6

Between December 1955 and July 1956, the US and UK governments and the World Bank had a large number of discussions and meetings while hundreds of secret memos and letters were exchanged in order to decide on the policy to follow regarding the Aswan Dam. They had offered to help Nasser build a dam across the Nile – creating the biggest man-made lake in the world, surrounded by the Saharan desert – but how were they to reap the political benefits of this enormous project? The British Government was still concerned about the role of the Consortium. Eden was adamant: the Americans must be pressed to support the Consortium. But the Americans had noted from day one Britain’s dependence on the US for maintaining its position in Egypt and the Nile valley. George Humphrey, the American Treasury Secretary, ridiculed London’s position, saying that London’s policy was that ‘they’d [the US] take ten per cent and we’d take ninety per cent’.136 In discussions with Hilmi and Dr Kassouni of the Egyptian Government, London had urged Egypt to give the contract to the European Consortium, at least in the first stage. This effort at covert support for European and British financial interests was regarded as a touchy issue by the British Government. Makins tried to intervene, insisting that the Egyptians were not now arguing in favour of giving the Consortium Stage One of the project, because there might ‘be an explosion’ in the US. The Americans might suspect that the British Government and the Consortium had prevailed on the Egyptian Government representative on his way through London. He added that the Americans will undoubtedly regard this move as a ‘dirty trick’ and an attempt to get the Consortium in by the back door.137 If this ‘became known’ to the Americans, the British Embassy warned, then they ‘should indeed be in an invidious position’.138 Apparently the US Government was well informed about British wheeling and dealing, but kept their knowledge secret. London’s efforts to win American support for the Consortium were rejected by the Americans, but in a diplomatic way. The US Government could simply reiterate that they were committed to international competitive tendering. Adding insult to injury they asked Eden for real money as the British contribution, and not just a swifter release of Egypt’s blocked sterling balances,139 which at this stage the British hoped to get away with.140 Eden and his Government changed tactics and the aim became to keep ‘in step with the Americans’.141 The British simply could not afford to pursue a policy of their own. They had to act in concert with the Americans. They gave up the idea of pushing the Consortium, because the Americans were ‘suspicious’.142 In January 1956 they told the British interests in the Consortium that they ‘would take a

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very serious view of any attempt on their part to persuade the Egyptians to go ahead without the Bank and the Americans’.143 Secondly, London now put some effort into trying to persuade the Bank to soften its demands and relax its principles, taking upon itself the role of bridging the gap of distrust between the Bank and Nasser. The first step was to get the Bank to ‘consider Nasser’s difficulties sympathetically’; the Bank should also send a representative to Cairo to talk them over with him.144 At a meeting on 14 January, representatives of the US Government (among them Hoover, who chaired the meeting, and Byroade, the American Ambassador to Egypt), the British Embassy (Makins, Flett and Bailey) and the World Bank (Black and Rucinski) discussed the attitude and future policy of the Bank.145 A starting point was Nasser’s objections, as reported by Byroade. These objections were well understood. The Bank’s letter of intent could not be published because Nasser’s opponents would criticise him for having sold out to imperialism. It would be said that the Bank had acquired a veto over Egypt’s economic policy.146 London urged an immediate start-up of the first stage of the project. In particular, the note stressed, it was important that the terms offered should be carefully designed ‘not to wound national susceptibilities’ in Egypt.147 The Bank drafted a ‘memorandum of understanding’ to meet Nasser’s objections.148 Later Black reported that the Egyptians were worried about possible reductions in other American aid, how this would affect the financing of the final stage, and the foreign exchange expenditure that would be required over and above the Bank loan. Eden and the British Government urged the Bank to pay heed to Egypt’s objections,149 calling the more liberal proposals a ‘great improvement on the draft, which Black took with him to Cairo in that they commit the Bank more firmly’.150 Black made some more concessions, the Egyptians did not accept the amendment to paragraph 4, and Black dropped it. This information reached the Foreign Office late in the evening of 9 February.151 Later that night the indefatigable Trevelyan sent another telegram, reporting in more detail on recent developments and that the Egyptians wanted to have ‘one more shot at trying to get us to change the language of the aides-memoires’. Trevelyan thought that the Egyptians would ‘give way in the end’.152 However, there was an additional difficulty, for the Bank still insisted on putting all contracts to international tender as usual. The US Government declared its reluctance to contribute to the project if American firms could not bid for the contracts. Britain and Egypt preferred that the first phase should be negotiated with the Consortium, the latter in the interest of speed. On this Black and the World Bank were adamant. In none of the letters and secret telegrams from early 1956 is there any indication that the British wanted the offer withdrawn. Eden on the contrary urged the Bank to accept the Egyptian reservations and was jubilant when the Bank apparently committed itself even more definitely to the dam project. On the other hand the British Government planned to put more pressure upon Egypt regarding the overall Nile question. They were comforted by reports to the effect that, if anything, the Sudanese attitude had hardened.153 On 8 February, Makins referred to a proposal in Eden’s letter about the conditions for Stage Two; the words ‘after a satisfactory

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solution of the legal problems affecting the High Dam project have been worked out’ should be changed to ‘after a satisfactory solution of the Nile water rights matter’.154

T H E T WO - PA RT S T R AT E G Y A N D T H E N I L E WAT E R S

As was to be expected, the Government in Khartoum complained to the world, and the British advisors there complained to the Foreign Office. They had heard on the BBC that Britain and the US had agreed to help Egypt. They wrote that they assumed that ‘any assistance would be conditional upon prior composition of differences between Egypt and Sudan’.155 London answered that, in light of the Soviet threat, it had to give Egypt a positive offer, but stressed that Britain had promised support only for the first phase of the project and that any further support would depend ‘inter alia on a settlement of the Nile Waters dispute’. In addition, Khartoum was informed that Stage One would take four years to implement.156 The attitude of the Sudan was very important both to Britain and Egypt. The Egyptian public regarded the Sudan as part of Egypt, and wanted it to vote for ‘unity with Egypt’ in the coming referendum. The British worked for an independent pro-British Sudan, trying to maintain its value as an upstream card to be played against Egyptian nationalism. The Sudan was the only upstream power to be directly affected by the Aswan Dam, and was also the only country in the basin that had a sufficiently clear idea about its water needs. It was therefore in line with British wishes that the Sudan Government, at the end of 1955, called the pledge a ‘sell-out’ to Egyptian interests. On 14 December 1955 the Government published a pamphlet with its views. The essence of the official Sudanese view on the future use of Nile waters was contained in three conditions under which the Sudan Government was prepared to agree to the construction of the High Dam. The third condition (the making of adequate arrangements for resettlement of the population of Wadi Halfa) was the first to require satisfaction. The works necessary to provide for the settlement of 50,000 or so people (that was the estimate at the time) were judged by Sudan Government circles to require some five to seven years. Thus, if Sudanese rights were to be safeguarded, it was argued, start of work on the first stage ‘must either be put off until resettlement works are well under way, or the Egyptians must be prepared for a pause’ of a few years between the ‘first part’ and the ‘second part’ of the High Dam works. Adams in Khartoum continued: But action such as Her Majesty’s Government’s unconditional participation in financing the High Dam, can only serve to make the Sudanese more obdurate and more critical of Her Majesty’s Government’s part in the business. This cannot fail to be prejudicial to our interests, both by prolonging old frictions between Egypt and the Sudan and by hardening opinion here against any future award of rights to the British East African territories.157 London’s decision to back the Aswan Dam without even talking to the Sudan Government was a breach of promise. Morrice wrote a very critical letter to Dodds-Parker

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at the Foreign Office. ‘What will H.M.G. do if the S.G. refuses to evacuate Halfa? Would you advocate drowning the inhabitants of Halfa like rats in a trap?’ 158 Three days before the declaration of independence, Khartoum informed London that Morrice had been shown ‘in strict confidence’ a letter from the Egyptian Minister of Public Works to the Sudanese Minister of Irrigation. In this letter the Egyptian Government refused the request for seasonal loan of water of the order which had been granted in recent years, asserted that it considered the provisions of the 1929 Agreement as binding, refused permission for the construction of the Roseiris dam and stated that it was uncommitted by any offer made in recent negotiations with the Sudanese.159 The prospects of an agreement were consequently described as ‘more remote than ever’. London urged Khartoum not to accept the 1929 Agreement as binding and proposed that the unofficial condition related to Nile waters ‘could, perhaps, be mentioned in confidence to Mr Morrice’.160 This would calm down his and Sudanese opposition to the Anglo–American offer, because it made the project less realistic. The Times also carried an article on Sudanese protests. Under the title ‘Sudan objects to High Dam’, the article stated that there had been few examples in history of a nation so coolly preparing to convert part of its neighbour into a lake. Egypt was described as willing to divide the surplus water equally between itself and the Sudan, meaning the surplus after construction of the dam, not before. The Sudanese argument was described as a better way of using the Nile, by treating it as a ‘hydrological unity’, which meant building numbers of smaller dams at several places (including Aswan).161 London’s Aswan strategy was now fairly clear: it had never considered ‘unconditional’ participation in the financing of the dam. The question had always been how and when to play the upstream card. Now the time had arrived. Eden minuted: ‘But we are not committed to help in Dam project unless Sudan has fair show from Egypt. We should surely tell Sudanese this or something like this.’162 On 6 January 1956 the Foreign Office received from the Colonial Office a study for which they had asked: ‘Note of East African Interest in Nile Waters’.163 Everyone knew that interest would be modest compared to those of Egypt and the Sudan. But the important point was that raising the question of rights would require either a revision or a reinterpretation of the Nile Waters Agreement. It was noted that the African territories would not be ready for formal negotiations on all points before early 1957,164 that is after Stage One of the High Dam was well under way, according to the offer presented on 15 December 1955. The British paid increasing attention to the overall Nile waters issue during the first months of 1956.165 In January the Foreign Office took the opportunity to explain to the Bank the British interests in other irrigation schemes in the Nile valley – not only in the Sudan, but also in Ethiopia and East Africa.166 The British knew that the Bank wanted to present Nasser with an alternative to its original offer. Black argued that the Bank’s own propositions, which provided for the whole scheme, would be preferred by Nasser instead of the two-part strategy advocated by London.167 But the two-part offer was not changed.

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In January and February there were discussions in London about how far the British were committed by offers to contribute to the first stage of the High Dam Project.168 These deliberations were affected by reports from Cairo that Nasser was now convinced that he should try to obtain an immediate agreement with the Sudan, and that it would be against Egyptian interests to start the construction of the dam until agreement had been reached.169 On 10 February a joint statement was issued by Black and the Egyptian Government. An agreement had been reached, covering the basis of the Bank’s participation necessary for financing the foreign-exchange cost of the project, for an amount equivalent to $200 million.170 The British Government acted immediately. Selwyn Lloyd told Cairo that he was concerned about an early agreement between Egypt and the Sudan on Nile Waters: ‘Can you say, without approaching Egyptian officials, whether Nasser assumes that our contribution to the first stage will begin to flow when he is ready for it even if the Nile Waters question has not then been settled?’ He also wondered whether Nasser realised that an essential ingredient of any settlement with British support was Sudanese ability to seek financial assistance from the West. Selwyn Lloyd knew that the Sudan could not do this, as it had no currency of its own and therefore could join neither the International Monetary Fund nor the Bank.171 In the Sudan there was growing agitation for revision of the Nile Treaty. Trevelyan informed London of Nasser’s annoyance over this, and that he believed that the British were behind it. Pamphlets on the water question, ‘hostile to Egyptian interests, had been issued by British officers in the Sudan’.172 The first sentence on page three of the Sudanese Ministry of Irrigation’s recently published pamphlet stated: ‘The Sudan does not dispute rights which have been established where her hands have been tied, but she claims that the time has now come to change the Nile Waters Agreement’. Revision of the Agreement would be considered at the same time as the division of the new waters was decided upon. According to Trevelyan, the Egyptians had every right to expect Britain’s support in ensuring that the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement remained in force, until amended or replaced by mutual agreement.173 London disagreed. In February, Selwyn Lloyd sent a telegram to Khartoum about the legality of this Agreement. He stated that although the Agreement was of the kind that normally would survive a change of sovereignty, legal advisors considered that the Sudanese could make out a fairly good case for holding that they were not bound by it. He continued, ‘I do not wish you to become involved in this question in any way that might suggest we are taking sides, particularly while further negotiations on future division of Nile Waters are being arranged. Nor is any British interest involved.’174 The British Ambassador in Washington reported that the State Department had started to question its own earlier agreement about financing the dam.175 The US Government said it was its understanding that the contribution to the first stage was ‘not in any way dependent on a priori settlement of the Nile waters question and that this was made clear in the aides-memoires’. The State Department further noted that Nasser’s statement to Black that he would not make a start until such an agreement had been reached presented certain domestic difficulties to the US

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Government. It would have to find ways and means of putting its contribution of $55 million into cold storage, if there were any delay as a result of the new Egyptian attitude on this point.176 The US Government regarded the British two-stage plan as a model that would favour only London in the current circumstances. On 20 February, therefore, the Foreign Office noted that the Egyptian Government’s decision not to start work until it had reached agreement with the Sudan was ‘rather unpalatable to the Americans’.177 In January and February a number of minutes were produced in the Foreign Office regarding the division of Nile waters. So far as the British knew at the time, the negotiations between Egypt and the Sudan rested, formally speaking, on Salah Salem’s letter of 25 July 1955 to al-Azhari, and the Sudanese Minister of Irrigation’s reply of 24 November 1955. Hitherto the discussion had been confined to the question of how to divide the present natural flow, which went to ‘waste in the sea’. The generally agreed amount involved was 32 billion cubic metres, of which it was calculated that about 12 billion cubic metres would evaporate in the High Dam reservoir, leaving about 20 billion cubic metres to be divided. The British Embassy in Cairo proposed broadening the question under discussion, to include certain types of what was called ‘unnatural’ water, that is water additional to the natural flow of the river, which would or could become available as a result of conservation projects on the Nile other than the High Dam (Lake Victoria and the Jonglei scheme were especially mentioned). If these waters were included, it was argued, the Sudanese might perhaps be prepared to offer the Egyptians a larger share of the existing natural surplus of 32 billion cubic metres in return for Egyptian recognition that the greater proportion, if not all, of future additions to the White Nile water should be reserved for the Sudan or the East African territories.178 London was very unwilling to contemplate this.179 Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya strongly objected to the proposal suggested by the Cairo Embassy,180 and argued that London did not fully appreciate the strength of feeling that existed upstream. The British learned for certain that, after Nasser’s negotiations with Black in January, the Egyptians would start only some minor preliminary works until the Nile waters question with the Sudan was settled. This was described as involving ‘a fundamental change’ in Egyptian policy with implications for British tactics. Those implications were examined and discussed with the Americans and the Bank in Washington, in February and March.181 While this reassessment was taking place, the British propaganda machine worked at full steam all over the world, publicising the Agreement between the Bank and the Egyptian Government. However, a confidential Commonwealth Relations Office memorandum issued at the end of February revealed the Sudan’s Note to the IBRD, and the three conditions on which it would agree to the building of the dam.182

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A GIFT AND A GUN

The policy of the British Government during this period has been described as full of contradictions: on the one hand it had secretly discussed military operations against Egypt; on the other, Britain planned to give £5.5 million to Nasser.183 Eden’s policy had aims that were incompatible, but not in the way it has usually been analysed. The ‘gift’ was at all times conceived as a threat in disguise. Even a pro-Russian Egypt could be given the project, as long as the donors, owing to the character of the pledge and the project set-up, retained the potential to put leverage on Nasser. Egypt’s downstream position made it extremely vulnerable. The British hoped that upstream presence and upstream pressure, that is the justifiable and reasonable demand that a new Nile Waters Agreement with the other riparians must be negotiated and finalised beforehand, provided this card. The problem with this policy emerged when it seemed Egypt was prepared to enter into agreement with the Sudan. On March 1, Selwyn Lloyd paid a visit to Cairo, and repeated the pledge to help finance the Aswan Dam. Egypt’s Vice-President suggested that Britain’s grant should be paid in full before work on the project started, as a gesture of ‘good will’. Eden minuted: ‘We could never agree to these greedy demands’ and ‘they certainly won’t get the money at present’.184 Egypt’s request was rejected immediately. On the same day Eden warned Eisenhower about Egyptian and Russian collaboration to destroy the Baghdad Pact, which he again asked the US to join, and said that a ‘policy of appeasement will bring us nothing in Egypt’.185 Trevelyan cabled again to London, reiterating that the Egyptian Government preferred to do business with the West. The Egyptians, however, were suspicious about the West’s commitment, and had now revised their plans. The Egyptian Government had decided not to start the work until agreement with the Sudan had been reached and the necessity for the division of the work into two stages had disappeared.186 Eden now stated, ‘It is either him or us, don’t forget that’.187 He had admitted earlier the same month, ‘we are at our best in a mess’.188 On 21 March, Selwyn Lloyd proposed to the Cabinet that British policy should be to counter and isolate Nasser by strengthening the Baghdad Pact, supporting British friends in the area and withdrawing the offer to finance the Aswan project together with the Americans. While Britain had criticised Egypt for years for acting as if the country owned the flow of the Nile, London now changed tactics. To Selwyn Lloyd, on 18 March, Eden minuted that they had ‘no present interest in bringing Egypt and Sudan together or in pressing on with the [Aswan High] Dam’.189 Let the ‘project linger on’, Eden suggested.

T H E R I PA R I A N I S S U E – AG A I N

On 29 March, London told its Ambassador in Khartoum to assure the Sudanese that their interests had ‘indeed been constantly in our minds’ throughout the negotiations about the Aswan Dam. He should also stress that no money would be

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given to Egypt before ‘all legal difficulties are out of the way’. Nasser, Selwyn Lloyd told the Ambassador, had recently stated, ‘though not publicly, that he will not start any work before reaching agreement with the Sudanese. You should not explain this to the Sudanese at this stage.’ A further consideration, Selwyn Lloyd stated, was that Nasser was as well aware as the Sudanese that ‘they can hold him to ransom on this issue’. But he did not want to give Nasser the impression that London was ‘conspiring against his legitimate interests’. It was therefore important to ‘avoid saying things to the Sudanese (who pass them to Nasser) which could be interpreted in this way’.190 The British feared that Nasser might solve both the Nile waters and currency problems in meetings with al-Azhari. Egypt asked the British to press the Sudan to reach an agreement with Egypt before the dam was built. The British did not want this now as it would empty their diplomatic bag. At the end of March Eden was told that the Egyptians believed they would have no difficulty in getting the Sudanese to make a division of the waters on ‘the lines of their proposals and to agree to the Sudanese currency being backed only by Egyptian bonds, if we were not for political reasons instructing the British advisors in the Sudan to get the Sudanese to put up their terms’.191 Kaissouni also voiced his suspicion about the two British advisors to the Sudan Government.192 Trevelyan had once more explained that they were not subject to the British Government’s orders, but were merely technical advisors for whose actions the Sudanese Ministers were responsible.193 The Sudan Government asked Britain to announce that it would not hand over any money to the Egyptians before an agreement had been reached with the Sudan. Both Trevelyan and the Foreign Office thought this unwise, in late April 1956. Nasser could then say that the statement was issued ‘in order to try and make an agreement on the waters more difficult’.194

L E T T H E N E G OT I AT I O N S ‘ L A N G U I S H ’

The Sudanese Minister of Irrigation was reported to have stated, on leaving for Khartoum on 13 May, that his preliminary talks in Cairo on Nile waters ‘were crowned with success’. The British Ambassador in Cairo now felt that there was a genuine desire to reach agreement on the question.195 The Prime Minister had just before minuted: ‘Should not our line be that we cannot agree until Sudan is in line and East Africa etc.? And then take our time about that.’ 196 The line for discussion with Egypt was set out. Stage One would be conditional on a settlement of the Nile waters question. The aim should be to move from a two-stage to a unified project. The State Department also proposed bringing in Ethiopia and the East African Territories.197 On 25 May the Foreign Office replied along the following lines: the British policy was to allow negotiations to ‘languish’. The objective was to postpone the decision ‘for as long as possible’. They were concerned that a prior agreement should be reached with the Sudanese but also ‘that there should be no doubt that the Egyptian

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and Sudanese Governments recognise the rights of the East African territories’. London objected, however, to the State Department’s idea of ‘making use’ of the Ethiopian interest in the Nile Waters. The reason given to the US Government was that it might appear to Nasser as a ‘move to postpone progress indefinitely and as deliberately intended to predicate a breakdown’.198 But to bring in Ethiopia at this stage might also harm the interests of the Sudan, and strengthen the Americans’ hand in the basin. The Americans asked what it thought of the idea of ‘floating a proposal’ to call a conference of riparian states. Information reaching Washington indicated that the Sudan and Egypt were on the verge of reaching agreement over the division of the Nile waters. If so, this would bring the problem of the pledge for the dam to the forefront. But a conference of riparian states would last some time and serve to ‘postpone the evil day’. London objected to the ‘use of the Ethiopians’, arguing that it was no good for the British or the Americans to put this idea directly to the Sudanese (since it would be leaked to Nasser). Instead they would have ‘to devise some devious method of planting the idea in Khartoum’.199 A couple of days later the Foreign Office produced another note on the Aswan Dam, relating how the British and American Governments had for some time been discussing the financing in the light of Egypt’s changed attitude regarding timing. (Egypt had confidentially made it known in February that it would not embark on the work until agreement had been reached with the Sudan.) This Aswan note was not primarily concerned with the Soviet threat, the Egyptian financial situation or the cotton farmers in the American south, as later became the official justification for the withdrawal of the offer. The Egyptian determination to reach an agreement with the Sudan changed the tactical situation. London now took the view that this plan to solve the water dispute with the Sudan had made ‘the division of the project into two stages not only unnecessary, but undesirable’. The Nile waters issue, settlement of which had been intended as a precondition and to bring London to centre stage, was now to take place before the work started. The Americans, on the other hand, wanted to stand firmly on the original December offers. They feared that the British proposal would inevitably lead to discussions regarding the financing of the whole project. The Communists could still be excluded, they thought, by getting the Egyptians to give a written undertaking to this effect. At the same time London had been examining with ‘the Americans, secretly and at a high level’, whether ‘we should go in with the project at all’. In April the British agreed with Dulles that the project should ‘languish’. Now the Foreign Office hurried ahead, working out a plan for the ‘best use of the Nile waters throughout the valley’.

Count Down A long memorandum, ‘High Aswan Dam’, was drawn up by the Foreign Office in consultation with the Board of Trade, to be considered by the Middle East Official Committee on 13 June.200 The paper set out the arguments for and against the

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project, examined a return to the modest original scheme financed by a commercial Consortium, considered the need for more information from the Americans about their intentions and underlined the importance of getting the Americans to take the initiative. The idea of a riparian conference was thought up as the solution, as it now, surprisingly, seemed likely that Egypt and the Sudan might sort out their differences. The British preferred a sort of Nile Valley Authority, since that would give them a permanent role. Eden hoped that the consideration of this suggestion by the Middle East Official Committee could be ‘expedited as much as possible’.201 The Americans voiced other reservations about a water deal between Egypt and the Sudan. If agreement were reached between Egypt and the Sudan on the lines hinted at, by which Egypt would ‘buy’ water from the Sudan by helping to finance the Roseiris scheme, this would, Washington thought, not only facilitate conclusion of a Soviet–Egyptian deal, but would also create a very substantial common interest between Egypt and the Sudan in the implementation of such a deal once it had been signed. As the Egyptians could not find resources from within their own economy for this purpose, the Russians would presumably have to provide them, and the Sudan would thus be developed, albeit at second hand, by the Russians. With such considerations in mind, the State Department expressed the view that Egyptian– Sudanese agreement on Nile waters would, for the foreseeable future, be undesirable.202 In a telegram to the Embassy in Washington, on 9 July, London suggested the possibility of trying a new approach. They could say that the present scheme was too exclusively focused on Egypt’s needs: that there was a need for a wider scheme ‘bringing in a lot of other affected states’, so that Egypt did not ‘scoop the pool on Nile development’. This would, it was argued, be a difficult charge for Nasser to answer. However, unless some additional arguments were adduced, this would ‘expose us to a charge of breach of faith’. The Foreign Office saw ‘considerable merit’ in the idea, but the Government had not yet made up its mind, and would ‘much value Mr. Dulles’ views’.203 The planning of a conference met with difficulties, however, although it was favoured by both Britain and the US: the Sudanese ‘would be against it’ and the ‘Ethiopians, although it was in [their] favour, would take no initiative’.204 A main public justification for withdrawing the offer in July 1956 was that Egypt had refused to come to terms with the other riparian states. As the Department of State put it: The December offer contemplated an extension by the United States and the United Kingdom of grant aid to help finance certain phases of the work, the effects of which would be confined solely for Egypt, with the understanding that accomplishment of the project as a whole would require a satisfactory resolution of the question of Nile water rights…Developments within the succeeding seven months have not been favourable to the success of the project, and the United States Government has concluded that it is not feasible in present circumstances to participate in the project. Agreement by the riparian states has not been achieved … The United States remains deeply interested in the welfare of the Egyptian people and in the development of the Nile. It is prepared to consider at an appropriate time and at

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the request of the riparian states what steps might be taken toward a more effective utilisation of the water resources of the Nile for the benefit of the peoples of the region.205

The role of the water issue in British and American strategy developed through three different stages. It meant one thing up to 1956, something else in the arguments in justifying withdrawal of the offer, and a third after it became clear that Egypt would go it alone or with Russian support. The problem now, in the weeks before the withdrawal, was that it was becoming more and more obvious that Egypt and the Sudan would manage to reach such an agreement. This would even be a deal that might not be limited to Nile waters: it would also ‘cover political support’.206 When the question was discussed at the Foreign Office in 1955 and 1956 before the offer was revoked, it had been concluded that the Nile Waters Agreement imposed, in effect, an Egyptian veto on the development of irrigation in the Sudan while leaving Egypt free to develop as much as it wished. Was it a law, as they said, of ‘the Medes and Persians which could not be revised by friendly negotiations’? 207 London wanted wide-ranging new discussions on the issue, but not a solution at this time, which was regarded as premature (the East African Territories still had no clear idea of their water requirements), and they could not fully side with the most aggressive Sudanese claims (often formulated by the Irrigation Advisor to the Sudan Government, Morrice, with whom the Foreign Office had close contact). In certain circumstances, this friction in water demands might work to London’s advantage as a ‘counter to Egyptian ambitions in the Upper Nile Valley’. But if London could not, in the current circumstances, fully support the Sudanese against Egypt, it must at least avoid the appearance of siding with Egypt against the Sudanese. Whatever assurances London gave, it was noted, no Sudanese would believe ‘in his heart of hearts’ that, having invested so much in Phase One of the High Dam, Britain would ever be willing to throw it all away if an agreed settlement were not reached before Phase Two, or that London would refrain in the absence of such agreement from putting pressure on the Sudanese to reach a settlement disadvantageous to them.208 So when Nasser declared that he wanted to reach an agreement with the Sudan before starting on the project, the rationale for financing the various stages of the work in different ways was removed.209 London had lost leverage. The line in both Washington and London had been ‘to keep negotiations going as slowly as possible, and neither to advance from nor to retreat from the positions reached and potential commitments accepted in December’.210 Half a year earlier the British had thought that a Nile agreement would be impossible. When they learned that agreement was very likely, they withdrew their offer. London had overestimated the difficulties Egypt would have in reaching such an agreement, partly by overestimating British influence in Khartoum and partly by underestimating the political skill of the Egyptian regime. Before Nasser sent his Ambassador, Ahmed Hussein, to Washington to meet Dulles, he discussed the Aswan issue with him. The Ambassador reported that the situation in Washington was dangerous, and that something should be done to rescue

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the Aswan Dam. Nasser said: ‘Hey! Wake up, doctor! There is no High Dam.’211 Nasser went on to say: ‘Go and see Dulles and tell him that I have accepted all the conditions he made’. Ahmed Hussein travelled to Washington with orders to withdraw the Egyptian counter-proposals altogether and to accept the Western aides-memoires without amendment. He was also to confirm that there would be no Soviet involvement at all. Hussein then asked for the instructions in writing, which he got.212 When Hussein called on Dulles at the State Department on the afternoon of the 19th, he brought a letter from Nasser, which in effect met all the American and World Bank conditions. Nasser was sure that the Americans were not interested in supporting the dam any more. He decided to test their attitude. Information about this ‘U-turn’ had reached London and Washington on 11 July. The decision could not be left pending any more, Eisenhower and Dulles decided. Dulles acted accordingly, and the British Nile era was essentially a thing of the past.

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A Last Roar – Turning the Nile Against Nasser

Ministers have recently shown much interest in the possibility that, by stopping or reducing the flow of the White Nile at Owen falls, severe damage may be caused to the Egyptian economy. (Foreign Office minute, 1956) 1

The nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July 1956 put the British Government in a precarious situation. London regarded this act by Nasser – in Downing Street nicknamed the Mussolini of the Middle East, the Mussolini reincarnate – as the most serious attack ever on Great Britain’s vital strategic interests in the region. As Foreign Secretary in the 1930s, Anthony Eden himself had called the canal the ‘swingdoor’ to the Empire, and many great names of the imperial epoch had made their names defending it, Cromer, Kitchener, Allenby, Milner and Lord Lloyd. Now both the canal and the Nile had slipped out of their hands. Eden, after waiting in the wings for decades, had finally taken over from Churchill, just a few months earlier. Now he was doing what Churchill had refused to do: presiding over the disintegration of the British Empire, and circumstances where the canal’s economic and strategic importance had changed: now the Suez Canal, according to Whitehall, was also Britain’s and Europe’s oil lifeline. When Nasser decided that Egypt should run the canal, Britain’s imperial future and Eden’s policy in the region were jeopardised. London lost the very symbol of the Empire. Nasser had mocked Britain’s role as policeman of the region. He had exposed the vulnerability of the imperial metropolis itself. The British Tory Government had to do something, but what? The shocking new experience of impotence in world affairs did not stop the machinery of the Foreign Office. One alternative considered was to try to exploit control over the Nile waters upstream, in the most brutal and direct way, so as to force Nasser into submission. If it had 300

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not been done before, the Nile should now be used as ‘a pistol’ against the head of independent Egypt. This hydropolitical aspect of British policy during the Suez crisis has been ignored in the biographies and autobiographies and in the many voluminous studies of the subject.2 One reason may be the utmost secrecy with which London handled these plans at the time. They are not mentioned in the Cabinet minutes or in files from the Prime Minister’s Office. Eden, his Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd, Harold Macmillan, Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister, and other central figures in the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office wanted to keep their Nile plans secret, even from their own regional administrators in East Africa. Since the literature has not referred to the question, it is necessary to document the plans and intentions by penetrating the cloud of official phrases and subsequent justifications in order to reconstruct the realities that lie beneath them.

AC T S O F P I R AC Y ?

Eden and his Cabinet did not regard Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal – called by the British ‘an act of piracy’ – as a clear sign of a new political situation in which former colonies dared to stand up against a much weakened Empire. Instead they chose to exacerbate the existing crisis. Eden opted for confrontation. After all, Britain was still a dominant power throughout the Middle East. Eden summoned his Cabinet late on the evening on 27 July 1956, to discuss what London’s reactions to Nasser’s decision that day should be. The Prime Minister declared that, if Britain did not take steps to regain control of the canal, there would be disastrous consequences for the economic life of the Western powers and for their standing and influence in the Middle East.3 The Cabinet concluded that, if London lost the Suez Canal, it would lead inevitably to the loss, one by one, of all its interests and assets in the Middle East.4 Some days later Eden emphasised this point to the US Secretary of State, Dulles. If Britain were to lose the pipelines and oil supplies, its economy would ‘be slowly strangled’.5 The longer-term outlook, however, was regarded as even more threatening: the maritime powers could therefore not afford to allow Egypt to expropriate the canal and to exploit it by using the revenues for its own internal purposes, irrespective of the interests of the canal and the canal users.6 Egypt and Nasser could not be trusted, he wrote, ‘to manage it with any sense of international obligation’. Britain’s objective was to achieve a reasonable settlement, by peaceful persuasion if this were possible, or by force if necessary. He stressed that the canal was an international asset and facility, which was vital to the free world.7 The British were, of course, considering ordinary economic pressure. But they realised that this would not achieve the settlement they wanted. They estimated annual net income of the nationalised canal to Egypt at £15 million.8 They could not try to deprive Nasser of canal dues since, if a situation were created in which Egypt received Canal dues in spite of Britain’s policies, this would mean a loss of face.9 Eden acknowledged, therefore, that Britain was unlikely to attain

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their objectives by economic pressures alone.10 Still, he urged the US not to give Cairo further aid.11 Dulles replied that he favoured more pressure on Nasser, but he reminded Eden that this would not be easy, because of Western interests; they should not bring more pressure to bear on themselves.12 To force shipping to go round Africa would be costly, Western Europe’s oil price would go up, Dulles said. They also discussed the possibility of the US using its cotton surplus to disrupt the Egyptian cotton market. This would affect Egypt, but it would also have worldwide repercussions. The Cabinet had noted that Egypt sold most of its cotton to Eastern Europe. They also discussed whether to ‘withhold’ the wheat Egypt imported from North America. Various economic options were considered, but they were either thought insufficient or counterproductive. What made things worse for the British was that, by the end of August, Dulles had already shown that he was reluctant to contemplate putting further financial or economic pressure on Egypt. To walk this line alone was impossible for the Eden Government. The British economy was too weak, a fact the Government was well aware of. Military action was thought possible, but as a last resort; preparations to this end must be made. The Cabinet knew, however, that this was risky, not least because the Americans were against it, as Selwyn Lloyd informed them on 1 August.13 Besides these well-known possibilities, London also considered another alternative to military aggression: exploitation of British upstream control over Egypt’s lifeline, the Nile. London thought Nasser might strangle Britain by stopping oil shipments through what they described as their lifeline. The British Government for its part discussed plans to strangle Egypt by constricting Egypt’s life artery. Eden, Selwyn Lloyd and Macmillan knew that Egypt’s downstream position (and downstream complex) made the country vulnerable to this kind of pressure. London argued that Nasser had violated international agreements and acted as if the canal were purely Egyptian property. But it was not a piece of Egyptian property, it was an international asset of the highest importance, and should be managed by an international trust; Cairo should not be allowed to exploit it for purely domestic purposes.14 The Nile, like the canal, was an international waterway, it was argued. The plan was to meet one ‘act of piracy’ with a plot that would soften Egypt’s defiant attitude: political and economic influence in the Upper Nile basin could be employed as a whip to force Nasser into submission. The Nile offered three options: the British could try to reduce the Nile flow and thus cause economic problems in Egypt and political problems for Nasser; they could put the problem of Nile water-sharing among the basin states on the top of the regional agenda, showing the Egyptian people and their leaders that the country could not act in disregard of what London considered to be international agreements regarding Suez; and finally, they could renew the proposal for some kind of Nile Valley Authority as a way to impress upon the Egyptian Government that it was in its own interest to comply with international arrangements for the Suez Canal.

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The Egyptians had feared British upstream control of their life artery for decades. This fear played an important role in the Egyptian revolution in 1919, and it had caused the Egyptians both to oppose the building of the Sennar Dam and the Jabal Auliya Dam in the Sudan in the 1920s, and to drag their feet over the British and Sudanese plans for the Lake Tana Dam in the inter-war years. One reason Cairo was opposed to major British-planned projects on the Upper Nile, first drawn up at the turn of the century, was that Egyptian nationalists had been sceptical about building up an irrigation economy totally dependent upon waterworks in territories controlled by British colonial administrations. The infamous Allenby ultimatum in 1924, by which the British withdrew Nile water without Egyptian consent, showed to all that Britain was quite capable of exploiting its position upstream. The river’s potential in this regard was taken up again for serious discussion just before the end of World War II. In March and April 1945 Eden, Lord Killearn, the British Ambassador in Cairo, and General Hubert Huddleston, the Governor-General in Khartoum, had discussed post-war strategy in the region. Killearn argued that, should the Egyptian Government be ‘sufficiently provocative’, it might be necessary to ‘change the policy of friendship for one of hostility’. Nile waters policy could be ‘changed for the purpose of compelling or punishing Egypt’. Still, as he said, ‘except in the most extreme conditions there would be grave political objections to the course proposed’.15 Huddleston noted that even if it were physically possible to divert the summer waters of the Nile, ‘the diversion would take time’. New canalisation, dams and other works would have to be undertaken to render it effective and the time lag alone between the threatened sanction and its enforcement would ‘rob it of all coercive value’. Meanwhile the situation would probably have deteriorated so much, Huddleston argued, as ‘to necessitate the application of military or naval sanctions of a more immediate forceful kind’.16 About three weeks after Nasser’s Alexandria speech, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office and a personal advisor to Eden during the Suez crisis,17 found that what Killearn had described as the ‘extreme time’ had arrived. He asked Denis Wright at the Foreign Office to study the question of diverting the Nile in Uganda.18 Could such an act force Egypt to climb down? Sir Archibald Ross discussed Kirkpatrick’s proposal on the same day.19 He thought the scheme feasible, though it would mean breaking treaty obligations towards Egypt and would adversely affect Uganda. Ross had come to the conclusion that the time was ripe for a change in Britain’s Nile policy.20 The new situation required more decisive action – action which, to use Killearn’s words, could ‘punish’ or ‘compel’ Egypt. Some few days later, Kirkpatrick temporarily broke off the investigations into diverting the Nile. Kirkpatrick had met Morrice, the influential British Irrigation Advisor to the Sudan Government. While Morrice argued in support of his and the Sudan Government’s Nile valley plan, he said that there would be no method of diverting the waters of the Nile which would make an impression on Egypt for some 15 or 20 years.21 If the British were lucky enough to hit a dry spell, he said, the

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impact upon Egypt would be perceptible sooner. The most effective way would therefore be to spend money developing the Sudan, because irrigation of the Sudan was ‘bound to deprive Egypt of waters’. Morrice explained that upstream projects like the Roseiris Dam would not begin to have any perceptible impact on Egypt for about five years. Yet, Kirkpatrick added, Morrice had told him that the Egyptians were very sensitive about the whole water problem and that a threat accompanied by initial work would be likely to have a great effect. Morrice said that the best bet for the British now was to support the Roseiris Dam.22 Morrice also informed Kirkpatrick that Sudanese opinion was hardening against the Aswan Dam. Kirkpatrick replied that when the Egyptians were ready they would send emissaries with bags of money to Khartoum and would bribe their way through all difficulties. Morrice tried to calm him down and stated that this ‘operation bribery’ would be more difficult than usual, mainly owing to conflicting interests in Nile waters. Morrice favoured a long-term strategy, one that would involve British economic commitment to the development of the Sudan. Apparently Kirkpatrick opted for the Morrice plan as a less dramatic, although still threatening, diplomatic card against Egypt. The problem with this strategy, as seen by the Government in London, was that it presupposed strong British financial support for irrigation projects in the Sudan, with money that was not available. On the same day, in response to an earlier request by Kirkpatrick, the Colonial Office produced a report (marked top secret) that discussed the effects of reducing the Nile flow at Owen Falls Dam.23 It gave no clear-cut advice, partly because of a lack of technical and hydrological knowledge. Wright, in the Foreign Office, produced a memo concluding that Britain should use the Owen Falls Agreement not as a basis for threats, but to demonstrate British readiness to forego an exercise of unlimited sovereignty in the interest of ‘civilised and sensible relations with neighbours’.24 The Foreign Secretary decided that, for the moment, it would be premature to make any inquiries either of the colonial governors in the lake region or of unofficial technicians.25 The reason was the need for secrecy. It would be politically disastrous if it became known publicly that London was considering such a move. The Government also knew that many British administrators and experts would have ridiculed the idea. In London, however, investigations and discussions about such a covert operation continued. The following day Kirkpatrick wrote to Sir Hilton Poyton, Colonial Office, that if the British found themselves at war with Egypt it was possible that, through one means or another, ‘she might persuade the other Arab countries to deny us our oil’. To counteract such a possibility, he said, it seemed to him that ‘one drastic weapon might be to interfere with the flow of the Nile Waters from Uganda to Egypt’.26 On 2 September, C.G. Hawes, the British Hydrological Consultant to the Ugandan Government, produced a top-secret memorandum, commissioned by Whitehall.27 It concluded that, since the White Nile supplied the greater part of the natural river in Egypt from January until May, and since the bulk of the White Nile flow comes from East Africa during these months, ‘a reduction of 30 per cent (or more, perhaps)

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in the East African component would certainly cause much embarrassment to Egypt and probably would force a reduction in the areas of rice and cotton crops sown’.28 In the Sudan, navigation would be difficult between Juba and Mongalla and possibly farther to the north, and the pump schemes on the White Nile would be adversely affected owing to increased water lifting, but the Gezira Scheme and other projects on the Blue Nile would not be affected.29 While these studies and discussions were being undertaken in utmost secrecy, the Foreign Office sent a note to a number of British embassies, quoting the Prime Minister’s speech on 13 September. Eden said that the Owen Falls Dam was on British territory and owned by a British Colonial Government. Egypt was a user and it was not sovereign over the dam. Yet, ‘by peaceful agreement’, as Eden emphasised in order to contrast Britain’s civilised policies with Egypt’s, ‘Britain submits to Egyptian user control of a project vital to Egypt…It seems to me that the parallel with Western requirements in respect of the canal is very close, indeed’.30 London thus directly linked the issues of the two waterways, while stressing in public the different attitudes of the two governments.31 While this kind of propaganda was at its noisiest, Kirkpatrick minuted on 17 September that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary had reached the conclusion ‘that we should look into the question of Egyptians in Uganda engaged in Nile waters’.32 The reason for this study was obvious: since the Egyptian technicians resided at the Dam, nothing could be done with the Nile flow without immediately causing a public outcry.33 Kirkpatrick asked Watson, Head of the African Department in the Foreign Office, for information on Egyptians in Uganda dealing with Nile waters and under what convention or agreement these people worked there.34 Watson minuted the following day regarding the overall plot, ‘The answer seems to be that considerable damage could be done to Egyptian crops. There is a view in the Ministry of Defence that the damage could be catastrophic: but this seems to require further examination before being accepted.’ 35 The legal advisors to the Foreign Office concluded, however, that the 1929 Agreement was binding on Britain although not on the Sudan.36 Lord Lloyd’s imperial Agreement from 1929 made it difficult to pursue an aggressive imperial Nile policy a generation later. There were no immediate possibilities of threatening Egypt by damming the river in the Sudan. It was clear: Britain was the only power that could act, and then in its East African Territories. But would it be effective? Would the political costs of violating the 1929 Agreement be outweighed? After discussions at the highest level on 19 September, information was sent in secret to some departments that it had been decided to make a further study of Nile waters. The Colonial Office continued its investigations of Egyptians at the dam site in Uganda. It wanted to know how many visits Egyptian technical experts had paid to the dam since the beginning of 1955. The Ugandan Government, now led by Cohen, the former Head of the African Department in the Foreign Office and well acquainted with London’s discussions on Nile strategy, reported that they had paid ten visits, besides which full-time Egyptian irrigation staff lived at Owen Falls Dam.37

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The political role of the Owen Falls Dam now became very important. The Foreign Office began to reread the negotiations preceding the Owen Falls Agreements and the text of the related Notes. They discovered that the concessions made in 1949 and 1950 to appease Egypt during the difficult negotiations over the Sudan and the Canal Zone now seriously restricted London’s freedom of action. The Exchange of Notes of 30 May 1949 stated, for example, that the Uganda Electricity Board would regulate the discharges through the Dam on the instruction of the Egyptian resident engineer. A later Note of 19 January 1950 further provided that the resident Egyptian engineer and his assistants should have access to all the [meteorological and hydrological observation] posts in Uganda in order to assure themselves that the posts were satisfactorily maintained and observations regularly collected. At the end of September the Foreign Office learned that there were three Egyptian engineers at the dam, with their wives and nine children. The engineers’ position could easily be made impossible by administrative action; and the visits of the technical experts could be stopped on the ground that, although Britain was committed to consultation, it was not laid down that the consultation should ‘be oral and take place in Uganda’.38 The Foreign Office discussed different ways of preventing the Egyptians from interfering with their plans for the Owen Falls Dam and of bypassing the legal implications embodied in the Exchange of Notes. On 22 September the Colonial Secretary made a broadcast speech that quite clearly and deliberately contradicted Eden’s message of the previous week. He said that the White Nile rose in Uganda, in British-protected territory; that Britain had an agreement with Egypt, under which their engineers stationed at ‘our Dam’ could, within certain limits, decide how much water reached Egypt through ‘our Owen Falls’. He concluded, ‘What would happen to Egypt’s vital interests if we were now to tear up this Agreement on the ground that it infringed with our sovereignty?’ This speech on the BBC was made to test possible political consequences in Egypt of more drastic action. As oral aggression it could serve to bring the issue to a head, as the Cabinet in August and early September had discussed might be desirable. London eagerly awaited Egyptian reactions. The Embassy in Cairo reported on 29 September that Al-Ahram printed the headline ‘Selwyn Lloyd threatens Egypt with cutting off Owen Dam waters’. On 1 October the Foreign Office again expressed particular eagerness to know whether ‘the suggestion that we might interfere with Nile waters inevitably increases support for Nasser or how far would there be a tendency to blame him for causing such dangers by his policies’.39 On 26 September Anwar Sadat had written in Goumhoria that he pitied the Minister who could threaten to deprive Egypt of water if ‘she refused to abandon her sovereign rights over an integral part of her territory’, and he claimed that London was applying the laws of the jungle. Trevelyan subsequently advised that the policy was counterproductive from the point of view of British interests. The Egyptians would make great play with British brutality (starving women and children), insincerity (‘no quarrel with the Egyptian people’), disrespect for treaties (Nile Waters Agreement), and propensity for empty menaces (pilots’ plot). The Owen Falls Agreement could best be used as London had previously suggested, not as a basis for threats but as

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a demonstration of British readiness to forego the exercising of absolute national sovereignty in the interests of civilised and sensible relations with neighbours.40 Warnings against the Foreign Office plot also came from Khartoum. The Sudanese would not take the threats of such actions seriously; they would think they were a bluff and merely propaganda. Nevertheless, it would raise a cry from the street against the colonisers in Uganda and would strengthen Nasser’s hand as the apostle of freedom in Africa.41 The British in Khartoum argued for a more cautious and positive long-term strategy. The Sudanese would not accept a solution based exclusively on their national interests, regardless of the Egyptian viewpoint. Britain should not give the Sudanese the impression that the British were pressing them further on the water issue than they wanted to go. The British in Khartoum thought that all the water could more profitably be used in the Sudan, but to advocate this would be clearly unreasonable not only to the Sudanese but also to the Egyptians and, for that matter, to world opinion. The British in Khartoum again argued in favour of increasing financial aid from London to the Sudan. Work on the Roseiris Dam could start if the Managil extension were to go forward at the accelerated rate the Sudan Government was talking about, that is at the end of 1957.42 This policy would achieve what the British in Khartoum now thought to be most important: increase food production, create a fairer deal regarding the Nile waters and strengthen the British position in the Sudan. Seen from London this plan had two main drawbacks. It depended on British financial assistance to the Sudan, based on money that Britain did not have. Secondly, it was not thought to carry sufficient and immediate ‘punishing’ power. Concrete studies of the potential impact of Nile flow reductions continued in the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade. At the very end of September a ‘Note on Egyptian Crops and Water Requirements’ was produced by the Board of Trade. This note rejected Hawes’s simplistic scenario and stated that it was difficult to forecast which crops would be affected by a reduction in White Nile water, because the Egyptians might choose to release water from the Aswan reservoir earlier than usual, in order to cover the shortfall from Jebel Aulia. The critical period would then be deferred until June/July, and an important factor would be the timing of the Blue Nile flood – its onset varies appreciably from year to year.43

On 27 September, the Sub-Committee on Economic Measures of the Middle East Official Committee discussed a note prepared by the Colonial Office concerning the possibility of action against Egypt by restricting the flow of the Nile, without taking a definite decision.44 The departments asked for further detailed assessments. These studies confirmed that the supply of the Nile at Aswan was usually ample for the requirements of irrigation in Egypt from July to December. In this period the main crop was maize and the water came mainly from the Blue Nile. Canals were closed from 20 December until the end of January, but water was passed from the river in sufficient quantity to permit navigation between Aswan and the Delta Barrage. From February to June the natural river is low, and the White

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Nile the most important tributary. This period had long been called the ‘timely period’ and all White Nile development had aimed at increasing the river flow in Egypt during this period. Now the problem was how to reduce it during the same period; was it feasible to do so by natural means and after the building of Jabal Auliya, and what would be the consequences? 45 The Foreign Office official was therefore right when he noted, ‘Ministers have recently shown much interest in the possibility that, by stopping or reducing the flow of the White Nile at Owen Falls, severe damage may be caused to the Egyptian economy’.46 At the beginning of October, Eden was much interested in the ‘particular question of denying the waters of the White Nile to Egypt’.47 Opinions varied, many argued in favour of caution, and what all agreed on was the need for more precise knowledge.48 The discussions about this ‘strangling’ scheme also reflect London’s disarray. London had to take into consideration its political and economic interests in the Sudan and East Africa, too. The Colonial Office gradually objected more to this ‘deprival scheme’, on the basis of the effects it would have on Uganda. The British representatives in Khartoum tended to put the interests of the Sudan high on the agenda, and were unwilling to perceive the Sudan only as a subordinate part in a strategy to maintain Britain’s global status and Suez interests. These conflicting considerations entered strategic planning in London, where a few politicians and selected officials were struggling in the utmost secrecy to find a solution to the dilemma: should their control over Lake Victoria be used as a threat or as a demonstration of British readiness to forego the exercise of unlimited national sovereignty in the ‘interest of civilised and sensible relations with neighbours’? Trevelyan argued for the latter. Kirkpatrick had argued in favour of the former. On Trevelyan’s letter of 3 October, both the Minister of State and Ross minuted that they agreed with Trevelyan.49 On 9 October the Colonial Office, on the basis of a new memorandum on Nile waters, concluded that it was ‘not a simple matter of turning the tap on and off ’. On the contrary, once control had been established it would have to be continued for a substantial period in order to produce significant results.50 The reason was the Nile’s physical properties as a river system. Because of the natural regulating effect of Lake Victoria, Lake Albert and Lake Kyoga on the discharge fluctuations of the river, there was no great seasonal variation in the flow of the White Nile at Nimule. Furthermore, of the 27 billion cubic metres of waters that annually (on average) reach Mongalla, it was estimated that about 16.5 billion cubic metres emerged from the sudd to the north in a normal year. Moreover, it was noted that the water would take four months to reach Egypt from Owen Falls, and due to the time taken to drain off the balancing water in the Ugandan lakes downstream (Lake Victoria contributed about 20 billion cubic metres, Lake Albert about 4 billion cubic metres and the seasonal torrents between Nimule and Mongalla added 3 billion cubic metres) any reduction in the flow at Owen Falls would not have an appreciable effect at Aswan for about 16 months on average, depending on rainfall in East Africa.51 The note concluded that the effects in Egypt could be serious, but that the consequences would be far from immediate.

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The note went on to analyse the consequences of a reduction of the flow at Owen Falls for Uganda. It was argued that passing sufficient water through the turbines at Owen Falls, to supply electricity to the most densely populated parts of Uganda, was essential for the new textile factory at Jinja, the smelting at Jinja of copper from the new mines in Western Uganda and the planned electrification of the western districts of Kenya. A reduction of the flow would also cause the water level of Lake Victoria to rise, which would result in flooding in the three lake countries: Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika. Shipping services would be hampered or even suspended if port facilities became unusable. To lower the level of the Nile below Owen Falls would disrupt navigation on the Nile, the Victoria Nile and on Lake Albert; navigation would probably become impracticable on the Albert Nile, and this in a situation where the Albert Nile played an important part in the transport of the cotton crop from the West Nile District of Uganda and also some part in the modest transport to and from the Southern Sudan. Yet perhaps even more important, the Colonial Office argued, in a top-secret note, that the political repercussions in the East African Territories would be both considerable and dangerous for British prestige. They also expected vocal Africans to react sharply to the use by the UK Government, in order to bring pressure on Egypt, of an instrument owned by Uganda. This feeling would be intensified by any economic distress arising from interference with the flow of the Nile.52 The strategists in London were desperately seeking a way out of the Suez corner. The Nile option was not completely dropped. The Colonial Office sent Selwyn Lloyd a letter they had received from a Mr Stallard of the English Drilling Equipment Company,53 arguing that it was now time for the Sudan Government to apply to the World Bank for funds to build a barrage on the Nile to irrigate large areas in the Sudan. By such an act the Egyptian claim which ‘seems to be accepted in all quarters – that they have complete sovereignty over all waters passing through their territory’ could be opposed. If Egypt could make such a claim, so could the British in the Sudan. Lennox-Boyd in Khartoum wrote to the Foreign Secretary: ‘You may have to look at this. It strikes me that there might be something useful in his suggestion.’ 54 However, Selwyn Lloyd was that same day at Sèvres, outside Paris, where he, Eden, the French, and Israel’s Prime Minister Ben Gurion and his advisors discussed secret plans for military action. While the Colonial Office prepared a final policy draft on the Nile issue, based on the reports by Hawes and Reynolds, the situation altered quite radically.55 In late October a new Foreign Office memo entitled ‘The Effect on the Sudan and Egypt of Restriction of the Discharge at Owen Falls’ argued that the economic consequences for the Sudan would be substantial, especially on the hundreds of cotton plantations between Kosti and the Jabal Auliya Dam. These depended for irrigation upon water pumped into canals from the river; the pumps in turn depended on a high water level, which was normally maintained until February by the Jabal Auliya reservoir. If the Egyptians decided to empty the reservoir early to postpone the effect of the reduced flow on their own economy, the effect in the Sudan would be seriously aggravated. It was perhaps considered most important that some of the

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biggest private schemes were owned by Sayed Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, the main British ally in the country, who was already in a difficult financial situation, and a large proportion of the other owners were supporters of the Umma Party. Therefore, the political effects in the Sudan, it was concluded, could only be bad. Regarding Egypt, the memo refuted Hawes’s assessments, and stated that in a normal year restrictions at Owen Falls consonant with Uganda’s planned requirements for electric power would have a very slight effect on Egyptian agriculture. Given a very low year or a very late Blue Nile flood, or both, the Egyptians ‘might be forced to make a significant but by no means disastrous reduction in the areas of crops sown’.56

A WA R R AT H E R T H A N A WAT E R WA R

At dusk on 31 October, French and British planes began bombing Egyptian positions in the Canal Zone. The Nile weapon was useless in this military context but the idea of reducing the Nile flow was not, however, completely abandoned. Legal advisors at the Foreign Office discussed whether the 1929 Agreement could be seen as less binding now, that Britain was at war with Egypt. They concluded that the attack could not be used as a pretext for breaching the Agreement on legal grounds.57 In mid-November 1956 a new memorandum entitled ‘Use of Owen Falls Dam to Deny Water to Egypt’ was produced in the Foreign Office. It summarised and assessed the investigations so far. It objected to Morrice’s arguments in his talk with Kirkpatrick in August, arguing that Morrice considered the question in the context of a general diversion of Nile waters for use elsewhere ‘rather than to turning off the tap at the Owen Falls’.58 It also discussed the discrepancies regarding how much water could be impounded (from 20 to 60 per cent) in Lake Victoria without affecting the generation of electric power at Owen Falls as planned at the time, and the disagreements about the consequences for Egypt of ‘complete closure of the sluices’. The Ministry of Defence had argued that such a closure during only part of the period between September and July ‘would cause the complete failure of the Egyptian crop’, while other investigations argued that it would not be felt in Egypt for about 16 months and that, meanwhile, Uganda and the Sudan would be ‘feeling the damaging effect’. The Ministry of Defence argued that the effect on the Sudan would be serious but not disastrous, ‘except to the water supplies to the city of Khartoum which are fed from a Dam on the White Nile’.59 The Foreign Office memo ridiculed this assessment. It concluded that the economic, political and moral disadvantages of regulating the Owen Falls Dam to Egypt’s detriment outweighed the advantages. After the failure of the tripartite attack on Egypt, Eden wanted to discuss the Nile weapon again with Selwyn Lloyd. The matter should be discussed in Cabinet before the Americans were approached. Alternatively the matter could be put to the Egypt Committee.60 On 29 November Dodds-Parker told the House of Commons that the British Government had no plans to interfere in the ‘legitimate activities’ of the Egyptian engineers at the Owen Falls Dam, and that the Owen Falls arrangements

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showed that Her Majesty’s Government had been and were ready to recognise the rights of users in such cases. Only a few days later Selwyn Lloyd announced to the House of Commons that the UK would withdraw from the Canal Zone.61 Britain had been forced to give way to American pressure and world opinion. Although the Government for some time had thought the plan for reducing the Nile flow unfeasible, further studies were made. On 20 December the Colonial Office stated that it had gone as far as it could in investigating the issue, ‘without consulting any of our East African authorities’ owing to the need for absolute secrecy, and that it did not plan to do any more, since the subject was no longer ‘a live issue’.62 There were some diehards: on 27 December a note produced at the Board of Trade argued in favour of strangling Egypt by reducing the water flow at Owen Falls Dam by 35 per cent to 50 per cent. It was suggested that the studies that had been undertaken underestimated the effect on Egypt of the reductions contemplated: Despite the steps which the Egyptians could take to mitigate the effect, as the paper suggests, it would, I think, still be a rather serious matter for them to be deprived of so large a percentage of their normal supplies in the period March to June. Winter wheat would be bound to suffer, and also cotton, which is planted in March and must be irrigated at regular intervals throughout the whole of its growing season.63

It was finally decided, on the same day, that in the ‘changed circumstances’ there was no point in pursuing further studies on the effects in Egypt of restricting the flow of the White Nile at Owen Falls Dam. The policy of strangling Egypt by reducing the White Nile flow was ruled out as a dead end, mostly because it would not have the effects the British thought necessary in Egypt, because of objections from the British administrations in the Sudan and Uganda and partly because of the effect that it was feared such an act would have on world opinion. The Government in London decided that the Owen Falls Agreement should be used as an example of good inter-state behaviour in international river basins, rather than as a threat. There was no alternative. London discovered too late that both Charles T. Beke in 1860 and Samuel Baker had been wrong when they had told the British Government that Egypt could be controlled by diverting Nile waters upstream. The African lakes could not be compared to wells, after all, because the Nile ecosystem was much more complex.

‘ BA N D I N G TO G E T H E R ’ T H E N I L E S TAT E S AG A I N S T E G Y P T

London regarded the Nile as having more potential as a diplomatic stick, although less dramatic. The project for reducing the Nile flow was discussed during the whole of autumn 1956. During more or less the same period, another proposal was considered, that of trying to organise the other Nile states so as to put a more legally acceptable pressure on Egypt. Egypt treated the Nile, rather arrogantly, as an Egyptian river, as if it had both historic and moral rights to its waters. An article in the Egyptian Gazette by Dr

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Abdul Aziz Ahmed, Technical Advisor to the Ministry of Public Works, dismissed the aspirations of Ethiopia and the Sudan and concluded that the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929 was ‘flexible enough to deal with future eventualities as it did in the past’; the problem was ‘not an international one’; the Nile flow regime limited the use of the waters to the two countries only. This article damaged Egypt’s position. The Foreign Office copied it to the Embassies in Addis Ababa and Khartoum, for further dissemination. The Embassy in Ethiopia reported ‘some pleasure’ in giving copies of the article to advisors of the Ethiopian Government; 64 if the Egyptian Government was ‘stupid enough to put out this imperialist claptrap’ they would ‘stir the Ethiopian Government into replying on equally extreme and unco-operative lines’. After this small diplomatic success in a difficult time, the British decided to send a copy of the article also to Entebbe.65 Besides the scheme for diverting the Nile or closing the sluices at the Owen Falls Dam, London reckoned that it had a more civilised, constructive option: to back the Nile valley plan drawn up by Morrice. This had the advantage of support by the Government of Egypt’s upstream neighbour. It approached the Nile as an international river, where Egypt, as the downstream state and principal user of its waters, had to co-operate with states under British control and influence. The planned Nile works would be built in the East African Territories, which objected to a big, costly and wasteful dam at Aswan. If this project won support and could be implemented, London would kill at least two birds with one stone. Even before Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal, the plan had been discussed in the Foreign Office as an alternative to the High Dam. On 22 July, after Dulles and Eden had withdrawn their offer, Morrice had argued that there was now an excellent opportunity to put forward his Nile valley plan. The Foreign Office agreed. On 27 July, the same day as Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the Middle East Committee was to discuss alternatives to the Aswan High Dam. The background paper was Morrice’s plan.

A N I L E VA L L E Y P L A N

Political developments had given Morrice’s Nile valley plan new importance. The basic hydrological and engineering idea of this proposal was to store excess water where the topography and climate were most favourable, in order to use it later when there was a shortage. The reservoirs were designed either to impound water for part of the year or to carry over from one year to the next. As far as possible, the water should be stored where evaporation losses were lowest; that is maximum storage in the Great Lakes and minimum storage north of Khartoum. It treated the whole Nile basin as a hydrological unit. The plan thus gave a scientific and ‘neutral’ foundation for Britain’s political aims. It included maximum storage in Lake Victoria; a regulator downstream of Lake Kyoga – designed to keep the water level of the lake constant and to avoid delay in passing water from Lake Victoria to Lake Albert; a reservoir in Lake Albert, with a regulator dam to control the amount of water sent

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down to Egypt and the Sudan; the Jonglei Canal; a dam on the Baro River above Gambella; a dam at the outlet of Lake Tana holding about a billion cubic metres of water for increased cultivation in the Sudan; and a small reserve which would help out in case of an emergency in Egypt, caused by exceptionally low waters. There should also be an Upper Blue Nile reservoir with a 25-billion-cubic-metre capacity; a smaller reservoir at Roseiris; continued use of the dams at Sennar and Jabal Auliya; a reservoir for annual storage at Khasm al-Girba on the Atbara; five dams on the main Nile between Atbara and Wadi Halfa for storage and/or electric power generation; and finally, a dam on the site of the proposed Aswan High Dam, the size of which could be established only when the results of computer calculations became known. This plan, if implemented, would increase the vulnerability of Egypt and activate its downstream complex as long as Britain was in control upstream.66 It is obvious that this plan, seen from the point of view of London, which was desperately seeking a device with which to put pressure on Nasser, had great advantages. The way it was to be worked out gave legitimacy to their ulterior political aims as the new data technology appeared very impressive but also objective.67 The problem was, of course, that Britain could not computerise the grave political realities and the severe conflicting interests among the Nile valley states at the time, and that it was too costly to implement, at least with only British support.68 The British also tried to play the Ethiopian card in the Nile waters negotiations. By supporting and forwarding Ethiopian interests in the Nile waters, they hoped to put political and economic pressure on Egypt. It was hoped that Ethiopia would support the Equatorial Nile project in preference to the Aswan High Dam, because the dispersal of storage dams through the territories of the various states would be less likely than Aswan High Dam to give Egypt the dominant role in any Nile Valley Authority that might at some future stage be set up. In Ethiopia there were two schools of thought on the water issue. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs supported adherence to the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, which had already been asserted internationally in some cases.69 One object was to formulate Ethiopia’s prescriptive right to the unusual flow of the river. They also thought of establishing a bargaining position, whereby from a position of strength they would be able to ask for monetary payments from downstream consumers. The second school of thought was more widespread in the Ministry of Works, where American influence was considerable, and where one of the advisors, Professor Eagleton, advocated the doctrine of equitable apportionment. As the Ethiopians, Americans and British all thought that the Aswan Dam had been postponed indefinitely, they considered Ethiopia’s case strong. The British tried to convince the Ethiopians that they should register their claim to an undefined share of the Nile waters along the same lines as London had done on behalf of the East African Territories. In this perspective, Washington’s decision to initiate and give financial support to an aerial survey of the Blue Nile basin in Ethiopia was regarded as positive.70 On the other hand, London could not give Ethiopia carte blanche, because it thought that ‘one day’ Britain might wish to support the Sudan against Ethiopia on the question of implementing the 1902 Treaty.71 Support for Ethiopia was therefore

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limited and hesitant. Petridis’s report could form a basis for the Ethiopian case: it could be useful as a potential stick against Egypt, but it conflicted with British policy in the Sudan, especially since Petridis disputed the validity of the 1902 Agreement. The British disagreed with Petridis’s assertion that the 1902 Treaty was invalid owing to the occupation in 1938 and Britain’s acceptance of it. London argued that the Treaty of 1902 was a boundary treaty and Article 3 was formulated in this context. As such it could not be abrogated by the occupation of Ethiopia. Without further research, the British recognition of the Italian occupation could not be used as an argument in support of Petridis’s idea. Therefore Ethiopia did not have the right to repudiate the Treaty as a whole. Article 3, the Foreign Office’s legal advisors maintained, ‘should in principle be regarded as surviving the acquisition of independence by the Sudan and as remaining in force between the Sudan and Ethiopia’.72 As part of bringing home to the Egyptians the message that they were not alone in having claims to the Nile waters, it was useful. London worked hard to press the East African Territories to come up with figures for water withdrawal. Their demands were modest, and the governments’ knowledge of hydrology and national water demand was scanty. This reflected these areas’ level of development before the coming of the British, climatic conditions (ample rainfall in large areas), British development strategy in its colonial territories (only after World War II was this concerned with hydropower development in East Africa, as in Uganda’s plans to exploit the hydropower of the Owen Falls Dam for industrialisation of parts of the country after 1945) and British Nile policy (e.g. the Nile Waters Agreement from 1929), which made Nile control and Nile use the domain of Cairo and, to a certain extent, of Khartoum. London now wanted to record their water demands (the rough estimates presented for the three countries’ water requirements were about 2 billion cubic metres annually). British administrators upstream now opposed the curtailing effects of the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929. At the same time, living their lives in the Nuer district in the Southern Sudan, among the Masai in Kenya and Tanzania or in Uganda, some administrators expressed fear of becoming involved in what they called ‘the general mêlée of Middle East politics’. They were opposed to initiatives that could be seen as a ‘general banding together of countries other than Egypt to force the issue’.73 P.P. Howell argued that it might be advantageous to impress on the Egyptians that they had no special rights to the waters of the Nile to the exclusion of other countries. But on the other hand, he pointed out, such an act must be weighed against the ‘disadvantages of compromising our present excellent relations with the Egyptian technical delegates’.74 This letter met a sour response at the Foreign Office. The points raised by Howell were ‘really our business – not his’.75 In a letter a couple of months later, the Foreign Office instructed the Colonial Office to assure Howell that ‘there is no grand design to involve Uganda in Middle East politics’.76

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A N I L E VA L L E Y AU T H O R I T Y ?

Another option, closely linked to discussions of water-sharing and an alternative Nile plan, was a Nile Valley Conference or a Nile Valley Board of some kind. Of course, this was not a new idea. It was first suggested by the Nile Projects Commission of 1920, which conceived of a Board of Arbitration. In 1923 Dupuis suggested an executive Board of Control to ensure observance of agreements between Egypt and the Sudan and to undertake construction and operation of waterworks affecting the interests of both countries. The subject came up again in the mid-1920s. Then the Egyptian Government were looking for a face-saving device to make it politically possible to give up their claim regarding control of the Sennar Dam. London saw it as a means of reinstating British advisorship to the Ministry. Selwyn Lloyd proposed to take up the issue with the Egyptian Government as a means of securing more efficient British control of matters relating to comprehensive Nile control, but it was not mentioned in the notes exchanged between Lord Lloyd and Muhammed Mahmoud in May 1929. In July 1931 the proposal was revived again – in a modified form. The Board was given a new label, ‘advisory’, and the idea of a controllergeneral was dropped. On the British side the aim was to reduce the difficulties resulting from the gradual disappearance of the British element in the staff of the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt, which would gradually lead, it was argued, to a ‘decay in the Egyptian Irrigation Services both in Egypt and the Sudan’. Eden, Selwyn Lloyd and Dodds-Parker were all familiar with parts of this history. By the end of June 1953, for example, Dodds-Parker wrote what was called a ‘very personal’ letter to Selwyn Lloyd about a Nile Waters Commission. Britain having supervised the control of the waters of the Nile for some 50 years, 1954 would witness a new development when the new Sudanese Assembly ( to be elected on 15 October 1953) would propose obtaining a larger share in the waters. Dodds-Parker argued that ‘fear of the Sudanese Government’s actions over water control, ever since Allenby’s action after Lee Stack’s murder, is the only legitimate fear Egypt has’.77 Selwyn Lloyd agreed in principle on a Nile Valley Commission, understanding that this would benefit the Sudan and perhaps weaken Egypt. He reminded Dodds-Parker that London had suggested something of the sort in October 1951, but that Egypt had rejected it. Therefore, the timing of a renewed suggestion was important.78 Now the time had arrived. In September, the British promoted the idea of a conference of riparian states. They proposed trying to persuade the Sudan Government to call it. But, as they admitted, ‘perhaps the Americans would put this to the Sudanese first, since our motives might be more suspect’.79 The Ambassador in Cairo wrote a confidential letter to the Foreign Office on 26 September, about future policy towards the Egyptian Government, focusing on the Nile waters question. He proposed following a policy of ‘enlightened self-interest’. A Foreign Office minute, commenting upon Trevelyan’s proposals, argued that at present neither London nor Khartoum should take the initiative in promoting a Nile Valley Authority. This did not mean, however, that Britain ‘should not covertly arrange the promotion of a Conference of Nile Valley States, out of which a Nile Valley Authority might, inter

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alia, eventually emerge’.80 There was a need to put short-term pressure on Nasser, and such an Authority might serve this end. The British should not try to promote ad hoc arrangements between the states concerned. The Foreign Office also definitely opposed the view that Britain should help Egypt in building the dam in any foreseeable future, as Trevelyan had proposed. London would rather go for the Morrice plan.81 The Ethiopians would welcome a Nile Valley Authority, the British representative in Addis Ababa reported in early October 1956. Any British attempt to negotiate between the Sudan and Egypt would be unpopular there, because the problem was not a bilateral one. The Ethiopians, moreover, were more interested in hydroelectric schemes other than a dam at Lake Tana. If they accepted that project, which favoured the interests of the Sudan and Egypt, Ethiopia would most likely demand support from Britain and the international community for its own most highly prioritised projects. By spreading dams around in the basin, Egypt would also have a less dominant position in any future Nile Valley Authority. Addis Ababa argued that London should lean more towards Ethiopia. That would increase the general bargaining power of the upstream states.82 By the end of October, London learned from Khartoum that Egypt had asked for renewed negotiations on the Nile waters issue.83 Morrice, on behalf of the Sudan Government, wrote a draft reply, which would be clearly unacceptable to the Egyptians, in order to block bilateral negotiations at once: he asked for 23 billion cubic metres gross per year; the Sudan was ‘entitled to the full benefit of the Jonglei Canal Scheme’; and the Sudan should ‘have the right to build on the Nile, or on any of its tributaries, such dams or other control works as are in her opinion necessary for the effective utilization of her share in Nile waters’. Morrice also stated that Halfa District should not be flooded until the Nile Waters question had been made the subject of an agreement.84 The British representative in Khartoum supported the Morrice plan, and recommended that a fair share for the Sudan of the 32 billion cubic metres of the water at present unused would be 18 billion cubic metres plus the eventual increment from the Jonglei Canal scheme (at this time estimated to be about 8 billion cubic metres). He also put forth the new strategic arguments: in the Sudan the scope for food production was ‘virtually unlimited’, and extra water could, in economic terms, be put to better use in the Sudan than in Egypt.85 The Foreign Office argued that the British representatives there, for tactical reasons, should not be plus royalistes que le roi; 86 that is they should not demand more water for the Sudan than the Sudanese were willing to claim for themselves. After the British had been forced to withdraw from Suez, the Eden Government opted for the Nile valley conference as the most realistic strategy. A conference of Nile valley states had been suggested by the Americans as a ‘stalling device’ in June 1956, a way to let the Aswan offer ‘linger on’ and to maintain pressure on Egypt without financing the High Dam. It would now, London thought, be supported by the Americans, the Sudan and Ethiopia. Britain should qualify as a participant owing to its position in East Africa. The topic of the conference should be plans for overall Nile developments, the division of Nile waters, and establishment of an Authority to supervise divisions and plans. The Sudanese already had Morrice’s

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plan, which they (unrealistically) hoped would receive the support of Uganda, Ethiopia and even Egypt, since it would provide for a larger dam at Aswan than the existing one, though smaller than the one proposed by Nasser. At such a conference, the Sudanese ‘would be bound to raise the division of Nile Waters’. Britain would support reasonable demands for division of Nile waters and would not themselves promote a Nile Valley Authority, but would support a Sudanese proposal for this. They knew it ‘would embarrass the Egyptians now’ but that in the long run they might come to accept it as a useful and sensible arrangement. However, the conference could not be held before the summer of 1957, when the Sudan would have a plan ready (Morrice’s plan). They could not send out invitations now, but on the other hand they could not wait too long, because the Egyptians might take the initiative ‘in trying to promote some less desirable arrangement, or a shift of politics might lead to an earlier bilateral agreement with the Sudanese’.87 The Embassy in Cairo commented generally on these proposals, and questioned some of the premises in this proposed policy, as Makins had done from Washington. Cairo hoped to bring some realism into the Cabinet discussions in London: Our special interest which arose from the Sudan condominium no longer existed; it was doubtful whether we possessed an unique expertise in the subject; and it was by no means certain that we should have obtained a major share of the Aswan Dam contracts.88

The British Ambassador therefore, as well as the Colonial Office, disagreed with the conclusions of the Foreign Office memo. The Ambassador concurred in the general policy aims, but objected to the idea of a Nile Valley Authority and a Nile Conference because these were likely to arouse Egyptian suspicions and would delay developments. The questions of a conference and some kind of basin-wide authority should be decided upon by the countries themselves, and should happen ‘organically and not as a result of direct United Kingdom encouragement’.89 The Colonial Office argued for a shift in thinking concerning Nile development, that is more towards power generation and the needs of the ever-growing populations of East Africa. It also pointed out that the Foreign Office memorandum was mistaken when it described the Owen Falls Dam as being an essential factor in any scheme. The Colonial Office pointed out further complications in such a scheme; the interests of Tanganyika were ‘in a sense antagonistic to those of the other two territories’ since the former’s requirement was water for irrigation and not for hydropower.90 The Colonial Office opted for a conference of technical experts before involving the politicians and also questioned the ideas behind a Nile Valley Authority. The Colonial Office asked a fundamental question: what functions should such an authority have? In theory it could range from an inter-territorial statistical office to a body with supranational executive power to construct and operate works on the Nile. Uganda was afraid that, if the question of the level of Lake Victoria was referred to a Board, the majority decision would jeopardise Ugandan interests, e.g. a higher gauge than Uganda could tolerate. The Colonial Office was interested in securing some understanding on the division of Nile waters between Egypt and

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the Sudan. It hoped that in any modification or reinterpretation of the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929, the water needs of the East African Territories would for the first time be ‘specifically recognised’. In December, London decided finally to postpone all these Nile initiatives until more mature consideration had been given to the issues involved. The British Ambassador took part in the meeting of the Middle East (Official) Committee on 13 December, and tried to bring home to the people in London that the world had changed; Britain could not longer base its position, he said, ‘on a vague general or traditional interest, the tradition being founded on historical circumstances which mostly no longer exist’. For Britain now to propose a Nile Valley Conference was unwise. Britain should re-orient its policies based on three points: ‘responsibility’ for the East African Territories, commercial interests, and willingness to give money ‘for development, if any’.91 The Foreign Office redrafted its memo accordingly,92 and the idea of a technical conference was advanced in preference to a political one; the creation of a Nile Valley Authority would depend on the need for it as promoted by the technical Commission. This approach was perhaps less glamorous, but more realistic. British rule in the Nile valley was clearly a thing of the past. British Nile policy in the autumn of 1956 was based on false assumptions. The British overestimated the power of the Nile weapon and underestimated the conflicting demands and interests of the other Nile basin states under their influence. During the Suez crisis, Khrushchev told the Egyptian Ambassador, ‘The British lion has tried to roar, but everyone can see that it has got no teeth, and now the Egyptians are going to cut its tail off ’.93 A similar comment could be made about Nile policies. The Nile, which the British ‘had taken in hand’ in the 1890s, and which their administrators and hydrological experts had worked to develop for more than half a century, had slipped out of their grip. With fundamentally changed power relations in the valley and the region, they still regarded upstream control of this crucial resource as one of their few remaining effective political weapons. The policy proved, however, to be based on illusions. The hydrological character of the Nile could not be manipulated to fit their ‘punishment’ scheme. Although from a hydrological point of view the Nile might be regarded as a unity, Egyptian, Sudanese, Ugandan, Ethiopian and British Nile policies both during 1956 and in the aftermath of the Suez crisis demonstrated that the valley was definitely not a single planning unit, and that a shared vision of Nile development had not yet taken hold.

Epilogue — The British Nile Legacy and the Pedagogy of the Atlas —

This story of River imperialism in the age of the British has dealt with hydropolitics on a grand scale, European colonialism and river modernisation, and a Promethean drive to subject the river Nile to technological control. The deep, silent and almost ‘timeless’ connections between river and culture and river and society have affected both the societies in the Nile basin and the river itself, and created a particular arena for colonial policy which has thrown light upon the colonial system itself. The Nile and the struggle for its control and exploitation had a crucial impact locally and regionally, and in certain cases it was also of world historical importance. Events and processes such as the partition of Africa, the collapse of the League of Nations, the demise of the British Empire and the rise of Nile valley states have been analysed. The River Nile in the Age of the British is also a case study in political ecology, in river-basin planning and in how ecology, planning and politics may intersect. It has reconstructed and analysed the relations between the Nile basin and a particular form of hegemonic Nile discourse, and how this created a complex arena in which world leaders fought for power and numerous local peoples were engaged in struggles over daily water and development. By focusing on the Nile and by drawing on rich, partly unused primary source material of secret documents and the rereading of more conventional sources and secondary literature, the book has produced a different story of the Nile basin during the colonial period. The story reveals that one cannot study colonialism or any other large-scale political project, its way of ruling or impact, if one neglects the place where this policy is implemented. To study the impact of colonialism on Nile control is not only a question of analysing how human beings’ relation to nature was changed and reproduced regionally and locally, but to study its impact on social developments and geopolitical events at the most basic level, since the whole region had only one thing in common (in addition to being under British control or influence) – and that is the Nile. The British formulated a Nile-basin strategy that brought the kaleidoscopic procession of individual civilisations, cultures and language groups 321

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into the maelstrom of world politics in a very specific way, with implications for any attempt at broad generalisations regarding questions about colonial rule, the colonial state or the legacy of imperialism. Dichotomies of promise and peril, of achievement and affliction, were hardened between the peoples and actors within the Nile basin and nourished by imperial arrogance and benevolent paternalism; all related to policies for Nile control and water-sharing. London’s main strategic aim was always to secure British control over the Suez Canal, but its tactics underwent changes that had consequences for its Nile policies. Generally speaking, Egypt was the most important country for London. It was predominantly conceived as a downstream country, entirely dependent on the Nile, and for decades it functioned as a farm for the Lancashire cotton industry. Sudan was important because it potentially ‘held Egypt at her mercy’, and because of the Gezira Scheme, the secure alternative for good cotton to the crops of an Egypt in growing opposition to Britain. Uganda became crucial to imperial strategy because, by controlling this country, London also exercised a monopoly over the headwaters of the White Nile, the most important river for the cotton crop in Egypt. Both Uganda and the Southern Sudan were primarily conceived as aqueducts to northern drylands, and no – or at best modest – water developments were allowed to be implemented there. Ethiopia, with the headwaters of the Blue Nile, was not allowed to use Nile waters, while London supported its ruler and its territorial integrity insofar as they hoped that the Emperor would give London permission to build a dam on Lake Tana. Upstream, this led to an overall policy of limited development and modernisation, while the Northern Sudan and Egypt received a modernising push seldom witnessed in other areas of the Empire. In Egypt, the British revolutionised the irrigation system by supplanting the old system of flood irrigation by all-year irrigation on a large scale, both in Lower and Upper Egypt. They also abolished the corvée system for canal clearance and bank repair. The most eloquent example of their achievements was the 1902 Aswan Dam, built at the height of imperial might, and one of the most economically successful and environmentally sound big dam projects ever undertaken. The British also helped to train a great number of Egyptian irrigation experts and hydrologists under the very able leadership of men like Garstin and Hurst. Not least, the British pioneered a system of river-sharing agreements among states, agreements that turned out to bolster Egyptian water demands vis-à-vis upstream countries, especially due to London’s and Egypt’s failure to negotiate a basin-wide agreement in the 1950s. The British formulated and popularised a basin-wide techno-scientific planning concept that was biased towards Egypt and primarily concerned with downstream needs. They helped reproduce a Nile-centred society, but paradoxically, and owing to the radical growth and complexity of the new irrigation system, Egypt became even more vulnerable to natural fluctuations and upstream political processes, which was one reason Nasser erected the new Aswan High Dam. The Aswan High Dam, built in the 1970s, was the crowning event in a long history of human efforts to control the Nile, signalling a kind of ultimate control of the river, though not of nature. In Egypt the river was turned into an irrigation

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ditch. The droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, which had such devastating effects in Ethiopia and the Sudan, were not felt in Egypt, where the fellahin could continue to irrigate their lands as before, safeguarded by the over-year Aswan reservoir. In even the most remote Egyptian village, thanks to the dam, the poor farmer could turn on the lights and switch on his television to watch soap operas and national and international news. And perhaps most important to the Egyptians: the High Dam meant that Egypt had achieved sovereignty over its life artery. But the water table rose, and threatened the magnificent Karnak temple at Luxor. The perennial water canals made the desert bloom, and malaria and bilharzia spread. The dam also trapped the silt that for thousands of years had been washed down from the Ethiopian plateau to fertilise the land of the Pharaohs, and the crippled Nile Delta allowed saline water from the Mediterranean to encroach on its agricultural lands. The Aswan High Dam, proposed by a man ‘full of mad ideas’, according to the British Foreign Office at the time, can be seen as a logical outcome of the modern scientific and developmentalist rationalism, which was brought to bear on the Nile by Muhammad Ali, but which triumphed during the British era. The Nile plans at the beginning of the twentieth century were as ambitious and complicated an undertaking as the building of the planned Cape to Cairo railway. The latter caught the mood of Victorian imperialism and struck the chord of the railway mania of the time, while the former was almost overlooked and largely forgotten in literature on imperialism. It aimed to tame the entire Nile and to plan for national water development in an area covering one-tenth of the African continent, including the biggest swamp in the world, the second largest lake and the longest river in the world. The British managed conceptually to conquer the Nile basin, and for the first time in its history the Nile was described and measured in detail, from source to Delta. Although the British were unable to achieve Garstin’s grand ideas, and Hurst’s Century Storage Scheme of the 1940s turned out to be unrealistic, the Nile experienced its most dramatic period ever under London’s rule. While the sudd is still largely uninfluenced by man, and the Blue Nile throws itself more or less unhindered over the series of rapids before it drops into a deep, violent gorge, flowing in a canyon southeast and west around the Choke Mountains before turning northwest to the Sudan, the building of dams and conveyance structures on the Nile was extraordinary by any comparative standard at the time. None of the other great rivers of the world was the subject of so many control plans and survey teams as was the Nile – especially during the first two decades of British rule over the basin. While the British in Egypt could build upon a long and sophisticated tradition of water engineering, in the Sudan they had to start virtually from scratch. In the Northern Sudan, various water-lifting devices were in use, such as the saqiya and the shaduf, and on the Upper Nile, Egyptian, French, Italian and German explorers had mapped part of the river system, but the coming of the British meant the coming of an entirely new age as far as irrigation was concerned. Due only to London’s overall Nile strategy, the Gezira Scheme on the Blue Nile was developed, to become the world’s biggest cotton plantation. The Sennar Dam and an extensive canalisation system were established in the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Jabal Auliya Dam on the

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White Nile was completed, but this was primarily intended to serve Egypt. The British eventually built up a Sudan Irrigation Service, independent of the Egyptian Public Works Department, which came to play an important role in the emergence of Sudanese nationalism. They produced an image of the Nile in the Southern Sudan as an aqueduct to the North. Only two years before the Nile empire finally collapsed the British came up with the first development plan for the people living in the Jonglei Canal Area and on the huge Nile plain in the Southern Sudan, but when it was first published it was an impressive report by any standard. If one cuts one’s way through the tall grasses that surround the monument erected to commemorate where Speke stood when he first gazed over the bay and the Nile at Jinja, one will find a dilapidated column. But while Speke may have been forgotten, the lake he named is still called Lake Victoria, and in the 1950s the British Government was instrumental, in negotiations with Egypt, in securing a power plant, officially opened by the young Queen Elizabeth in 1954. Almost as soon as the river leaves the lake, it has passed ever since through the turbines at the Owen Falls Dam, producing power for Eastern Africa up to the present day and impacting the natural rhythm of people’s lives more than the river’s flow. If, in the cool and clear air of the morning, not long after the sun has risen, one walks up the path to the Tisisat Falls in Ethiopia, one will see a spectacular and beautiful waterfall, attributed to the pre-Pleistocene uplift that occurred more than 2.5 million years ago. Lake Tana is naturally dammed by a lava barrier over which the Blue Nile drops 42 metres, but the British did not manage to get their concrete dam built there. A combination of Ethiopian opposition, Egyptian fears of British intentions upstream, Mussolini’s occupation, and naïve and unclear British hydropolitical tactics vetoed the dream of the Lancashire cotton industry, the Sudan Government, the Sudanese elite and the foreign policy strategists in Whitehall. Had the dam been built in the 1930s, the history of the Horn of Africa since then would most likely have been very different. When, on 16 November 1983, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army stormed out of the bush and captured nine employees of the French Consortium Compagnie de Construction Internationales, working under the burning sun in the middle of a huge plain to dig the 360km-long Jonglei Canal, the project was effectively brought to an end and the civil war in the Sudan took a more serious turn. The French company was attacked as it was excavating what the resident leader of the company told the author could be likened ‘to a new Seine through the heart of Africa’. But the guerrilla movement’s aim was to deal a serious blow to the Sudan Government. An attack on the water scheme was seen as an attack on the very heart of Khartoum’s power, since the main aim of the project was to increase the supply of irrigation water to the northern drylands. This enormous scheme, however, was only a modified version of the ambitions expressed by the Scottish water engineer in British service in Egypt, William Garstin, at the dawn of the twentieth century. The appeal of Garstin’s vision of a new and improved Nile through the swamps of the Southern Sudan was so strong that it survived both him and the British Empire. This ‘dawn of the century’ idea was transformed into an enduring conceptual structure and water

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perspective which, in fundamental ways, has affected the history of the Southern Sudan until today and the relationship between the riverain north and south. When Julius Nyerere and his Government in Tanzania planned to develop the water resources of the Kagera basin, they came up against what they regarded as a living ghost – the first Nile Waters Agreement between London and Cairo from 1929. In the 1970s the Kagera Basin Organisation estimated that about one million acres could profitably be irrigated there and in the Lake Victoria basin in Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania. But according to the 1929 Agreement, these countries were not allowed to withdraw Nile waters without the prior agreement of Egypt. The Nyerere doctrine regarding state succession treaties, formulated in 1962, opposed the legal view that implied that independent Tanzania inherited this Nile Agreement, which had originally been applied to territories under British colonial administration, and hence could not use the waters of the Kagera tributary. Egypt replied in a note on 21 November 1963. Pending further agreement, it said, the 1929 Agreement ‘remained valid and applicable’. The East African states are still impacted in their development by the Exchange of Notes between Lord Lloyd and Mohammed Mahmud Pasha, an exchange that reflected at the time Anglo–Egyptian relations, Egyptian ideas about ‘unity of the Nile Valley’ under Cairo’s leadership and London’s imperial strategy in the 1920s, which had nothing to do with Tanzania or the Kagera basin. During the final decade of the twentieth century, the Governments of Ethiopia and Egypt repeatedly aired their sharp differences about the use of the Nile. Although the Ethiopian Nile tributaries contribute more than 80 per cent of the entire flow of the main Nile, Ethiopia cannot exploit these water resources as it sees fit. A main justification for the present situation rests on a historical argument and the interpretation of the legality of a Nile Agreement from 1902. Ethiopian ministers have time and again declared that what they call ‘this inequitable state of affairs’ cannot continue. The Ethiopian Government also argues that existing Nile projects downstream are wasteful and irrational, since water would be more costeffectively stored on the Ethiopian plateau. Therefore what they oppose can, from a historical perspective, be seen as the implications of the British notion of the Nile. Proposals have been discussed for diverting the Setit to irrigate about 70,000 acres and for diverting the Blue Nile waters into the Awash catchment by drilling a tunnel. Egypt, for its part, and against strong opposition from upstream states, has diverted water from the Nile beneath the Suez Canal to irrigate the Sinai desert. Representatives of upstream states have argued that Egypt violates past understandings by channelling Nile water outside the basin. This is also an argument based on a historical construct; they employ a delimitation of the river basin developed during the British period. The gradual disintegration of colonial authority and of London’s ability to enforce a common strategy caused a more decentralised decision-making process but a less integrated rational Nile development strategy. On the other hand the combination of the physical character of the Nile basin and British Nile strategy created both increased water vulnerability and uneven development in the sphere of water development and water rights. Conflicts over the Nile waters did not start with the British

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age in the Nile basin and neither did it end with the demise of the Empire. Since London’s crushing defeat in the Suez crisis and the emergence of independent Africa in the 1960s, the states in the Nile basin have been at loggerheads over the sharing and control of the waters of the Nile. The legacy of the British age did not, of course, cause these conflicts, but their water policy in the basin has had important implications up until the present day. The British age is over, but the river is flowing as before, every year, every day, every second, all the time creating and recreating possibilities and constraints for economic change and political development. In the Nile basin the past is in the present and the present is in the past, but nobody can escape the impact of the Nile’s power and its history.

Notes on the Text

Notes on Introduction 1

2

Librarians and archivists in Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Abilene, Princeton, London, Durham and, not least, the University Library, University of Bergen, and the library at Chr. Michelsens Institute, Bergen, have been of invaluable assistance when writing this book. I will hereby thank them all. I have presented parts of the book to a number of historians and researchers from other disciplines in a number of countries, and received useful criticism and suggestions. It is impossible here to mention them all. I will, however, especially thank Inger Nygaard and Kristin Holst Paulsen for helping me with the typing of the manuscript, Hugh Allen for improving the language, and Professor Martin Daly for his sharp and detailed criticism of the manuscript. For an overview of all these plans for controlling the river, see Tvedt 2000a: 187–318.

Notes on Chapter 1

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Cromer 1908, II: 461. The Suez Canal runs north to south across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt. Rather than rounding Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, after 1869 ships could use the canal, which runs from Port Said (Bur Sa’id) on the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez in the south – altogether about 160km. It was built by the French-owned Suez Canal Company under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Its ownership remained largely in French and British hands for 80 years. When Disraeli defended his purchase of Khedive Ismail’s Suez Canal shares in 1875, he said that the canal was important because it secured Britain a ‘highway’ to the Indian Empire and its other colonies. Eighty years later, during the Suez crisis, the then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, used almost the same words in describing its importance: he talked of it as the ‘gateway’ and the ‘swing-door’ to the Empire. In 1882, the starting point of this narrative, France and Britain parted company over Egypt, with important regional and global political consequences. They joined forces over Egypt and Suez in 1956, at the time this story ends, in an event which signalled the end of British and French imperialism. In the meantime, Anglo– French rivalry affected the region’s history in important ways. The story of these relations is a minor narrative within the greater story of the river Nile under British tutelage.

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The great and lasting influence of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher’s Africa and the Victorians in 1961 (new edition 1981) has to a large extent been owed to its forceful proposition of a broad explanation of late-Victorian British expansion in Africa, and to its contribution to the general theory of imperialism. A central element and building block of this theory was the interpretation of the British ‘way to Fashoda’; the adoption of Britain’s Nile valley strategy is described as ‘perhaps the critical decision of the Partition’ (Robinson and Gallagher 1981: 283); ‘henceforward almost everything in Africa north of the Zambesi River was to hinge upon it’ (ibid.). Their theory will be referred to in some detail here, in order to clarify the content of the present narrative and historiographical differences. In Robinson and Gallagher’s theory Britain’s overriding motive was ‘Security of the Empire’: to protect and control the major lifeline, the Suez Canal. It was fear that other European powers might take control of the Upper Nile as a lever to expel the British from Suez that ‘compelled’ the British to occupy the regions south of Egypt. The occupation was pre-emptive; in order to forestall the danger, Britain had to rule the Nile basin. According to this interpretation, the importance of the Sudan in British imperial strategy was fundamentally shaped by the state’s conceived role as a buffer zone in defence of the British position in Egypt; Robinson and Gallagher called it ‘another Afghanistan’ (ibid.: 475). The existence of an anti-British state in the Sudan would not cause any serious problems for the British in Egypt. The relationship between Britain and the Mahdists was a kind of collaboration by default, since ‘the Dervishes who held the Sudan could not cut off the flow of the river…for they were no engineers’ (ibid.). Formal empire became necessary because of growing Mahdist weakness. If this buffer state had not weakened, the Mahdist state could have maintained its sovereignty. It was the threat from other European powers that made it necessary to send Kitchener and his troops to Fashoda, activating a kind of domino-complex among British policy-makers: if the Upper Nile fell, the Sudan might fall, then Egypt would be destabilised and the British might lose their control over Suez. Robinson and Gallagher’s thesis can therefore be reformulated: had there been no European rivalry in the Upper Nile, the British fears would not have been aroused, and the occupation of the Sudan would have been unnecessary. An important premise for the above interpretation is its assessment of the intrinsic economic value of the Upper Nile, and especially the Southern Sudan: according to the theory there was nothing there worth having (Uganda is not discussed). As in the rest of tropical Africa, they were merely scraping ‘the bottom of the barrel’ (Robinson and Gallagher 1953: 15), making ready for war with France for ‘the mastery of these deserts’ (Robinson and Gallagher 1981: 372). The British expanded, but without expansionist motives. The book also stresses what is seen as an irrational element in British policy. The British feared what the French might do with the water flow at Fashoda, a fear based on a fantasy. When the French arrived, they found that there was ‘no stone within miles of Fashoda’ (ibid.: 376). British Nile policy was therefore, according to Robinson and Gallagher, a typical example of what they called ‘an imperialism without impetus’ (ibid.: 25). Their description of the British ‘way to Fashoda’ was a case which served to demonstrate this general theory of late-Victorian imperialism.

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The Rosetta section was 465 metres in length with 61 arches. The Damietta section was 545 metres long and had similar numbers of arches and locks. See for example Sayyid-Marsot 1968 for a general description of Lord Cromer’s leadership. Tignor 1966: 234. Crouchley 1938: 145. Scott-Moncrieff 1895: 414-15. The Egyptian politician Nubar Pasha (Prime Minister under Ismail, but in 1888 dismissed by Cromer; Prime Minister again in 1894, but resigned the following year) formulated this common wisdom: ‘The Egyptian question is the irrigation question’ (quoted in Willcocks 1936: 67). Napoleon had also realised this: on occupying Egypt in 1798 (he rode into Cairo wearing Muslim dress and declaring himself to be a Muslim) he remarked that in no other country did ‘the prosperity and welfare of the inhabitants depend so directly upon the government as in Egypt’ (quoted in Crouchley 1938: 53). Barrages consist of low masonry structures built at right angles to the direction of stream flow, designed to be submerged in times of flood and to heighten the water level in times of low flow to such a level that it will enter a canal. Linant de Bellefonds and Lois Maurice Aldolphe 1873. See Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, 1882, no2. See, for example, Bulletin de l’Institut égyptien, third series, no2, 1891: 36-83, Cairo: 1892; Bulletin de l’Institut égyptien, third series, no5, 1894: 416-33, Cairo: 1895; Bulletin de la Société Khédivial de Géographie, fourth series, no1, January 1894: 9-43; Bulletin de la Société Khédivial de Géographie, fourth series, no10, December 1896: 745-65. The literature on the Wadi Rayan alone was ‘so extensive indeed…that the name of Wady Rayan ought to be as well known to the world as that of the lake of Geneva’ (Garstin 1894: 30). Cromer to Kimberley, 27 June 1894, FO 407/127. The corvée was unpaid labour for digging, clearance and repairing of canals and embankments during the low Nile. After 1890 a form of corvée continued for strengthening the embankments in order to avoid the risk of inundation during the high Nile flood. The corvée system had probably existed since the times of the Pyramids. It has been estimated that during the time of Muhammad Ali’s projects, 400,000 labourers were continuously employed (a labourer had to give 60 days’ work, often far from his village, every year). The Mahmudiyya Canal from the Rosetta branch to Alexandria employed, for example, a work force of 320,000 men, and the canal was dug without any survey or levelling. The work took place throughout the spring and early summer, just when the peasants of Lower Egypt were normally fully occupied with cultivation. Scott-Moncrieff 1895: 413. See for example Scott-Moncrieff 1895 and Willcocks and Craig 1913. Crouchley 1938: 148. Willcocks 1894: 5. Quoted in Robinson and Gallagher 1981: 277. Ross had been employed in irrigation in the Gangetic plains in India from 1863 to 1883, and came to Egypt in 1883, where he was first appointed Irrigation Inspector

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in charge of the Eastern Delta, and then became Inspector-General of Irrigation (1885–1892). Ross 1893: 190. Ibid.: 188. Willcocks, W. 1893, Report on the Nile and proposed reservoirs, in CAIRINT, 3/14/232, NRO. Ibid.: 9. Ibid.:5. The direct gain to the state was said to be from the sale of reclaimed lands and the increase in the annual revenues derived from them. Indirect gain to the state, but direct gain to the country, would result from the increased value of agricultural produce, the rise in the price of land, rents and customs revenues etc. A dam is a structure designed to store water for a considerable period of time, above and beyond the ‘heading up’ function of a weir or barrage. Normally, water never flows over a dam, but may be released around or through it via tunnels or penstocks. The Aswan Dam, like most dams constructed during British rule in the Nile valley (an exception was the Owen Falls Dam in Uganda in the 1950s: see below), was built primarily for irrigation. This is a distinctly different path of development from the case of the Indus, where until 1950 the only dams were for hydroelectric schemes, a difference that should not be overlooked when general descriptions of imperialism, British imperialism or even British imperial water policies and their impact on economic development are discussed. At the 1889 Paris International Congress for the Utilisation of Rivers, a Spanish engineer had stated that the Puentes reservoir had silted up to a vertical height of 14 metres in a few years, while the Nijar reservoir had silted up to the very top of the dam. Two reservoirs in Algeria had been failures for the same reason. And, as British experts were well aware, Indian irrigation literature agreed on this subject (see Willcocks 1894: 11). Garstin 1894. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmed had declared himself to be the Mahdi, the prophesied Muslim messiah who would rid the world of evil. He also declared a holy war against the Sudan’s infidel enemies: the European-supported Egyptian rulers. In 1885 the Mahdi’s forces managed to take Khartoum and kill General Charles Gordon. The Mahdi began to create a unified Islamic state, but died in June 1885, leaving that task to the Khalifa. William Garstin (1849–1925) entered the Indian Public Works Department in 1872. In 1892 he became Inspector-General of Irrigation in Egypt, and in September 1893 Under-Secretary of State. He was so popular that on a farewell tour through the Delta before he retired in 1908, he was enthusiastically greeted by people of all ranks, nationalities and parties, and by crowds of Egyptian farmers. Thereafter he often visited the country to advise on irrigation matters and as a Director of the Suez Canal Company. Cromer wrote about Garstin as early as 1901: ‘He has for many years directed the important irrigation works, the execution of which has raised the condition of Egypt from one of bankruptcy and poverty to one of almost unexampled prosperity’ (Cromer to Lansdowne, 19 June 1901, in ‘Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo enclosing a Report as to Irrigation Projects on the Upper Nile, &c.’, by Sir William Garstin, KCMG, 2).

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Garstin, W. 1895, ‘Note upon the Public Works Department for the year 1894’, 19 February 1895, enclosure 3 in no51, FO/407/131. Garstin, W. 1894, ‘A Note’, in Willcocks 1894: 53. Willcocks 1894: 45. Scott-Moncrieff 1895: 417. Quoted in Sandes 1937: 383. Garstin 1907. Garstin 1901. Willcocks especially thanked Baker: see Willcocks 1894, Appendix III: 3. In 1869 Baker had been employed by Ismail to lead an expedition up the White Nile to establish Egyptian hegemony over the equatorial regions of central Africa and to curtail the slave trade. Baker remained until 1873, establishing Equatoria Province as part of the Egyptian Sudan. Baker published a number of articles in The Times in the 1880s and 1890s, urging the British to build reservoirs on the Nile in the Sudan and at the African lakes (see below). Baker 1867: 563–67. Mason-Bey 1881: ‘Note sur les nilomètres et le mesurage des affluents du Nil, notamment du Nil blanc’, in Bulletin de la Société de geographie d’Egypte, 1881, 1–2: 51–56. See Ventre-Bey, ‘Hydrologie du bassin du Nil. Essai sur la prévision des crues du Fleuve’, in Bulletin de la Société Khédival de Géographie, fourth series, I, January 1984, Cairo: 1984. For a detailed description of the role of water-measuring stations in the Sudan for rational water planning in Egypt before 1885, see Chélu 1891: 2–38. Chélu 1891: 35. The death of Gordon has played a significant role in the historiography of British African policies in general and of the Nile valley in particular. The British public reacted by proclaiming him a martyred warrior-saint. Gordon had been a figure in the Egyptian expansion in the Nile valley. In 1873, this Christian mystic (he claimed among other things to have discovered the grave of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem) had been employed by Khedive Isma’il to ‘civilise’ the black pagans as Governor of Equatoria in the Southern Sudan. While there he also mapped the Upper Nile, thus contributing to the history of Nile discovery; see next chapter. Later, he became Governor-General of the Sudan. In 1884 Gordon was again sent to the Sudan, this time by the British Government, to help evacuate Egyptian forces from Khartoum. Khartoum came under siege by the Mahdists, and on 26 January 1885 the rebels broke into the city, and Gordon was killed. The literature about Gordon is enormous. The most important work politically was Slatin’s memoir Fire and Sword in the Sudan, published in February 1896. It became a sensational bestseller (see Daly 1997: 83). Sources falsely explain that Britain occupied the Sudan to ‘avenge the death of Gordon’, an argument used at the time to justify the march southwards in the Nile basin. This still pops up here and there, as in a recent bestseller on the scramble for Africa (see Pakenham 1991). See for example Milner’s description in Milner 1892: 197–98. See Willcocks 1893: 17, Cairint 3/14/232, NRO . Willcocks 1894: 12. Until the occupation in 1894, Cairo received water data on a less regular basis. Cromer wrote to Salisbury in 1891, anticipating future political

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changes: ‘No readings of the Victoria–Nyanza gauge have been recorded for a later date than the 31st July. This is, without doubt, due to the disturbances in Uganda. It is to be hoped that before long it will be possible to resume the regular transmission of this very useful information’ (Cromer to Salisbury 29 March 1891, FO 633/67). Ross 1893: 191. Many British called Muslims in the Sudan ‘Dervishes’. This stereotype was in line with the public mood and the ‘avenging of Gordon’ myth. The Sudan tended to be equated with Islamic ecstatism in the popular press. People at the time knew that the main ritual practised by the ‘Dervishes’ (called the dhikr) involved the repeated recitation of a devotional formula in praise of Allah, where the aim was to attain an ecstatic experience. Scott-Moncrieff 1895: 405. Garstin 1909: 135. More than a generation later the leading British Nile expert of the century, H. E. Hurst, summarised what the water-planners in the 1890s had already envisaged, and what Garstin and his colleagues had experienced: the occupation of the Sudan was ‘the great landmark’ in recent research on the Nile. See Hurst 1927: 40 Garstin succeeded Scott-Moncrieff as member of the institute on 30 December 1892. Willcocks 1894: Appendix III: 11. Willcocks 1894: Appendix III: 10. Ross 1893: 189. Willcocks 1894: Appendix III: 8. He quotes (in Appendix III: 4), among others, Linant Pasha’s estimates suggesting that the White Nile carried twice as much water as the Blue Nile during the crucial summer season. Willcocks 1894: Appendix III: 11. For a scientific description of the physical composition and role of sudd on the Upper Nile swamps, see Rzoska 1976. Baker 1874, Gessi 1892, Garstin 1901 and Gleichen (ed.) 1905 give detailed contemporary accounts of the trouble these plants caused for river communication. E. Lombardini published Saggio idrolico sur Nilo (Milano: 1864) and A. Chélu Le Nil, Le Soudan, l’Egypte (Paris: 1891). See also Willcocks 1894: Appendix III, 10–11. Mason Bey 1881 discussed how removal of the sudd could increase the water flow to Egypt, an idea shared by many at the time. In 1889 and 1900 the British sent out an expedition of 2000 people who spent six months clearing the river. See next chapter for a description of this strenuous task, which clearly showed the British determination to ‘take the Nile in hand’. Scott-Moncrieff ’s expression, in Scott-Moncrieff 1895: 410. In 1893, one year before Uganda was occupied, he wrote in a secret report: ‘When we consider the energy and the self-denying labours of the men who achieved the great discoveries of the sources of the Nile, it seems but a poor compensation to them to know that these sources can now be depicted on the plans. It would be a triumph indeed and a real compensation if the resources of modern science could be employed to utilise these great lakes, and by the construction of suitable works to insure a constant and plentiful supply of water to the Nile valley during the summer months when water is scarce and as valuable as gold. Both the Victoria

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and the Albert lakes lend themselves to be utilised as reservoirs as they have rocky sides at their outlets, while the Albert and Tana lakes by their convenient size are eminently suited for regulating basins’ (Willcocks 1893: 18). Garstin 1904: 166. Scott-Moncrieff 1895: 418. Cromer 1908, II: 110. Modern Egypt as a source is not unproblematic. It is not a dependable record or a trustworthy account of British achievements, and the book should therefore not be used – as it often is, without qualification – as a guide to his administration’s practice. This very interesting and well-written book can, however, be used to understand how Cromer wanted to legitimise his policies and, where it is not contradicted by other, more contemporary sources, it can also be used as a guide to actual British intentions. Cromer 1908, II: 461. The following comments on Cromer’s Nile policy and Egyptian policy were typical of the attitude of both Salisbury’s and Gladstone’s administrations: ‘[The government] entirely concur in your general views as to the general policy which should be followed in Egypt’ (Salisbury to Cromer, 8 March 1889, FO 407/93). I have not found any correspondence between Cromer and successive prime ministers in London indicating disagreements about Nile policy. Lord Salisbury was a Conservative. He was three times Prime Minister (1885–86, 1886–92, 1895–1902) and four times Foreign Secretary (1878, 1885–86, 1886–92, 1895–1900). Salisbury was thus both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister at the time when the British declared their Nile valley policy and at the time of the Sudan campaign. He has aptly been called a Victorian titan (see Roberts 1999). William Ewart Gladstone was four times Prime Minister (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94). Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery became Prime Minister 1894–95 as a result of Gladstone’s resignation. He had served under Gladstone in his second Government (1880–85) as Under-Secretary at the Home Office, handling Scottish affairs. Rosebery moved to Foreign Secretary in Gladstone’s third (1886) and fourth (1892–94) Governments. He was known as a politician with strong imperialist views. ‘List of Appointments held by English officials’, enclosure in no33, Baring to Salisbury, 26 January 1890, FO 407/99. Cromer to Earl of Kimberley, 27 July 1894, in FO 407/127. Alfred Milner (1854–1925), Financial Advisor under Cromer in Egypt in 1889–92. In 1892 he published England in Egypt, a book which effectively argues in favour of stronger British involvement there. In 1897 Milner became High Commissioner in South Africa. After serving as Secretary of War (1918) he was appointed Colonial Secretary (1919–1921). The Milner Mission played an important role in the Anglo–Egyptian conflicts of the early 1920s. When the Cabinet rejected his proposal that Egypt should be given a modified form of independence, Milner resigned in 1921 (see chapter 3). Milner 1892: 228. Cromer 1908, II: 464. Cromer to Lansdowne, 19 June 1899, in ‘Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo enclosing a Report as to Irrigation Projects on the Upper

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Nile, &c.’, by Sir William Garstin. Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice Lansdowne (1845–1927) had been appointed by Salisbury as Viceroy of India, became Secretary of State for War in 1895, and, after the elections of 1900, was appointed Foreign Secretary in the Conservative Government (1900–06). Landsowne had experienced the importance of river control in India. See chapter LIV on ‘Irrigation’ in Cromer 1908, II: 456–65. Cromer to Salisbury, 2 March 1889, FO 407/93. Milner 1892: 310. The question of who should be appointed Under-Secretary was therefore politically important. When Colin Scott-Moncrieff was appointed Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the British acted immediately. Salisbury was to tell Sir Colin that he should write his letter of resignation to the Khedive immediately so that Garstin could be appointed in his place. Two days later the Khedive, ‘hurt’ at hearing of Sir Colin’s appointment via Reuters, appointed Garstin on British advice (Hardinge to Salisbury, 18 August 1892, FO 407/114). M. Denaut, the French Acting Agent and Consul-General, cherished unrealistic hopes of putting a French engineer in that position. He spoke to Tigrane Pasha and expressed ‘surprise at the haste with which [the appointments of Garstin] appeared to have been made, as well as the disregard shown for the claims of M. Barrois’. At the same time Garstin was appointed, the first Egyptian after the British reorganisation of the Irrigation Service, Ismail Bey Sirri, Director of Works at Girgeh, obtained a rather highranking job in the Irrigation Service, by being appointed as Inspector of the 2nd Circle of Irrigation. R.M. MacGregor: ‘The Upper Nile Irrigation Projects’, 3, 10 December 1945, Allan Private Papers 589/14/48, SAD. Milner 1892: 310. Cromer 1908, II: 465. Quoted in Marquess of Zetland 1932: 171. Cromer to Salisbury, 21 October 1891, FFO 141/284. Cromer to Salisbury, 14 November 1891, FO 141/283. Cromer to Rosebery, 9 March 1893, FO 407/119. Cromer to Rosebery, 27 December 1893, ‘Further correspondence respecting the finances of Egypt’ 1893, FO/407/124. Rosebery answered immediately, and supported Cromer’s strategy. ‘Note by Mr Garstin upon Sir Elwin Palmer’s proposals for carrying out the Assouan Reservoir’, enclosure 2 in no10, Lord Cromer to the Earl of Kimberley, 27 June 1894, FO 407/127. Cecil 1921–32, IV: 137–38. Cecil 1921–32, IV: 135–40. Cromer to Granville, 3 April 1884, FO 633/6. Cromer to Granville, 21 January 1884, FO 633/6. Churchill 1899: 90. This was how Churchill described the ideas of the people who advocated a ‘forward policy’ in the Sudan. Mohammed Tawfiq Pasha had been appointed by the Ottoman Sultan in 1879 to placate European interests. Tawfiq became increasingly isolated, while a group of military officers led by Ahmad ‘Urabi Pasha gained public support. Tawfiq was forced to seek the protection of the British, and when they invaded Egypt Tawfiq

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was returned to authority, until 1892. He was almost completely in the hands of Cromer and the British. Cromer to Rosebery, 23 February 1886, FO 633/6. Or in Cromer’s words: ‘I have always strongly deprecated any attempt at reconquest, mainly on the ground that an expedition to the Soudan would disorganise Egyptian finance, and check the progress of reform in Egypt…At the same time, I have always regretted the loss of the Soudan, and I have felt that it must and should come back to Egypt eventually…’ (Cromer to Salisbury, 18 January 1890, FO 403/99.) Ethiopia has been called both Ethiopia and Abyssinia. ‘Abyssinian’ is still an accepted description of those who are Christian and speak Amharic or Tigrinya. They comprised the ruling groups during the whole of the twentieth century (as indeed in the past), although often in conflict with each other. ‘Abyssinia’ was used commonly by the Europeans in the last century, and again during the Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941. Cromer to Salisbury 13 March 1890, FO 141/276/84. See Cromer to Salisbury 15 March 1890, FO 403/99. Extract from a minute by General the Viscount Wolseley, Adjutant-General to the Forces, concurred in by H.R.H. the Commander in Chief, and forwarded by the Secretary of State for War, 13 January 1890, FO 141/274/16. Cromer concurred, and wrote confidentially to Salisbury in 1890 that he regarded ‘the occupation of Dongola…as a first step towards the reoccupation of the Soudan…’ (Cromer to Salisbury, 15 March 1890, FO 403/99). Kitchener was appointed Sirdar (Commander in Chief) of the Egyptian army in 1892. He later led the troops in the Battle of Omdurman, successfully handled the encounter at Fashoda with Marchand’s force, and became the first GovernorGeneral of the Sudan. Cromer to Salisbury, 12 March 1890, FO 141/276/29. One engineering point should be noted: the railway line had a different gauge from that in Egypt. Although the British publicly occupied the Sudan on behalf of Egypt against the ‘Dervishes’ and ‘threatening European powers’, they built a railway line from the north and through the desert that could not be used by Egyptian trains. On the other hand, in 1905 the British planned and built a new railway from Khartoum to the Red Sea coast at Port Sudan that was compatible with the Wadi HalfaAtbara line. See for example Salisbury to Rustem Pasha, 8 August 1890, FO 141/275/182. See for example Salisbury to the Marquis of Dufferin, 15 October 1890, FO 141/275/229. In Modern Egypt Cromer explained: ‘Before any reconquest could be entertained, two conditions had to be fulfilled. In the first place, the Egyptian army would have to be made efficient. In the second place, not only had the solvency of the Egyptian Treasury to be assured, but funds had to be provided for the extraordinary expenditure which the assumption of an offensive policy would certainly involve’ (Cromer 1908, II: 81). In spite of a number of very clear statements, in both contemporary documents and Modern Egypt, supporting an interpretation of Cromer’s Nile policies as imperialistic and expansionist, most explanations of his role in the occupation of the Sudan have mixed his patient, practical and down-to-earth

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attitude with a kind of ‘defensive imperialism’, or the prototype of the ‘reluctant imperialist’. Cecil 1921–32, IV: 139–40, 252–53, 280–82. Robinson 1959: 169. Gladstone to Queen Victoria, 29 September 1892, CAB 41/22/11. Gladstone to Queen Victoria, 30 September 1892, CAB 41/22/13. Lugard 1983, II: 584. He further wrote: ‘Egypt is indebted for her summer supply of water to the Victoria Lake, and a dam built across the river at its outlet at its exit from the lake would deprive Egypt of this’ (ibid.). And further: ‘The occupation of so distant a point as Uganda would be a fair and just claim to render valid our influence over the Nile basin beyond. With the evacuation of Uganda we must cede all claims to any exclusive influence in the Nile valley’ (ibid.:566). Finally, he quoted Lord Rosebery, who had said that Uganda commanded ‘probably the key to Africa’ (ibid.: 584). Lord Rosebery to Queen Victoria, 28 May 1895, CAB 41/23/34. Collins 1996: 58. When Tawfiq died he was succeeded by his 17-year-old son, ‘Abbas Hilmi II, in 1892. The new Khedive was not content to accept Cromer’s tutelage. The Khedive’s dismissal of the Prime Minister, Mustafa Fahmi, in January 1893 caused a crisis with the British. A new phase in Anglo–Egyptian relations began. ‘Abbas Hilmi was Khedive until 1914. Sir Francis Reginald Wingate (1861–1953) was Governor-General of the Anglo– Egyptian Sudan from 1899 to 1916. He joined the Egyptian army in 1883. In 1889 he became Director of Egyptian Military Intelligence, and produced a number of Intelligence reports on the Sudan before and during the Sudan campaign. On 24 November 1899, he defeated and killed the Khalifa ‘Abd Allah ibn Muhammad, successor to al-Mahdi. In December the same year he was appointed GovernorGeneral of the Sudan and Commander in Chief of the Egyptian army. He became High Commissioner for Egypt in January 1917 and was dismissed in October 1919 by the British Government. Cromer 1908 II: 81. Collins argues: ‘In June 1895 Lord Salisbury and his government returned to power. He immediately sought alternatives, other than the unwanted reconquest of the Sudan, to protect the Nile waters’ (Collins 1996: 53). This assessment does not explain actual developments, contradicts both Salisbury’s and Cromer’s own versions of their plans, and is not supported by documentation. Cromer to Kimberley, 8 March 1895, FO 633/6/235 The leader of Egyptian Intelligence, Francis Reginald Wingate, wrote that Egyptian troops were sent so as to ‘save [the Italians] from a further disaster’ (Wingate, The Sudan, 30 December 1896, Wingate Private Papers 263/1/355, SAD). Cromer 1908 II: 84. Collins argues that it was out of a fear of Italy in Ethiopia that Cromer stated: ‘Whatever Power holds the Upper Nile must by the mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt’ (Baring to Salisbury, 15 December 1899, FO 78/4243, quoted in Collins 1968: 123). This emphasis on imperial fear is one-sided. The Italian policy in the Nile valley was important for the evolution of Salisbury’s and Cromer’s Nile policy, not so much because of the threats it

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posed, but because of the tactical situation it created. Cromer wrote to Salisbury in March 1890: ‘It cannot be too clearly understood that any civilised Power holding the upper waters of the Nile at Khartoum and Berber will in reality dominate Egypt by reason of the control it will be able to exercise over the supply of water’ (Cromer to Salisbury, 15 March 1890, FO 403/99). In the same confidential note, Cromer suggested that Britain should reoccupy Khartoum and Berber, and described the future administration of this new Sudan as ruled by ‘the English officers of the Egyptian army’ (ibid.). See ‘Correspondence respecting the law-suit brought against the Egyptian government in regard to the appropriation of money from the general reserve fund to the expenses of the Dongola expedition, Egypt’, no1 (1897), London: Harrison and Sons, in FO 633/66. Abbas 1952: 43. On the Anglo–Egyptian side, the occupation of Dongola claimed a total of 47 lives in battle, while 47 British died of disease (21 of cholera), and 381 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers died of disease (235 of cholera). Cromer 1908 II: 91. Cromer to Salisbury 15 January 1897, Annual Report for 1896, FO/407/142. Cromer to Salisbury 26 February 1898, FO 407/150. Quoted in Cromer 1908 II: 94. Cromer 1908 II: 94. In April 1898, the prominent financier Sir Ernest Cassel arrived in Cairo. So far had the negotiations come (they started in 1897) that the details of the arrangement were settled in one day, and contracts were signed the following morning. Cassel was to provide £2 million (Peel 1904: 79). He had clearly understood the value of water and cotton in Egypt at a time when Lancashire was consuming around four million bales of cotton a year. The great increase in world demand meant that there was not enough raw material to go around, especially since cotton grown in India was of a short-staple type for which there was little demand in Lancashire. Salisbury to Queen Victoria, 25 July 1898, CAB 41/24/42. ‘Report by Mr Garstin on the Province of Dongola’, enclosure in no12, ‘Further correspondence respecting the affairs of Egypt, April–June 1897’, FO/407/143. Cromer to Salisbury, 27 February 1898, Annual Report for 1898, FO 407/146. Gleichen (ed.), 1905, I: 280. Earl of Cromer 1899 ‘Report by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration and Conditions of Egypt and the Soudan, 1899’. Cromer did not regard the Southern Sudan as completely worthless, as has been claimed. Sanderson, referring to Cromer 1908, I: 349-51, assigns to him the opinion that the ‘Southern Sudan was the least profitable part of an unprofitable region’ (see Sanderson 1965: 19). Cromer never said anything of the kind. Of course, Cromer was no romantic empire-builder, so control of the territory of Upper Nile – or of the Southern Sudan for that matter – was not a goal in itself. It was a means to an end, that of controlling the hydropolitics of the whole region. The dominant idea in much historical literature that the Southern Sudan was without value to the British is a clear example of what can be called ‘water blindness’ in analyses of regional politics.

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136 This analysis therefore also questions the explanation given by R.O. Collins and G.N. Sanderson, who approach the Sudan question within the ‘defensive paradigm’ of Robinson and Gallagher. See, for example, Collins 1968 (ed.), 1968, 1971, 1983 and 1996; and Sanderson 1965. 137 In 1877, Stone, the American Chief of the Egyptian General Staff, strongly urged the Egyptian Khedive to occupy Buganda and Kragwe without any loss of time. He thought Egyptian claims for these areas would soon be challenged, by the British among others. He emphasised the need to safeguard the Nile waters: ‘I tremble for the future of Egypt if she loses these Equatorial provinces. The Great Power which possesses the sources of the Nile will also possess for ever domination over lower Egypt’ (see Gray 1961: 185). 138 In the literature on the occupation of the Sudan, Baker has not been portrayed as an imperialist, but as a man who expressed the defensive mood ofVictorian imperialism. Robinson and Gallagher (1981: 283) quote from Langer’s book Diplomacy of Imperialism. Langer presents Baker’s position, mainly limiting his discussion to Baker’s letters to The Times in October 1888, but he misinterprets them. 139 In Ismailia, Baker wrote about the Sudan as a potential El Dorado. In 1884 he published an article called ‘Egypt’s Proper Frontier’. He talked about the Sudan as the ‘so-called Soudan’, and advocated extending the borders of Egypt to the south of Khartoum (see Baker 1884a: 42). 140 ‘An Interview with Samuel Baker’, Pall Mall Gazette, ‘Extra’ (1884), 8. 141 Collins argued that Baker tried to warn the British of the ‘danger they had long preferred to ignore’ (see Collins 1968: 122). What emerges in this analysis is a benevolent British imperialism that was forced to move up the Nile, against its own interest, ‘to allow Egypt, with British assistance, to conquer, occupy and administer the Sudan’ (Collins 1968: 124). 142 Baker to Kitchener, 29 April 1892, PRO 30/57/12. 143 Baker, ‘Military routes towards Berber’, 26 April 1892, PRO 30/57/12. 144 Baker 1884a: 43. 145 Baker’s articles have been used in the literature before now (see Langer 1935). The problem with Langer’s quotations and interpretation are that they miss some very clear points, and interpret those he uses as a sign of British fear of fellow European imperialists. More concretely, Langer argues that Baker became fearful of French motives owing to some speeches by a Frenchman in Cairo called Victor Prompt (see below), and therefore wrote his articles to warn the British public about ulterior French designs. Here it is sufficient to note that Baker wrote the articles and books before Prompt published anything or even came to Cairo. 146 Lugard 1983, II: 584. 147 Riaz Pasha’s Memo., 9 December 1888, encl. Baring to FO., 15 January 1889, C. 5668, P.P. 1889 LXXXVII, 769-70, quoted in Robinson and Gallagher 1981: 283–84. 148 Baker 1893, ‘A letter to a friend’, 1 May 1893, quoted in Langer 1968: 127. 149 Wingate to Bigge, 1 February 1897, Egyptian Army, Sudan Correspondence 13 January – 13 December 1897, 262/1: 262/2/7, SAD. 150 Wingate was appointed as Director of Military Intelligence to the expedition. At the same time he was the press censor and, more unusually, worked for some crucial days as correspondent for Reuters (Daly 1997: 85). Forty years after the

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campaign, Wingate told the military historian E.W.C. Sandes that the true story behind the Egyptian advance could not yet be put in writing (Wingate to Sandes, 3 February 1936, SAD 227/7). Collins writes: ‘Until hydrological studies were carried out along both the Blue Nile and the White in the first decade of the twentieth century, the British and everyone else assumed that the Nile flow was composed predominantly of water carried northward by the White Nile from the great reservoirs of the equatorial lakes’ (Collins 1996: 38). However, the hydrological reports on the Nile by Linant Pasha, von Strömen, Chélu, Lombardini, Willcocks and Garstin published in the nineteenth century, and the famous travel books by Samuel Baker, are quite clear: they all knew that the Ethiopian rivers bring most water. They were, however, seen from the British point of view at the time as less important, because this water came down at the wrong time of year. Menelik, 1844–1913 – original name Sahle Miriam – was King of Shewa (or Shoa) from 1865 to 1889, and later Emperor of Ethiopia (1889–1913). The name was significant, since Menelik I was the legendary son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Makeda). Menelik expanded the Empire almost to its present-day borders, fought back an Italian invasion in 1896, and carried out a wide-ranging programme of modernisation (see for example Marcus 1975). Prouty 1986: 79. Alfred Ilg had worked in Ethiopia for decades. Menelik had named him ‘Councillor of State for Foreign Affairs’, a function he exercised since the early 1890s. Ilg designed and constructed a piped-in water supply for the palace. A poem was even composed to commemorate this achievement: ‘We have seen wonders in Addis Ababa, Waters worship Emperor Menelik’ (Prouty 1986: 110–11). Consul Barnham to Baring, 29 April 1891, FO 407/106. The Spectator wrote on 7 March 1896 that the Italians ‘suffered a great disaster… greater than has ever occurred in modern times to white men in Africa’. Cromer to Salisbury, 16 January1897, FO 141/324. It has been argued that Salisbury, when he learned about what has been called the ‘failure of the Rodd mission’, had to ‘contemplate securing the Nile by military force’ (see Collins 1996: 57). Wingate also wrote that the Rodd mission had failed (see Daly 1997: 95), and most historians have tended to believe him. Most evidence suggests, however, that it basically achieved its objectives, since Menelik did not support French claims or the French missions. Neither Cromer nor Salisbury regarded the Rodd mission as a failure. Collins also wrongly argues that the Italian ‘threat to the Nile valley’ in the late 1880s was the ‘great watershed’ in British Nile policy, and that Italian ambitions in Eritrea and the Kassala area threatening British interests were the factor that forced Salisbury to ‘crystallize his upper-Nile policy’ (Collins 1996: 38). No sources have been cited to back up this assertion. On the contrary, there is much evidence in the sources indicating that this was not the intention. Secret notes for the British Cabinet stated the following: ‘Our intervention was provoked by the imminent peril which at one moment appeared to threaten the Italian forces at Kassala and Adigrat. With the object of effecting a diversion in their favour, we have announced to the European powers that we intend to advance up the valley of the Nile, and that it seems to us expedient to occupy Dongola. Our explanation to Lord Cromer has, however, been

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more specific, for we have told him that, while the movement was intended to help the Italians, the ulterior object was to restore a portion of her lost territory to Egypt’ (CAB 37/41, no28, PRO 1/12/33). The fact is that Salisbury and Cromer had decided on a military conquest years before, in order to strengthen their position on the Nile. At the time of the Italian ‘threat’ to the Nile valley, London already held the source of the river and Kitchener’s army was before the gates of Omdurman. Abyssinian report, Wingate 122/10/19, SAD. Note on intelligence received concerning King Menilik and his possible collaboration with the Khalifa, 20 December 1896, 203/1/290–97, SAD. Abyssinian report, Wingate 122/10/19, SAD Cromer to Salisbury, 11 February 1897, FO 407/146. Bonchamps 1898. Lewis aptly summarises this aspect of the Bonchamps mission: here the ‘French suffered a diplomatic Adwa’ (Lewis 1988: 136). From another point of view, this mission was unimportant. In the diplomatic and military history of the Nile valley, it was very marginal. Wingate, re: decision to remain at Dongola, Slatin’s opinion of the possible success of a French expedition to Fashoda, and French collaboration with Menelik, 263/1/51–8, SAD. In October, Salisbury wrote privately to a friend about the importance of Egypt and the Nile. He did not mention the threat of European rivals at all. It was British interests in Egypt that made it important for London ‘to strengthen our position on the Nile (to its source)…’ (Salisbury to Currie, private letter, 19 October 1897, copied in Bourne 1970: 452. Also in Salisbury MSS, A/138 no43). Wingate to Kitchener 6 August 1897, 263/1/650-51, SAD. ‘It seems to me’, a Jesuit wrote as early as 1520, ‘that in all the world there is not so populous a country, and so abundant in corn, and herds of innumerable cattle’ (see Alvares 1961, I: 131). Quoted in Prouty 1986: 102. On their way to the coast, the Ruwenzori mountains were seen by European explorers for the first time (described as Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon). They were also able to note that the Semliki River was connected to Lakes Edward and Albert (see next chapter for the history of European Nile discoveries). Junker’s plans were not a ‘German threat’, or a threat that caused Equatoria to become the ‘linchpin’ of Salisbury’s Nile policy (see Collins 1967: 129). Salisbury never made Equatoria the linchpin of his policy, and his Nile valley policy was not in any important way affected by the issue of leadership of this expedition. It has been argued that Peters created ‘something like a panic in London’ (see Hornik MP, 1942, The Anglo–Belgian Agreement of 12 May 1894: 228). But who panicked? Gladstone? Salisbury? Did anyone really panic? British strategists did not panic at all, although Peters functioned as a reminder, and his activities, if they had any effect, only made the British more sure of their chosen Nile policy. Uganda had been occupied the year before, and now the rest of the Nile issue had to be settled. Hornik also writes that the French thought their ‘possession of the Nile sources would enable her to flood or dry up Egypt at will’ (ibid.: 228). The problem with this assessment is that the French never possessed any Nile sources at all.

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171 Salisbury to Sir Edward Malet, 25 June1989, Africa no266, FO 84/1954. 172 Some years later on 9 May 1906 Britain, and what was called the Government of the Independent State of Congo, signed a new Agreement. Article III was about the Nile waters: ‘The government of the independent state of Congo undertakes not to construct, or allow to be constructed, any work over or near the Semliki or Isango river which could diminish the volume of the water entering Lake Albert except in agreement with the Sudanese Government’ (see below). 173 Sir Edward Grey became Foreign Secretary in 1905 and served without interruption until 1916. He was to play an important role in Blue Nile negotiations with Italy, but in 1895 his statement should rather be seen as an undiplomatic warning to the French. 174 Hansard, fourth series, xxxii, 405–6, also quoted in Bourne 1970: 434–35. 175 Some of the analyses presented in the literature are quoted here in order to show how strong the dominant tradition is. Langer 1968 (1935) argues that Prompt, in his speech ‘Soudan Nilotique’, made ‘some rather indiscreet speculations’. If the water in the great lake-reservoirs were not let out in time, the summer supply of Egypt could be ‘cut in half ’. If the reservoirs were thrown open suddenly, and the whole flood sent down to Egypt, the ‘civilization of the Nile could be drowned out by one disaster’ (Langer 1968 [1935]: 127). He further argued that Prompt had a real influence on French, and probably British, policy. Baker must have had Prompt’s speech in mind, Langer argues, when he wrote to an English friend on 1 May 1893, ‘If we settle down at the headwaters of the Nile, we command Egypt.’ From this time on, the ‘theory of the French engineer, which was sound in most respects, became a sort of nightmare to the English’. Langer also pointed out that the speech had great influence on French policies, and that it was the direct reason behind the decision of the Under-Secretary for the Colonies, T. Delcassé, on 5 May 1893, to send Major Monteil to Fashoda. Collins has repeated the main parts of Langer’s original analysis: ‘Prompt did not confine his remarks [in 1893], however, simply to Nile hydrology. He suggested that a dam constructed on the Upper Nile could destroy Egypt. He who controlled Fashoda controlled Egypt’ (Collins 1968: 16). Collins also writes that Fashoda ‘had long been considered the hydrological key to the basin of the Upper Nile’, and ‘the point where the Nile waters could best be controlled’ (ibid.: 4). The assumption is that these speculations of a Frenchman in Cairo scared the British, and helped to form their defensive Nile valley strategy. Collins: ‘The French ultimately chose Fashoda as their goal, not only because it was the capital of the Shilluk kingdom , but because anyone at that time, or even today, causually [sic] looking at the configuration of the Upper Nile basin without any specific knowledge of its hydrology would observe that all of the many tributaries of the White Nile come together and form a single mighty river at Fashoda’ (Collins 1990: 49–50). In Bates (1984), the whole of the first chapter is devoted to a description of the threatening visions that Prompt talked about at the gathering on that fatal afternoon of 20 January 1893, held at what was described as the Institut Egyptien (Bates asserts that it was a forum for Frenchmen and French-speaking Egyptians, while a number of British administrators were members, among them Garstin,

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Willcocks and Scott-Moncrieff; see pages 1–10). Bates admits that no towns or villages were named by the speaker, but ‘anyone could work out from the map that his dams were in the vicinity of a small, smelly, abandoned mud-flat fort called Fashoda’ (page 3). Another monograph on the race to Fashoda, by D.L. Lewis, repeats the above arguments: ‘Victor Prompt’s report convinced Carnot that French engineers, having dug the Suez Canal and begun to pierce the ill-conceived Panama Canal, could dam the headwaters of the Nile, turning the great waterway on and off like a bathtub spigot. Helped by the small but well-organised imperialists in the National Assembly, Delcassé was able to insert preliminary credits in appropriations voted in June 1893 for an expedition through the French Congo to the Nile watershed in the Bahr-al-Ghazal’ (Lewis 1988: 47–48). One was entitled ‘La Vallée du Nil’, and was given on 6 February 1891; another lecture was ‘Note sur les résérvoirs d’eau dans la Haute Egypte’, on 26 December 1891; then came the herostratic ‘Soudan Nilotique’ on 20 January 1893, and finally ‘Puissance éléctrique des cataracts’ on 28 December 1894. Prompt 1893: 95. He was interested neither in the Bahr al-Ghazal province, nor in Deim Zubeir, with which Marchand was preoccupied in his discussions of French strategic aims in letters of 1896 to Monteil. In spring 1894, Lugard went to Paris to see Monteil, among others. He reported that Monteil planned to ‘march on Lado or Fashoda with an exceptionally well-organised expedition’ (Lugard memorandum, 10 March 1894, FO 83/1310, quoted in Taylor 1950: 54). Of course, Lugard was not a reliable source in these matters. His role was to propagate the necessity for British occupation of the entire Nile valley, and he can therefore not be used as a reliable source for what Monteil said. Monteil was in any case a rather marginal figure in French political life. See note 177. Prompt 1893: 109. White 1899. Silva White communicated with Wingate and was familiar with British policies. Cocheris 1903. See, for example, Willcocks 1894, Appendix III. He wrote: ‘All the small ponds and pools cease to aid the stream, and if they are very extensive, as they are south of Fashoda, they diminish the discharge considerably by their large evaporating areas’. He dismissed Prompt’s findings as those of a layman (Willcocks 1894: 17). These speculations were left out of the official report published the next year, but they were rational and realistic, while Prompt’s were irrational and not very realistic. Baker, S. W. 1862–63, ‘Extracts from a letter of Samuel W. Baker’ in Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, vol.7: 78–80. His narrative of the dramatic tour of Baroness Tinné and her sister and daughter shows clearly that the area would not hold up one of the mightiest rivers in the world: ‘The steamer with the exploring Dutch ladies has been unable to ascend the Sobat for want of fuel. Its course is through waterless plains of high grass. With determined pluck they used all their furniture for fuel, in the hopes of reaching some spot of forest, but at length with exhausted fires they floated slowly to the White Nile.’ Baker 1867, I: 44

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185 Emin Pasha 1879: 273. 186 Brown simply misunderstood the nature of the geography and hydrology of the Nile: ‘The strategic centre of this region was the ancient fort of Fashoda at the headwaters of the Nile’ (see Brown 1970: 23). Magnus repeats as if it is true the idea that Fashoda ‘was regarded hydrographically as the key-point on the Upper Nile’ (Magnus 1958: 138). 187 This understanding of the rivershed is found in Lewis 1988. Lewis also apparently believes that the rivershed and Fashoda are located at the same place. 188 He wrote that the railway was ‘projected solely as a political railway to reach Uganda, and to secure British predominance upon the Upper Nile’ (Churchill 1989 [1908]: 10). 189 French works on the Marchand Mission scarcely mention Prompt at all (see, for example, C. Vergniol and his three articles on ‘Les origines de la Mission Marchand’ in La Revue de la France, I: 1936, August and September issues). Michel mentions Prompt in passing in relation to the Monteil mission, but then writes: ‘On ne retrouvera pas chez Marchand de telles vues “technocratiques” mais il ne lui vint pas à l’esprit de chercher un autre objectif que Fachoda’ (Michel 1972: 20). See also Emely 1935, who does not even mention Prompt. 190 Gabriel Hanotaux (1853–1944), member of the Chamber of Deputies (1886–89), appointed Foreign Minister in May 1894. He held this post until 1898. 191 Brown 1970: 27. 192 See Taylor 1950 for a discussion of Hanotaux’s effort to reach an agreement with Great Britain. See also Dethan 1966: 205–13. 193 Brown 1970: 29, Delcassé to Monteil 13 July 1894. 194 This report neither discussed Prompt’s report nor elaborated on the hydrological importance of Fashoda. 195 Collins argues that the British (in June 1895) were ‘unable to determine the exact goal of the Marchand expedition, but any simpleton would have realised that a French expedition moving up the tributaries of the Congo in a north-east direction could only terminate at Fashoda’ (Collins 1996: 53). Obviously the Marchand expedition could not have had any effect on British policy in 1895, since his orders were not signed before February 1896, and there were, of course, many other places an expedition could go. 196 Sir E. Monson to Salisbury, 20 February 1898, FO 407/146. 197 Salisbury to Cromer, 2 August 1898, FO 407/147. 198 Rodd, Alexandria to Salisbury 18 August1898, FO 407/147. 199 Rodd, Alexandria to Salisbury, 7 September 1898, FO 407/147. 200 The Times, 14 April 1898. 201 Historians have argued that Marchand was rather comfortably in possession of Fashoda – well supplied and well fed, acting in the name of France, and more secure and comfortable than the Anglo–Egyptian garrison that Kitchener would leave there (Sanderson 1965: 338–39). The crux of this argument is that the British (and Wingate, who was the press censor) twisted the facts, and described Marchand as in a very weak position in order to weaken the hand of the French Government. The problem with this analysis is that it disregards Marchand’s own version, most literature (as well as secret intelligence information from Wingate to Cromer) and the logic of military force and supply routes. Cromer wrote to

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Salisbury that ‘in the event of the French Government refusing to order Marchand to return’ there would be ‘no great practical difficulty in cutting off all supplies’, and that the Sirdar saved the French forces from ‘annihilation’ (Cromer to Salisbury, 7 October 1898, FO 407/147). What is also important is that Wingate described the encounter to his wife in the same way: the ‘poor Froggies’ were ‘virtually our prisoners’; indeed, had been ‘rescued’ by the British from certain ‘annihilation’ at the hands of the Mahdists. He concluded, ‘I suppose the “conclusion” cannot be long in coming; for the French govt., in the face of our rescue of their expedition, which is now at our mercy, cannot fail to send them orders to return via Cairo and in that case I shall hope to introduce to you my friend Marchand’ (Wingate to his wife, 23 September 1898, SAD 233/5). It should be noted that he accurately foresaw what would happen. See Beall Giffen 1930: 18. Parliamentary Papers, Egypt no2, 1898: 9, Rodd to Salisbury, 25 September 1898. Bates 1984: 132. Quoted in ‘France, Russia and the Nile’, Contemporary Review, LXXIV: 769, and in Beall Giffen 1930: 45. Parliamentary Papers: Egypt no3, 1898: 4, Kitchener to Cromer, 21 September 1898. Théophile Delcassé (1852–1923) was French Foreign Minister (1898–1905 and 1914–15). In 1894–95 he was Minister of Colonies. He was a main architect of the new system of European alliances formed in the years preceding World War I. He worked for understanding with the British. In 1904 an Agreement with the British on a broad range of questions (including Nile questions; see below) was signed, establishing the basis for the Anglo–French Entente Cordiale on 8 April 1904. Monson, Paris, to Salisbury, 7 September 1898, FO 407/147. Parliamentary Papers: Egypt no2, 1898: 5. Monson to Salisbury, 8 September 1898 The British Government reminded the French of Grey’s speech in Parliament in 1895, and about a note Monson had addressed to the French Foreign Minister on 10 December 1897, which forcefully emphasised that ‘Her Majesty’s Government… must not be understood to admit that any other European Power than Great Britain have any claim to occupy any part of the Valley of the Nile’ and that the British Government ‘entirely adhere to the language’ in Grey’s speech. This was the message Salisbury sent to Cromer in order to underline the diplomatic strategy. See Salisbury to Cromer 2 August 1898, FO 407/147. Salisbury to Monson, Paris, 9 September 1898, FO 407/147. Monson to Salisbury, 8 September 1898, FO 407/147. Monson to Salisbury, 12 September 1898, FO 407/147. Parliamentary Papers: Egypt no2, 1898: 9, Rodd to Salisbury, 25 September 1898. Monson to Salisbury, 27 September 1898, FO 407/147. Monson to Salisbury, 30 September 1898, FO 407/147. Monson was reporting an unofficial conversation, but Delcassé assured him that the decision just communicated was irrevocable. Marchand returned to Paris and became an idol in the middle of the Dreyfuss affair. For his bravery in crossing Africa and confronting the British, he was promoted to commander of the Legion of Honour.

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218 This, like other interpretations up to the present day, was very much influenced by the official despatches Lord Salisbury took the wise and unusual step of publishing as early as 9 October 1898, recognising that the country was thoroughly behind him and that it was of the highest importance that France should see this was so. 219 On the other hand, they were willing to guarantee to France and other powers a commercial outlet on the Nile (see Salisbury to Monson, 11 January 1899, FO 407/150). 220 Tignor 1966: 215. 221 On the other hand, in January 1898 Salisbury instructed Major Macdonald in Uganda that it was ‘preferable where possible to avoid hoisting the Egyptian flag in the districts which he visits’ (Salisbury to Crawford 20 January 1898, FO 407/150). Uganda was, of course, also claimed by Egypt as part of its lost territories. 222 Magnus 1958: 139. 223 In his memorandum on the Condominium Agreement, Cromer starts by portraying the occupation as a continuation of the policy of Muhammad Ali and Ismail. The Sudan had been only temporarily evacuated by Egyptian and British troops. He wrote, ‘Britain organized the reconquest of the territory in 1896–8 with Anglo– Egyptian forces primarily to forestall French designs’ (Cromer’s memorandum of 10 November 1899; Agreement establishing a condominium in Sudan: Great Britain and Egypt, 10 November 1899 – 10 July 1899, British and Foreign State Papers, 91: 19–22, quoted in Hurewitz 1975: 467). Here Cromer is playing the altruistic card; London is giving Egypt its lost territories back. But this memorandum should not be read as a memo on British intentions. Rather it should be interpreted as his proposal for how the Agreement should be justified officially. 224 Quoted in First 1970: 127–28. 225 Britain actually also became the first power in Egypt’s modern history to exploit Egypt’s vulnerable geopolitical situation, and was the first in history with the technological capacity not only to threaten the country, as apparently Ethiopian rulers did during the European Middle Ages, but actually to deprive Egypt of some of the natural Nile flow. That was reflected in the Allenby ultimatum in 1924. (See below.) 226 Robinson and Gallagher 1981: 288. 227 Ibid.: 474–75. 228 Taylor wrote: ‘Diplomacy had ceased: the race to Fashoda had begun. Each side was a little frightened by what it had started’ (Taylor 1950: 76). This misunderstanding expresses a perspective in which the Nile and plans for its exploitation are of no importance. He also argues that the breakdown in diplomatic negotiations with France in 1894 showed that, since the British now had realised that the idea of occupying the Sudan from Uganda had proved unworkable, the British were thus ‘belatedly willing to leave the Nile alone south of Fashoda if the French would do the same’ (Taylor 1950: 79). This argument is as wrong as it can be. It fails to include in the analysis the hydrological unity of the river and the role of the sudd and of evaporation on the amount of water in Egypt and the plans for river modelling in the Southern Sudan.

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Notes on Chapter 2 1 2

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Cromer to Lansdowne, 15 March 1905, FO 407/164. Garstin 1904: 166. No wonder that contemporaries characterised the irrigation engineers as being ‘animated by the best spirit of the empire-building Englishman’ (Peel 1904: 44). It has recently been argued that the concept of the ‘river basin’ ought to be replaced by other units with different interdependencies, because ‘the adherence to the dictates of its physical unity is a hindrance to the distribution of water according to need’ (Teclaff 1967: vi). The great plans for inter-basin transfer of water, for example, reject the basin as the dominant or sole planning unit. In Sri Lanka, during the heyday of the Sinhalese civilisation (about a thousand years ago), the whole irrigation system was based upon a conceptualisation of running water which regarded the basin perspective as a constraint. Furthermore, some of the best-known modern laws and treaties that prescribe unified development of water resources apply not to a whole basin but to tributary basins, or only to some parts of the basin (see Brohier: 1934). In many Western European countries, where water has been relatively abundant, the river basin concept is a very novel idea, and many countries have not taken the basin as the unit of description, monitoring or planning. The 1904 vision of basin-wide planning was not only concerned with water resources; as with the launching of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s the vision of basin-wide planning became broader, leading to claims that the river basin should be the unit for development of all its resources, the presumption being that its physical unity tends to make it a suitable multipurpose economic region (Teclaff 1967: 2). This report was the first anywhere that both described an entire river basin of such enormous size and suggested a basin-wide plan to use it, decades before similar documents were produced about other transnational rivers such as the Danube, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambezi and the Amazon. Garstin 1904: 166. The following observation by Wingate caught the crux of the matter, and reflects the foundation of British Nile discourse: ‘During my visit to the Bahr-el-Ghazal I was much struck with the difficulty of identifying various rivers owing to the fact that the natives, through whose territory they pass, give to those portions of them their own distinctive names. For instance, the Bahr-el-Arab, in its upper reaches, is known as the Bahr-el-Rizeigat, as it passes through the Rizeigat country; lower down, for the same reason, it is known as the Bahr-el-Janghe; and still further down as the Bahr-el-Homr. The Jur River, which is, in point of fact, the principal river of the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province, has a variety of names, and it would be much simpler to call it the Bahr-el-Ghazal from its source to its junction with the White Nile.’ (Quoted in Cromer to Lansdowne, 15 March 1905, FO 407/64, and Report by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration and Conditions of Egypt and the Soudan for the year 1904: 172.) Garstin 1909: 346. Herodotus 1954. The Nile was thus far from being a gateway ‘to the interior’, as many other great rivers in other areas have been, such as the Yangtze (which could be navigated for 2500 kilometres upstream from the sea), and the Amazon (even farther).

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This is an analysis of the relationship between conceptualisation and practice regarding the understanding and planning of a river basin. It tries to understand and describe the development of the relationship between ‘nature’ or ‘place’ as something material, something ‘outside’ society, and human interactions, which are seen as what creates society, with the implication that ‘nature’ is either irrelevant or only relevant as a social construction. Geographical differences cannot be reduced to things that are produced by societal development; they also affect structural differences among societies. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was still held that the sources of the Nile were to be found in a place called the ‘Mountains of the Moon’. These have since been identified with the Ruwenzori mountains between Lake Albert and Lake Edward. If this theory is accurate, the ancient geographers were perhaps more correct than many of the famous British explorers of the nineteenth century. The Ruwenzori mountain range is known as the Mountains of the Moon because of its stark, desolate landscape. It is located south of Lake Albert, and lies in one of the most remote and sparsely populated regions of Africa. The Portuguese Jesuit Pedro Paez visited the source in company with the Emperor Susenyos and his army in 1618. His account of the spring was published in 1678 by Athanasius Kircher of the Jesuit Roman College, in his famous Mundis Subterraneus, 2 vols, Amsterdam, 1665. Jeronimo Lobo published his account of the Blue Nile springs in English in 1673. One of the most curious but lesser-known attempts to find the sources of the Nile was made by a Norwegian long-distance runner, Menzen Ernst. In 1836 the East India Company had paid him £250 to run from Constantinople to Calcutta. He did it in four weeks. After a three-day rest in India, he ran back again – 8900km in 59 days. According to a contemporary German biographer, Ernst’s motto was ‘Motion is life, stagnation is death’. In the spring of 1842 he reportedly ran from Muskau in Prussia down through the Ottoman Empire to Jerusalem in 30 days. He then continued to Cairo, intent on following the Nile to its source, 30 years before Stanley and Livingstone arrived on the scene. By January 1843 he was close to the present border between Egypt and the Sudan when he succumbed to dysentery. Menzen Ernst was found dead in the sand a few days later and was buried under some stones at a spot now submerged by the Aswan Dam. Now we know that of the freshwater lakes of the world it is exceeded in size only by Lake Superior in North America, its area being 64,484 square km. Its greatest length from north to south is 337km, its greatest breadth 240km. Its coastline exceeds 3220km. The lake’s basin area covers 238,900 square km. Gleichen (ed.) 1905: 15. Cheesman 1968: 17, and Moorehead 1962: 282. Blashford-Snell 1970: 43. The first recorded journey down the entire Ethiopian Blue Nile was made by Cheesman during the late 1920s. The first man who canoed from the Blue Nile Bridge to Roseiris in the Sudan was Arne Rubin, a Swede, in 1965 (see BlashfordSnell 1970: 43). Gleichen to Wingate, 20 February 1898, 266/2/22–23, SAD. For a listing of contributions in different journals in the 1870s and 1880s, see Tvedt 2000.

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The following books are most relevant for an understanding of Nile knowledge before the British period: Lombardini 1864, 1865 and 1869, Klöden 1865, Chavanne 1983 and Chélu 1891. For a description of Egyptian Nile gauges in the Sudan before 1885, see Chélu 1891: 2–38. See, for example, Milner’s description in Milner 1892: 197–98. Cromer to Salisbury, 15 January 1897, Annual Report for 1896, FO/407/142. The records of the main Nile’s maximum and minimum levels at Roda island on the outskirts of Cairo, which went back, with interruptions, to AD 640, were of limited help because the aim of those records was not so much to understand the river in order to control it as to adapt to it by a system of flood irrigation. The level that the water reached on the octagonal pillar of red stone decided the day of ‘the cutting of the canals’ and it enabled the administration to fix an appropriate level of taxation to plan for a ‘lean year’ or a ‘year of plenty’. Now, the aim was to acquire sufficient information about the various tributaries upstream to change the natural river regime to suit a system of perennial irrigation downstream. The Nilometer at Roda Island is an octagonal pillar of red stone with scales on its side. It stands in the middle of a kind of a cistern, and a stone staircase leads down to the bottom, allowing the observer to read the scales. The well had passages which connected it with the river, and the restored gauge has a pyramidal roof as in former times. This measurement too had its flaws. Where the flow was turbulent, as it is when the Nile is in flood, the tendency was for discharges determined by currentmeters to be too great because of the difficulty of sounding. Where the velocity varies in direction and magnitude, current-meters may also give excessively high results. This may be one (often overlooked) reason that during the early years of British rule the Nile had a higher discharge, according to the statistics, than it has had since. In this method a large masonry tank was used to measure the discharge of one type of sluice under all conditions of head and sluice opening. Through the medium of the river level below the dam, comparison of the discharge rates of different types of sluices was made. Step-by-step, all the sluices of the dam were calibrated, and the discharge of the river was measured. During the low stage of the river, when this method could be applied most successfully, the discharge could be determined with an accuracy greater than that obtained by any other method. Rodd to Salisbury, 25 September 1898, Parliamentary Papers, Egypt no2, 1898, 9. Garstin 1904: 119. When King Leopold proposed to obtain commercial facilities on the Nile by improving the Upper Nile for purposes of navigation, Garstin’s observations blocked his suggestions. Garstin informed Cromer that between Lakes Albert, Edward and Lado there were two reaches where cataracts and rapids were frequent (on the Semliki and on the Nile between Dufilé and Rejaf), and that 78 locks would be required on the Semliki, with 72 on the Nile. Besides these locks, costly regulators or barrages would be required, owing to the impossibility of passing the entire river discharge through the valves of the lock gates. Cromer and London agreed with him; Leopold’s project could also safely be turned down because it was technologically unrealistic.

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Securing the Nile basin for the British had to be done in a more indirect, diplomatic way, and by ‘hard’ scientific facts. The aim was clear: if King Leopold wanted more territory in the Bahr-al-Ghazal, exclaimed Lansdowne, ‘by all means let us give him something more’, as long as it was not the Nile (quoted in Collins 1971: 97). Findlay to Lansdowne, 23 July 1905, FO 407/164. The text of Article III of the 1906 Agreement between Britain and the Government of the Independent State of Congo reads, ‘The government of the independent state of Congo undertakes not to construct, or allow to be constructed, any work over or near the Semliki or Isango river which could diminish the volume of the water entering Lake Albert except in agreement with the Sudanese Government’. Garstin’s new research made this formulation an improvement, from London’s point of view. Garstin 1899: 30. I use the past tense here, although the Southern Sudan is one of the few places in the world where a document describing the relationships between man and water in 1904 is still valid, and can be used as a description of present-day circumstances (one important difference is that the Nilometers have been out of operation for decades because of war). See Gleichen (ed.) 1905: 144. Garstin’s expression, in Garstin 1905: 349. For other more detailed descriptions, see Garstin and Lyons 1905 and Garstin and Peake 1905. Such plans were drawn up by the Egyptian Government in the early 1960s. Garstin 1905: 349. Garstin 1904: 165. Garstin 1904: 155. This fact had been described by Willcocks in general terms as early as in 1894: ‘In an average year on 20 May, the White Nile discharge is 300 cubic metres per second at Khartoum’, while ‘the low water discharge of the Blue Nile is 160 cubic metres’ (Willcocks 1894, Appendix III: 9). The Blue Nile and Atbara contribute together about 70 per cent of the total annual discharge, while the White Nile carries the rest. The Blue Nile has its maximum flow in August, when it can emit as much as 60 times its discharge in the low season. The Atbara is a similar type of stream, but of about one-quarter of the volume of the Blue Nile. Cromer to Lansdowne, 22 April 1904, Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo, enclosing a Report by Sir William Garstin upon the Basin of the Upper Nile, published in Blue Book, Egypt, no2, 1904, London, Harrison and Sons (also published by the Ministry of Public Works, Cairo: ix). Cromer to Lansdowne, 19 June 1901, Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo enclosing a Report as to Irrigation Projects on the Upper Nile, &c., by Sir William Garstin, 5. Garstin 1899: 10. Cromer to Lansdowne, 22 April 1904, Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo, enclosing a Report by Sir William Garstin upon the Basin of the Upper Nile, published in Blue Book, Egypt, no 2, 1904, London, Harrison and Sons (also published by the Ministry of Public Works, Cairo: vii).

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Peel 1904: 263. The report was presented to Parliament in April 1904. Cromer ended his note to Lansdowne praising his water-planner: ‘I cannot close this dispatch without recording my opinion that all interested in Egyptian affairs owe a debt of gratitude to Sir William Garstin for the care and the conspicuous talent with which he has treated this very important question’. Cromer to Lansdowne, 22 April 1904, Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo, enclosing a Report by Sir William Garstin upon the Basin of the Upper Nile, published in Blue Book, Egypt, no2, 1904, London, Harrison and Sons (also published by the Ministry of Public Works, Cairo: xi). Cromer 1904: 19. Cromer here publicly wrote what he, the British water-planners and Salisbury had known since the early 1890s: the scene for the next stage in water-control works had to be outside Egypt. The quotation can also exemplify a methodological issue. Cromer’s reports dealt with Egypt and the Sudan, and they can therefore not be a complete source for British Nile policies. The fact is, of course, that plans for Uganda and Ethiopia were just as important, but they were not part of Cromer’s reports, a fact that has probably helped to play down the importance of the basin-wide strategy of the British in later historical literature. In 1752 Phillippe Buache presented a memoir to the French Academy of Sciences in which he outlined the concept of the general topographical unity of the drainage basin. Since basins as physical spaces are not stable, the historicity of how they are understood and described needs further elaboration, a fact that does not concern this study very much. All rivers tend to increase their drainage systems, and the most powerful of them extend their basins at the expense of other rivers by capturing the latter’s tributaries. The geological history of the Nile describes a river that has changed over time, sometimes violently, at other times slowly. It is thought that in the mid-Tertiary Period (approximately 30 million years ago) the early Nile, then a much shorter stream, had its sources at about latitude 18º to 20º N. Its main headstream may then have been the Atbara River. To the south lay the vast enclosed drainage system containing what was then most probably a large ‘Lake Sudd’. According to one theory of the evolution of the Nile system, about 25,000 years ago the East African drainage to Lake Victoria developed an outlet to the north that sent its water into ‘Lake Sudd’. Sediments were accumulated over a long period, and the water level of this lake therefore rose gradually. As a result, the lake spilled over to the north. The waters of ‘Lake Sudd’, rapidly forming a riverbed, linked the two major parts of the Nile system, thus unifying drainage systems from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. The Upper White Nile project in general and the Garstin Cut or the Jonglei Project in particular has, with some justification, been called the most-researched water project in the Third World. It certainly has one of the longest and most intensive planning histories in the world. For more than 90 years the project has been a high-priority issue for the governments ruling the Upper Nile area. For some of the most important reports, see Garstin 1899, 1901 and 1904, MacDonald 1920, Dupuis 1923, Newhouse 1929, Butcher 1936 and 1938, Hurst, Black and Simaika 1946, Amin and Bambridge 1948, and Jonglei Investigation Team 1954. Even since the demise of British colonialism in the area, a number of voluminous

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reports about the project have been produced, and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century it is still considered a very important project by the Egyptian and Sudanese Governments. The Gezira Sporting Club was opened during the time when Britain was consolidating its military hold over Egypt. The club was a famous landmark by the close of the nineteenth century, as evidenced by guidebooks and other turn-of-the-century literature. By then it was called the Khedivial Sporting Club (KSC) in honour of Khedive Mohammed Tewfik (1879–92). It was during his time that the Club was founded for the benefit of the British army and the army of British administrators. W. Basil Worsfold, an observant literary barrister who visited Egypt in the winter of 1898–99, remarked in The Redemption Of Egypt that ‘The English residents have no more to do with the picturesque ruins and mud-heaps of Medieval Cairo than the average West End Londoner has to do with the Mile End Road and Tower Hamlets. Except when they wanted to show a visitor the tombs of the Khalifs or the Pyramids they only left their villas in the European quarter to drive to their offices or the Gezira Club.’ Owen 1969: 185. Tignor 1966: 226. Cromer to Salisbury, 20 February 1900, FO 407/155. In 1854, Taylor in his travel book stated that the banks of the Nile in Shilluk country constitute ‘the most thickly populated region in Africa, and perhaps in the world, China alone excepted’ (342), and concluded that the number of Shilluk is estimated at between two and three millions, or ‘equal to the population of Egypt’. The point is, of course, not that Taylor was right, but that the Nile valley he saw in the south was different from Garstin’s. There are a great number of travel accounts of this area from 1850 to 1904, and a comparison of these with Garstin’s account will underline the profile and importance of his downstream water perspective (for these travel descriptions, see Tvedt 2000a: 319–86, and Tvedt 2000b: 597–656). Evans-Pritchard 1940: 50. He wrote that to the Nuer water was everything: ‘Excess or insufficiency of water is the first problem that faces Nuer’ (57), and ‘Variation of water supplies and vegetation thus force Nuer to move and determines the direction of their movements’ (61). Willcocks 1904: 33 and 39. The District Commissioner, W. Fergusson, wrote about this in 1922. In 1921 a pool appeared in Khor Lait in Dinka Agar country. The Dinka associated it with a saviour, which meant ill for foreigners but happiness and wealth for the Dinka. To prevent an uprising, the Government arrested all leaders (see Fergusson 1922: 163–66). Deng 1993: 67. In 1940 there were believed to be about 60,000 cattle in the Zeraf District alone (as well as 60,000 people). The name of one of the ethnic groups, Shilluk, means ‘ambatch (reed-pitch) canoe’, clearly indicating that the Shilluk is a nation of fishermen. For an explanation of the word, see Holt 1967, picture 9. Garstin 1904: 165. Garstin 1904: 98–99.

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Garstin 1901: 52. Garstin 1901: 55. Garstin 1899: 5. It was not uncommon in the late-nineteenth century to call the Shilluk, the Jur, the Nuer, the Dinka and the Anuak ‘swamp Negroes’ (for this attitude, see for example Marno 1874). On his third journey of December 1871 – April 1873, Marno travelled along the Bahr al-Arab and Bahr al-Zaraf, and spent seven months in the Sudd Region. Lord E. Cecil, Sudan Agent, Cairo to Findlay, 17 July 1905, FO 407/164. Quoted in Gray 1961: 173. Garstin 1899: 44. Garstin 1899: 33. Garstin’s expression from the 1899 report. Garstin 1899: 33. Some have suggested that the Southern Sudan is mentioned in the Bible in the following way: ‘Go you swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people feared near and far, a nation mighty and conquering, whose land the rivers divide’ (my italics; see the American Standard Version of the Bible, Isaiah, chapter 18, verses 1–2). Another translation goes: ‘Go ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation matted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled’ (my italics; see King James Bible, Isaiah, chapter 18, verses 1–2). Churchill 1908: 10. Churchill 1908: 74. Churchill 1908: 75. Churchill 1908: 114. Mitchell 1954: 174–75. Countless examples of the same attitude can be found. Some years later, Willcocks delivered two lectures at meetings of the Khedivial Geographical Society, on 21 December 1907 and 25 January 1908 (extracts are also given in Willcocks and Craig 1913). In lecture no2, he concludes that Egypt could store all the water the country needed for unrivalled cotton fields and for the maintenance of their fertility in the natural giant reservoirs of the terminal reach of the White Nile (Willcocks 1908).

Notes on Chapter 3 1 2 3

Foreign Office Memorandum, Murray, 4 January 1923, Memorandum on the political situation in Egypt, FO 371/8972. Lloyd 1906: 9. Arnold Toynbee’s description of the relative value of the two main Nile tributaries is interesting because of the influence it has had on historical writing, and because of the ‘objectivist’ approach it signifies when it comes to how nature is socially constructed. He wrote that ‘Egypt was less dependent upon the tropical provinces of the Sudan than upon the sovereign state of Ethiopia’ (Toynbee 1925: 234). On the basis of a simple calculation of volume of water, he appears to be right. On the basis of dominant British and Egyptian attitudes at the time he wrote the article,

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he was also right. But the crux of the matter is that this description of the river system is more in line with dominant conceptualisations of the river system in the mid-1920s, when Toynbee was writing, than an objective description of the natural Nile system. As shown in chapter 1, it was the White Nile that had been regarded as the ‘river of gold’ for half a century (since the introduction of summer cultivation of cotton), because it was the White Nile that carried all the water during this most profitable cultivation season. Saad Zaghlul Pasha (1857–1927) was leader of the Wafd and of the nationalist movement of 1918–19. In 1924 he was Prime Minister for a short period. Unlike the traditional political elite in Egypt, he was an ethnic Egyptian – and an Egyptian from Ibyanah in the Nile Delta. He was a former Minister of Education (1906) and Minister of Justice (1910). In Arabic, wafd means delegation; hence the name of the Wafd party. Edmund Allenby (1861–1936) directed the Palestine campaign in World War I, and was the last great British leader of mounted cavalry. From 1917, he was in charge of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. His forces crushed the Turks at Gaza and captured Jerusalem in December 1917, and later captured Damascus and Aleppo, ending Ottoman rule in Syria. In 1919 he was appointed High Commissioner for Egypt (1919–25). He was created first Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe in October 1919. See Marlowe 1976. Wingate to Clayton, 10 September 1910, 462/2/81, SAD. Wingate to Clayton, 6 March 1910, 469/2/24, SAD. This company was started by the American Leigh Hunt in 1904 to develop his Zeidab concession, but was reorganised in 1907 under its new name. The British Cotton Growing Association, Annual Report; the Sudan, 1912: 15. Minutes of the one hundred and seventh Board Meeting of Directors held at the registered office of the Company at 1 London Wall Buildings, London, E.C. on Thursday 18 December, 1913, 3.00 p.m., 416/1/1–110: 416/1/25–6. Wingate to Clayton, 22 November 1913, 469/5/43, SAD. Extract from letter from Clayton to Wingate, 17 December 1913, 469/5/70, SAD. The issue of the convicts was, of course, also linked to the question of Sudan’s status. Some of the British in Egypt argued that the convicts could be sent to Sudan without any problems, since the Sudan was part of Egypt. An article published in 1935 related the story that, during the war, there had been some rumours that German agents planned to blast the banks of the Blue Nile near Lake Tana (see Baker 1935: 533). According to contemporary sources, however, the British strategists were not worried, and did not even discuss it. Wingate to Lovat, 5 August 1915, Wingate Papers, 112/4/68, SAD. Wingate to Lovat, 7 December 1916, Wingate Papers, 112/5/18, SAD. Wingate to Lloyd George, 14 August 1916, Wingate Papers, 112/5/8–10, SAD. Minutes of evidence taken before the Board of Trade Committee on the Growth of Cotton in the British Empire at 7 Whitehall Gardens, S.W. on Wednesday 1 August 1917, first day. Annexe no9, in Sudan Government, Gezira Irrigation, 108/3, SAD. The interview with MacDonald is on page 12. MacDonald to Symes, 22 May 1917, Note on the sufficiency of water for the Gezira project as at present contemplated, 112/7/13, SAD.

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Lord Curzon was Foreign Secretary in the post-war Government headed by the Liberal Lloyd George, and continued under the Conservatives until 1924. Symes, Note on the Egyptian situation for week ending 6 March 1920, enclosure 2 in no1, Allenby to Curzon, 29 March 1920, FO 371/4984. C. F. Ryder, Report on the situation in Egypt for the period from February 29 to March 6 1920, enclosure in no 1, Allenby to Curzon, 29 March 1920, FO 371/4984. Sinnot Bey Hanna, in Afkar, 17 February 1920, quoted by G. S. Symes, Note on Egyptian Press, no17, Period from 13 to 19 February, 20 February 1920, FO 371/4995. Wingate to Clayton, 8 April 1914, 469/6/120, SAD. Clayton to Wingate, 2 April 1914, 469/6/22, SAD. The Nile Projects charged MacDonald with ‘crediting the Nile with grossly exaggerated discharges in the all-important minimum years’; argued that owing to the heavy withdrawal of water in winter from the Nile in the Sudan, both for direct irrigation and for maintaining the ‘terrible wasteful reservoirs’ on the Blue and White Niles, the days of the Aswan Reservoir ‘will be numbered’; and presented among other things what Willcocks believed to be the correct figures for river discharges, as well as a description of ‘the Sudd Region of the White Nile’ (Appendix G) and ‘The Sudd reservoir’ (Appendix H). Willcocks saw it as an ‘appeal to the instinct of every fair-minded man in the British Empire, and to the intelligence of every engineer in the world’ (see Willcocks 1919). Foreign Office minute, Murray, 1 December 1920, FO 371/4994. He wrote: ‘Egypt is a small and helpless country, but it is in our keeping…and every dictate of honour appeals to us to do the very best for it that we can. To wilfully shut our eyes to sound projects is worthy neither of our race nor of our traditions. It is not even honest stewardship. The Sudan is neither small nor helpless. It is only inarticulate’ (Foreign Office, Wingate to the Under-Secretary, 3 January 1919, 156/5/2, SAD). This was also the opinion of Murray, the expert of the Nile in the Foreign Office (see Foreign Office minutes, Murray, 15 March 1920, FO 371/4993). E.M. Dowson, Financial Advisor, Egyptian Government, (no date), FO 371/8403. Allenby to Curzon, 18 February 1920, FO 371/4993. Foreign Office minutes, Murray, 24 February 1920, FO 371/4993. See G.S. Symes, Note on Egyptian Press, period 5–11 March 1920, 12 March 1920, enclosure in no1, Allenby to Curzon, 14 March 1920, FO 371/4995. Foreign Office minutes, Murray, 15 March 1920, FO 371/4993. Scott to Curzon, 6 November 1920, FO 371/4994. E.M. Dowson, Financial Advisor, Egyptian Government, (no date), FO 371/8403. As Financial Advisor, Dowson was the informal head of the non-Egyptian staff of the civil service. Allenby to Foreign Office, 4 December 1921, FO 371/4994. The American member, Cory, put forth a proposal that was not adopted, but that was later regarded as reasonable by the Sudan Government. His proposal was that established water rights should be recognised, and that thereafter the unappropriated water made available should be divided between the two countries according to their potential irrigable land. He assumed that this potential was

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practically equal in the Sudan and Egypt (see below for the story of the Nile Waters Agreement in 1929). Allenby to Curzon, 16 April 1920, FO 371/4995. Foreign Office minutes, Murray, 1 December 1920, FO 371/4994. Foreign Office minutes, Murray, 9 July 1920, FO 371/4993. Curzon to Allenby, 4 December 1990, FO 371/4994. Foreign Office minutes, W. Malkin, 2 December 1920, FO 371/4994. Curzon to Allenby, 3 January 1920, FO 371/4994. Allenby to Curzon, 23 May 1921, FO 371/6311. See Allenby to Foreign Office, 23 November 1921, FO 371/6311, and Murray, Minutes, 24 November 1921, FO 371/6311. When Collins writes that MacDonald resigned, that is at best an understatement (see Collins 1990: 157). In reality, he was asked to leave. Report on Egypt for the year 1921, enclosure in no1, Allenby to the Marquis of Kedlestone, 16 December 1922, FO 371/7766. Ronald Charles Lindsay (1877–1945) entered the diplomatic service in 1899 and was Private Secretary to Sir Edward Grey in 1908–09. In 1913 he went to Egypt as Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, where he remained throughout World War I. He first became Assistant Under-Secretary of State, and then in the summer of 1928 Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He later became Ambassador in Washington. The Times, 11 February 1922. Allenby to Curzon, 2 February 1922, 470/14/25, SAD. In January 1922, Clayton, E.M. Dowson, W.G. Hayter and R.S. Petterson insisted that Britain had to change its policy, and had to grant Egypt independence; if not, Britain could not rule. They argued strongly in favour of a more liberal policy, by which Britain could regain some of the confidence of the Egyptian people (see Correspondence and Memoranda, January–March 1922, 470/14/2). Quoted by Major Temperley, draft chapter on Egypt for History of Peace Conference, (no date), 16, FO 371/7766. On 9 February 1922 The Times carried a story with the reassuring title ‘The season of Egypt. Tranquillity and sunshine’. Austen Chamberlain was the eldest son of the statesman Joseph Chamberlain and half-brother of the future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He was Secretary of State for India (1915–17) and a member of the War Cabinet (1918-19). From March 1921 until October 1922 he was Conservative Party leader. He replaced Lord Curzon and became Foreign Secretary in Baldwin’s second Government (1924–29). Foreign Office Memorandum, Murray, 4 January 1923, Memorandum on the political situation in Egypt, FO 371/8972. Sudan Monthly Intelligence Report, no334, May 1922, 2–3, FO 371/7746. Milner said this at a meeting in the House of Commons where he was invited to present his report (see Draft conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held in Mr Bonar Law’s Room, House of Commons, S.W.1, on Tuesday 22 February 1921, at 6.00p.m., FO 371/6296). Repayment terms and interest rates for these advances were not set at the time. It was not until 1938 that the British agreed that repayment to Egypt should begin,

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and not later than 1949 by minimum annual instalments of E£150,000, without any accrued or other interest charges (see Gaitskell 1959: 35). Gaitskell was Director of the Gezira Scheme for decades. See Deng, F.M. and M. Daly, 1989, Bonds of Silk. The human factor in the British administration of the Sudan, East Lansing: Michigan State University. Wingate to Cromer, 2 January 1905, 276/1/4, SAD. Wingate to Stack, 29 April 1913, 108/15/38, SAD. The Government made some trials to assess the potential of basin irrigation north of Khartoum using floodwater from the Main Nile – apparently without success, mainly due to the irregularity of the floods. The Government established irrigation schemes in the Gash and Tokar deltas in the eastern Sudan, outside the Nile basin (these projects involved negotiations with Italy, however, since the waters came from Eritrea). Cromer wrote to the Italian Government about these rivers, noting that in correspondence addressed by Signor Prinetti to James Currie on 15 December 1901 Italy had agreed to ‘regulate its conduct in accordance with principles of good neighbourship’. The Italians had given interviews interpreted by Cromer as if they just wanted to inform the Sudan about all their plans for the river, so that the Sudan should be ‘sparing them the expense of erecting works which might be rendered useless in the future’ (Cromer to Sir Edward Grey, 12 March 1906, FO 407/165). Memo to Foreign Office, Sir Lee Stack, 17 June 1922, FO 371/7754. Sir A.H. Dixon (President of the International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners & Manufacturer’s Association) to Curzon, 28 July 1920, FO 371/5014. Curzon to Dixon, 3 August 1920, FO 371/5014. Board of Trade to Foreign Office, 31 July 1920, FO 371/5014. Murray to Allenby, 1 April 1920, FO 371/9495. Allenby to Curzon, 16 April 1920, FO 371/4995. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 14 October 1921, FO 371/6321. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 4 October 1921, FO 371/6320. Foreign Office, Lindsay to Curzon, 19 October 1921, FO 371/6320. Minutes of the Fourteenth Ordinary General Meeting of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate Limited, 23 November 1921: 6, 415/10/62, SAD. Himbury, General Manager, British Cotton Growing Association, to UnderSecretary of State, 4 October 1923, FO 371 /8971. It was entitled ‘Note on the present situation in Sudan for submission to the Prime Minister’, FO 371/10031. Sir James Currie joined the Egyptian Education Service in 1899 and was appointed first principal of Gordon College and Director of Education in the Sudan in 1900. After he had been a pioneer in Sudanese educational history, he became Director of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation between 1922 and 1937, and at the same time Chairman of the Governing Body of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, 1927–37. Foreign Office, Killy, Secretary, Empire Cotton Growing Corporation to Murray, 17 February 1922, FO 371/1746. For the text of the contract, see Gezira Works Contract (188p), FO 371/7755. Gaitskell writes that in connection with these developments, ‘Opportunity was taken to transfer supervision of the work from the irrigation service in Egypt to

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the Sudan’ (Gaitskell 1959: 95). This is an understatement; this act represents a historic event. For the first time, Nile control was taken out of the hands of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. See Gaitskell 1959: 83-–95. Egypt and Sudan, FO 371/10049, no5239, quoted in Kurita 1989: 14–62. Crowfort 1924: 86. Keown-Boyd to Allenby, 14 March 1920, FO 371/4984. Vatikiotis 1991: 388. It has been argued that there ‘was nothing, till 23 November 1924, to make Egypt have any suspicions about the British using their position and influence in the upper regions of the Nile to bring political pressure on her’ (Abbas 1952: 87). The ultimatum may have come as a surprise when it was eventually issued, but Britain had, as has been shown, used its upstream power for political purposes before 1924. Allenby to Austin Chamberlain,15 December 1924, FO 371/10046. Quoted in Kurita 1989: 26. The Times, ‘The crisis in Egypt. Mr MacDonald on the ultimatum. A mandate for the Sudan’, 29 November 1924. Prayers of Consecration by the Rt Rev. Bishop Gwynne and the Mufti of the Sudan, 636/6/2, SAD. See Dupuis, 1904. See Foreign Office Memo, T.M. Snow, 23 January 1923, History of Blue Nile negotiations, FO 371/8403. The original text with Amharic translations can be found in Treaty between Great Britain and Ethiopia, 15 May 1902, FO 93/2/5. A literal translation of the original Amharic text differs: ‘His Majesty Menelik II, King of the Kings, Ethiopia, has agreed in the treaty not to construct a work to block up [in Amharic, daffana, which means ‘to stop up, stuff up, bung up’] from river bank to river bank, without previously agreeing with the English Government, the water descending from the Black [i.e. Blue] Abbai [i.e. Nile] and from Tsana Sea, from the Sobat River towards the White Abbai, nor to give permission to anyone (whomsoever) to construct a river-blocking-up work’. This translation can be found in Bentinck to Chamberlain, enclosure 2 in no1, 9 January 1928, FO 371/13099. What should be especially noted is that the Sudan Government is not a partner in the Amharic text, only the English Government. Cromer 11 January 1907, FO 371/14591. Addis Ababa to Cromer, 12 February 1907, in enclosure in MacGregor to Murray, 18 September 1930, FO 371/14591. Ibid. The full text of this Treaty can be found in the British Foreign Office, 1920, Peace Handbooks no129, Ethiopia, London: HM Stationery Office. Article 1: Italy and Great Britain will co-operate for the maintenance of the political and territorial status quo in Ethiopia, as determined by the following agreements, and by the state of affairs at present existing: (a) Anglo–Italian Protocols of 24 March and 15 April, 1891, and of 5 May 1894, and the subsequent Agreements modifying them; (b) Italy–Ethiopian Treaty of 10 July 1900;

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(c) Anglo–Ethiopian Treaty of 15 May 1902; (d) Note annexed to the above-mentioned Treaty of 15 May 1902; (e) Anglo–French Agreements as to Harrar of 2–9 February, 1888; (f) Franco–Italian Protocols of 24 January 1900, and 10 July 1901, for the delimitation of the Italian and French possessions in the littoral of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. But the way the last sentence of the Tripartite Agreement was formulated gave the Italian Government a diplomatic opening, and when Rome claimed some decades later that Lake Tana was within the Italian sphere of influence it referred to this agreement (see next chapter). His Majesty’s Government defended their ‘Nile sphere’ on large and small issues with consequences for Ethiopian development. In 1908 it protested when it learned that Menelik had given a concession to a certain Mr Ydlibi to establish a tea or coffee plantation on the Baro. Menelik had given him the right to ‘form Companies and work this land which I have given him’ and the waters required could be ‘taken from the Baro River’. Lord H. Hervey, Addis Ababa, to Sir Edward Grey, 19 December 1908, FO 401/12. The project never materialised. Wingate to MacGillivray, 5 August 1915, 112/4/65, SAD. Thesiger to Wingate, 30 November 1916, 112/5/15, SAD. Wingate to Thesiger, 25 November 1916, 112/5/15, SAD. Quoted in R. Sperling, 19 January 1920, Memorandum respecting Italian territorial claims in Abyssinia, FO 371/10872. Russell to MacDonald, 16 February 1924, Report on Abyssinia for 1923, FO 371/9993. Foreign Office minute, Campbell, 1 April 1920, FO 371/4388. Dodds to Curzon, 6 March 1920, FO 371/4388. Dodds to Curzon, 25 February 1920, FO 371/4388. See memo, P.M. Tottenham, 29 September 1920, FO 371/4388. Allenby to Curzon, 18 February 1920, FO 371/4388. Dodds to Curzon, 18 February 1920, FO 371/4388. Dodds to Allenby, 18 February 1920, FO 371/4388. Sperling to Allenby, 28 September1922, FO 371/7151. Dodds to Foreign Office, 23 August 1922, FO 371/7151. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 31 August 1922, FO 371/7754. Foreign Office to Allenby, 11 October 1922, FO 371/7151. Foreign Office to Allenby, 19 October 1922, FO 371/7151. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 27 January 1923, FO 371/8403. Foreign Office minute, Sperling, 24 November 1922, FO 371/7151. Murray to Sir J. Currie, Empire Cotton Growing Corporation, 30 November 1922, FO 371/7151. Currie to Murray, 4 December 1922, FO 371/7151. Murray put forward drafts and revised draft agreements between the British and Egyptian Governments regarding the use of the waters of the Nile on 17 August 1923, 21 September 1923, 26 September 1923, and again in October. Clearly the British were preoccupied with the question. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 12 February 1923, FO 371/8403. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 26 September 1923, FO 371/8404.

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125 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 26 September 1923, FO 371/8404. 126 One of the most striking gifts of Ras Tafari, according to Lockot, was his memory. The number of successive British representatives to Addis Ababa from the 1920s to the 1950s tended in general to misinterpret his silence and hesitations as a lack of knowledge. Lockot has written, ‘As well as a vast quantity of administrative detail, he stored information about thousands of individuals away in his brain: he knew the names, faces, positions, functions, tribal connections and family relationships of officials, military officers or students. All of them he had personally appointed, promoted, transferred or dismissed, or he had supported their education; and reports on all of them had been submitted to him. It was said that he never forgot any conversation he had ever had and indeed from his early youth he had been trained to store everything in his memory. He avoided leaving any written records of his actions, and never took notes: only his final decisions went into the files. For the population it was a matter of course that the Elect of God should have supernatural qualities, but for officials it was deeply portentous, and it kept them constantly in a state of apprehension. Even when unexpected situations arose, the Emperor would be able quickly and effortlessly to recall accurate details of events which had taken place many years before without consulting files or asking his aides’ (Lockot 1992: 53–54). 127 Russell to MacDonald, 1 February1924, Text of Proposed Agreement respecting Tsana Dam, FO 371/10872. 128 Russell to Curzon, 26 May 1923, FO 371/8403. 129 Dodds to Curzon, 19 October 1922, FO 371/7151. 130 Foreign Office minute, Sperling, 13 August 1923, FO 371/8403. 131 Curzon to Russell, 22 August 1923, FO 371/8403. 132 Russell to MacDonald, 16 February 1924, Report on Abyssinia 1923, FO 371/9993. 133 Stack to Allenby, 8 October 1922, FO 371/7151, and Allenby to Foreign Office, 18 October 1922, FO 371/7151. 134 Russell to Curzon, 2 February 1922, FO 371/8403. 135 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 25 January 1923, FO 371/8403. 136 Foreign Office minute, Sperling, 6 July 1923, FO 371/8403. 137 Foreign Office Memo, Murray, 9 July 1923, Lake Tsana, FO 371/8403. 138 Ibid. 139 Dowson to Chancery, 30 July 1923, the Residency (Cairo), FO 371/8404. 140 Foreign Office Memo, Murray, 16 April 1923, FO 371/8403. 141 Currie to Murray, 2 May 1923, FO 371/8403. 142 Curzon to Allenby, 11 May 1923, FO 371/8403. 143 Torretta to Curzon, 3 October 1923, FO 371/8404. 144 Foreign Office minute, Lindsay, 15 October 1923, FO 371/8404. 145 Curzon to Torretta, 20 October 1923, FO 371/8404. 146 Foreign Office to Russell, 29 November 1923, FO 371/8404. 147 Foreign Office to Dodds, 9 November 1922, FO 371/7151. 148 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 25 January 1923, FO 371/8403. 149 Foreign Office to Russell, 7 June 1923, FO 371/8403. 150 Foreign Office Memo, Murray, 26 November 1923, FO 371/8404. 151 Curzon to Russell, 29 November 1923, FO 371/8404.

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Foreign Office Memo, Murray, 26 November 1923, FO 371/8404. Curzon to Allenby, 29 November 1923, FO 371/8404. The Observer, 25 May 1924. Manchester Guardian, 18 June 1924. Bentinck to Chamberlain, 20 May 1926, FO 371/11574. Russell to MacDonald, 1 February 1924, Text of Proposed Agreement respecting Tsana Dam, FO 371/10872. R. MacDonald to His Imperial Highness, 19 July 1924, enclosed in Foreign Office, 24 March 1925, Memorandum respecting the History of Lake Tsana Negotiations, FO 371/10872. Ras Tafari to MacDonald, 26 July 1924, FO 371/9986. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 17 July 1924, FO 371/9992. Allenby to the British Legation, Addis Ababa, 5 January 1923, FO 371/8403. Foreign Office to Allenby, 27 January 1923, FO 371 /8403. Grabham and Black 1925: 2. Both Tottenham (1923) and Dupuis (1922), however, had written short unofficial summaries of the survey and of the project (see Dupuis, C.E. 1923). See also Note on the possibility of utilising Lake Tsana as a reservoir by means of relatively light and inexpensive works, FO 371/4803 and Tottenham, P.M., 1923, Report of Lake Tsana Survey Mission, FO 371/8404. Dupuis argued that the reservoir could be manipulated in the interests of Egypt, pending the provision from other sources of water ‘she so urgently needs’. Zeila, also called Seylac, is a town and port in the far northwest of Somalia. For centuries it was the most important Arab settlement on the Somali coast, serving as the centre for trade between the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and Muslim Arabia. In the nineteenth century the town was fought over by the European colonial powers; it was now in British Somaliland. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 17 June 1925, FO 371/10872. Murray to Currie, 23 June 1925, FO 371/10872. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 2 July 1925, FO 371/10876. Bentinck, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 1 July 1925, FO 371/10876. Foreign Office to Bentinck, Addis Ababa, 16 July 1925, FO 371/10876. Foreign Office minute, 15 July 1925, FO 371/10876. France was regarded as easier to please. The Foreign Office argued that the French would be quite willing to come to terms with London if Britain agreed to their extending their railway ‘south west from Addis Ababa for a matter of 150 to 200 miles so as to tap the productive Jimma country’ (Foreign Office minute, Murray, 17 June 1925, FO 371/10872). Chamberlain to Graham, 8 May 1925, FO 371/10872. Graham to Chamberlain, 15 May 1925, FO 371/10872. Schuster, 6 June 1925, Note on Italian negotiations for concessions in Abyssinia, FO 371/10872. See Murray to Graham, 9 November 1925, FO 371/10873; Bentinck to Chamberlain, 7 November 1925, FO 371/10873; Graham to Chamberlain, 27 November 1925, FO 371/10873; Chamberlain to Graham, 10 December 1925, FO 371/10873; and Graham to Chamberlain 29 December 1925, FO 371/10873. Reported in Foreign Office minute, Murray, 15 April 1931, FO 371/15388. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 15 April 1931, FO 371/15388.

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178 Graham to Mussolini, 14 December 1925, enclosure 1 in no 1, Graham to Chamberlain, 1 January 1926, FO 371/11563. This version is the original, with the proposed changes in the text written by hand. 179 Graham to Mussolini, 14 December 1925, enclosure 1 in no 1, Graham to Chamberlain, 1 January 1926, FO 371/11563. 180 Bentinck to Chamberlain, 5 February 1926, FO 371/11561. 181 Bentinck to Chamberlain, 16 March 1926, FO 371/11562. 182 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 8 April 1926, FO 371/11562. 183 Chamberlain to Graham, Rome, 10 April 1926, FO 371/11562. 184 Chamberlain to Graham, 13 May 1926, FO 371/11562. 185 Bentinck to Murray, 25 May 1926, FO 371/11563. 186 Foreign Office to Graham, 19 May 1926, FO 371/11562. 187 Graham to Chamberlain, 7 June 1926, FO 371/11563. 188 Lord Lloyd to Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 15 June 1926, enclosure 1, in Lord Lloyd to Chamberlain, 18 June 1926, FO 371/11564. 189 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 14 June 1926, FO 371/11564. 190 Chamberlain minute, 15 July 1926, FO 371/11564. 191 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 17 July 1926, FO 371/11564. 192 Foreign Office to Graham, 3 July 1926, FO 371/11564. 193 Graham to Foreign Office, 4 July 1926, FO 371/11564. 194 Bentinck to Foreign Office, 12 June 1926, FO 371/11564. 195 Ibid. 196 Telegram from the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs to the GovernorGeneral of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa and the Governor of New Foundland (sic) 4 August 1926, FO 371/11565. 197 The Times was a mouthpiece of the Foreign Office regarding the issue: ‘The British and Italian Governments entered into an agreement some time ago to define in a more precise manner their economic rights in Abyssinia in accordance with the agreement of 13 December 1906…The British embassy has communicated the text of the new agreement to the French Government. As Abyssinia is a member of the League of Nations the agreement when ratified will be filed with the League Secretariat at Geneva’ (The Times, 17 April 1926). The Daily Telegraph wrote, ‘A great deal of unnecessary concern and of misrepresentation is recorded in connection with the Anglo–Egyptian (sic) negotiations now in progress…It has even been suggested by ignorance and malice that a partition of that country is in contemplation’ (Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1926). 198 Letter from the British Government concerning the Note from His Imperial and Royal Highness Tafari Makonnen, Regent and the heir to the throne of Abyssinia, League of Nations, 6 August 1926, FO 371/11565. The British answer to the League was also written ‘after consultation with the Italian Government’ (Murray to Bentinck, 9 August 1926, FO 371/11565). 199 Washington Post, 8 August 1926 200 Bentinck to Foreign Office, 2 March 1926, FO 371/11561. On London’s instructions he had turned down Johnson Matthey and Company, who wanted to start business in what was defined as an Italian sphere of influence. The French Government told the Foreign Office privately that Britain had paid the Italian Government an

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206 207 208 209 210 211

212 213 214 215 216

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unnecessarily high price for support the Italians had very little grounds for withholding, the Foreign Office later noted (Memorandum respecting the policy of His Majesty’s Government towards Ethiopia, 5 February 1935, FO 371/19175). Murray had then answered the French that Britain had voluntarily renounced other claims ‘in order to concentrate on the one thing which was absolutely vital to the development of Egypt and the Sudan’; that is, the Lake Tana dam (ibid.). Foreign Office minute, Murray, 10 March 1926, FO 371/11561. Foreign Office to Bentinck, 8 March 1926, FO 371/11561. Chamberlain, Parliamentary Question, 6 July 1926, FO 371/11564. Bentinck to Foreign Office, 10 June 1926, FO 371/11563. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 13 July 1926, FO 371/11564. Ras Tafari did not inform the British that he planned to send an emissary to America to invite the US to establish a legation at Addis Ababa and to enlist the services of a US engineering firm for the Tana studies. Foreign Office minute, 17 June 1926, FO 371/11563. Light and Peace, 10 June 1926. Foreign Office minute, 6 July 1926, FO 371/11564. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 31 March 1926, FO 371/11562. Quoted in ‘Memorandum respecting the policy of His Majesty’s Government towards Ethiopia’, 5 February 1935, FO 371/19175. In 1927 the project for Lake Tana was to make it possible to store an extra 3 million cubic metres a year, and to regulate its discharge throughout the year primarily in accordance with the Gezira’s water requirements. Bentinck to Foreign Office, 26 September 1927, FO 371/12341. Schuster to Murray, 21 October 1927, FO 371/12341. Foreign Office minute, Hamilton-Gordon, 5 November 1927, FO 371/123442. Bentinck to Chamberlain, 1 August 1927, FO 371/12341. London received repeated evidence of Ethiopian suspicion. When a British subject, Mr Rey, first asked Ras Tafari for a permit to travel down the Blue Nile, the scheme was turned down completely. This scheme was to be supported by the Sudan Government, but Ras Tafari was not informed about this. Had he known, his suspicions would not have been diminished. Rey said that the alternative plan of going upstream from the Sudan, proposed in Khartoum, would create ‘the wildest suspicion, if not hysteria, in the hearts of the Abyssinians’ (Foreign Office minute, Ronald, 12 April 1927, FO 371/12340). Rey also planned to write an article on the Blue Nile issue, which was to be ‘censored’ by the Foreign Office, as the other Nile articles written by British administrators on the Nile had been. The Foreign Office and the Sudan Government were deeply concerned about further studies of the Blue Nile basin. In October 1927, for example, Cheesman circulated a copy of his diary as a staff member of the War Office (about 200 pages), written in the field on his journey down the Abbai. Murray, the Sudan Government, MacGregor and Schuster had all received it (M. Hotine, Geographical Section, General Staff, the War Office, to Sudan Government, Wellington House, 5 November 1927, FO 371/12342). Bentinck to Chamberlain, 20 January 1928, FO 371/13112. Conclusions of a Cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street, Wednesday, 21 December 1927, 11.30 a.m., CAB 23/55.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 3

219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241

242

363

Enclosure in Addis Ababa despatch no.363, 14 December 1927, FO 371/13099. Bentinck to Foreign Office, 7 December 1927, FO 371/12343. Murray, 9 December 1927, FO 371/12343. Bentinck to Foreign Office, 13 December 1927, FO 371/12343. Murray, 9 December 1927, FO 371/12343. Foreign Office minute, Patrick, 13 January 1928, FO 371/13099. R.G. Leigh, Foreign Office to Lord Stamfordham, 10 March 1928, FO 371/13112. Stamfordham to Leigh, Foreign Office, 10 March 1928, FO 371/13112. Bentinck to Chamberlain, 20 January 1928, FO 371/13112. R. Dunbar to Chamberlain, 26 March 1928, FO 371/13112. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 17 May 1928, FO 371/13112. Foreign Office to Dunbar, 15 August 1928, FO 371/13112. Murray to Grabham, Khartoum, 11 January 1928, FO 371/13099. Chamberlain to Graham, Rome, 23 March 1928, FO 371/13112. D. Rogeri, Italian Embassy to Lord Cushendun, 11 August 1928, FO 371/13112. Chamberlain, minute, 7 November 1927, FO 371/12342. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 7 November 1927, FO 371712342. Similar articles appeared in The Yorkshire Post, The Daily News, The Westminster Gazette, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Express. Foreign Office minute, Norton, 4 November 1927, FO 371/12342. New York Times, 13 November 1927. San Francisco Chronicle, 13 November 1927. Fraser, R. S. Fraser & Co., to Sir Leslie Scott MP, 25 November 1927, FO 371/13099. But they were not as ‘cool’ as they officially claimed to be. The Harrington-Ilg Exchange of Notes in March 1902 was described as binding in the Foreign Office. In these notes Menelik should, according to London, have promised to give concessions for the dam to Britain and the Sudan. Tafari questioned, however, the right of Ilg to give these assurances, because he was only a foreign advisor and not Foreign Minister. In 1927 the Foreign Office searched for the originals. Bentinck said it was ‘essential to know whose seal was on Ilg’s note’ (Bentinck to Foreign Office, 11 December 1927, FO 371/12343) to assess their status. The Foreign Office could find only copies of Ilg’s letters, and on copies of the notes ‘the seal appears to be that of ‘Alfred Ilg, Conseiller d’Etat’ (Foreign Office minute, Ochard, 14 December 1927, FO 371/12343). The Foreign Office did not tell Bentinck that only Ilg’s seal was there, informing him only that London had the copies (Foreign Office to Bentinck, 16 December 1927, FO 371/12343). On Christmas Eve, Bentinck reported that a further search for the Ilg notes had been made in the Legation in Addis Ababa, without success (Bentinck to Foreign Office, 24 December 1927, FO 371/12343). On 2 January 1928, Lord Lloyd reported from Cairo that the original notes, dated 18 and 20 March 1902 and bearing both the seal and signature of Alfred Ilg, Conseiller d’Etat, were in the Cairo archives (Lloyd 2 January 1928, FO 371/13099). On 13 January 1928 the Foreign Office asked Lloyd to send these original notes, insisting that they were in the nature of a ‘treaty instrument’ (Murray to Lloyd, 13 January 1928, FO 371/13099). Farrer, Department of Overseas Trade to Hamilton, Foreign Office, 7 November 1927, FO 371/12342.

364 243 244 245 246

247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262

263 264 265 266 267 268

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Foreign Office to Bentinck, 7 January 1928, FO 371/13099. Henderson to Foreign Office, 7 November 1927, FO 371/12342. Foreign Office to Henderson, 8 November 1927, FO 371/12342. Prime Minister Sarwat Pasha was given Ramsay MacDonald’s note of 19 July 1924, Ras Tafari’s note of 26 July 1924, MacDonald’s note of 14 August to Ras Tafari, Mr Bentinck’s note to Ras Tafari of 3 May 1927 (revised to exclude mention of a possible visit of a British Royal Prince to Ethiopia), Ras Tafari’s note to Bentinck of 22 September 1927, and six telegrams about the White concession. Lord Lloyd to Chamberlain, 24 March 1928, FO 371/13099. Lord Lloyd to Foreign Office, 24 April 1928, FO 371/13100. Patrick, Foreign Office to C.C. Farrer, Department of Overseas Trade, 28 January 1928, FO 371/13099. Foreign Office to Dunbar, Addis Ababa, 20 April 1928, FO 371/13100. Howard to Foreign Office, 27 April 1928, FO 371/13100. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 8 November 1927, FIO 371/12342. J.P. Morgan & Co, New York, to Morgan Grenfell & Co, London, 17 February 1928, FO 371/13099. Howard to Foreign Office, 27 April 1928, FO 371/13100. Foreign Office to Howard, 4 May 1928, FO 371/13100. Foreign Office to Dunbar, 20 April 1928, FO 371/13100. Dunbar to Foreign Office, 21 May 1928, FO 371/13100. Schuster to Murray, July 1928, FO 371/13100. MacDonald 1920, I: 134–35. Garstin 1907: 15. Newhouse 1926: 1–15. H.G. Lyons, The Rains of the Nile Basin, 3, 1905, Cairo: National Printing Department. This was an annual report on the rains of the Nile basin (in 1908 the report was subtitled ‘and the Nile Flood of 1908’ and published the reports for the years 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908). The object of these reports is clearly stated in the first report: ‘From April to September each year the rainfall of the Nile basin should be of great interest to all who live in Egypt and the Sudan’. The reason, of course, was its effect on the Nile flood. Lyons 1906: 3–5. Dupuis 1907: 40. Dupuis 1908: 39. Tottenham 1910: 233. Dupuis 1923: 248. Allenby to Balfour, 6 August 1922, FO 371/7754. Arthur James Balfour (1848– 1930) was Conservative Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, Foreign Secretary from 1916 to 1919 (best known for the Balfour Declaration) and served twice (1919–22, 1925–29) in the Cabinet post of Lord President of the Council. The British Residency had ‘scrutinised’ the report in draft and concluded, ‘With the Egyptian elections in close prospect, I see every advantage in procrastination with a view to using the proposed concession as a lever in the subsequent general election’. It also discussed the possibility of establishing a permanent irrigation body in Uganda, but once again the problem was who should sit on the board: Egyptians, Britons from the Irrigation Department in Egypt

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only, British officials in the Sudan, etc. (See Allenby to Curzon, 3 July 1923, FO 371/8971). 270 Mr Tottenham’s Mission to Uganda to His Excellency the Minister of Public Works, 11 June 1923, FO 371/8971. 271 Dupuis 1923: 255, 249, 237. 272 Foreign Office minute, Murray, 31 July 1928, FO 371/13138.

Notes on Chapter 4 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10

Foreign Office Memo, Sperling, Resumption of negotiations for the construction of a dam on Lake Tsana, 8 November 1922, FO 371/7151. MacDonald returned as a consultant, and was active until the 1950s (see chapters 3, 5 and 6), and now and then produced ideas for water control and wrote letters to British policy-makers that they often thought a nuisance. Lord Lloyd to Mohammed Mahmoud Pasha, 7 May 1929, in Sudan Pamphlets 89. Ziwar Pasha to Allenby, 26 January 1925, Texts of notes exchanged between Lord Allenby and the Egyptian Government on 26 January 1925, regarding the control of the Nile water, FO 371/10882. Allenby to Ziwar Pasha, 26 January 1925 (as put together in the Foreign Office from Cairo telegrams), FO 371/10882. Note from Lord Allenby to Ziwar Pasha, 26 January 1925, in Sudan Pamphlets 89. MacGregor found the Egyptian member difficult to co-operate with. In order to come up with an acceptable report, he informed Allenby and the British Government that he had had what he himself called ‘clandestine meetings’ with the British water-planners Hurst and Butcher, who were employed by the Egyptian Government (Allenby to Chamberlain, 25 May 1925, enclosure 3 in no1 by Mr R.M. MacGregor). Nile Commission 1925: 30. Ibid.: 28. MacDonald’s Nile Control provided, during the period when the Sennar reservoir would be in use, a water allowance at canal head of 15 cubic metres per feddan per day, including 33 cubic metres for losses between canal head and the 5,000 feddan blocks. MacGregor had worked out, on the basis of figures obtained from research at Hag Abdulla and Wad el-Nau, that a water allowance at canal head of 10 cubic metres, including two cubic metres for losses, would suffice. Thus, only two-thirds of the water provided would actually be required, and an extension of 150,000 feddans became possible on the assumption that the reservoir drew upon the Nile from 18 January to 15 April. In terms of volume, this saving amounted to five cubic metres per feddan per day on 300,000 feddans for 87 days; that is, 130.5 million cubic metres. Moreover, Nile Control argued that the date from which the canal would have to be supplied from storage was 18 January, and the waters could be brought back to the river at the end of March. MacGregor discovered, however, that the former date should be brought back to nearer the beginning of January, which also made it possible to bring the latter date forward to the beginning of March. Therefore it was assumed that the reservoir would be called upon to serve

366

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13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

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the present area for a period of 60 days instead of 87 as contemplated in Nile Control. This saving would amount to 15 cubic metres per feddan per day on 300,000 feddans for 27 days; that is, 125 million cubic metres. Assuming the period to be 65 days, the volume available would permit an extension of 190,000 feddans. Lord Lloyd to Sarwat Pasha, 16 February 1928, enclosure 1 in no1, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23 February 1928, FO 371/13138. Draft of a Note to be addressed by His Majesty’s High Commissioner to the President of the Council of Ministers, enclosure 3 in no1, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23 February 1928, FO 371/13138. Vatikiotis 1991: 284. He wrote a note about the Egyptian Government’s consideration of the report of the Parliamentary Finance Commission on the budget of the Irrigation Department for the current financial year. Under the heading ‘Sudan’, an estimate of E£1.1 million, of which E£130,000 was to be spent in 1928, had been included for ‘modification and improvement of the flow of the Nile in the sudd region’, by means of large dredgers to be purchased abroad. Lloyd to Chamberlain, 12 May 1928, FO 13138. Foreign Office minute, Murray, 1 August 1928, FO 371/13138. Foreign Office to Lloyd, draft, 15 March 1928, FO 371/13138. Draft Note, Lloyd to the Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, n.d. [July 1928], FO 371/13138. Lloyd to Chamberlain, 14 July 1928, FO 317/13138. Chamberlain to Lloyd, 15 March 1928, FO 371/13138. Lloyd to Chamberlain, 14 April 1928, FO 371/13138. Copy of letter dated 12 April 1928 from the Secretary of the Aboukir Company, Ltd., to his Excellency the Minister of Public Works, FO 371/13138. The question of British personnel in the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works and later in the Sudan Irrigation Service naturally was of great political importance. During the Nile waters discussion in 1929, London and Cairo discussed who should be Inspector-General of Irrigation. Lord Lloyd objected both to Parker and to Harris, as proposed by the Minister of Public Works. Lloyd argued that the Egyptian Ministry should make more use of Butcher, a ‘man of unusual ability, enjoying the full confidence of the British authorities’, although ‘the Ministry appeared to make inadequate use of his services’ (Note of conversation between His Excellency the High Commissioner and the Minister of Public Works at Wellington House on 13 August 1928, FO 371/13138). Mr Butcher was subsequently appointed Director-General by the Ministry of Public Works. The decision was taken on 28 May 1929 (A.R.I. Mellor, Financial Secretary to Chancery, The Residency, Cairo, 3 October 1929, FO 371/13857). For Butcher’s position, see note 32. Collins compares the Nile Waters Agreement with what he describes as Allenby’s demand for ‘unlimited irrigation’ in the Sudan (Collins 1996: 157). This is based upon a misunderstanding, since Allenby’s ultimatum never dealt with the question of unlimited irrigation in the Sudan, but with irrigation of an unlimited area in the Gezira. Collins 1996: 157. Tottenham 1927: 21. See Collins 1996: 158.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 4

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39

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But the water-planners in charge of the operations were British. In 1930 there was a great deal of uncertainty about Butcher’s position. Butcher protested to the Egyptian Government that his advice had not been asked for regarding the Assiut barrage (Butcher to the Under-Secretary of State, Public Works Ministry, Cairo, 3 June 1930, FO 371/14632). Butcher was almost completely boycotted at the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works in 1930. Hoare and Maffey were strongly against this, and the Governor-General expressed ‘considerable disquiet at entire relegation to the background of Mr Butcher whose appointment was our main safeguard for planning and carrying out of extensive and lengthy Egyptian works in Sudan territory with the efficiency and expediency required by the fact of essential inter-relation of all irrigation projects on the Nile and with due regard to political and administrative considerations’ (Hoare to Loraine, Foreign Office, 8 April 1930, FO 371/14632). Later that year the Egyptian Government, after considerable pressure from London, officially confirmed his position. In November 1930 Osman and Fahmy issued a continuation of what they recognised as ministerial order No 168 of 10 July 1929. It stated that Butcher should be ‘charged with the control of all irrigation works, projects and studies, on the Nile south of Wadi Halfa, and the implementing of the Nile Water Agreement’ (Ministerial Order, 4 November 1930. Signed by M. Osman and I. Fahmy, enclosure in no1, Loraine to Henderson, 25 November 1930, FO 371/14633). Foreign Office to Sir W.F. Gowers, November 1929, Draft letter, FO 371/13857. Foreign Office, Parkinson, Colonial Office to the Under-Secretary of State, 2 November 1929, FO 371/13857. They had just organised fisheries surveys in these lakes for the first time (see Worthington 1929). Foreign Office, Parkinson, Colonial Office to C.J. Norton, 14 November 1929, FO 371/13857. Murray to the Under-Secretary of State, Colonial Office, 2 December 1929 FO 371/13857. For a discussion of the economic arguments, see Memorandum on the Aswan Scheme, G.H. Selous, FO 371/21993. The group consisted of the British Nitrogen Engineering Company Limited – comprising the UK firms of Messrs Crompton Parkinson Limited and Messrs British Thomson Houston Company Limited – the US Chemical Construction Corporation, and the American hydroelectric engineering expert Hugh Cooper (see Egyptian Gazette, 15 June 1935, ‘The Assuan Dam Scheme’). Twenty years later, English Electric was to play a very central role in the history of the High Dam, and in the meantime this was ‘the firm’ of the British Government regarding Nile developments. In 1954 and 1955, Churchill and Eden strongly supported its bid for the High Dam contract against American competition, regarding it as one of London’s best cards, but Eden had to drop it in the end (see chapters 5 and 6). Foreign Office Memo, 18 July 1938, FO 371/21933. For general literature on the Treaty, and literature that analyses it from various perspectives, see Ibrahim 1970, Jal 1989 and Zayid 1965. Vatikiotis 1991: 293. The British Ambassador was ‘so great that he never carried money on his person. Nor did he take personal responsibility for his glasses, his cigarette case, his fly

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

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whisk or any other thing required when he went out of the grounds, even for a picnic in the desert.’ Sir Miles Lampson was kept on as Ambassador, although he had been High Commissioner before the 1936 Agreement. There he was, Shuckburgh writes, ‘behaving in much the same way as before the Treaty, with his special train and all, flying his flag in the same conspicuous Residence, associated in every Egyptian mind with British rule since Cromer’ (Shuckburgh 1986: 6). Shuckburgh was Third Secretary at the Embassy in Cairo from 1937, and Private Secretary to the Ambassador. See for example Al Ahram, 8 November 1936. Muhammad Hussein Haykal, a Liberal Constitutionalist in the House of the Senate. Referred to in Jal 1989: 56. The cost of the project was at the time estimated at E£7 million, including a provision for contingencies amounting to about E£700,000 and for interest on capital during construction amounting to over E£300,000. The works comprised a hydroelectric station of 270,000kW, a sub-station of 120,000kW and a chemical factory using this power to produce synthetic nitrates. The work would take five years to complete, and would be divided into three parts, each with a capacity of 100,000 tons per annum. The first part would be producing in four years, the second in four and a half, and the third in five. It had been established with reasonable certainty that some 30 million tons of ore were available in one field about 18km from the Nile. The ore was either lying on the surface, or was to be found just a few feet below the ground (Lampson to Halifax, 16 March 1939, FO 371/23358). Foreign Office memo, Aswan Nitrate Scheme, G.H. Nelson, The English Electric Company Limited to D. V. Kelly, 3 March 1939, FO 371/23358. Foreign Office minute, 6 January 1939, FO 371/23358. The Hungarian factory was to be established at Toura, near Cairo, with an estimated annual output of 180,000 tons. Foreign Office note, 30 December 1939, FO 371/24622. Lord Halifax (1881–1959), British Viceroy of India (1925–31), Foreign Secretary (1938–40), and Ambassador to the US (1941–46). Lampson to Halifax, 2 June 1939, FO 371/23359. Foreign Office minute, Lasky, 6 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Board of Trade to Treasury Chambers, 8 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Aswan Dam and Power and Fertiliser Scheme, summary of a meeting held at the Treasury on 16 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Lampson to Foreign Office, 18 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Thompson minute, 22 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Thompson minute, 8 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Foreign Office minute, Laskey, 30 January 1940, FO 371/24622. W.C. Lusk, British Thompson-Houston Company to Sir Horace Wilson, Treasury Chambers, 8 January 1940, FO 371/24622. Foreign Office to Lampson, 6 March 1940, FO 371/24622. Lampson to Foreign Office, 9 February 1940, FO 371/24622. Laskey, Summary of meeting at the Treasury on 13 February, FO 371/24622. Somerville-Smith to Bewley, Treasury Chambers, 14 February 1940, FO 371/246229. It maintained its guarantee, covering about £5 million, but on

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68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

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condition that it would not be used until after the war, except to the extent that they would have to ship sluice gate outlets and other equipment indispensable to the preliminary civil engineering work in connection with the contract. It would also require 1500 tons of steel in 1941, and 1500 tons in 1942, and English Electric were given assurances that the steel would be made available. Note by Mr Horsfall, English Electric, on the meeting with Hussein Sirry Pasha, 21 March 1940, FO 371/24622. Wingate to the Under-Secretary, Foreign Office, 3 January 1919, 156/5/2, SAD. Ministry of Public Works, 1923, ‘Annual Report for 1920–21’: 3, Cairo: Government Press. See also Gebel Awlia Dam (sic), Sidky Pasha interviewed, Egyptian Gazette, 7 August 1933. Loraine to Simon, 21 November 1933, FO 371/15449. In hydraulic societies, hydraulic structures attain great symbolic power. A hot diplomatic issue arose when the Egyptian Government suggested that King Fuad should lay the foundation stone of the Jabal Auliya Dam. Maffey, GovernorGeneral in the Sudan, saw a visit by the King to the Sudan as open to the ‘gravest objection’, unless the Egyptian Government had finally abandoned its claims to sovereignty over the Sudan. He added that the visit would necessarily be an ‘occasion for pomp and ceremony of a kind that appeals with peculiar force to an oriental people’. What would happen if the King were officially welcomed by the Governor-General and treated with royal honours (Maffey to Loraine, 2 February 1933, enclosure in no1, Loraine to Simon, 18 February 1933, FO 371/17002). See Tvedt in Harir and Tvedt 1994 for an analysis of the post-independence period, 1956–85, and Tvedt 2000 for an event-oriented reconstruction of development and destruction in the period between 1972 and 2000. Sanderson 1965: 1. Tosh 1981: 276. Elbashir 1974: 150. Tosh 1981: 276. Digernes 1978: 27. Collins 1971: 338. Collins and Herzog 1961: 130. Collins 1983: x. For a useful exception, see the study of the social impact of local floods in the Upper Nile region by Johnson 1992. Collins 1971: 242. Governor Upper Nile Province to Director of Irrigation (through Civil Secretary), 4 September 1943, Upper Nile Province 1/9/72, NRO. Director of Irrigation to Civil Secretary, 19 October 43, Upper Nile Province 1/9/72, NRO. See the bibliography in this book and Tvedt 2000: 187–317. To mention two examples of official support: MacMichael, Civil Secretary in Khartoum from 1926 to 1933, and the strong man of Sudanese politics and administration for about a decade, wholeheartedly endorsed the project in 1934 (MacMichael 1934). Similarly, a book published in 1935, which, according to the Governor-General’s foreword, was essential reading for any official in the Sudan

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90 91 92

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Government in the 1930s, supported the canal project in the Southern Sudan (MacGregor 1935, in Hamilton [ed.]: 293). The annual reports published by the Government do not reflect this view. They are basically silent on the issue, because the Nile in the Southern Sudan was under Cairo’s responsibility. This aspect of the official documents reflects the character of Nile management in the period, and should not be mixed with an analysis of intentions. Roberts, W.D. Irrigation Projects on the Upper Nile and their Effect on Tribal and other Local Interests, October 1928, UNP 1/9/83, NRO. Willis saw the Nuer as obstacles to these development plans. Deliberately misleadingly, he also reported the existence of a dangerous plot of Nuer prophets (‘kujurs’), inspired by the Deng cult, in order win enough support to gain control over them. Letter from C.A. Willis, Governor Upper Nile Province to H. MacMichael, Civil Secretary, 24 October 1925, Upper Nile Province 1/9/79, NRO. C. A. Willis, Governor Upper Nile Province, Handing Over Notes 1928, 115, CIVSEC 57/2/8, NRO. Martin 1921: 297–98. Draft Agreement between Sudan Industries Ltd. and the Sudan Government, CIVSEC, 12/5/26, NRO. The existence of the plans for the Upper Nile projects had, of course, quite similar – although less important – effects in Uganda. The schemes for the Ugandan lakes, closely related to the sudd channel project, would have important impacts both on the area of agricultural land in the areas surrounding the lake-shores, and on the communication system in both central and northern Uganda. To give an example, the East Africa High Commission, the chairman of which was Sir Evelyn Baring, stated in 1949: ‘The proposed site at Kisumu (on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria) has been queried due to uncertainty regarding the ultimate level of the lake, and the impending decision on the construction of a bund: until these points have been definitely decided the final acceptance of this proposed office and African housing site near the Lake shore must remain in abeyance’ (Colonial Office: Annual Report of the East Africa High Commission 1949, 32, 1950, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office). Governor of Equatoria to Civil Secretary, 13 May 1941, Equatoria 1/3/10, NRO. Letter from Governor of Upper Nile Province to Director, Sudan Irrigation Department, 4 September 1943, Upper Nile Province 1/9/72, NRO. Note by General Manager, Sudan Railway 27 May 1950, and ‘Railway Development’, report by J. R. Hillard, General Manager, 10 June 1950, Upper Nile Province 1/10/89, NRO. Note by General Manager, Sudan Railway, 27 May 1950, Upper Nile Province 1/10/89, NRO. Civil Secretary, Note, 16 December 1946, South 1/18/188, NRO. Minutes of an ad hoc Meeting in the Foreign Financial Secretary’s Office, 25 May 1947, Upper Nile Province 1/10/85, NRO. A.E. Griffin to Civil Secretary, Economic Development of Upper Nile, 19 March 1943, Allen Private Papers 500/13/24, SAD. Notes of a meeting held in the Financial Secretary’s Office on Monday, 13 November 1944, Dahlia 1/3/7, NRO. Southern governors meeting 1925, MONGALLA 1/9/61, NRO.

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100 101 102 103 104 105

106

107 108

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This popular view of the Nuer, fostered by Evans-Pritchard throughout his writings, has been opposed by other authors, who call it a ‘homeostatic synchronic model’ of Nuer social organisation. They argue that the model fails to consider social oppositions in diachronic perspective, but this disagreement is of little relevance here. Taylor 1961: 95. Historians tend to agree with this. See Baer 1976 and Sbacchi 1985. Taylor 1961: 96. Taylor 1961: 89. Taylor 1961: 90. Taylor 1961: 96. See also Sbacchi 1985 and Baer 1976. In a conventional perspective, British ordinary economic interests were indeed insignificant. One typical example of the failure of British capitalists to earn money in Ethiopia: the Abyssinian Corporation was formed in 1918 as a result of a British Government initiative, and the hope was that if British firms co-operated, they might be able to cope with other ‘foreign competitors’. Support for the venture was even given by Parliament in June 1919, but by 1926 the Corporation had gone into liquidation, without return to the shareholders. In 1925 the Annual Report of His Majesty’s Minister in Addis Ababa stated that there were two British companies in Ethiopia, the Abyssinian Corporation and the Abyssinian Produce Company. The former company went into liquidation the following year, while the latter was a small one managed by Colonel Sandford, who also, the report pointed out, leased a farm of about 500 acres approximately 40 miles from Addis Ababa, for a period of 30 years. British interests dominated the Bank of Abyssinia, but as the Minister wrote, ‘Most of the capital is, I understand, now Egyptian, French and Italian’. If capital export or production of cheap raw materials is a criterion of economic interests, the British certainly had none in Ethiopia (as compared, for example, to South Africa or Rhodesia). But definitions and conceptualisations of ‘interests’ have to take account of concrete temporal and spatial relationships. The Exchange of Notes in 1925, discussed above, is not mentioned at all by Taylor 1961 or Baer 1976, two of the most influential historians to have worked on the history of Ethiopia and her relations with Britain in the inter-war years; thus the continuity in British aims is not grasped. Taylor’s book does not mention that Britain supported Italian spheres of interest there at the time, and puts instead all the blame on the French Foreign Minister, Laval, and his role in January 1935 (see Taylor 1961: 88). The Times, 8 April 1930. They disagreed about the road to the dam. The Ethiopian Government thought that all of the building material should be transported by road from Addis Ababa to the Lake, and not from the Sudanese frontier as the Sudan Government insisted. Murray, Foreign Office to Ronald Lindsay, Washington, 22 May 1930, FO 371/14591. Lindsay and Murray had worked together on the Blue Nile issue during the early 1920s. On 19 August 1930 Barton wrote that ‘the latest developments in the Tsana negotiations will come as rather a shock, but in this country one has to learn to be surprised at nothing’ (Barton to Murray, 19 August 1930, FO 371/14591). Barton wondered whether there was any ‘precedent in diplomatic history for a Government raking up an I.O.U. twenty-three years old and trying to cash it’ (ibid.). Barton

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regarded the whole thing as representing a ‘somewhat childish idea at bluff ’ (ibid.). The fall of the dollar, the approaching coronation, the rebellion, and the purchase of the Bank of Abyssinia left the Government in Addis Ababa hard pressed, Barton thought, but he misread the situation. The promised payment was a matter of principle for the Ethiopian Government. Hoare, Cairo to Foreign Office, 3 April 1930, FO 371/14591. MacGregor, Sudan Government London Office, 17 September 1930, note Lake Tana, FO 371/14591. MacGregor to Murray, 26 September 1930, FO 371/14591. Lindsay, British Embassy, Washington to Murray, 5 November 1930, FO 371/14592. Murray to Lindsay, 20 November 1930, FO 371/14592. Minute by MacGregor, 7 December 1930, FO 371/14592. Bentinck to Henderson, 2 September 1930, FO 371/14591. Maffey, Governor-General Sudan to Loraine, Cairo, 9 December 1930 and Loraine to Henderson, 16 December 1930, FO 371/14592. MacGregor, 25 June 1932, Lake Tana negotiations, FO 371/16100. Chancery, British Embassy, Washington to Egyptian Department, Foreign Office, 26 December 1930, FO 371/15388. Foreign Office minute, Moble, 29 April 1931, FO 371/15388. The whole trouble was ‘due to the recent fall in the price of cotton combined with low yields from the Gezira plantations’ (Foreign Office minute, Moble, 22 January 1931, FO 371/15388). Troutbeck, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 21 March 1931, FO 371/15388. On 11 December 1932 MacMichael, Civil Secretary in Khartoum, wrote a note ‘solicited for the information’ of the Foreign Secretary. He argued that the Sudan Government, ‘cannot, for any period that can be predicted, take an active part in the prosecution of the Tsana project’ (MacMichael, Acting Governor-General of the Sudan to His Majesty’s High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan, Cairo, 11 December 1932, FO 371/16101). Loraine to Foreign Office, 18 March 1932, FO 371/16100. Foreign Office minute, Wallingford, 17 December 1932, FO 371/16101. The Egyptian Public Health Department had suggested that an Egyptian sanitary mission should visit Lake Tana along with the White Corporation, to investigate whether construction of the dam would affect the health of Egyptians, particularly with respect to bilharzia, introduced through the waters of the Blue Nile. Campbell wrote that the Abyssinians resented the idea, and he would do what he could to have the suggestion suppressed (Campbell, Alexandria to Foreign Office, 27 August 1933, FO 371/16988). The Foreign Office agreed that this line was undoubtedly the best course (Foreign Office minute, Wallinger, 30 August 1933, FO 371/16988). Some days later, Campbell forwarded other arguments which made it easier to stop the mission. Medical authorities considered it quite impossible for germs from Tana to reach the Sudan or Egypt. Bilharzia was not endemic in the upper reaches of the Blue Nile in the Sudan. The incidence of bilharzia varies directly with the distance from Egypt when both ‘human carriers and locally bred snails are already abundant’ (Campbell, Alexandria to Foreign Office, 28 August 1933, FO 371/16988).

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146 147 148 149 150 151

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Foreign Office minute, Murray, 1 May 1931, FO 371/15388. Loraine to Murray, 18 May 1931, FO 371/15388. Aide-memoire, 6, 25 February 1932, The Residency, Cairo, FO 371/16100. See R. MacGregor and A.D. Butcher, 1932, note dated 21 May 1932, Lake Tsana reservoir, FO 371/16100. Loraine to Foreign Office, 2 July 1932, FO 371/16100. Loraine to Abdel Fattah Yehia Pasha, Acting President of Council of Ministers, 29 July 1932, FO 371/16100. The Times, 14 January 1933. Loraine to Foreign Office, n.d., 18 January 1933, FO 371/16988. Foreign Office minute, Wallinger, 17 January 1933, FO 371/16988. Foreign Office minute, Wallinger, 20 January 1933, FO 371/16988. Barton to Foreign Office, 19 January 1933, FO 371/16988. Herui W.S., Ethiopian Foreign Office to Sir Sidney Barton, 5 December 1932 (or Hidar 26, 1925), FO 371/16101. Barton to Simon, 3 October 1932, FO 371/16101. Foreign Office minute, Peterson, 9 May 1933, FO 371/16988. Peterson to Broadmead, 30 October 1933, FO 371/16988. Murray, Rome to Thompson, Foreign Office, 25 August 1934, FO 371/18032. Note by MacGregor, 28 April 1934, Aswan – Gebel Aulia – Lake Tsana, FO 371/20193. Barton to Simon, 15 May 1934, FO 371/18032. Barton said that the survey had met with no unusual difficulties, ‘though the activities of the Ethiopian representative attached to the party for liaison (or espionage)’ duties had proved very trying for ‘Major Roberts’s nerves’. It looked as if it would not be possible to save much money on the 1931 estimates, and this was bad news. He considered it possible to move certain of the churches on the islands in the Lake to higher ground, or to transfer them to the ruined Portuguese-built edifices, which Barton thought could be restored for this purpose. But even with the aid of such expedients, which Barton thought would be extremely doubtful to realise from the political point of view, a saving of a maximum of $1 million was conceivable. Barton also remarked that the survey of the motor road to the Sudan frontier had revealed that ‘no practicable descent of the escarpment could be constructed without expensive blasting operations’. This was also bad news owing to the importance the British had put on this road. All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Barton to Simon, 15 May 1934, FO 371/18032. Foreign Office minute, Wallinger, 5 June 34, FO 371/18032. Murray to Simon, 18 September 1934, FO 371/18032. Murray to Simon, 26 September 1934, FO 371/18032. See for example Marcus 1994: 138. The Commission of the League of Nations concluded that ‘neither the Italian Government nor its agents on the spot can be held responsible in any way for the actual Walwal incident’. Although the Ethiopians ‘may have given the impression that they had aggressive intentions’ locally, they could not be held responsible for the incident on 5 December 1934 either: therefore, the League concluded that the incident had resulted from ‘an unfortunate chain of circumstances’

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158 159 160

161

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(Italo–Ethiopian Commission of Conciliation and Arbitration, enclosed in Note by the Secretary-General, League of Nations: Dispute between Ethiopia and Italy: request of the Ethiopian Government, 9 September 1935, CAB 21/411). This version has been refuted by historians – Italy was the aggressor. It looked for an incident, and found it. Baer 1976 overlooks this memo (5 February 1935, Memorandum respecting the policy of His Majesty’s Government towards Ethiopia, FO 371/19175), arguing that the British Government had no policy – or was indecisive – from February to June, and commenting that the ‘machinery of foreign policy worked poorly in foreseeing and preparing for the coming crisis’ (Baer 1976: 3). Marcus notes: ‘London reasoned, furthermore, that it had no interests in Ethiopia…’ (Marcus 1994: 142). Memorandum respecting the policy of His Majesty’s Government towards Ethiopia, 5 February 1935, FO 371/19175. Quoted in Baer 1976: 3. Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W. 1 on Wednesday 27 February 1935, at 11.00 a.m., CAB 23/81. See his autobiography. At this time, two alternative projects were discussed. The plans were not significantly different from previous ones. The first involved raising the Lake above its maximum natural level, and provided only annual storage. The second would raise it by 1.5 metres, providing the same amount of annual storage and also a moderate amount of reserve storage. In both cases the benefit for the downstream states would vary considerably from year to year. Barton to Ethiopian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 25 May 1935, FO 371/19186. F.M. Moussa, Egyptian Consul to Ethiopian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 28 May 1935, Enclosure in Barton to Simon, 28 May 1935, FO 371/19186. Members were J.L. Maffey (chairman, previous Governor-General of the Sudan), O.St.C. O’Malley (Foreign Office), G.H.Thompson (Foreign Office), R.A.Wiseman (Dominions Office), Ronald Adam (War Office), J. Harding (Admiralty) and J.G. Pirie (Air Ministry). It was led by the former Governor-General of the Sudan. He had, as has been shown, become very familiar with Nile politics and Blue Nile development, and he had himself for years been very active in securing the Lake Tana concession. Report of Inter-Departmental Committee on British interests in Ethiopia (what was later called the ‘Maffey Report’), in Maffey to Foreign Office, 18 June 1935, FO 371/19186. One copy was purloined from the safe in the British Embassy in Rome by the Italian secret service (Baer 1976: 4), so Italy and Mussolini knew British priorities very well. The Italians had the best secret service in Europe at the time, reading 70 or 80 codes, and had penetrated every embassy in Rome except that of the Soviet Union. It intercepted up to 16,000 messages a year (Baer 1976: 4). Mussolini was therefore well aware of British intentions and aims. Baer 1976 repeats Taylor’s assessment. Baer’s book on Italy, Ethiopia and the League of Nations has an index, but it has no entry on the Nile, Lake Tana or the Lake Tana dam. It overlooks the hydrological aspect of the issue, and the whole interesting analysis is based on developments in Europe only.

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164 Report of Inter-Departmental Committee on British interests in Ethiopia (what was later called the ‘Maffey Report’), in Maffey to Foreign Office, 18 June 1935, FO 371/19186. 165 Thompson, Notes for the Secretary of State, Abyssinia, 12 June 1935, FO 371/1975. 166 Drummond to Hoare, 11 June 1935, FO 371/19186. 167 Foreign Office minute, Roberts, 14 June 1935, FO 371/19186. 168 The Cabinet Secretary described the Fascist leader in this way: Mussolini, ‘standing on a cannon, had delivered a speech of a truculent character’ (the expression ‘standing on a cannon’ was deleted in the final minutes of this Cabinet meeting). Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Wednesday 10 July 1935, at 11.00 a.m., CAB 23/82. 169 Foreign Office minute, Thompson, 29 July 1935, FO 371/19186. 170 Foreign Office minute, Thompson, 29 July 1935, FO 371/19186. 171 Here called Memoranda by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (C.P.–147 [35] and C.P.–138 [35]), see Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Wednesday 24 July 1935, at 11.00 a.m., CAB 23/82. 172 Samuel Hoare became Foreign Secretary on 7 June 1935. He was forced to resign half a year later, on 18 December 1935, owing to British policies regarding Italy and Ethiopia (see below). Anthony Eden, who succeeded him as Foreign Secretary, was forced to resign after the Suez fiasco 20 years later (see below). 173 Foreign Office minute, Campbell, 4 and 5 August 1935, FO 371/19186. 174 Conclusions of a conversation at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1., on Tuesday, 6 August 1935, at 2.30 p.m., CAB 23/82. Eden should do his utmost to maintain close relations with France, and in addition try to obtain ‘the acceptance from Abyssinia of certain concessions on points in the Italian case which His Majesty’s Government have already told the British Ambassador in Rome (who did not have occasion to use them) that they could support, if the case was made out, viz.: (1) in so far as threats to, or violations of, the Italian frontiers are concerned: (2) in respect of aggressions such as the Walwal affair is proved against Abyssinia to our satisfaction and that of the League of Nations: (3) in respect of breaches – if proven – between Italy and Abyssinia. Further (4) in a general way His Majesty’s Government would be willing to support Italy in pressing Abyssinia to permit Italians and other foreigners the usual and reasonable facilities for trade, habitation etc. with regard to which she has been obstructive in the past: (5) as regards slavery His Majesty’s Government could support insistence on Abyssinia putting into force such future measures as the League may think necessary and remedying past failures to carry out her obligations in this matter.’ 175 Conclusions of a conversation at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Tuesday, 6 August 1935, at 2.30 p.m., CAB 23/82. 176 Conference of ministers held at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday, 21 August 1935, at 5.00 p.m., CAB 23/82. 177 Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Thursday, 22 August 1935, at 10.00 a.m., and continued at 2.20 p.m., CAB 23/82. 178 Cabinet: The Italo-Abyssinian dispute. Summary of conclusions by the Cabinet and sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on defence policy and requirements in regard to co-operation with other powers in the application of sanctions, Cabinet 42(35) Conclusion 1, 22 August 1935, CAB 21/412.

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179 Cabinet: The Italo-Abyssinian dispute. Summary of conclusions by the cabinet and sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on defence policy and requirements in regard to co-operation with other powers in the application of sanctions, sub-committee on defence policy and requirements. 6th meeting, 5 September 1935, CAB 21/412. 180 The Times, 13 September 1935. 181 Cabinet: The Italo-Abyssinian dispute. Summary of conclusions by the cabinet and sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on defence policy and requirements in regard to co-operation with other powers in the application of sanctions, Cabinet 44(35) Conclusion 1, 2 October 1935, CAB 21/412. 182 Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Wednesday, 9 October 1935, at 11.00 a.m., CAB 23/82. 183 Pierre Laval (1883–1945), Prime Minister in France in 1931 and again in 1935, when he became Foreign Minister. He later led the Vichy Government that collaborated with Hitler’s Germany, and was executed as a traitor to France in 1945. 184 Cabinet Committee – Foreign Policy, Draft conclusion of the twenty-eighth meeting of the Committee held at 10 Downing Street, at 11.30 a.m., FO 371/22010. 185 Haile Selassie 1976: 257, 307, 310. 186 Note for the Secretary of State, 2 August 1936, The consequences of an ItalianAbyssinian War, FO 371/19123. 187 See, among other studies, ‘Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Centro Studi per l’Africa orientale italiana’, 1938. 188 Foreign Office minute, Lambert, 18 October 1937, FO 371/20934. 189 Major W.J. Cawtorn, The War Office, to Connor Green, Egyptian Department, Foreign Office, 13 October 1937, FO 371/20934. 190 Foreign Office minute, Bentinck, 1 January 1938, FO 371/20934. 191 Foreign Office minute, Sir W.Malkin, 6 March 1937, FO 371/20934. 192 Eden minute, 24 March 1937, FO 371/20934. 193 Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), Prime Minister from 28 May 1937 to 10 May 1940. 194 It was decided that the annual reports on Ethiopia should be replaced and published in the colonial chapters of the annual report on Italy. Preparation of annual reports on Ethiopia ‘ceased with the closure of the Legation’, although the ‘man on the spot’ continued to produce a ‘report on the events of the year’. The most interesting items were included in the annual report on Italy, ‘as seen from the Rome angle’. This bureaucratic decision suggests that London had given up Ethiopia’s independence. 195 MacDonald, the man behind the Nile plans in 1920, wrote to the Prime Minister with a somewhat original solution to the Italian question. Chamberlain should ‘consider purchasing from Italy the Blue Nile catchment area in Abyssinia, it is roughly one fourth of the whole country. I suggest a bargain might be struck when recognising her possession of the remainder as I feel you must shortly do, and that Italy be paid £20,000,000 for what is taken over for the benefit of Egypt. The latter country would, I am sure, gladly pay £10,000,000 as her share. Possibly you could secure the territory for a lesser sum than £20,000,000 but it is in my view certainly worth the greatest amount to Egypt. Italy is hard up for cash. Here is an opportunity

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207

208

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to put right the whole situation and I commend it to you’ (MacDonald to Chamberlain, 11 December 1937, FO 371/20934). Lampson to Foreign Office, 12 April 1938, FO 371/22001. This Pact is not mentioned by Taylor 1961 or Baer 1976. See FO 371/22010. Chamberlain to Mussolini, 16 April 1938, FO 371/21981. Foreign Office note, Dixon, 14 April 1940, FO 371/24639. Polsen Newman, E.W., 1938, ‘North-East Africa’, Nineteenth Century, July 1938. Foreign Office minute, Bentinck, 20 July 1938, FO 371/20009. Cabinet. Visit to Rome of the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 11–14 January 1939, Telegram sent from Turin to Mussolini by the Prime Minister on leaving Italy on the night of 14 January 1939, FO 371/23373. Foreign Office minute, Bentinck, 30 January 1939, FO 371/23381. Pankhurst to Bevin, 15 June 1940, FO 371/24639. Sylvia Pankhurst was editor of the weekly New Times and Ethiopian News. Thompson to J.R. Colville, 28 June 1940, FO 371/24639. Thompson described Pankhurst as ‘this unbalanced and fanatical lady’ (Foreign Office minute, Thompson, 27 June 1940, FO 371/24639). Lugard, former ruler of Uganda, was still active. He suggested that Britain should give Haile Selassie the province of Gojjam, ‘which is completely encircled by the Blue Nile from its source in Lake Tsana. He could have a safe conduct to the province via the Sudan.’ The idea got the support of Margery Perham, a leading authority on Native Administration. She wrote and advised the British Government to follow up these suggestions, also since ‘it would give the important Lake Tana area a special status in which we are interested’ (Perham to Lord De La Warr, 1 May 1938, FO 371/22010). In Parliament, an MP suggested that 6,000 Abyssinians living as refugees in Kenya at the time should be sent to the hilly territory of Tanganyika, and asked the Secretary of State to approach the Emperor with a view to offering him the rule of this territory within the suzerainty of the Empire (Mr Perkins, Parliamentary question, 22 July 1938, FO 371/22010). The Foreign Office was also being pressed by the League of Nations Union. In September the Egyptian Department received a letter asking the Government to make it perfectly clear, ‘by word and action’, that Britain’s official aim included the restoration of the freedom of Ethiopia (which was still a Member of the League), that the Emperor should be recognised as the rightful ruler of Ethiopia, and that Ethiopia, like Poland and Czechoslovakia, should be given allied status (Freshwater, League of Nations Union to Egyptian Department, Foreign Office, 6 September 1939, FO 371/84639). The Foreign Office disagreed. A Foreign Office bureaucrat minuted, ‘I do hope we are not getting to allow this organisation which in the past has done so much harm in “befogging” the public mind, to muscle in now on Abyssinia or any other problem’ (FO minute, 8 September 1939, FO 371/24639). In Mosley, he is quoted as having said: ‘C’est l’eau de mon pays’ (‘It is the water of my country’, Mosley 1964: 252). I have chosen a translation from Haile Selassie’s autobiography over Mosley’s phrasing. ‘Emerging from’ is also a formulation much more in line with the Emperor’s careful wording than Mosley’s rather blunt quotation.

378 210 211 212 213 214 215

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Haile Selassie 1997: 101. Quoted in Mosley 1964: 258. Expression taken from Lampson to Foreign Office, 23 June 1941, FO 371/27519. E.E. Bridges to Churchill, 2 October 1941, FO 371/27522. Report, Committee on Policy in Regard to Ethiopia, War Cabinet, 8 November 1941, FO 371/27525. Mosley argues that Eden was ‘always to be Haile Selassie’s friend in the British Government’ (Mosley 1964: 273). The story of the Lake Tana negotiations shows that the reality was more complex, and that Eden pursued what he thought were British interests, to the clear disadvantage of Ethiopia. Conclusions of a meeting of the War Cabinet held in the Cabinet War Room on Monday, 13 January 1941, at 6.00 p.m., FO 371/27515. ‘Les questions qui se present, au premier plan, sont les suivantes:- 1. La garantie des droits de l’Egypte sur les sources du Nil Bleu et de lac Tana.’ (‘The questions which present themselves [during the Abyssinian campaign] in the foreground are the following:- 1. The guarantee of Egypt’s rights on the sources of the Blue Nile and Lake Tana.’) Ministère des Affaires Etrangères to l’Ambassade de sa Majestée Britannique, 21 July 1941, FO 371/27543. The former Advisor to the Ministry of Public Works, Murdoch MacDonald, argued along the same lines. He wrote to Churchill ‘that either actual possession by the Sudan of the Blue Nile area including Lake Tsana or at least some form of suzerainty over it’ should be provided for (MacDonald to Churchill, 23 January 1941, FO 371/27536). Lampson to Sir Arthur Cadogan, Acting Secretary of State, 17 March 1941, FO 371/27536. Newbold to Bateman, Foreign Office, 1 July 1941, FO 371/27536. When in May the British Middle-Eastern War Council met in Cairo, it discussed long-term strategy as spelled out by the Foreign Office. Members of the Committee on Ethiopia, appointed by the Middle-Eastern War Council, included Howe, Henderson, Douglas Newbold and John Hathorn Hall. When Eden received their memo, he wrote that it might be of help in discussions about various frontier adjustments with Ethiopia ‘which might be made in British interests’. Eden to Lord Moyne, 10 June 1943, FO 371/35647. It was discussed at a meeting in the Foreign Office, attended by the Financial Secretary of the Sudan Government and Mr MacGregor. Lake Tsana: The present position, Research Department, Foreign Office, 13 February 1945, FO 371/46081. Foreign Office minute, Schrivener, 18 January 1943, FO 371/35646. Schrivener, Foreign Office to Lampson, Cairo, 29 January 1943, FO 921/70. Schrivener, Foreign Office to Howe, Addis Ababa, 29 January 1943, FO 921/70. Howe to Foreign Office, 18 March 1943, FO 371/35646. He suggested that MacGregor should enter into preliminary negotiations, although his ‘arrival in Cairo would immediately arouse speculation in the world press’, particularly in America, because the White Corporation was still interested. Howe, Addis Ababa to Office of the Minister of State, Cairo, 2 February 1943, FO921/70. Foreign Office minute, MacKereth, 15 April 1943, FO 371/35633. Huddleston to Lampson, 24 March 1943, FO 371/35646.

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Lampson, Cairo to the Governor-General of the Sudan, 10 April 1943, FO 921/70. Lampson to Foreign Office, 10 April 1943, FO 371/35646. Lampson to Foreign Office, 21 April 1943, FO 371/35646. Foreign Office to Cairo, 29 May 1943, FO 371/35646. Killearn to Foreign Office, 15 June 1943, FO 371/35646. Shone, British Embassy, Cairo to Foreign Office, 27 September 1943, FO 921/70. M. el Nahas, Présidence du Conseil des Ministres, to Killearn, British Embassy, 25 September 1943, FO 921/70. Killearn to Eden, 6 October 1943, FO 921/70. Howe, Addis Ababa to Eden, 11 June 1943, FO 921/70. Howe, Addis Ababa to Cairo, 3 July 1943, FO 921/70. Howe, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 13 August 1943, FO 371/35633. Howe, Addis Ababa to Eden, 29 October 1943, FO 921/70. War Cabinet Paper, Memorandum by the Deputy Minister of State resident in the Middle East, October 1943, FO 371/35634. British financial assistance to Ethiopia, Note for the Middle East Office (n.d.), FO 921/72. Howe to Eden, 29 October 1943, FO 371/35646. Howe, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 17 December 1943, FO 371/35634. Lieutenant-Commander Marshall (War Cabinet Offices) to MacKereth, 20 December 1943, FO 371/35646. Killearn to Foreign Office, 11 August 1944, FO 371/41496. Civil Secretary’s Office, Khartoum, Note on discussions held at Khartoum on 19 September 1944, FO 371/41496. Lake Tsana: The present position, Research Department, Foreign Office, 13 February 1945, FO 371/46081. Smith 1971: 234. Ludwig 1935 argued that ‘England’s power to turn the key and starve Egypt out of water is a fable’ (vol. II: 36). Britain had turned the key once (in 1924), and discussed it again, so in this sense it was not a fable, but – as Huddleston also shows below – it turned out to be more difficult than anticipated because of the character of the river and its hydrology. Lord Killearn to Foreign Office, 16 March 1945, FO 371/46081. H.J. Huddleston, Khartoum to Lord Killearn, Cairo (forwarded to Eden), 12 April 1945, FO 371/46081.

Notes on Chapter 5 1 2 3 4

Prime Minister Winston Churchill 1954, quoted in Shuckburgh 1986: 75. US Secretary of State (1953–59) under Eisenhower. He was a principal architect of US foreign policy in the Cold War and in the Middle East after World War II. For the two years 1955 and 1956, there are 35 thick files in the Foreign Office alone on Nile water questions and the Aswan High Dam scheme. It has also been argued that Dulles’s brusque rejection in July 1956 was the beginning of the end of the influence that the US had exerted in the Middle East. Although Dulles later conceded that his refusal could have been more subtle,

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he never wavered in his defence of the action. Obviously, this criticism was premature, since the Russians were thrown out of Egypt under Sadat less than 15 years later. Anthony Eden later offered a more detailed official version. In his book Full Circle he argues that London agreed with Washington’s policy, and supported Dulles’s action. He spells out the reasons (which have more or less been reproduced in many history books): the raising of the Egyptian demands and conditions, Egypt’s heavy expenditure on Soviet-bloc arms, the constant anti-British propaganda from Radio Cairo, and growing Soviet influence. Eden’s version resembled Dulles’s justifications, but Eden did not tell the whole story. These justifications are very different from those given publicly in 1956, and their accuracy might be questioned. Nasser had accepted all demands on 19 July 1955, and he had bought his weapons from Czechoslovakia before the offer to finance the dam was made in December 1955. His propaganda was not less anti-British in 1955 than in June 1956. See Hahn 1991 for a discussion. This book partly distances itself from the trend, but ends by arguing that co-operation was what won out in the end. This is obviously correct, but during the late 1940s and 1950s competition was, nevertheless, so fierce and important, and so concrete, that it was decisive in forming the last decades of British imperial policy in the region. Regarding Nile policies, rivalry was more important than co-operation. This perspective, as every perspective, has its own filters and ‘blind spots’. The focus on the Nile valley implies that the international political scene and developments in the Middle East are given less analytical attention. The focus on the Nile in explaining the build-up to the Suez episode is based on the following justifications: that this perspective has generally been neglected in the literature, and that the Nile played a very prominent role in British thinking about the region, and was the most important issue to Nasser (two factors the US leadership knew very well, and also knew to exploit). See for example FO 371/41397. Killearn to Foreign Office, 11 March 1944, FO 371/41397. London took care to inform its embassies in the Middle East about this policy: the British should not ‘make any concessions that would assist American commercial penetration into a region which for generations has been an established British market, except as regards the further expansion of healthier oil concessions, in accordance with the Anglo–US oil agreement of September 1945’ (Bevin to His Majesty’s Representatives at Bagdad [no 279], Cairo [no 697], Teheran [no 255], Beirut [no 239] and Jedda [no 182], CAB 134/499). Cabinet. Middle East Committee, Financial and economic sessions of conference of British representatives of Middle East territories (15–18 April 1956), Note by Secretary, 17 May 1946, Record of a speech by W.A.B. Iliff, Treasury Representative in the British Middle East Office, CAB 134/499. The American Loan Agreement restricted London’s freedom to promote British industry. Britain could not make additional releases from its sterling balances to Middle Eastern countries unless they used them for purchases of capital goods solely in the UK. If they did not adhere to this, they broke the provisions of the Washington Loan Agreement.

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25 26

27 28 29 30 31

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Cabinet, Middle East (Official) Committee, Economic policy in the Middle East, 15 May 1947, CAB 134/499: 4. Ibid.: 17. Cabinet, Middle East (Official) Committee, meeting 21 May 1947, Relationship with the US, CAB 134/499. H.J. Huddleston to Cairo, 7 January 1947, FO 371/63022. C.A. Brown, Ministry of Supply to D. H. Greenhill, Foreign Office, 27 February 1947, FO 371/63022. Bevin to Lord President of the Council, 24 July 1947, FO 371/63023. Bevin to H.S. Morrison, 3 September 1947, FO 371/63023. E.J.C. Dixon, Ministry of Fuel and Power to D.M.R. Riches, Foreign Office, 11 September 1947, FO 371/63023. Foreign Office minute, Scrivener, 9 August 1947, FO 371/63023. Foreign Office minute, Greenhill, 25 August 1947, FO 371/63023. Ministry of Fuel and Power to Foreign Office, 2 October 1947, FO 371/63023. The Egyptians had an idea of using Eritrea as a direct bargaining counter in connection with Lake Tana and the Tana dam. See Foreign Office minute, 14 February 1947, FO 371/63130. See Kent 1998: 154. Memorandum by the Chiefs of Staff, Defence negotiations with Egypt, appendix to R.W. Ewbank, Chiefs of Staff Committee. Defence negotiations with Egypt, (top secret), 15 December 1952, CAB21/3304. Kent 1998: 155. Foreign Office to His Majesty’s Representatives, 3 August 1951, CAB 21/3304. Extract from the minutes of C.O.S. (51) 131 meeting held on 16 August 1951, CAB 21/3304. Foreign Office memo, Murray, 4 January 1923, Memorandum on the political situation in Egypt, FO 371/8972. One method was by spreading education that would enable them to increase the number of Sudanese in government service. The deliberate policy was to open up as many career options as possible for qualified Northern Sudanese (in the Southern Sudan the policy was very different, as has been argued in previous chapters). Therefore, they also worked to transform the Gordon Memorial College into a university to fill the higher-level bureaucracy with qualified Sudanese. Sudan Government 1945, The Advisory Council for the Northern Sudan. The Proceedings of the First Session, held at the Palace, Khartoum, from 15 to 18 May 1944, Khartoum: McCorquodale & Company Ltd: 29. Governor-General’s Diary 1944, 15 May 1944, Dept. P. 11/7/54, NRO. The Sudan was still mostly concerned with the Tana Dam on the supply side. The commissioned report by Professor Peers stated that the Sudan depended entirely on the Tana scheme, allowing the maximum rate of expansion to be 40,000 to 50,000 feddans per year, which would require the labour of 5,000 to 10,000 men, according to the kind and amount used. The report concluded that an agreement with Ethiopia on the Tana scheme was one of the most urgent requirements, if ‘new outlets for labour are to be created in the Sudan during the difficult period which will follow the end of the war’. Professor Peers, Draft Report, The Sudan, 1944: 14, FO 921/305.

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Sudan Legislative Assembly, Proceedings. 1st Assembly, Second Session, 6 – 14 March 1950: 2, Governor-General’s Opening Speech, no1. Report on the Administration of the Sudan for the year 1950–1, Sudan no1 (1956), Presented by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Parliament by command of Her Majesty, July 1956, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. See Alexander Gibb & Partners 1954. Coffee was, as usual, the most important export crop. Coffee made up 40 per cent of exports, while cereals and flour made up 25 per cent, and gold, hides and skins were fairly important parts of the total. By the end of 1946, however, Brazilian coffee started to enter the Egyptian market at a price lower than Ethiopian coffee in Addis Ababa. Nile Waters and the Sudan, Record of a Meeting at Wellington House, London 18 September 1945, 589/14/16, SAD. Allan, the Sudan Agent and Irrigation Consultant, the Governor-General, the High Commissioner in Cairo and prominent members of the Foreign Office took part. Comments on Memorandum ‘Nile Waters’, dated 29 June 1948, prepared by the Egyptian Department of the Foreign Office, 9 July 1948, 590/1/86, SAD. Note on the ultimate sharing of Nile Waters between Egypt & the Sudan, February 1957: 7, 500/7, SAD. Eden described the Wafd in his autobiography in the following way: ‘It was a rich party and a party of rich men, many of whom had grown fat at the expense of the state’ (Eden 1960: 225). Leffler 1992: 477. It was, said the British Foreign Minister during the Suez crisis, Selwyn Lloyd, from ‘these events in the year 1951 onwards that the crisis of 1956 was to emerge. Therefore, I must deal with what happened in the Sudan over self-government and self-determination’ (Lloyd 1978: 8). Although his book should be read as a senior politician’s effort at defending his and official British policies (the former Ambassador in Cairo, H. Trevelyan, wrote a review of Selwyn Lloyd’s book in The Times and said that Selwyn Lloyd had ‘done his best at the very end of his life to justify British policy, but I fear he does not convince’ [The Times, 6 July 1978]), he was correct in placing much emphasis on the Sudan question. When his party returned to power in 1951, Selwyn Lloyd became Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. He was later Minister of Supply (1954–55), Minister of Defence (1955) and Foreign Secretary (1955–60). Selwyn Lloyd joined the Cabinet of the new Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as Lord Privy Seal in 1963. With his party’s victory in 1970, Selwyn Lloyd was elected speaker of the House of Commons. Political fortunes are difficult to foretell. In July 1951 an Egyptian corvette detained the British steamer Empire Roach at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba. The Egyptians wrecked the ship’s radio, looted the bosun’s store and removed goods to an approximate value of £200. Eden asked somewhat arrogantly what the Labour Government had done about it. Herbert Morrison, the new Foreign Minister (from March 1951 until his party lost office five months later), had no good answer in the House debate on 11 July. Exactly five years later Eden lost not only a radio and a few pounds but the Empire. He had no good answers, either. Shuckburgh 1986: 29. Churchill to Eden, 30 January 1952, FO 800/768.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 5

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

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Eden to Cairo, 25 January 1952, FO 800/768. Churchill to Eden, 9 March 1952, FO 800/768. Eden to Churchill, 10 March 1952, FO 800/768. Churchill to Eden, 6 April 1952, FO 800/768. Churchill to Eden, 17 June 1952, FO 800/768. Sir R. Stevenson to Foreign Office, 11 January 1952, FO 371/96890. Eden to African Department, 24 January 1952, Eden Private Papers, FO 800/768. Eden to Stevenson, Conversation between the Secretary of State and Mr Acheson, 16 January 1952, FO 800/768. Eden to Stevenson, Cairo, 13 February 1952, FO 899(768). On 15 February Eden met Sir Cecil Campbell, who was President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Cairo and had spent his whole life in Egypt, to discuss these issues. Campell asked Eden to make some concessions to the present Government – especially on the Sudan issue – or the alternatives would be, he said, either total withdrawal or occupation of Egypt. Eden to Stevenson, Cairo, 15 February 1952, FO 800/768. Record of a meeting held in the Secretary of State’s room at 5.00 p.m. on 21 April 1952, and reconvened on 22 and 23 April (1952), FO 800/768. Shuckburgh 1987: 41. Extract of minutes of D (52) 7th meeting held on 2 July 1952, CAB 21/3309. Extract from minutes of C.O.S. (52) 73rd meeting held on 27 May 1952, CAB 21/3309 See Nasser 1955. Churchill continued to play the Korean card: ‘The PM is sending quite needlessly offensive messages to Eisenhower suggesting that if they do not support us better in Egypt we shall take away our troops from Korea’ (Shuckburgh 1987: 82, Diary 24–30 March). This attitude was caught by Haykal, who wrote that when Eden met Nasser in Cairo that year he behaved like a ‘prince dealing with a vagabond’ (Haykal 1972: 81). Lloyd to Churchill, 22 May 1953, FO 800/773. Churchill was obliged to cancel the planned Bermuda meeting owing to a sudden stroke in June which caused partial paralysis. By October he had recovered, and the meeting was held in December. Churchill to Eisenhower, draft, 12 June 1953, FO 800/773. Mr Hankey, Cairo to Foreign Office, 16 June 1953, FO 800/773. Churchill to Hankey, Cairo, draft, 28 June 1953, FO 800/773. Churchill, Personal minute to Foreign Secretary, 30 July 1952, FO 880/768. Eden to Churchill, 8 August 1952, FO 800/769. Dulles to Eden, enclosure no2, in Eden, note on Conversation between the Secretary of State and the United States Ambassador, 17 November 1953, FO 800/774. R.T.D. Ledward, Foreign Office to L.M. Minford, British Embassy, Cairo, 22 October 1953, FO 371/102866. Mackworth Young, Egypt negotiations. Economic and military assistance. Brief for interdepartmental meeting, 16 October 1953, FO 371/102866. Shuckburgh 1986: 60. Shuckburgh with Eden at UN, 25 November 1952. British Embassy to Commercial Relations & Exports Department, Board of Trade, 26 October 1953, FO 371/102784.

384 78 79 80 81

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British Embassy to Commercial Relations & Exports Department, Board of Trade, 26 October 1953, FO 371/102784. Foreign Office minute, Mackworth Young, 18 September 1953, FO 371/102866. M.J. Creswell, Cairo to Foreign Office, 12 November 1953, FO 371/102784. Personal relations also counted, of course: Shuckburgh argued that a lot of trouble in Anglo–American relations were caused by the fact that ‘Master [Eden] and Foster [Dulles] do not really understand one another’ (Shuckburgh 1987: 23). Eden minute, 14 November 1953, FO 371/102843. Foreign Office note, Dixon, 16 December 1953, FO 371/102843. Eden minute, n.d., most likely 16 December 1953, FO 371/102843. Eden minute, n.d., most likely 16 December 1953, FO 371/102843. Allan, Foreign Office, to Makins, Washington, 19 December 1953, FO 371/102843. The diplomats and ambassadors were also discussing the dress of the British technicians in the Canal Zone. Eden insisted that ‘on the wearing of uniforms by the British technicians, I said that we must insist upon the right to wear uniform. In practice, our technicians might wear overalls or khaki drill, and they might also wear an armband showing that they were base technicians, but they would be British soldiers and as such they must be able to wear their uniform on occasions.’ The Egyptian Ambassador objected, and the American Ambassador questioned this principle (Eden, note on Conversation between the Secretary of State and the US Ambassador on 7 October 1953, Concerning the Egyptian Negotiations, FO 800/774). Eisenhower to Churchill, 21 December 1953, FO 800/773. Churchill to Eisenhower, 22 December 1953, FO 800/774. Ibid. See also Shuckburgh 1987: ‘The PM is sending quite needlessly offensive messages to Eisenhower suggesting that if they do not support us better in Egypt we shall take away our troops from Korea’ (Shuckburgh 1987: 82). Canada chose to ally itself closely with the US in security matters. Australia and New Zealand forged the so-called ANZUS Pact with the Americans, from which the British were excluded. The US encouraged Saudi Arabia to intrigue against British client regimes in the Gulf. The British later reached agreement with the Americans to topple Mossadiq in Iran, but there was a price to be paid: the Americans were given an equal share in exploiting Iranian oil. Churchill to Washington, 19 December 1953, FO 800/774. Winthrop Aldrich Recollections, John Foster Dulles Oral History Collection, Princeton University Library, quoted in Carlton 1981: 391. Quoted in Lamb 1987: 157. The British mood was not optimistic. Shuckburgh at the Foreign Office wrote on 7 January 1953: ‘There is evidence that Caffrey…is actually working against us with the Egyptians over the Sudan question…I ended today extremely gloomy over British prospects everywhere. In Kenya the Mau Mau. In Egypt and Persia: the Americans refusing to support us. Even Iceland in process of destroying our deep-sea fishing industry. I see no reason why there should be any end to the surrenders demanded of us…Bit by bit we shall be driven back into our island where we shall starve.’ (Shuckburgh 1986: 71). Salisbury to Churchill, 7 August 1953, FO 800/774. Robertson to C.G. Davies, Sudan Office, London, 21 February 1953, 523/7/12, SAD. The Governor-General organised parties and celebrations to win over the

NOTES ON CHAPTER 5

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385

Sudanese intelligentsia. In February 1953 he threw a party and afterwards told Robertson that some damage was done to the Palace carpets by cigarette ends and because some of the influential Sudanese drank so much that they were sick in corners. Howe, Governor-General, Khartoum to Marquess of Salisbury, Acting Secretary of State, 17 September 1953, FO 371/102839. D.H. Serpell, Treasury Chambers to R. Allen, Foreign Office, 2 October 1953, FO 371/102839. W. Morris, Foreign Office to D.W.G. Wass, Treasury, 21 October 1953, FO 371/10283. Morris to Riches (draft letter), 18 August 1953, FO 371/102717. Riches, Office of the UK Trade Commissioner, Khartoum, to the Marquess of Salisbury, 14 July 1953, FO 371/102717. Foreign Office minute, W. Morris, 22 July 1953, FO 371/102717. Lloyd 1968: 14. Shuckburgh wrote in his diary on 12 December 1953: ‘A.E. rang early when I was still asleep to tell me more trouble with the PM. Latest idea to send troops to Khartoum (“to restore order” – though not a dog has barked), so as to offset the disgrace of retiring from the Canal. We would also discontinue negotiations with Egypt and announce that we will leave in our own time, taking away or destroying the base. This is too bad. A.E. has just begun the process of pacifying the party over the Egyptian negotiations and explaining his motives to them. He saw Waterhouse and co. yesterday. Now comes along the PM to undermine his position’ (Shuckburgh 1986: 118). Churchill to Eden, 11 December 1953, FO 800/774. Eden to Churchill, 12 December 1953, FO 800/774. Eden to Churchill, 12 December 1953, FO 800/774. Shuckburgh 1986: 17. Nutting 1967: 26. Shuckburgh wrote in his diary on 25 February 1954: ‘I met the PM coming into his room in the House and he drew me in – “Splendid news from Egypt. Negwib’s gone.” “Well, sir, I don’t know that Nasser is much better”. “No, no. Much worse. That’s the point. Perhaps he will bring it to a head. I have been afraid they might agree. I have been afraid (chuckling) they might bring it to our tail”…He can only mean attacking our troops, so that we have an excuse for fighting’ (Shuckburgh 1986: 136). Churchill to Eden, personal minute, 15 January 1954, FO 800/775. Eden to Churchill, 18 January 1954, FO 800/775. Minister of State for Secretary of State, (draft Cabinet Paper), 26 January 1954, FO 800/775. Stevenson, Cairo to Foreign Office, 30 January 1954, FO 800/775. On the Suez Canal British policy was formulated in this way in June 1954, just before an agreement was reached: ‘1) H.M.G. must strive to uphold the 1888 Convention and prevent its revision [this was a treaty between Turkey, the nominal sovereign of the canal and the European powers]. 2) We must also seek to preserve the existing status of the Suez Canal Company for as long as possible to prevent Egyptian interference with the Company. 3) It may well be impossible to prevent

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the Egyptians from obtaining full control of the Canal in 1968. But in case the Egyptians may be willing then to permit international participation in some form, we must try not to allow the position after 1968 to be compromised by concessions now. 4) Good relations with the Suez Canal Company are very important, since the future is to some extent in their hands’ (Cabinet, Suez Canal Committee, Future of the Suez Canal. Note by the Foreign Office, 9 June 1954, CAB 134/802). The British discussed how they could put pressure on Egypt at the meeting of the Suez Canal Committee on 30 June 1954: ‘We should examine what cards the Egyptians held, and what means we had [sic] of bringing pressure to bear on them’ (Mr W. Armstrong, Minutes of a meeting held in Conference Room ‘A’, Cabinet Office, Great George Street, S.W.1., on Wednesday 30 June 1954 at 3.00 p.m., CAB 134/802). As usual, they found no means. Conventionally, it has been said that ‘for Egypt the agreement with Britain was not a preliminary to alignment with the West. The West on the other hand believed in 1952–54 that better relations with Egypt implied such an alignment. Consequently the better relations soon took a turn for the worse’ (Calvocoressi, 1991: 299). Hall to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 27 March 1946, FO 371/69231. Hawes’s team made a series of surveys in the areas of Lakes Victoria and Albert, including both the Kano plain near Kisumu in Kenya and Tanganyika territory. Based on these surveys, Uganda – for the first time in its history – put forward proposals for water control, and these were regarded as improved alternatives to the Egyptian plans. Hall to A. Creech Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 3 March 1948, FO 371/69231. They also had one motive that they did not disclose: the Uganda Government had plans for oil exploration in the Semliki valley, which might be inundated by the reservoir (see Allan to Miller, 12 November 1947, SAD 589/3/38, quoted in Collins 1996: 217). Lake Victoria Project. Meeting held in Nairobi on 25 November 1947, FO 371/69231. Includes a list of works required on Kenya and Ugandan Territory if Lake Victoria were to be used as a storage reservoir for Egypt. CO 822/129/3. Hydro-Electric Scheme Investigations, part 1, 1947, CO 537/4761. Lake Albert and Victoria: Construction of Dams and Reservoirs. W.G. Wilson for M.J. Davies, Colonial Office to G.L. McDermott, Foreign Office, 11 March 1948, FO 371/69231. Hall to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 2 July 1948, FO 371/69232. The Uganda Electricity Board would claim compensation for loss of installed capacity, but it was shown that Egypt could, by referring to the 1929 Agreement, argue that the Board was claiming compensation for not constructing a power station that they had no right to build, according to the same agreement. Hall to J.H.Wallace, Colonial Office, 2 July 1948, FO 371/69232. Amin and Bambridge 1948. Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 24 August 1949, FO 371/73619. Clutton chaired the meeting, and Howe, Troutbeck (Head of the British Middle East Office, Cairo), Chick, Allan, Galsworthy and Wallace from the Colonial Office, and Clutton, Dundas and Maitland from the Foreign Office attended. Hall to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 19 July 1948, FO 371/69232.

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131 Draft letter to Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, n.d. but in August, FO 371/69232. 132 Foreign Office minute, Clutton, 16 September 1948, FO 371/69233. 133 Foreign Office minute, Bevin, 19 October 1948, FO 371/69233. 134 Foreign Office minute, Clutton, 16 September 1948, FO 371/69233. 135 Foreign Office minutes, Clutton, 28 October 1948, FO 371/69233. 136 Foreign Office to Campbell, Cairo, Draft Despatch, November 1948, FO 371/69233. 137 Secretary of State for the Colonies to Sir J. Hathorn Hall, 24 November 1948, FO 371/69233. 138 Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 27 November 1948, FO 371/69233. 139 Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 29 November 1948, FO 371/69233. 140 Foreign Office minute, Cullen, 30 November 1948, FO 371/69233. 141 Foreign Office minute, D. Maitland, 21 February 1949, FO 371/73614. 142 Foreign Secretary Bevin minute, 19 March 1949, FIO 371/73641. 143 Foreign Office to Khartoum, 22 March 1949, FO 371/73614. 144 Khartoum to Foreign Office, 21 March 1949, FO 371/73614. 145 Campbell to Foreign Office, 4 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 146 Hall to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 21 March 1949, FO 371/73615. 147 Owing to a lack of funds, Britain looked for other sponsors. In February 1949 a representative of the British Embassy, W.F. Crawford, discussed the Nile water projects with the World Bank representative, Mr Bayne of the Loan Department. Bayne told Crawford about a grandiose idea – a gigantic international Corporation for the building and control of the projects, and development of the backward countries through which the Nile ran. His idea was that a Corporation should be set up; e.g. working copper in Ethiopia by power from Tana, factories in Uganda and the Sudan, and possibly some scheme for developing the sudd in the Sudan. It was suggested that the Corporation should be sanctioned by the UN. An international Corporation might do away with the suspicion of imperialism arising from any loans made by Britain or the US. On 6 April, Campbell wrote to Attlee and informed him of his discussions with Vice-President Garner, thinking of something similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority, composed of representatives of Great Britain, Egypt and the Sudan (and perhaps Ethiopia). He also hoped that this practical co-operation might take ‘the curse’ out of the Sudan question. See Campbell to Attlee, 6 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 148 Campbell to Foreign Office, 7 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 149 Foreign Office to Thomas Lloyd, Colonial Office, 7 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 150 Foreign Office to Cairo, 7 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 151 Secretary of State for the Colonies to Uganda (Sir J.H. Hall), 6 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 152 Hall to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 11 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 153 Campbell to Foreign Office, 9 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 154 Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 12 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 155 Campbell to Foreign Office, 15 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 156 Foreign Office to Cairo, 22 April 1949, FO 371/73615. 157 See also two similarly secret telegrams about British policy from the Foreign Office to Cairo (22 April 1949, FO 371/73615), one of them drafted and written by Bevin himself.

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158 On 15 May a meeting at the Foreign Office discussed the Nile Waters scheme, including MacDonald’s comments on the project, and Cairo Despatch no258 of 7 May and no663 of 9 May (Stewart [in the chair], Bailey, Kennedy and Westlake [Uganda Electricity Board], Allan, Sudan Government and Wallace and Robertson [Colonial Office]). Allan did not agree with MacDonald’s assessment of Lake Tana. See FO 371/73617. 159 Campbell to Foreign Office, 13 May 1949, FO 371/73617. 160 Minute from Maitland, 13 May 1949, FO 371/73617. 161 Governor-General, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 17 May 1949, FO 371/73617. 162 By virtue of the 1929 Agreement, the Egyptian Government had been given the freedom to co-operate with the Sudanese Resident Engineer at the Sennar Dam, so that he could satisfy himself with the operation of the control works. See Hosni 1975. 163 Campbell to Foreign Office, 17 May 1949, FO 371/73617. 164 See The Times 11 February 1949 for a description of the scheme. The project, it was estimated, might take 20 years to complete. 165 FO 371/73618. 166 Campbell to Foreign Office, 16 July 1949, FO 371/73619. 167 Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 18 July 1949, FO 371/73620. 168 Foreign Office to Colonial Office, Top Secret, 12 July 1949, FO 371/73619. 169 Foreign Office minute, Edmond, 1 November 1950, FO 371/80518. 170 R.W. Newsam, Colonial Office told R. Edmonds, Foreign Office, 22 August 1950, FO 371/80518. 171 Foreign Office minute, Stewart, 30 October 1950, FO 371/80518. 172 Foreign Office to Addis Ababa, 14 July 1949, FO 371/73619 173 Hall to A. Creech-Jones, 23 May 1949, FO 371/73618. 174 Draft, Foreign Office to Cairo (n.d.), 1949, FO 371/73618. 175 African Department, Foreign Office to Cairo, 14 June 1949, FO 371/73618. 176 The British Government tried to hinder American firms and American interests from obtaining a foothold in Uganda too, as they had been doing for decades in Egypt and Ethiopia. Bevin discussed the issue with Mr Westlake, Chairman of the Uganda Electricity Board, who had apparently gone to the US to obtain equipment needed in Uganda in connection with the Owen Falls scheme (R. W. Newsam to R. Edmonds, Foreign Office, 22 January 1951, FO 371/90201). The Colonial Office maintained that there was no question of preferring American to British capital, as Bevin thought. A group headed by the Danish firm Christiania & Nielsen Ltd had been awarded the contract for works at Owen Falls. The consulting engineers to the Uganda Electricity Board were Messrs Kennedy & Donkin and Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners, and the Board’s Chief Civil Engineer was Brigadier C.G. Hawes, the Uganda Government’s water expert. Other firms involved were Dorman Long & Co Ltd, Edmund Nuttall Sons & Co Ltd, K.L. Keir & Co Ltd, and four Dutch firms. 177 Quoted in Smith 1955: 290. 178 MacDonald 1920: 135. 179 The conceptual strength of the term ‘sudd’ was noted already in 1905, when one of the leading British scientists in the area warned that the word ‘sudd’ should be limited to its proper meaning – a block of vegetation in a water channel (see Lyons 1905: 664).

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180 The name Sudd Region was in general applied to the whole central Southern Sudan 25 years later (see Hurst 1933: 721). 181 There were, of course, cases when they showed muscle: ‘I am starting out today to burn the Gamok villages on the Duk Ridge, and it seems likely that when this has been done, Gow (the chief) will be more reasonable’; Acting District Commissioner Zeraf Valley to Governor Upper Nile Province, 5 April 1930, UNP 1/8/58, NRO. 182 For an analysis of the legacy of British state-building policies in the Southern Sudan, and post-independence development, see Tvedt 1994. 183 Newbold to Howell, 9 October 1943, Howell 767/1/25. 184 Report by C.A. Willis, Governor Upper Nile Province, Report on the possible effects of the Sudd Project of irrigation on the local population, 30 May 1928, 212/10/3, SAD. 185 Collins 1968: 178 186 Note by C.A. Willis, Governor Upper Nile Province, prepared June 1929. A Brief Survey of the Policy of the Sudan Government in the Upper Nile, CIVSEC 1/42/112. 187 See MacMichael 1934. 188 See MacMichael 1954. 189 In 1923 Jackson, Governor of Upper Nile Province, wrote, ‘The Nuer are so backward a race and so unenterprising in character that their only excursion into the agricultural domain has been limited to the production of a little “dura” and tobacco…In their ordinary greeting of Chinieng, “have you slept”, is the epitome of their whole life’ (see Jackson 1923: 60 and 66). 190 MacMichael 1954: 238. 191 The article by Allan and Smith published in 1948 had not adapted to this new political turn – in this post-war image, the Southern region was still basically an aqueduct to the north (see Allan, W.N. and Smith, R.J., 1948, Irrigation in the Sudan, in Tothill [ed.], 1948). 192 A major weakness of Collins’s book on the Jonglei Project (Collins 1996) is that the project is analysed as if Her Majesty’s Government in London had no stake in it at all. In fact, the British Government is not mentioned once. His interpretation of the intentions and roles of the ‘man on the spot’ thus become unintelligible. 193 The British had documented how deeply the whole social and economic fabric of Nuer society was embedded in regional Nile ecology (see Evans-Pritchard 1940). 194 Civil Secretary’s Office to Governor, Upper Nile Province and Governor, Equatoria Province, 5 June 1939, UNP 1/10/85, NRO 195 J. Winder, Note on the proposed Jonglei Canal Scheme. Note on the terrain and inhabitants, including two sketch maps, 13 May 1940, UNP 1/10/85, NRO. 196 Letter from Finance Department to Armstrong, Governor Upper Nile Province, 23 November 1939, UNP 1/10/85, NRO. 197 Jonglei Investigation Team, 1954, Introduction and Summary: iii. 198 Collins’s expression, aiming at interpreting Khartoum’s attitudes to these Nile plans (see Collins 1996: 205). 199 Nile Waters, Record of a meeting held at the Foreign Office on 4 August, 1948, 590/1, SAD. 200 Morrice to Secretary, Jonglei Committee, 5 July 1945, UNP 1/10/85, NRO.

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201 Comments on the Second Interim Report of the Jonglei Investigation Team by the Sudan Government, Appendix A, UNP 1/10/85, NRO. 202 Quoted in Report by the Governor-General on the Finances, Administration and Conditions of the Sudan for the year 1947: 212. 203 Humphrey Morrice was appointed chairman of the Jonglei Team in 1946, with John Winder as Secretary. Their investigations were written up in three interim reports, revealing the magnitude of the project’s consequences for the local peoples. 204 Collins depicts the role of the Jonglei Investigation Team as to protect the Upper Nile ‘from the calculations of the engineers’ (Collins 1983: 350). This description focuses on a peripheral aspect, and misrepresents the character of this change in approach. An important aspect symbolised by the Team’s composition and conclusions, was the unity between engineers and agriculturalists in opposing the previous plans. Many team members were engineers. Moreover, some of the engineers previously in favour of the project were now against it, including MacGregor and MacDonald. MacDonald – who had described the region as without people in 1920 – said after the War, when his company worked for the Sudan Government, that the Jonglei Project should be revised because the Nilotes had an established right to the irrigation waters in the swamps. 205 The Governor-General’s Annual Reports from 1947 (212), 1948 (224) and 1949 all support the work of the team. 206 Winder, the Secretary of the Jonglei Investigation Team, wrote to Governor Cowfield of Upper Nile Province a letter called ‘Jonglei without tears’ in March 1948. 207 See Route Report on the Treck from Mupair to Khor Bilnyang, 541/2/19-22, SAD. 208 J. Winder, Flood protection for the Sudan, 6 January 1948, UNP 1/10/85, NRO. 209 J. Winder to Governor Upper Nile Province, 31 January 1949, 541/11/13. Winder later wrote a summary of the various interim reports: The politico-economic effects of the Jonglei Scheme, February 1949, UNP 1/9/80, NRO. 210 Minutes of 5th Meeting, Jonglei Committee, 28 February 1949, UNP 1/10/88., NRO. 211 R.J. Smith to W.N. Williams, 11 July 1949, UNP 1/9/80, NRO. 212 P. P. Howell to Governor, Upper Nile Province, 30 November 1951, UNP 1/26/198, NRO. 213 Bacon, Director of Agriculture to Commissioner for Development, 15 February 1953, 768/8/83, SAD. 214 R.J. Smith, ‘Jonglei Investigation Team’, 7 February 1953, 500/14/20–2, SAD. 215 Wakefield to Howell, 10 March 1953, 768/9/14, SAD. 216 Howell to Duncan, Private Secretary, 31 December 1952, 768/8/39, SAD. 217 Jonglei Investigation Team, 1953: 41. 218 Minutes of the 7th Meeting of the Jonglei Committee, 19 December 1942, and Minutes of the 8th Meeting of the Jonglei Committee, 6 June 1950, UNP 1/10/8, NRO and the Team Report 1954, Introduction and Summary, ixviii. 219 Equatoria Province Council Meeting on 16–18 October 1952. Amendment to Draft Constitution, Juba Political Committee Memorandum, 768/8/17, SAD. 220 ‘As a matter of fact it runs to many kilos of paper and I have yet to find anyone who has managed to read right through a “short” summary of the Jonglei team’s report which is a mere pamphlet of a thing about as long as the Holy Bible’ (P.G.D.

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221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233

234 235 236 237 238 239

240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250

391

Adams, Office of the UK Trade Commissioner to R.W. Bailey, Washington, 25 February 1955, FO 371/113731). R.W. Bailey, British Embassy, Washington, to G.E. Millard, African Department, Foreign Office, 17 February 1955, FO 371/113731. Khartoum, UK Trade Commissioner to Foreign Office, 17 February 1954, FO 371/108342. Khartoum to Foreign Office, 16 September 1954, FO 371/108342. Stevenson to Foreign Office, 17 February 1954, FO 371/108342. Conclusion of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Friday 26 August 1955, at 2.30 p.m., CAB 128/29. Report on the utilisation of Lake Tana, by E.R. Wilkinson, Commercial Manager, Central Electricity Board, October 1946. Extracts can be found in FO 371/73620. J.W.E. Miller, Khartoum to Allan, Sudan Agency, London, FO 371/63130. Allan to Scrivener, Foreign Office, 8 January 1947, FO 371/63130. Middle East Secretariat, Foreign Office, to British Legation, Addis Ababa, 11 February 1947, FO 371/63130. H. J. Huddleston, Governor-General, Khartoum to British Ambassador, Cairo, 27 January 1947, FO 371/63130. Cairo to Foreign Office, 22 April 1949, FO 371/73616. R.G. Howe, to E. Rowe Dutton, Treasury, 19 March 1947, FO 371/62130. Parts had already been built by the Italians. At that time this was an all-weather road for 180km, to the point where it began its rapid descent into the gorge of the Blue Nile. Tana Reservoir. Draft Instructions to delegates, Conf., signed by Allan and Nahib, 24 November 1946, FO 371/63130. Secretary of State to Campbell, Cairo, 12 May 1947, FO 371/63130. Governor-General, Khartoum to Cairo and Foreign Office, 4 June 1947, FO 371/63130. Foreign Office minute, Beckett, 7 June 1947, FO 371/63130. Farquhar, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 8 June 1947, FO 371/63130. Ronald Ian Campbell started his career in Washington. He moved to the Foreign Office in July 1923 and then went to Washington in April 1927. In July 1931 he started a three-year term as Acting High Commissioner in Egypt, and returned to the Foreign Office in January 1935. Campbell, Cairo to Bevin 20 June 1947, FO 371/63130. Bevin to Campbell, 28 November 1947, FO 371/63130. Farquhar, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 20 December 1947, FO 371/63130. Campbell to Foreign Office, 2 March 1949, FO 361/73641. Weld Forester, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 24 January 1948, FO 371/69303. Cairo to Foreign Office, 7 May 1948, FO 371/69231. Campbell to Foreign Office, 9 April 1949, FO 371/73615. Governor-General, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 18 July 1949, FO 371/73619. Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 11 July 1949, FO 371/73619. Foreign Office Memo, ‘Lake Tana negotiations’, Clutton, 19 July 1949, FO 371/73619. In January 1948 a meeting in the US State Department of Greenhill of the MiddleEastern Secretariat, representatives of the British Foreign Office and Henry A.

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251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260

261 262 263 264

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Lardner, Vice President of the J.G. White Engineering Corporation, took place. The company had reported in both 1931 and 1935 on the possibilities and cost of constructing suitable works for the control of the outflow from Lake Tana. Although no new studies had been made, a rough estimate was drawn up for this meeting, indicating the changes in prices etc. during the war. A storage reservoir, including an essential access road using Massawa, could be developed for approximately $9 million, of which $4 million would be in US dollars, and the remainder in Ethiopian or other currencies. Should it be impractible to use Massawa, either Assab or Djibouti could be used, but the cost would be approximately $2,250,000 more for Assab and $6,400,000 more for Djibouti. The track from the Sudan ‘has not been included in the above estimate as the presence of the Asmara-Gondar road may make it unnecessary’ (Joseph Palmer II to George Lewis Jones, American Embassy, London, 12 January 1948, FO 371/69303). British Embassy, Addis Ababa to the Ethiopian Government, 22 July 1949, FO 371/7361. Foreign Office to Cairo, 24 June 1949, FO 371/73618. Foreign Office minute, Maitland, 1 September 1949, FO 371//3620. Andrews, Alexandria to Foreign Office, 30 September 1949, FO 371/73620. Foreign Office to Alexandria, 3 September 1949, FO 371//3620. Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the British Ambassador, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 1 August 1949, FO 371/73619. Foreign Office minute, Stewart, 21 March 1949, FO 371/73687. Foreign Office minute, Clutton, 8 June 1949, FO 371/73687. Donkins to Sir W. Strang, 2 December 1949, FO 371/73687. The Gash water Agreement complicated relations between the Sudan and Eritrea, and hence between the Sudan and Ethiopia, and eventually the whole British strategy in the area. This Agreement resulted from the written record of conclusions reached at Khartoum and Asmara in direct negotiations between Eritrea and the Sudan, followed by letters exchanged between Mussolini and Ronald Graham in Rome in 1925. The Agreement was regarded as in suspension since 10 July 1940, when Great Britain went to war with Italy, and the question arose of whether the Agreement from 1925 was still binding, and whether the Sudan should pay compensation to the Administration in Eritrea according to a fixed percentage of the profits produced by exploiting the Gash waters in the Sudan. The Foreign Office held the view that it was no longer binding (after the Italian invasion) and that the Sudan was therefore not liable to annual payments. The British administration in Eritrea regarded the 1925 Agreement as still in force. The Government of Eritrea or any future Government of Eritrea was seen as being technically ‘free to divert additional water from the Gash, subject, of course, to what may be considered reasonable having regard to International Law’ (F.G. Drew, Chief Administrator, Headquarters Asmara, to M.N.F. Stewart, Foreign Office, 28 August 1950, FO 371/80533). The Foreign Office was extremely upset by this interpretation. Lascelles, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 10 March 1950, FO 371/80514. Foreign Office to Khartoum, 4 April 1950, FO 371/80514. Lascelles, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 10 March 1950, FO 371/80514. Foreign Office minute, R.H.G. Edmonds (no date, but apparently written just after the change of government in Egypt in 1950).

NOTES ON CHAPTER 5

265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303

393

Foreign Office to Cairo, 15 February 1950, FO 371/80513. Foreign Office to Khartoum, 15 February 1950, FO 371/80513. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 14 February 1950, FO 371/80514. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 20 February 1950, FO 371/80514. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 20 February 1950, FO 371/80514. Campbell, Cairo to Foreign Office, 23 February 1950, FO 371/80514. Campbell, Cairo to Foreign Office, 24 February 1950, FO 371/80514. Foreign Office to Cairo, 8 March 1950, FO 371/80514. Governor-General, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 27 February 1950, FO 371/80514. Lascelles, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 6 April 1950, FO 371/80240. Lascelles Addis Ababa, to Campbell, 11 April 1950, FO 371/80241. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 6 May 1950, FO 371/80241. A number of documents on these issues were still ‘retained by Department of origin’, in PRO terminology, when I made my research in the 1990s. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to African Department, Foreign Office, 5 June 1950, FO 371/80516. Foreign Office minute, F.E. Stafford, Note on conversation with Ato Aklilou on 15 June 1950, FO 371/80516. Stevenson, Alexandria to Foreign Office, 28 June 1950, FO 371/80517. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to J.H. Wardle-Smith, 7 December 1950, FO 371/80519. Foreign Office minute, R. Allen, 18 January 1951, FO 371/90201. Lascelles to R. Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 1 February 1951, FO 371/90201. Borrough, British Embassy, Cairo to R. Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 26 January 1951, FO 371/90201. R. Allen, Foreign Office to Lascelles, Addis Ababa, 20 January 1951, FO 371/90201. African Department to Chancery, Cairo, 27 April 1951, FO 371/90201. Foreign Office minute, R.C. Mackworth-Young, 24 May 1951, FO 371/90201. Stevenson, Cairo to Foreign Office, 25 May 1951, FO 371/90202. Foreign Office minute, R. Allen, 8 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Foreign Office minute, Mackworth-Young, 11 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Foreign Office minute, Mackworth-Young, 12 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Foreign Office to Addis Ababa 14 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Foreign Office to Addis Ababa, 14 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Governor-General, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 21 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Foreign Office to Addis Ababa, 7 July 1951, FO 371/90202. Lascelles, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 9 August 1951, FO 371/90203. Foreign Office to Addis Ababa, 12 August 1951, FO 371/90203. Foreign Office to Addis Ababa, 22 August 1951, FO 371/90203. Foreign Office minute, Mackworth-Young, 6 June 1951, FO 371/90202. Secretariat, Khartoum to Chancery, British Embassy, Cairo, 15 August 1951, FO 371/90203. Smith, Khartoum to Wardle-Smith, Cairo, 18 August 1951, FO 371/90203. Lascelles, Addis Ababa to Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 11 September 1951, FO 371/90203. Foreign Office to Stevenson, Cairo, 28 September 1951, FO 371/90203. Foreign Office minute, Mackworth-Young, 19 October 1951, FO 371/90203.

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304 Stevenson, Cairo to D.L. Busk, Addis Ababa, 26 March 1952, FO 371/96805. 305 D. Cumming, British administration, Eritrea to Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 28 February 1952, FO 371/96749. 306 Busk, Addis Ababa to Howe, Khartoum, 13 March 1952, FO 371/96805. 307 Governor-General, Khartoum to African Department, Foreign Office, 24 March 1952, FO 371/96805. 308 Foreign Office minute, Mackworth-Young, 27 March 1952, FO 371/96805. 309 Busk, Addis Ababa to Foreign Office, 26 March 1952, FO 371/96805. 310 Governor-General, Khartoum, to Foreign Office, 1 April 1952, FO 371/96805. 311 Busk, Addis Ababa, to R. Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 23 May 1952, FO 371/96805. 312 Allen, Foreign Office, to Busk, Addis Ababa 25 June 1952, FO 371/96805. 313 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Allen, Foreign Office, 4 August 1952, FO 96805. 314 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 9 September 1952, FO 371/96805. 315 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Eden, 26 June 1952, FO 371/96764. 316 Foreign Office to M.J. Creswell, Cairo, 26 September 1952, FO 371/96805. 317 M.J. Creswell, Cairo to Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 17 October 1952, FO 371/96805. 318 By 1953 the rhetoric of the development aid era had become prominent in the US foreign policy language: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies – in the final sense – a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…The cost of a heavy bomber is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a country of 60,000. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer [warship] with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people’ (Eisenhower’s speech 16 April 1953, quoted in Technical Cooperation Service, Addis Ababa, Point 4 News, April 1953, FO 371/102653). 319 Busk, Addis Ababa to Sir Christopher Steel, British Embassy, Washington, 19 March 1953, FO 371/102653. 320 B.J. Garnett, Foreign Office to Busk, Addis Ababa, 8 May 1953, FO 371/102653. 321 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 6 July 1953, FO 371/102653. 322 Busk, Addis Ababa, to African Department, Foreign Office, 16 July 1956, FO 371/102653. 323 D.W.G. Wass, Treasury Chambers to R.T.D. Leward, Foreign Office, 19 January 1954, FO 371/108513. 324 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Foreign Office, 21 June 1954, FO 371/108258. 325 P. T. Hayman, Foreign Office to J. E. Killick, Addis Ababa, 22 July 1954, FO 371/108258. 326 J. S. Killick, Addis Ababa, to P.T. Hayman, Foreign Office, 2 August 1954, FO 371/108258. 327 Busk, Addis Ababa, to R. Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 1 May 1952, FO 371/96805. 328 See FO 371/96718. 329 Allan, Note for file, Lake Tsana – Town Planning Survey, 17 April 1952, FO 371/96718.

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330 Foreign Office minute, Mackworth-Young, 18 March 1952, FO 371/96805. 331 Foreign Office minute, T.C. Barker, 13 March 1953, FO 371/102666. I have not found what should be an interesting report on the issue, written by Perry Fellows in 1952/53. 332 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Allen, African Department, Foreign Office, 28 March 1953, FO 371/102666. 333 Harris, Harris & Gard to Garnett, Foreign Office, 10 April 1953, FO 371/102666. 334 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Bromley, African Department, Foreign Office, 25 September 1954, FO 371/108258. 335 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Eden, 2 April 1954, FO 371/108228. 336 Busk, Addis Ababa, to African Department, Foreign Office, 11 January 1954, FO 371/108264. 337 Garnett, Foreign Office to Luce, Khartoum, 21 January 1954, FO 371/108264. 338 Morrice, Khartoum to Garnett, Foreign Office (secret), 18 January 1954, FO 371/108264. 339 Harris comments on the ‘Child's Guide to Knowledge’, enclosed in Busk, Addis Ababa, to Garnett, African Department, Foreign Office, 5 May 1954, FO 371/108264. 340 Millard for Bromley to Luce, Khartoum, 8 July 1954, FO 371/108264. 341 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Bromley, Foreign Office, 2 July 1954, FO 371/108264. 342 Busk, Addis Ababa, to Hayman, African Department, Foreign Office, 21 July 1954, FO 371/108264. 343 Pierre Petridis was a Greek in the service of the Ethiopian Government who came to play a role in regional water politics because he wrote a plan for Ethiopia’s use of Nile water in the spring of 1956. 344 S. Pierre Petridis, Les problèmes hydrauliques entre L’Ethiopie & le Soudan, Addis-Abeba, April 1956, in FO 371/119061. 345 Hoover to Aklilou Abte Wold, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 26 May 1956, FO 371/119062.

Notes on Chapter 6 1 2

3 4 5

R. Allen, Foreign Office to A. N. Cumberbatch, Cairo, 26 January 1953, FO 371/102843. W.F. Crawford, Development Division, B.M.E.O., c/o British Embassy, Beirut to J.C.B. Richmond, Middle East Secretariat, Foreign Office, 22 December 1952, FO 371/102784. Haykal 1986: 103. Stevenson, British Ambassador, Cairo, to Foreign Secretary Macmillan, 16 May 1955, FO 371/113733. Compared to the current discourse on big dams and sustainable development, it is interesting to note that the ecological argument was seldom evoked, even on the political chessboard. Some isolated voices argued that to replace the silt that every year had acted as a fertiliser in Egypt would require a large artificial manure plant, but that this would not be enough to provide for the lost fertility. This development would, incidentally, ruin the quality of Egypt’s food. But, as indicated, the project had become a political issue, and ‘probably Nasser would fall if he didn’t

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8

9 10

11 12 13

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go on with the job’ (R.R. Stokes to Sir Edward Boyle M.P., Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, 20 March 1956, FO 371/119054). The Irrigation Advisor to the Sudan Government also pointed to problems of evaporation, degradation of the riverbed below Aswan, the effect of depriving land of the annual ‘red water’ deposit of silt, etc. (R.J. Smith, The Greater Aswan Project, 10 April 1953, FO 371/102895). The Foreign Office in London responded in a way that was typical for the time, and in line with British strategic interests: they could not reject the plan or criticise the idea too much, so they presented a deaf ear. They remarked that it was difficult to forecast what effects this silt problem would have on Egyptian agriculture, and they wrongly asserted that any scheme for over-year storage on the Blue Nile – for example, a dam at the mouth of Lake Tana – would have the ‘same disadvantage’ (H.B. Shepherd to M.E. Johnston, Treasury, 11 February 1956, FO 371/119051). As for the silt, it was argued that methods of irrigation had changed, and that nothing was really lost by ‘trapping the silt behind the dam’ (M.E. Johnston, Foreign Office, to R.R. Stokes, M.P. House of Commons, 29 March 1956 (draft letter), FO 371/119054). Public Relations Officer, Sudan Government, Khartoum to Sudan Agent, London and Sudan Agent, Cairo, 18 October 1952, FO 371/97018. The World Bank encompasses three separate institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which was involved with the Aswan project; the International Development Association; and the International Finance Corporation. The US Government had been studying how it could assist the Egyptians in building the dam for a long time, and finally asked Black ‘to see if he could work out a plan’ (see Dwight D. Eisenhower, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University). Sir Edmund Hall-Patch, IBRD to D.H.F. Ricket, British Embassy, Washington, Confidential, 25 September 1953, FO 371/102896. As part of a campaign to achieve rehabilitation of Germany in world opinion, the West German Government had concluded a restitution Agreement with the state of Israel in 1952. The reaction of the Arab League was to threaten a boycott of West German goods. To avert this, Bonn sent Dr Westrich to Cairo in February 1953. On 9 June the Foreign Office was informed of a French banking mission in Egypt to discuss a loan for the dam. Dr Abd al-Hamid al-Sharif, Minister of Finance and Economy, had said on Cairo radio that the French mission was sympathetic to support, and also that French technicians would be kept informed of the results of research by experts that same summer (BBC Monitoring Service, 9 April 1954, FO 371/108514). MacDonald to Sadd el Aali Authority, 5 November 1955, FO 371/113738. Dwight D. Eisenhower, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. The World Bank was instrumental in solving the disputes over the Indus river between India and Pakistan. It took as a starting point the fact that both India and Pakistan seemed to agree on one key point: that the waters in dispute should be considered separately from the dispute over Kashmir. When the question of how to approach India and Pakistan came up, Black wrote directly to Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan early in September 1951. He offered the Bank’s good offices for

NOTES ON CHAPTER 6

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28

397

discussion of the dispute and negotiation of a settlement. Pakistan accepted almost immediately, and India followed by the end of September (see Michel 1967). Sir Edmund Hall-Patch, IBRD to D.H.F. Ricket, British Embassy, Washington, 25 September 1953, FO 371/102896. Washington to Foreign Office, 16 October 1953, FO 371/102896. Washington to Foreign Office, 16 October 1953, FO 371/102896. Foreign Office to Washington, 21 September 1953, FO 371/102895. Foreign Office to Washington, Departmental distribution, 28 September 1953, FO 371/102895. Makins, British Ambassador, Washington to Foreign Office, 21 October 1953, FO 371/102896. E. Chapman Andrews, Beirut, to Foreign Office, 1 November 1953, FO 371/102896. Howe, Khartoum, to Foreign Office, 6 November 1953, FO 371/102896. Foreign Office to Khartoum, 11 November 1953, FO 371/102896. Crawford, Development Division, Beirut to K.J. Simpson, Levant Department, Foreign Office, 15 October 1954, FO 371/108514. The Egyptians objected to the Nile valley desk study, according to the bank representative, because they thought the British were behind it. In February 1954 the bank informed the British Government that if the bank did not make this a condition for the grant of the loan, it was possible they would agree to it (R.W. Baily, British Embassy, Washington, to R.T.D. Leward, African Department, Foreign Office, 8 February 1954, FO 371/108513). IBRD, aide-memoire, 22 June 1954, FO 371/108514. Makins, Washington to Foreign Office, 12 November 1954, FO 371/108514. The members were Dorsey Stevens, Middle East Representative of the International Bank, Gail Hathaway and Professor C. Coolhaas. It is of less direct historical importance, but of interest from an institutional waterplanning perspective, that the new project caused disagreement among British water-planners who had earlier worked together in the Egyptian Government service. F. Newhouse, now employed in MacDonald’s firm, was adamantly opposed to the scheme. He said that the Wadi Halfa Province would be ‘swamped out. Perhaps the new Sudanese Government would not mind, the old certainly would.’ But his main argument was evaporation. To form a huge lake in one of the hottest parts of the world would create an evaporating basin; the whole gain of the Sudd Channel Scheme would ‘go up in the air’. He also thought that several decades would probably elapse before any decision to build it would be taken. Additionally, Newhouse argued, the project furnished an excuse, if the Egyptian Government wanted one, ‘for suspending work on all Nile Projects’ (F. Newhouse to Miss C. Waterlow, Middle East Secretariat, 2 March 1953, FO 371/102895). Roderick MacDonald distanced himself from Newhouse’s view, because, the Foreign Office minuted, the firm did not want to prejudice their ‘own chances of getting in on the scheme’ (Middle East Secretariat, Foreign Office to The Chancery, British Embassy, 18 April 1953, FO 371/102895). Other water-planners, such as Black and Hurst, supported the new project, to the British politicians’ surprise. Secretariat, Governor-General’s Office, Khartoum to African Department, Foreign Office, 4 April 1953, FO 371/102784.

398 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51 52

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Sir R. Howe, Governor-General to Foreign Office (Foreign Office and Whitehall distribution), 21 June 1953, FO 371/102895. Khartoum to Foreign Office (Departmental distribution, 24 September 1953, FO 371/102895. H.A.W. Morrice, The development of the main Nile for the benefit of Egypt and the Sudan, in FO 371/108514. Foreign Office minute, Millard, 13 December 1954, FO 371/108514. A.C. Buxton, Office of the UK Trade Commission, Khartoum to Bromley, Foreign Office, 16 December 1954, FO 371/108514. Records of two meetings on ‘Arrangements for financing the construction of the Aswan High Dam’, held at the Board of Trade on 16 and 22 April 1955, FO 371/113733. K.E. Mackenzie, Board of Trade to W. Godfrey, H.M. Minister (commercial), British Embassy, Cairo, 7 February 1955, FO 371/113730. T.E. Bromley, Foreign Office to A.K. Potter, the Treasury, 8 March 1955, FO 371/113731. G.E. Millard, Foreign Office to W.H. Luce, Khartoum, 12 February 1955, FO 371/113370. W.H. Luce, Governor-General’s Office, Khartoum, to Millard, Foreign Office, 11 March 1955, FO 371/113732. Note of meeting held on Wednesday 6 April 1955, to discuss arrangements for financing the construction of the Aswan High Dam, FO 371/113732. See Note of a meeting on 20 June 1955, to discuss progress made by the International consortium for the construction of the High Dam, at the Board of Trade, FO 371/113734. T.E. Bromley, Foreign Office to K.E. Mackenzie, Board of Trade, 3 May 1955, FO 371/113733. Foreign Office to Washington, 11 May 1955, FO 371/113733. World Bank, Memorandum to the Government of Egypt, Washington 30 August 1955, FO 371/113735. Financial Times, 8 October 1955. New York Times, 8 October 1955. Washington to Foreign Office, 26 October 1955, FO 371/113736. In that same month, Eden had prepared a note for Trevelyan to deliver to Nasser, criticising his policy in strong words for causing a deterioration in Anglo–Egyptian relations. Trevelyan considered the note ‘inopportune’, and after thinking it over Eden concurred that it should not be handed over ‘for the time being’ (James 1986: 430). Quoted in James 1986: 439. Winthrop Aldrich, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, FRUS XIV, pp. 632–36, from Aldrich, 20 October 1955, quoted in Kyle 1991: 83. Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office, 21 October 1955, FO 371/113736. Macmillan to Makins, 20 October 1955, FO 371/113736. The President of the Board of Trade, the Minister of State, Sir Edgar Cohen, Ord Johnstone, Mackenzie, Rickett and Potter (Treasury), Shuckburgh (FO) and Roland Owen (ECGD) were present. F.W. Glaves-Smith, Note of meeting High Aswan Dam (secret), 24 October 1955, FO 371/113737.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 6

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75

399

F.W. Glaves-Smith, Note of meeting High Aswan Dam (secret), 24 October 1955, FO 371/113737. Foreign Office to Embassy, Washington, 25 October 1955, FO 371/113736. Washington to Foreign Office, 25 October 1955, FO 371/113736. Foreign Office to Cairo, 28 October 1955, FO 371/113736. Makins, Washington to Foreign Office, 29 October 1955, FO 371/113737. Makins, Washington to Foreign Office, 9 November 1955, FO 371/113737. W. Godfrey to C.B. Reynolds, Commercial Relations and Exports Department, Board of Trade, 15 November 1955, FO 371/113739. Foreign Office to Washington, 19 November 1955, FO 371/113738. Foreign Office to Washington, 22 November 1955, FO 371/113738. The British Ambassador in Washington also summarised British policy in this way (see Washington to Foreign Office, 21 November 1955, FO 371/113738). Foreign Office to Washington, 26 November 1955, FO 371/113739. Eisenhower’s relations with Eden had been very friendly: they were on first-name terms. But Eisenhower understood very well the weak position of the British. He said, ‘One of the principal origins of the British Empire, you might say, lies right here in the Middle East situation. And you can’t expect that the British are going to do anything, but just do everything they possibly can, to save their face before the world and to not lose one of the things that has almost been part and parcel of the British tradition’ (see Sherman Adams, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University). Makins, Washington to Foreign Office (copy for Eden), 29 November 1955, FO 371/113739. Foreign Office to Washington, 30 November 1955, FO 371/113739. FO 371/113740. Foreign Office to Washington, 7 December 1955, FO 371/113740. Foreign Office to Washington, 7 December 1955, FO 371/113740. Makins to Foreign Office, 15 December 1955, FO 371/113740. Eden to Eisenhower, 15 December 1955, FO 371/113742. Personal from Makins, Washington to Eden, 16 December 1955, FO 371/113741. In the literature, this is often described as a US offer. James 1984, for example, describes the Suez affair as if Britain had never offered to build the dam for Nasser, and that what Dulles revoked was an American offer only. The offer was a big public issue at the time. Some pro-Western governments expressed support, such as Pakistan (Wright, Baghdad to Foreign Office, 19 December 1955, FO 371/113742). In the US, Representative Witten from Mississippi, who was Chairman of the House Agriculture Sub-Committee, complained that the US loan meant ‘using our dollars to put our farmers out of business’. In London, the Foreign Office noted that there had been ‘no Zionist outbursts’ (Foreign Office minute, Mansfield, 28 December 1955, FO 371/113742). The offer’s two-stage character is generally not mentioned in the literature on Suez, and its importance is neglected. The two-stage scheme is not mentioned by Eden, Selwyn Lloyd or Nutting, although they all were deeply involved in formulating its details (Lloyd simply wrote that it had been decided to ‘lend the Egyptian Government $400 million towards the cost of the project’; see Lloyd 1978: 29).

400 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93

94

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

The British were, as usual, worried about money: would they manage to provide their £5.5 million contribution? The British Government wanted it to be spent within the sterling or transferable account areas: i.e. anywhere in the world other than the dollar area. To convert it into dollars to finance orders placed with US firms would be difficult to defend in Parliament and in the country, in view of the sterling area’s acute shortage of gold and dollar reserves. There was also discussion about what the money guarantee implied. The British did not want to guarantee a certain percentage of the total cost, owing to the likelihood of changes in the existing dollar–sterling exchange rate. They guaranteed a fixed sum of £5.5 million in the first stage, and discussed informing the Americans that they were willing to pay £5.7 million in the second stage (Makins to Foreign Office, text of proposed letter to the US Government, 16 December 1955, FO 371/113741). Makins, Washington to Foreign Office, 16 December 1955, FO 371/113740. Aswan High Dam. Mr Byroade’s talk with Colonel Nasser, 3 January 1956, FO 371/119046. Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office (Foreign Office and Whitehall secret Cabinet distribution) 1 January 1956, no2, FO 371/119046. Foreign Office minute, Brief Aswan High Dam, 12 December 1955, FO 371/113741. Makins to Foreign Office, 16 December 1955, FO 371/113741. Foreign Office to Washington, 17 December 1955, FO 371/113741. Foreign Office minute, J. O. Lloyd, 30 December 1955, FO 371/119046. Kyle 1991: 84. Selwyn Lloyd 1978: 28. FO 371/113738 to 28 November 1955, JE 1423/252. Foreign Office Memorandum, Shuckburgh, 28 November 1955, FO 371/113738. Humphrey and Hoover, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. M.T. Flett, Washington Embassy to Bromley, Foreign Office, 6 January 1956, High Aswan Dam. Proposed exchange of letters with the US Government, FO 371/119047. Trevelyan to Foreign Office, 24 December 1955, FO 371/113742. Foreign Office minute, Points for use in discussing the High Aswan Dam and Nile Waters division, 29 December 1955, FO 371/119047. Foreign Office to Khartoum, UK Trade Commissioner, 30 December 1955, Foreign Office Secret and Whitehall secret (cabinet) distribution, FO 371/119059. In September 1947 the Ugandan Government had written to London asking for assurances that the 1929 Agreement would not operate against schemes of development then planned in Uganda. Governor Hall had argued that there was no question of seeking the agreement of Egypt to measures such as contour terracing for the conservation of water, or minor irrigation schemes, which he thought could not seriously be regarded as entailing any prejudice to the interests of Egypt within the meaning of clause 4 (ii) of the Agreement. Egyptian consent to any large irrigation scheme would certainly be necessary, he wrote, involving as it would the abstraction of material quantities of water from the Nile or its tributaries, but this necessity arose under international law and would be obtained even were there no specific agreement governing the subject. Foreign Office minute, J.K. Roberts, 2 November 1948, FO 371/69233.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 6

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106

107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116

401

Foreign Office minute, G.L. Clutton, 8 November 1948, FO 371/69233. Dodds-Parker to Selwyn Lloyd, 29 June 1953, FO 371/102895. Selwyn Lloyd to A.D. Dodds-Parker, MP, House of Commons, 7 July 1953, FO 371/102895. D.M.H. Riches, Office of the UK Trade Commissioner, to W. Morris, African Department, Foreign Office, 1 September 1953, FO 371/102895). El Umma, 21 November 1953, in FO 371/102986. Foreign Office to Alexandria, 9 July 1952, FO 371/97017. Foreign Office to Alexandria, 9 July 1952, FO 371/97017. This cable was sent 20 minutes before the one quoted above. Hankey, British Embassy, Cairo to Foreign Office, 10 July 1953, FO 371/102895. D.M.H. Riches, Office of the UK Trade Commissioner, Khartoum, to E.B. Boothby, African Department, Foreign Office, 6 February 1954, FO 371/108531. D.M.H. Riches, Office of the UK Trade Commissioner, Khartoum, to E.B. Boothby, Foreign Office, 17 February 1954, FO 371/108531. Statement on Nile waters, Sudan Government 10 February 1955, FO 371/113731. The 35 billion cubic metres proposed by the Sudan was calculated on the basis of an irrigable area of 4.5 million feddans at 8000 cubic metres per feddan per year, being the mean used in Egypt. This should be compared with MacGregor’s discussion of MacDonald’s assessment of Gezira needs. For example, on 13 April 1950, Edmonds at the Foreign Office minuted, ‘We are in for trouble’. He referred to a letter by the (British) Financial Secretary in Khartoum, A.L. Chick, about Sudanese water demands. The country would need more water, and therefore the Sennar Reservoir should be raised by one metre. London realised that Egyptian consent to this project was necessary according to the 1929 Agreement. Edmonds interpreted the letter as ‘a bargaining counter’ in the Foreign Office discussions about the Lake Tana issue, more than as a real plan (Foreign Office minute, Edmonds, 14 April 1950, FO 371/80515). Warburg 1992: 117. W.H. Luce, Governor-General’s Office, Khartoum to G.E. Millard, Foreign Office, 24 February 1955, FO 371/113731. W.H. Luce, Governor-General’s Office, Khartoum, to G.E. Millard, African Department, Foreign Office, 20 January 1955, FO 371/113370. T. E. Bromley, Foreign Office to W. H. T. Luce, Governor-General’s Office, Khartoum, 23 February 1955, FO 371/113370. Stevenson, British Embassy, Cairo to Foreign Office, 8 April 1955, FO 371/113731. For a British summary of these discussions, see W.N. Allan ‘Discussions on Nile Waters’, 10 May 1955, SAD 500/5/37. Foreign Office minute, T.E. Bromley, 18 May 1955, FO 371/113734. Cairo to Foreign Office, 26 September 1955, FO 371/113735. Helm, Governor-General, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 29 September 1955, FO 371/113735. Helm, Governor-General, to T.E. Bromley, African Department, Foreign Office, 27 September 1955, FO 371/113736. In the Sudan there had been established a Board that issued licenses within the total share of the water which was allocated to the Sudan. At the end of the year the Board sent its account to the Egyptians.

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117 Cairo to Foreign Office, 21 May 1955, FO 371/113733. 118 F.R.H. Murray, British Embassy, Cairo to Shuckburgh, Foreign Office, 29 July 1955, FO 371/113735. 119 Foreign Office to Cairo, 22 September 1955, FO 371/113735. 120 Note of a meeting, Egypt. High Aswan Dam, in the Treasury, 31 March 1955, FO 371/732. 121 W.A.C. Mathieson, Colonial Office, to T.E. Bromley, Foreign Office, 6 April 1955, FO 371/113732. 122 Foreign Office minute, G.E. Millard, 21 February 1955, FO 371/113731. 123 See for example Foreign Office minute, G.E. Millard, 21 February 1955, FO 371/113731. 124 Tanganyika Standard, 26 July 1955. 125 T. E. Bromley, Foreign Office to R. Stevenson, Cairo, 21 April 1955, FIO 371/113732. 126 W.H. Luce, Governor-General’s Office, Khartoum, to T. Bromley, Foreign Office, 5 May 1955, FO 371/113733. 127 Stevenson, British Embassy, Cairo, to Macmillan, 16 May 1955, FO 371/113733. It should be noted that the underlying tone in this letter, as in most other letters from the British Ambassadors in Cairo during these years, was more favourable towards Egyptian needs than necessitated by policy followed in London. 128 Khartoum to Foreign Office, 24 September 1955, FO 371/113735. 129 Khartoum to Foreign Office, 26 September 1955, FO 371/113735. 130 Alan Lennox Boyd, Colonial Office to Cohen, Governor of Uganda, 28 September 1955, FO 371/113735. 131 Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office, 17 November 1955, FO 371/113738. 132 See Macmillan to Trevelyan, 22 September 1955, FO 371/113735. Macmillan argued that ‘in the interest of speed’, London should try to keep out Ethiopia and the Belgian Congo. He also argued against arbitration, if that was suggested by Egypt. As the legal advisor had pointed out earlier, arbitration might lead to earlier results than negotiations, and it was the latter that the British sought. 133 Text of a Note presented by Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Cairo to the Egyptian Government on 22 November 1955, FO 371/119062. 134 Khidr Hamad, Minister of Irrigation to Minister of Works, Egypt, FO 371/113739. 135 Foreign Office to Washington, 5 December 1955, FO 371/113739. 136 George Humphrey and Herbert Hoover Jr, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Princeton. 137 Makins, British Embassy, Washington to Foreign Office, 22 December 1955, FO 371/113742. 138 Makins, British Embassy, Washington to Foreign Office, 31 December 55, FO 371/119046. 139 Blocked sterling was money Britain owed to Egypt, for goods sold and services rendered during and since World War II. 140 What made things worse was that the Consortium was in immediate danger of breaking up. The French and German sections of the Consortium considered dissolving it. The Foreign Office wrote to the embassies in Bonn and Paris and urged them to encourage French and German ministers to keep their firms within the ranks – at least for the time being (see aide-memoire to French Ministry

NOTES ON CHAPTER 6

141 142 143 144 145

146

147 148

149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

403

of Foreign Affairs, 17 December 1955, FO 371/113742). Since the electrical and mechanical work now had been separated from the civil engineering parts, there would be nothing to interest the electrical companies for several years (see Note of a meeting at the Board of Trade on 19 December 1955, FO 371/113742). J.H.A. Watson, Foreign Office, to Viscount Harcourt, Washington, 28 March 1956 FO 371/119054. Foreign Office, High Aswan Dam, 7 January 1956, FO 371/119052. M.B. Shepherd, Foreign Office to R.S. Isaacson, Paris, 18 January 1956, FO 371/119046. Foreign Office, High Aswan Dam, 7 January 1956, FO 371/119052. Record of a meeting in the State Department on Saturday 14 January between representatives of the US Government, the International Bank and Her Majesty’s Embassy, FO 371/119048. Nasser had been convinced that in reality Egypt would have to put up more foreign exchange than was envisaged in the recent aides-memoires, and consequently that the Bank’s estimates were wrong. (Black and Hoover accepted this possibility, because it was impossible to judge the final figures with any accuracy.) M.E. Johnston, 24 January 1956, ‘High Aswan dam, Mr. Black’s visit to the Chancellor’, FO 371/119049. On the advice of Makins and Hoover, the Bank should now send a letter to the effect that ‘the Bank intends at the appropriate time to participate in’, instead of ‘The Bank therefore … informs the Government of Egypt that the Bank is prepared to consider, at appropriate times, participating in the financing’ of the external foreign exchange needs. The British and the Americans had signed a secret letter of intent and the Foreign Office discussed the possibility of conveying the gist of this letter privately to Black. The Foreign Office commented on the drafts for the new letter of intent and welcomed the concessions made to the Egyptian point of view. On 27 January some minor changes in the aide-memoire were made. Makins, Washington to Foreign Office, FO 371/119049. Foreign Office to British Embassy Washington, FO 371/119050. Foreign Office to British Embassy Cairo, 7 February 1956, FO 371/119050. Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office, 9 February 1956, FO 371/119051. Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office, 9 February 1956, FO 371/119051. Foreign Office, High Aswan Dam, 7 January 1956, FO 371/119052. Makins, Washington to Foreign Office, 8 February 1956, FO 371/119051. Adams, UK Trade Commission, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 18 December 1955, FO 371/113741. Foreign Office to Khartoum, UK Trade Commissioner, 20 December 1955, FO 371/113741. Adams, Office of the UK Trade Commissioner, Khartoum, 23 December 1955, to T.E. Bromley, African Department, FO, FO 371/119046. Morrice to Dodds-Parker, 24 December 1955, FO 371/119047. Adams, UK Trade Commissioner, to Foreign Office, 28 December 1955, FO 371/113742. Foreign Office minute, 29 December 1955, FO 371/113742. The Times, 31 January 1956.

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162 Millard 10 Downing Street to J.A.N. Graham, F.O. 30 December 1955, enclosing a note by Eden, 29 December 1955, FO 371/119047. 163 See Foreign Office 371/119059. 164 Colonial Office, ‘Note on East African interests in Nile Waters’, 6 January 1956, FO 371/119059. 165 At this time Morrice, the Irrigation Advisor to the Sudan Government, had long discussions about Nile matters with representatives of the Foreign Office. C.O.I. Ramsden to J.H.A. Watson, FO 14 April 1956, FO 371/119061. 166 Foreign Office to Cairo, 26 January 1956, FO 371/119048. 167 See Foreign Office to Cairo, 26 January 1956, FO 371/119048. 168 H.B. Shepherd, Foreign Office, P.G.D. Adams, Khartoum, 25 February 1956, FO 371/119049. 169 Trevelyan, Cairo, to Foreign Office, 1 February 1956, FO 371/119050. 170 Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office, 10 February 1956, FO 371/119051. 171 Foreign Office to Cairo, 13 February 1956, no 400, FO 371/119051. 172 Some material of this nature had also been broadcasted by the BBC. See Sir H. Trevelyan, Cairo to Foreign Office, 14 February 1956, no 290, FO 371/119051. 173 Trevelyan to Foreign Office, no 2026, 31 December 1955, FO 371/119059. 174 Foreign Office to Khartoum, 9 February 1956, FO 371/119059. 175 Haykal argues that ‘all the evidence is that, in spite of the letter Nasser was supposed to send to Eugene Black, the US had by now given up any idea of financing the High Dam. It was not going to make this decision public, preferring to let the project die a natural death’ (Haykal 1988: 108). 176 Makins to Foreign Office 15 February 1956, FO 371/119052. 177 Foreign Office minute, Watson, 20 February 1956, FO 371/119051. 178 See T.W. Garvey, British Embassy, Cairo to J.H.A. Watson, African Department, Foreign Office, 25 February 1956, FO 371/119060. 179 Michael E. Johnston, Treasury Chambers to J. H. A. Watson, Foreign Office, 2 March 1956, FO 371/119060. 180 See R.O. Hennings, Nairobi to W.A.C. Mathieson, Colonial Office, 21 March 1956, FO 371/119061 and P. P. Howell, Entebbe to W.A.C. Mathieson, Colonial Office, 8 March 1956, FO 371/119061. 181 Foreign Office minute, 17 March 1956, FO 371/119053. 182 Commonwealth Relations Office Memorandum, High Aswan Dam, 28 February 1956, FO 371/119051. 183 See for example Kyle 1991: 93. 184 Bishop, 10 Downing Street to J.A.N. Graham, Foreign Office, 3 March 1956, FO 371/119053. 185 Quoted in James 1986: 447. 186 Sir H. Trevelyan, British Embassy, Cairo to Foreign Office (Foreign Office secret and Whitehall secret (Cabinet) distribution, 5 March 1956, FO 371/119052. 187 Shuckburgh 1986: 346, entry for 12 March 56. 188 Quoted in James 1994: 575. 189 Quoted in James 1986: 443. 190 Foreign Office to Khartoum, 29 March 1956, FO 371/119060. 191 Trevelyan, Cairo, to D.A.H. Wright, Foreign Office, 31 March 1956 FO 371/119054.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 6

405

192 Trevelyan had argued all along for a Western commitment to the pledge of December 1955. He argued that it was not only a question of London’s relations with Nasser, but that it would have profound effect upon the West’s relations with Egypt over at least the next 15 or 20 years. He also argued that it would be futile politics to ask the Egyptians to undertake in writing a promise not to seek assistance from the Soviet bloc. He repeated that he thought an agreement with the Sudan could be reached rather soon. Trevelyan, Cairo, to Watson, FO, 4 April 1956, FO 371/119054. 193 Trevelyan, Cairo, to Wright, Foreign Office, 31 March 1956 FO 371/119054. 194 Trevelyan to Watson, FO, 23 April 1956, FO 371/119054. 195 Trevelyan, Cairo, to Foreign Office, 16 May 1956, FO 371/119054. 196 Foreign Office Minute, Watson, The High Aswan Dam, 2 May 1956, FO 371/119054. 197 Mr Coulson, British Embassy, Washington to Foreign Office, 27 April 1956, FO 371/119054. 198 Foreign Office to British Embassy, Washington, 25 May 1956, FO 371/119054. 199 Foreign Office to British Embassy, Washington, 4 June 1956, FO 371/119054. 200 Watson, Foreign Office Memorandum, ‘High Aswan Dam’, 11 June 1956, FO 371/119055. 201 Millard, 10 Downing Street, to P.F. Hancock, Foreign Office, 6 June 1956, FO 371/119055. 202 British Embassy, Washington to Watson, Foreign Office, 19 June 1956, FO 371/119062. 203 Draft telegram from the Foreign Office to British Embassy Washington, 9 July 1956, FO 371/119056. 204 British Embassy, Washington to Foreign Office 11 July 1956, FO 371/119056. 205 Department of State, for the Press, 19 July 1956, Aswan High Dam. 206 Foreign Office minute, W.S. Shepherd, 19 April 1956, FO 371/119060. 207 Dodds-Parker, Foreign Office to Nutting, n.d. (late December 1955 or early January 1956), FO 371/119047. 208 Bowie describes what took place between the time the offer was made and when it was revoked. Two things had happened: the large arms purchases by Nasser from the Soviet Union (in reality this took place before the offer was made, in September 1955) and Nasser’s criticism of Black and the Bank, claiming that they were trying to take control of Egypt and its domestic affairs (these problems were, on the contrary, solved between the offer being made and revoked) (see Bowie, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University). Eisenhower emphasises that the only restriction his Government put on the offer was that Nasser could not simultaneously ‘build up an unwarranted defensive force’ because that would destroy the Egyptian economy, and then ‘outsiders would have to do the entire job of building the dam’. Then, according to Eisenhower, Nasser came back with a ‘bunch of extraordinary conditions’, and there it stopped. Nasser was, according to Eisenhower’s analysis, looking for a crisis to seize the Suez Canal (see Dwight D. Eisenhower, J.F. Dulles Oral History Project, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University). 209 See draft telegram from M.M. Ord Johnstone, Board of Trade to W. Armstrong, Treasury Chambers, 24 March 1956, FO 371/119053.

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210 D.B. Pitblado, British Embassy, Washington to Armstrong, Treasury, 27 April 1956, FO 371/119054. 211 Quoted in Haykal 1988: 124. 212 Haykal 1988: 125.

Notes on Chapter 7 1 2

3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10

Ramsden, Foreign Office minute, 4.10, 1956, FO 371/119065. None of the following books even mention this aspect of British policy during the Suez crisis: Abadi 1983; Adamthwaite 1988; Acheson 1969; Aster 1976; Baeyens 1976; Bar-Zohar 1964; Barnett 1986; Blake 1985; Bowie 1974; Braddon 1973; Burton 1957; Bromberger 1957; Calvocoressi and Moncrieff 1967; Cameron 1956; Cameron 1957; Campbell 1960; Carlton 1981; Carlton 1988; Carlton 1990; Churchill 1959; Dodds-Parker 1986; Dougherty 1959; Drummond and Coblentz 1960; Eayrs 1964; Eden 1962; Eden Earl of Aven 1960; Epstein 1964; Fawzi 1987; Fisher 1982; Freiberger 1992; Fullick and Geoffrey 1979; Gaujac 1987; Georges-Picot 1978; Gorst and Scott 1988; Haykal 1986; Haykal 1972; Hennessy 1987; Horne 1988; James 1986; Kirkpatrick 1959; Kuniholm 1980; Kunz 1990; Kyle 1991; Labour Party 1956; Lamb 1987; Lapping 1987; Louis 1984; Louis and Owen (eds) 1989; Love 1969; Lucas 1987; Lucas 1990a; Lucas 1990b; Lucas 1991; MacDermot 1969; Macmillan 1971; Massu and Le Mire 1978; Northedge 1975; Nutting 1958; Nutting 1967; Nutting 1972; Pineau 1976; Rhodes 1986; Robertson 1965; SelwynLloyd 1978; Shuckburgh 1986; Thomas 1967; Thorpe 1989; Trevelyan 1970. Cabinet meeting held in the Prime Minister’s Room at the House of Commons, 27 July 1956, CAB 128/30. The ‘Egyptian Committee’ was appointed at this meeting. The members were Eden, Salisbury (Lord President), Home (Commonwealth Secretary), Macmillan (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Selwyn Lloyd (Foreign Secretary) and Monckton (Minister of Defence). The materials of this committee are still to a large extent inaccessible, and a number of documents have not yet been released. All the sources quoted can be found in the Public Record Office, Kew. Cabinet meeting held in the Prime Minister’s Room at the House of Commons, 27 July 1956, CAB 128/30. According to estimates made for the Cabinet, the UK had only a six-week supply of oil when Nasser nationalised the canal (Eden to Eisenhower, 27 July 1956, PREM 11/1098). One-third of the 14,666 ships which passed through the canal in 1955 were British, and two-thirds of the oil – about 60 million tons – passing through the canal was for Western Europe. More than half of British imports came through the canal. Eden to Eisenhower, 27 July 1956, PREM 11/1098. In the draft letter the proposed wording was ‘vital to us and important for the whole free world’. Draft, message to President Eisenhower, 27 July 1956, PREM 11/1098. ‘Nationalising the Suez Canal’, Financial Times, 28 July 1956. Record of a meeting between the Secretary of State, Mr Dulles, M. Pineau and advisors at Lancaster House on 23 August 1956, at 5.00 p.m., PREM 11/1099. Eden to Eisenhower, 27 July 1956, PREM 11/1098.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 7

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

407

Ibid. To block completely the release of Egyptian sterling would do harm to the British economy, the economist Sir Leslie Rowan pointed out. Ibid. Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held in the Prime Minister’s Room, House of Commons, S. W. 1, on Wednesday 1 August 1956, at 7.20 p. m., CAB128/30. It has been argued that Eden was unaware of and surprised by US attitudes to British military action. But the Cabinet knew the US Government’s opinions, and they regarded their ‘disobedience’ as part of a regional power struggle with the Americans. Just before they launched the attack, the Cabinet noted: ‘Our action would cause offence to the United States Government and might do lasting damage to Anglo–American relations. There was no prospect of securing the support or approval of the United States Government’ (Conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street, S.W.1, on Wednesday, 24 October 1956, at 10.00 a.m., CAB 128/30). Cabinet meeting held in the Prime Minister’s Room at the House of Commons, 27 July 1956, CAB 128/30. Lord Killearn to Foreign Office, 16 March 1945, FO 371/46081. H.J. Huddleston, Khartoum to Lord Killearn, Cairo (forwarded to Eden), 12 April 1945, FO 371/46081. Kyle calls him Eden’s ‘draftsman’ during the Suez crisis (Kyle 1991: 88). Denis Wright, Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, later Ambassador to Ethiopia and Iran. Archie Ross took over the African and Levant Department from Shuckburgh; Assistant Under-Secretary (ME), Foreign Office. In the days before Nasser’s speech in Alexandria, Ross argued in support of an official Nile strategy that was more in line with Huddleston’s objections from 1945, stating: ‘However our covert policy may now develop I suggest that we must now demonstrate that we were not motivated by hostility to Colonel Nasser in withdrawing our offer for the Aswan High Dam. This means continuing to be cool but correct in our dealings with the Egyptian Government…On the positive side we might with great advantage divert interest from Nasser and his Dam to the needs of the people of the Nile Valley as a whole and our interest in trying to meet them…We cannot immediately commit ourselves either to a conference of riparian states or to support for any particular damming or irrigation scheme.’ But, he said, they ‘might well encourage the press and the BBC to speculate on these ideas as serious possibilities which H.M.G. naturally have in mind’ (A.D.M. Ross to African Department, News Department, Information Policy Department, 21 July 1956, FO 371/119058). Kirkpatrick to Wright, 16 August 1956, FO 371/119063. Kirkpatrick to Watson 16 August 1956, FO 371/119063. Colonial Office memorandum, Implications of reducing the flow of the White Nile by action at the Owen Falls Dam in Uganda 16 August 1956, FO 371/119063. Wright, Use of the Nile Waters against Nasser [n.d., but written 20 August 1956], FO 371/119065. Wright, Foreign Office to A.N. Galsworthy, Colonial Office, 20 August 1956, FO 371/119063. Kirkpatrick to Poyton, Colonial Office, 21 August 1956, FO 371/119063.

408 27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Hawes lived in England at the time. The Foreign Office could therefore approach him through the Colonial Office without involving the ‘men on the spot’, who were kept in the dark about these plans and these commissioned studies. C.G. Hawes, ‘The effect of restricting the outflow of Lake Victoria on conditions in Egypt and the Sudan’, 2 September 1956, FO 371/119064. Ibid. ‘Foreign Office to certain of Her Majesty’s Representatives’ [28 representatives altogether], 17 September 1956, FO 371/119063. On the same day, 13 September, the Foreign Office sent a letter to the Chiefs of Staff Committee about whether, in the ‘event of hostilities with Egypt, there should be a declaration or claim of a state of war’ (see Action in the event of hostilities with Egypt. Copy of a letter dated 13 September, 1956 from the Foreign Office to the Secretary, Chiefs of Staff Committee, 17 September 1956, DEFE 5/71). The Foreign Office argued that the best alternative was not to declare war, since London could then more easily ‘maintain that we were attacking only Nasser and his Government, and had no quarrel with the Egyptian people’ (ibid.). Kirkpatrick, FO minute, 17 September 1956, FO 371/119063. Kirkpatrick’s secret message to Dulles explains the sudden interest in the Egyptian engineers in Uganda: ‘I could not tell you off the cuff exactly what damage we could do by removing the Egyptian engineers and regulating the flow of water in a manner hostile to Egypt. But I am advised that we could do considerable damage’ (Kirkpatrick to Dulles, 21 September 1956, FO 371/119063). Kirkpatrick to Watson, 17 September 1956, FO 371/119063. Foreign Office minute, J.A.H. Watson, 18 September 1956, FO 371/119063. See Kirkpatrick to African Department, 31 August 1956, FO 371/119063. Governor Sir A. Cohen, Uganda to Wilton, Foreign Office, 19 September 1956, FO 371/119063. Foreign Office Minute, 21 September 1956, FO 371/119063. Foreign Office to Embassy, Cairo, 1 October 1956, FO 371/119063. Trevelyan to Foreign Office, 3 October 1956, FO 371/119063. Sir E. Chapman Andrews, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 5 October 1956, FO 371/119063. Chapman-Andrews, Khartoum to Watson, African Department, Foreign Office, 4 October 1956, FO 371/119064. The Managil extension of the Gezira Scheme had been planned earlier in 1956 to be implemented in four phases. When completed, it would roughly double current production. The cost of the dam was estimated at about £20 million, and it was proposed that construction could take place between 1957 and 1965. It was to provide more water for Managil, and also for land in the Kenana region. It would also provide for electric power and more pump schemes. Board of Trade, ‘Note on Egyptian crops and water requirements’, September 1956, FO 371/119063. A.N. Galsworthy, Colonial Office to Wright, Foreign Office, 20 December 1956, FO 371/119066. On the basis of data from 1924 to 1927 which Hawes had studied, the British had some scientific foundation for their speculations. They knew that the reduction of outflow from Lake Victoria in September 1924 was felt in Egypt by the end of 1925, i.e. 16

NOTES ON CHAPTER 7

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

409

months later. During 1926 the reduction was of the order of 30 per cent. If these conditions had prevailed, the reduction during 1927 would have been about 35 per cent. Foreign Office minute, Ramsden, 4 October 1956, FO 371/119065. Ross, Use of Owen Falls dam to deny water to Egypt, 14 November 1956, FO 371/119065. Foreign Office minute, Ramsden, 4 October 1956, FO 371/119065. See minutes on Sir H. Trevelyan’s letter to Foreign Office, 3 October 1956, FO 371/119064. See Some implications for the East African territories of a decision to restrict the flow of the White Nile (top secret), 9 October 1956, FO 371/119064. As early as the 1920s the British hydrologists had discovered that there was latency of four to five months between peak levels on Lake Victoria and Lake Albert. It was estimated that the extensive swamps which the Victoria Nile runs through while joining the two lakes caused this long time lag (see Newhouse 1939: 25). Some implications for the East African territories of a decision to restrict the flow of the White Nile (top secret), 9 October 1956, FO 371/119064. Lennox-Boyd to Selwyn Lloyd, 23 October 1956, FO 371/119065. Lennox-Boyd to Selwyn Lloyd, 23 October 1956, FO 371/119065. A.N. Galsworthy, Colonial Office to Wright, Foreign Office, 20 December 1956, FO 371/119066. Phillips, Foreign Office memo, The effect on the Sudan and Egypt of restriction of the discharge at Owen Falls, 29 October 1956, FO 371/119065. Foreign Office minute, Wallace, 6 November 1956, FO 371/119065. Ross refers to a memo by the Ministry of Defence, Chiefs of Staff Committee, dated 26 September 1956, with old file number JE 1423/113G. This memo discussed, according to Ross, the ‘complete closure of the sluices’ at Owen Falls Dam. I have not found this memo in the DEFE files. It is not mentioned in the Cabinet minutes, PREM or in Eden’s private papers. Ross, Foreign Office memo, Use of Owen Falls Dam to deny water to Egypt, 14 November 1956, FO 371/119065. 10 Downing Street to Foreign Office, 8 November 1956, FO 371/119065. Draft statement for the Foreign Secretary, 30 November 1056, CAB 128/30. Galsworthy, Colonial Office to Wright, Foreign Office, 20 December 1956 (top secret), FO 371/119066. C.B. Reynolds, Commercial Relations and Exports Department to Wright, Foreign Office, 27 December 1956, FO 371/119066. Chancery, Addis Ababa, to Chancery, British Embassy, Cairo, 31 August 1956, FO 371/119063. J.P.S. Phillips, Foreign Office, to T.S. Whestley, Colonial Office, 26 September 1956, FO 371/119063. Morrice had already hired US company IBM to work on the calculations, under a contract with the Sudan Government. Work, however, was proceeding slowly because the only machine in the UK was at Derby, where, concurrently with the Sudanese and other commissions, it was carrying out calculations for Rolls-Royce. Morrice had earlier proposed a meeting of a representative of the Foreign Office, Mr van de Worde (IBM representative in London) and himself to try to accelerate the work. This was regarded as important, since not until the Sudanese had their

410

67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

proposal ready could they call a conference of interested states to discuss it. Morrice suggested a conference at Geneva, because the machines were ‘about the size of a small haystack’, and it would therefore be a major undertaking to move both the machine and a team of expert operators to Khartoum (Foreign Office minute, Phillips, 23 July 1956, FO 371/119058). Morrice wrote, ‘The data fed into the machine is punched on 576 cards, one for each month of the 48-year period. The instructions for processing these data are contained in a a pack of about 1280 punched cards. In order to work out the consequences of any particular scheme it is therefore necessary to run through the larger pack 576 times. The machine we are using can perform this operation in rather under 40 minutes, and the tabulated results are printed automatically almost as quickly’ (Morrice 4 October 1956, FO 371/119064). At a time when most things seemed to have turned against it, London thought it to be good news when the Chancery, Khartoum, reported that the Sudanese Minister of Irrigation and Agriculture had said on a press conference that it was hoped to build the Roseiris Dam in six years instead of eight. The consultant engineers were Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners (Chancery, Khartoum to African Department, Foreign Office, 21 August 1956, FO 371/119063). See cases such as the US–Canada Agreement of 1906, the River Drava case between Austria and Yugoslavia and the River Yarmac case between Jordan and Israel. See for example Foreign Office to British Embassy, Washington, 2 October 1956, FO 371/119063. P. R. Mansfield, British Embassy, Addis Ababa to J. F. S. Phillips, African Department, Foreign Office 1 August 1956, FO 371/119062. Phillips, Foreign Office to P.R.A. Mansfield, Addis Ababa 15 May 1956, FO 371/119061. P.P. Howell to W.A. Mathiesen, Colonial Office, 24 July 1956, FO 371/119063. Ibid. Uganda wanted to establish rights to a permanent discharge. The Uganda Chamber tried to put pressure on London to reconsider the whole effect of the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929, since it was regarded as detrimental to local development. The Owen Falls Dam made it possible to start with irrigation upstream, since the discharge was now controlled by the dam. Howell argued against those who would repudiate all previous agreements with Egypt. This argument, he said, would ignore the fact that, whether there was an agreement or not, diminution of the flow of the Nile by some upstream party would ‘probably not be upheld in international law should the matter be put to arbitration’ (Howell to Mathieson, 7 February 1957, FO 371/125524). Foreign Office minute, Phillips, 22 August 1956, FO 371/116063. Phillips, Foreign Office to J.E. Rednall, Colonial Office, 18 September 1956. Dodds-Parker to Selwyn Lloyd, 29 June 1953, FO 371/102895. Selwyn Lloyd to A.D. Dodds-Parker, MP, House of Commons, 7 July 1953, FO 371/102895. Foreign Office minute, Nile Valley Conference, 28 September 1956, FO 371/119063. Foreign Office minute, Phillips, 9 October 1956, FO 371/119064. Foreign Office minute, Phillips, 9 October 1956, FO 371/119064. J.E. Killick, British Embassy, Addis Ababa to J.H.A. Watson, African Department, Foreign Office, 29 September 1956, FO 371/119063.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 7

83

84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

411

Minister of Works, Cairo to Minister of Irrigation & Hydro-Electric Power, Khartoum, 30 September 1956 (received in Khartoum 20 October 1956), FO 371/119065. Morrice, Suggested basis for draft reply to letter of 30 September 1956 from the Egyptian Minister of Works, 23 October 1956, signed by Morris, Mahmud Mohammed Gadein and Mohammed Rashid Sid Ahmed, FO 371/119065. Sir E. Chapman Andrews, Khartoum to Foreign Office, 8 October 1956, FO 371/119064. Foreign Office minute, Phillips, 15 October 1956, FO 371/119064. Ibid. Enclosure no 2 in The Nile. Memorandum by the Foreign Office, 23 November 1956, FO 371/119064. Ibid. Mathieson, Colonial Office to Watson, Foreign Office, 12 December 1956, FO 371/119066. Trevelyan minute, 14 December 1956, FO 371/119066. See Cabinet Official Committee on the Middle East. The Nile. Memorandum by the Foreign Office [n.d. but written around 20 December 1956], FO 371/119066. Quoted in Haykal 1986.

Bibliography

This bibliography lists archival material, reports and government publications and literature quoted in the book. For a more complete registration of reports and literature on the Nile and on the Southern Sudan, see Tvedt 2003a and 2003b. Archival Material This class consists of unpublished documentary sources. It includes certain material printed for restricted circulation within government circles, large numbers of secret notes and minutes produced by different government institutions, private letters, a collection of oral sources (John Foster Dulles oral history project, transcripts of telephone conversations etc. (Dwight D. Eisenhower Library). Only those classes and files that I have consulted are listed. Reports and Government Publications This group includes mainly official reports related to the Nile question, but also other government-sponsored reports and government publications of relevance to the Nile question. Reports that have not been published are found in the notes. Books and Articles This is a list of the books and articles quoted or discussed in the book, except those classified as official publications or reports. Newspaper articles (Egyptian, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Ugandan and British) are only referred to in the notes.

A RC H I VA L M AT E R I A L

Public Record Office, London The classes and series listed below are those consulted and that contain documents of direct relevance to the Nile issue. The given covering dates are in general adapted to the topic of the book (e.g. 1912–89 will be 1912–56). CAB 6: Committee of Imperial Defence: Defence of India Memoranda. 1901–39. Memoranda Series D deals with, among other things, Abyssinia. CAB 21: Cabinet Office and predecessors: Registered Files. 1916–56. 6077 files. CAB 37: Cabinet Office: Photographic Copies of Cabinet Papers. 1880–1916. Consists of a collection of photographic copies of memoranda circulated to the Cabinet to the end of 1916. 162 volumes. Some of the documents deal with the Sudan issue. CAB 41: Photographic Copies of Cabinet Letters in the Royal Archives. 1868–1916. 41 volumes. This series consists of prints made from microfilms of letters in the Royal

413

414

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Archives at Windsor, written by Prime Ministers to the Sovereign to report proceedings at Cabinet Meetings. Relevant subject headings: Abyssinia, Sudan, Egypt and Uganda. CAB 78: Consists of minutes and papers of various Cabinet committees in the Miscellaneous and General Series. 1941–47. 39 volumes. Includes subject headings on policies in regard to Ethiopia, Egypt and the Middle East in general. CAB 95: Consists of minutes and papers of a variety of committees and sub-committees on the Middle East and Africa (also War Cabinet). 1939–1945. 18 volumes. Deals with policies regarding Middle East, East, Africa and Ethiopia. CAB 128: Cabinet meetings. Consists of minutes and papers of a variety of committees and sub-committees on the Middle East and Africa. 1939–45. 49 files, microforms and volumes. Deals with the Middle East, Egypt and the Sudan. CAB 129: Cabinet Memoranda. 1945–76. 160 files. CAB 130: Cabinet: Miscellaneous Committees: Minutes and Papers (GEN, MISC and REF Series). Consists of the minutes and papers of various Cabinet committees. 1945–74. CAB 134: Cabinet: Miscellaneous Committees: Minutes and Papers (General Series). Minutes and papers of various Cabinet committees. 1945–74. 3356 files and volumes. Contains series such as Africa Committee, Official Committee on Overseas Development, Committee on Commonwealth Relations, Committee on Colonial Development, Middle East Committee, Suez Canal Sub-committee, Egypt Committee, Suez Canal Committee. CO 537. Colonial Office and predecessors: Confidential General and Confidential Original Correspondence. 1945–56. Sub-series on Uganda. This also contains documents related to Lake Albert and Lake Victoria in the late 1940s. CO 822: Colonial Office: East Africa: Original Correspondence. This series consists of the minutes and papers of various Cabinet committees, 1927–64. Deals with, among many subjects, hydroelectric scheme and the Westlake Report. FO 1. Foreign Office: Political and Other Departments: General Correspondence before 1906. Includes correspondence on Abyssinia (before 1905) and Africa in general. FO 2: Foreign Office: Political and Other Departments: General Correspondence before 1906. Africa in general, including the Uganda question. FO 78: Foreign Office and predecessors: Political and Other Departments: General Correspondence before 1906. 1780–1905. 5491 volumes. Contains general correspondence relating to the Ottoman Empire. FO 83: Foreign and Commonwealth Office and predecessors: Political and other Departments: General Correspondence. 1745–1975. 2642 volumes. Consists of material not relating to any one country and therefore not assignable to a specific country series. Contains no records of a date later than 1905 related to Africa. FO 83/1310 deals with miscellaneous Africa. FO 84: Foreign Office: Slave Trade Department and successors: General Correspondence before 1906. 1816–92. 2276 volumes. This series contains correspondence etc. of the Slave Trade and African Departments, including FO 48/1954, containing correspondence with Sir Edward Malet, Germany, in May–August 1899. FO 115: Records of the British Embassy in Washington FO 141: Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Embassy and Consulates, Egypt: General Correspondence. 1815–1971. 1482 volumes. Contains

BIBLIOGRAPHY

415

general correspondence of the British Embassy and consulates in Egypt. Papers dealing with British and American policies in the Middle East. Correspondence described in the register. FO 368: Foreign Office, General Commercial Correspondence. 1906–19. Includes correspondence on Abyssinia, Egypt and the Sudan for all the years. FO 369 Foreign Office: Consular Department. Includes general correspondence from 1906 on Egypt, Ethiopia and the Sudan for all relevant years. FO 371: Foreign Office: Political Departments: General Correspondence 1906–66. Sub-series on Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. A very rich collection of relevant sources. Separate index to general correspondence for all the relevant years. Documents under the following headings: Egypt, Sudan, Abyssinia/Ethiopia, Irrigation, Tsana, Jonglei, Nile projects, Aswan. FO 401: Further correspondence respecting the affairs of Abyssinia (confidential print) 1884–1939 (the files have a gap between 1885 and 1905). FO 403: General correspondence East Africa 1835–1957. This series contains confidential print relating to Africa. Comprises selected correspondence and papers relating to, among other things, the Suez Canal and Egypt, 1942–46; Abyssinia, 1911–13, 1919–23 and 1942–46. FO 407: Confidential Print Egypt and the Sudan. 1839–1958. 237 volumes. Organised chronologically. FO 633. Cromer’s correspondence. 113 files and volumes. This series contains private and official correspondence and papers of Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer, mainly dealing with his career as Commissioner of the Egyptian Public Debt and later Minister Plenipotentiary in Egypt (1883–1907). Organised chronologically. Details of correspondence explained in the register. Contains a great number of letters dealing with irrigation, dams and Nile control. FO 794: Foreign Office: Private Office: Correspondence concerning Ambassadors and Senior Diplomats. A small selection of files of correspondence (19 files) between ambassadors and the Foreign Secretary. 794/13 deals, for example, with Allenby’s resignation in Egypt in 1924. FO 800: Foreign Office, Private Offices: Various Ministers’ and Officials’ Papers. 1824–1968. 986 volumes. Consists of the Private Office papers of most Secretaries of State 1900–56 and of many Under-Secretaries of State from 1886 to 1948 (Bevin, Curzon, Eden, Eric Drummond, Selwyn Lloyd and Roger Makins). Many of the files deal with Egypt, Abyssinia and thus the Nile issue. FO 867: Anglo–Egyptian Sudan. 1903–1971. 104 files and volumes. Contains records relating to the administration of Anglo–Egyptian Sudan, including minutes of proceedings of the Governor-General’s Council and Sudan Government Gazettes 1903–. FO 921: War Cabinet: Office of the Minister of State Resident in the Middle East: Registered Files. 1942–46. 384 files. Contains sources from the Office of the Minister of State, Resident in Cairo. He had Cabinet rank and his main function was operations in the Middle East. Sub-series on Ethiopia, Egypt, North Africa General, Cairo Conference. FO 953: Foreign Office, Information Departments. General correspondence from 1947. Contains, for example, translations of Egyptian newspapers and public information policy (indexed alphabetically for each year).

416

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FO 954: Foreign Office: Private Office Papers of Sir Anthony Eden. Photocopies of private office papers of Anthony Eden as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1936–38 and 1940–45. Few papers from 1935 and 1946. 34 volumes. PREM 8: Prime Minister’s Office: Correspondence and Papers. 1945–51. The records in this series cover Attlee’s Labour administration of 1945–51. PREM 11: Prime Minister’s Office: Correspondence and Papers, 1951–64. Contains the general correspondence and papers of the Conservative administration 1951–54. PRO 30/57: Kitchener Papers. Within the first category of this huge collection of private papers there are many papers that deal with the conquest of the Sudan and the High Commissionership in Egypt.

National Records Office, Khartoum At this archive sources related to Nile developments and general policy regarding the Southern Sudan were consulted. It was of particular importance to read sources relevant for reconstructing the ideas of the ‘man on the spot’ related to the Nile issue in general and the Jonglei Canal Project in particular. The material consulted is: Upper Nile Province (UNP) FILE NO

TITLE

1/4/16 1/4/18 1/4/26 1/6/40 1/7/56 1/8/58 1/8/67 1/9/70 1/9/71 1/9/72 1/9/77 1/9/78 1/9/79 1/9/80 1/9/83

General Policy for the Southern Sudan Provincial Administration Nuer Nuer settlement Bombing and air demonstration General Reports, 1929–39 Political, 1946–50 General Reports, 1915–18 Concessions and Projects, 1939–40 Economic Development of Upper Nile Province Cellulose for the Sudd Report, Willies Irrigation Projects in Upper Nile Province Terms of reference, programme of work Irrigation Projects on the Upper Nile and Their Effect on Tribal and other Local Interests, 1928 Jonglei Canal Scheme, 1936 Jonglei Canal Scheme, 1939 Jonglei Scheme, 1927–28 Minutes of Jonglei Committee, 1949–50 Concessions and Projects Bor Canal Line General Instructions Governors Meeting, 1947, March 16th to March 19th, and 1951, February 6th to February 9th

1/10/84 1/10/85 1/10/86 1/10/88 1/10/89 1/10/90 1/12/103 1/18/151

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1/25/191 1/26/198 1/32/254 1/33/272 1/36/285 1/41/306 1/43/322 1/44/324 1/44/325 1/44/326 1/44/328 1/44/329 1/51/3 1/1/1 1/9/60 1/9/61

417

Irrigation Department (Employees) Jonglei Confidential Reports (Officials) Circulars Baro Scheme North/South roads Trade District Commissioners’ Meeting, 1940 Subject for discussion by Governors at Khartoum Southern Governors’ Meeting at Malakal on the 26th May 1935 Upper Nile Province Annuals, 1898–1948 Upper Nile Province Annuals Reports and Notes on Bor-Duk District, 1930–54 Mongalla Province General Administrative Policy – General Rulings, 1910–28 Events in Upper Nile Province. Chronological Alphabetical Index to Sudan Intelligence Report Southern Governors’ Meeting 1925

Equatoria Province FILE NO

TITLE

2/1/1

General Administrative Policy, 1937–57

South FILE NO

TITLE

18/168

Main Features of the Policy of Governors for Administration of the Southern Provinces are stated Southern Policy, 1930 Southern Policy, 1946, Aweil District-Bahr el-Ghazal Province Administrative policy for the Southern Sudan

18/171 18/188 1/4

Dakhlia (Interior) FILE NO

TITLE

1/2/5 1/3/7 1/3/8 1/5/13

Juba meeting on future of Southern Sudan Economic development of Southern Sudan Economic development of Southern Sudan Devolution Upper Nile Province

Civsec (Civil Secretary) FILE NO

TITLE

1/1/11 1/3/7–8 1/5/11 1/42/112

Economic Development in the Southern Sudan Nuer Settlement Economic development Southern Sudan Devolution Upper Nile Province

418 1/43/113 1/43/114 12/5/26 20/5/27 36/1/1 50/15/65 57/2/8–10 57/23/90 58/1/2–3

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Devolution Upper Nile Province Devolution Upper Nile Province Sudd File Irrigation Colonial Service Conference, 1946 Upper Nile Province – Trade Province reports, Upper Nile Province Monthly Diary 1945 New Roads, Upper Nile Province

Palace Papers FILE NO

TITLE

2/4/11 4/12/59

Governor-Generals’ Mission 1953 Hydrographical policy in the Nile Valley

Cairint FILE NO

TITLE

3/9/176 11/2/201 3/14/232 3/15/241 3/16/261

Report on the Nile 1884 Report on the Nile 1898 ‘Report on the Nile and Proposed Reservoirs’ by W. Willcocks Report on the Sobat River Notes on the Upper Nile Province 1900

Reports FILE NO

TITLE

4/1/13 4/1/14 4/1/15 4/2/22 4/2/23 5/3/50

Report of the Sudd Region and the harnessing of its waters Report of the Nile Projects Commission Short summary of the Report of the Nile Project Commission 1920 Upper White Nile Mission 1922 Report of the Nile Water Commission 1925–26 Report of the East African Commission 1925

Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas Below are listed the files that have been of particular importance to the Nile issue in general and the Aswan Dam in particular. 1 Eisenhower papers: a) White House central file; b) General file; c) Presidential personal file. 2 Ann Whitman File: Ann. Diary; Cabinet; Dulles–Herter series; Legislative meeting series; NSC meetings; International series, Press Conference Series; Dwight D. Eisenhower Diaries; Names: Suez March 1956–December 1956; Miscellaneous series.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

419

3 Office of Special Assistants for National Security Affairs (OSANSA). 4 Office of the Staff Secretaries (OSS). 5 Operation Co-ordination Board (OCB): Council of Economic Policy Papers; Office of the Chairman (OCC); Committees; MAP (Dorber), OSAD (Stassen). 6 Dulles papers 1953–58: Dulles telephone call series; Special assistant chronological series; Dulles general correspondence and memo series. 7 Other private papers at Eisenhower Library: a) Adams, Sherman; b) Areeda, Philip E.; c) Hagerty, James; d) Harlow, Bryce E.; e) Jackson, C.D.; f) Seaton Papers; g) Smith, W.B. 8 White House Official files: a) Africa; b) Aswan; c) Egypt; d) Middle East; e) oil. 9 Dulles, Allen W., former Director of CIA, private papers.

Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton This library has 282 interviews with personal or professional associates of John Foster Dulles, who served as the Secretary of State for the Eisenhower Administration. Originals held at Princeton University Libraries. Transcripts from the extensive JFD Oral History Project I consulted all these interviews to see if they were of relevance to an understanding of the Aswan Dam and the Suez affair, but the book quotes from interviews with the following: Adams, Sherman; Alsop, Joseph; Black, Eugene; Chamoun, Camille; Dillon, Douglas. Also: US Senate, 1956, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings: Mutual Security Program, April and May 1956, specifically Dulles’s testimony.

Sudan Archive, University of Durham This archive comprises holdings of over 300 individual collections of official, semiofficial and private papers of British men and women who lived in the Sudan during the Condominium period. This book is based upon an assessment of all these individual collections and their relevance to the Nile question. Only those quoted in this book are described below. Allan, W.N. Worked in the Irrigation Department, 1927–46; Irrigation Consultant to Sudan Government, 1946–69. An important collection: sources relating to Nile Waters, 1920–56 (1969); Lake Tana, 1920–55; Gezira, 1925–69; Sennar Dam, 1926–69; White Nile, 1936–50; Upper Nile and Equatoria, 1945–53; fourth cataract project, 1946–53; projects in Egypt, 1950–59. 10 boxes. 1920–46 Nile waters file I 589/12/1-50 1939, Mar. 26–1939, Oct. 10; Lake Tana; Nile Water Agreement. 1941–1946 Nile Waters File II

420

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589/13/1-125 1941, Jun. 3–1945, Jun. Summaries; irrigation. Nile Waters historical 589/14/1-95 1945, Jun. 6–1946, Aug. 8 ‘Nile Waters and the Sudan’; ‘Upper Nile irrigation’, review by R.M. MacGregor; administrative control. 1946–49 Nile Waters File III 590/1/1-103 1946, Aug. 23–1948, Aug. 31; Nile Waters technical; general; historical. 590/2/1-132 1948, Sep. 5–1949, Mar.; Foreign Office discussions; note on interests of the Sudan. 1949–50 Nile Waters File IV 590/3/1-101 1949, Feb. 24–1949, Jun. 28; Foreign Office and Cairo discussions; Equatorial and Tana projects; Nile Hydro-electric scheme. 590/4/1-44 1949, Jul. 4–1950, Mar. 20; Sudan water requirements; Nile Waters Board; raising Sennar Reservoir. 1951 Nile Waters File VI 590/9/1-59 1951, May 17–1951, Jul. 20; Legislative Assembly speeches; Lake Tana; Foreign Office discussions. 590/10/1-62 1951, Jul. 23–1951, Aug. 7; Discussions re Lake Tana; Roseires Dam project; raising Sennar Dam, Fourth Cataract Dam. 590/11/1-73 1951, Aug. 19–1951, Dec. 30; Lake Tana; Sennar; Fourth Cataract; Agreement with Egypt; Sudan policy. 1951–54 Nile Waters File VII Notes by W.N. Allan, R.J. Smith, H.A. Morrice. 591/1/1-101 1951, Dec.– 1952, Aug. 20; Sudan’s rights in restricted period; Lake Tana 591/3/1-113 1954, Feb. 17–1954, Dec. 14; Descriptive note (W.N. Allan); development Main Nile; draft agreement; discussions, stored water. 1935–47 Project File I 597/2/1-91 1946, Feb. 24–1947, Jan. 27; ‘The future conservation of the Nile’ by H.E. Hurst (The Nile Basin, Vol. VII, Ch. XI); note of conversation Sir Edington Miller; Cairo technical discussions; draft Instructions to Delegates; proposed Agreement with Ethiopia. 597/3/1-93 1947, Feb. 20–1947, Dec. 23; Conversations with Foreign Office; technical discussions in Cairo; letter to Egyptian Prime Minister; notes on Lake Tana project 1948–1955 Project. 1935-47 Project File II 597/4/1-50 1948, Feb. 23–1949, Sep. 10; Correspondence Foreign Office; British Embassy Cairo, etc.; notes on factors affecting development of Lake Tana Project. 597/5/1-40 1949, Sep. 13–1949, Dec. 4; Preliminary Technical Memorandum; negotiations Cairo; concession terms; draft Instructions to Delegates; proposed Heads of Agreement with Ethiopia. 597/6/1-52 1950, Feb. 4–1950, Oct. 12; Correspondence British Embassies; report Legal Adviser to Royal Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Legal Counsellor to the British Embassy. 1945–1953 Equatorial Nile project 598/3/1-57 1945, Aug. 19–1948, Mar. 4; ‘Upper Nile projects review’ by R.M. MacGregor; notes by W.N. Allan on Jonglei investigation; Nile waters; Victoria-Albert-Jonglei; Equatorial Nile Project; Nile control meetings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

421

598/4/1-55 1948, Mar. 25–48, Jun. 6; Victoria-Albert-Jonglei project; draft Equatorial Nile Agreement and Working Arrangements; conditions Egyptian participation. 598/5/1-62 1948, Jul. 1–53, Oct. 22; ‘Notes on Equatorial Nile Project’ by W.N. Allan and R.J. Smith; HMSO leaflet ‘Exchange of Notes Britain and Egypt on Owen Falls Dam’; W.N. Allan Note of visit to Uganda; ‘The Water Hyacinth: a new problem of the Nile’ by P.A. Gay and L. Berry; Heads of Agreement and Working Arrangements Bruce-Gardyne, I.M. Worked in Sudan Political Service, 1920-28, including appointments in Blue Nile, White Nile, Kassala & Halfa provinces. Legal Department, 1928-1931. Includes official papers on White Nile Province including Jabal Auliya Dam. 478/13/11, 478/13 Chinn, F.M. Worked in irrigation Department, 1925–41; Director, 1937–41. Includes correspondence re tables for reservoir and river contents; printed material. 1 box. 634/6/1-2 Clayton, G.F. Worked in the Egyptian army, 1898–1910; Private Secretary to Governor-General 1908–13; Sudan Agent and Director of Military Intelligence, Cairo, 1913–16; Adviser to Egyptian Ministry of the Interior, 1919–22. Of special relevance, correspondence between Clayton and Wingate 1908–16. 7 boxes. 469/3/1-53, 469/5/1-82, 469/8/1-69, 470/3/1-99, 469/5/1-82, 469/6/1-173 and more documents on the situation after 1919. Crawford, W.F. Worked in the Sudan Political Service, 1922–44, including appointments in Blue Nile Province. Of special relevance: Notebooks on the Gezira Scheme, 1930–32. 502/1/1-99, 502/2/1-100, 502/3/1-100. Cummins, J.W. Worked in Sudan Political Service, Finance Department, 1919–47, including Assistant Financial Secretary, 1938–44, and Deputy Financial Secretary. 636/1/1-15, 634/14/1-7. Gaitskell, A. Worked in Sudan Plantations Syndicate, 1923–50, and first Chairman and Managing Director, Sudan Gezira Board, 1950–52. Also author of a book on Gezira. Contains material about the Sudan Plantations Syndicate and the Gezira Scheme. 1 box. 418/6/1-39. Gillan, J.A. Sudan Political Service, 1909–39, including appointments in Kordofan, Darfur, Red Sea, Berber and Nuba Mountains provinces; Civil Secretary, 1934–39. 723/9/1-52, 723/15/1-45

422

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Henderson, K.D.D. Worked in Sudan Political Service, 1926–53, including appointments in Blue Nile and White Nile provinces and the Civil Secretary’s Office. 12 boxes. 659/7/1-75 Howell, P.P. Worked in Sudan Political Service, 1938–55, Assistant District Commissioner and District Commissioner Nuer District; Chairman Jonglei Investigation Team, 1948–53, and Chairman Southern Development Investigation Team, 1953–55. Especially interesting papers relating to the Jonglei Investigation Team and Southern Development Investigation Team as well as personal letters about the political situation in the Southern Sudan and in the early 1950s. 4 boxes. 768/9/1-114, 768/8/1-101, 767/1/1-77 Official Correspondence U.N.P. 1942-45. King, G.R. Sudan Political Service, 1929–53, including appointments in Mongalla and Equatoria provinces. 402/1/1 Martin, L. Worked in the Egyptian army. Includes Diary of Governor-General’s inspection tour south of Khartoum, 1921. 627/3/1-18 Robertson, J.W. Worked in Sudan Political Service, 1922–53, appointed among other places in Blue Nile, White Nile and Fung provinces; Civil Secretary, 1945–53. 531/12/25-38; 526/3/3; 520/9 to 523/7; 531/12/1-44 Smith, R.J. Worked in Sudan Irrigation Department, 1925–53. Papers on technical aspects of water control, on Gezira, on Nile waters and Nile projects. 498/6/1-49 1927, Dec.–1950, Jul.; General-Irrigation in the Sudan. 499/14/1-40 1944, Jul.–1952; Jan.; First five-year plan for post-war development, ‘Note on the first stages of planning and development of irrigation in the post-war period’ by W.N. Allan, note on statistics, notes on Gezira Scheme, 1951–56 Development Programme, progress reports. 500/13/1 Equatorial Nile Project – notes and correspondence on the Sudan. 500/14/1-24 1946, Jan.–1953, Jan.; Jonglei – maps, notes and correspondence. 500/10/1-46, 500/1/1-38 Tottenham, P.M. Worked in Egyptian and Sudan Irrigation Services, 1895-1914. Papers re Sudan career; note on exploration between the Rivers Sobat and Bor for the Garstin cut (Jonglei canal); printed material. 1 file. 635/5/2 Correspondence May–Jul. 1970

BIBLIOGRAPHY

423

Williams, W.M. Worked in Sudan Irrigation Department, 1926–51. 1 box. Official papers on the Gezira, Tokar Delta and Nile Waters; papers of the Ceylon Irrigation Department; printed material. 626/4/1-29 1937, Mar.–1948, Jun.; Notes by W.M.M. Williams, ‘Irrigation Agreements’, note by R.M. MacGregor, ‘Historical Note on Nile Waters and the Sudan’ by W.N. Allan. 626/10/1-32 1929; ‘Use of the Water of the River Nile for Irrigation Purposes’, Exchange of Notes between His Majesty’s Government in the UK and the Egyptian Government, Treaty Series No. 17, 1929. Willis, C.A. Worked in Sudan Political Service, 1905–31, including appointments in Dongola and Upper Nile provinces; A/Director of Intelligence, 1915–26. Notes on Upper Nile Province; report on tribes in Upper Nile Province, 1927; and especially interesting, an early report on the possible effects of the sudd canal project on the local population, 1928; draft report of the Public Works Ministry committee on the Veveno-Pibor scheme. 4.5 boxes. 212/10/3 1927, Jun.; ‘A brief survey of the policy of Sudan Government in the Upper Nile’ by C.A. Willis. 212/5/1-53 1928, May 30; ‘Report on the possible effects of the Sudd Project of irrigation on the local population’ by C.A. Willis, with covering letter. 212/6/1-51 1931, Mar. 26; ‘Upper Nile Projects’, draft report of the Ministry of Public Works Committee on the Veveno-Pibor Scheme, Remarks by G. Parker, Inspector-General of Irrigation on the Report, Remarks by E.S. Waller, Assistant Inspector of Irrigation, Upper White Nile Division. Winder, J. Worked in Sudan Political Service, 1927–55, including Mongalla, Khartoum, Upper Nile and Northern provinces. Of special interest Upper Nile Province correspondence, 1939–42; papers on the Jonglei Canal investigation, 1940–46. 2.5 boxes. 541/2/1-17 1940, May 13; ‘Note on the proposed Jonglei Canal Scheme’; Note on the terrain and inhabitants, including two sketch maps; also note by Winder, written later, explaining the purpose of his note 541/2/18-23 1947, Apr. 14–19; Jonglei investigation route report. Part of original route report and map, with note by J. Winder written later 1947, Dec. 13–16 Trek in Kosti District, with Winder’s notes on Jonglei. 541/9/77-79 1948, Jan. 13; Notes on 1947–48 Flooding of Zeraf Island and notes taken from Vol. V of Nile Basin 541/9/80-82 1948, Jan. 14; Shambe experimental pump site. 541/9/83-91 ND; Jonglei team notes: analysis of Nile Basin, Vol. VII re Jo. 541/1/1-187, 541/9/1-91, 541/11/1-36, 541/2/1-23. Wingate, General Sir Reginald Governor-General of the Sudan, 1900–16, High Commissioner for Egypt, 1916–19. Papers relating to official career. Papers relating to Wingate’s Egyptian army career, 1883–99. 16 boxes.

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Papers relating to Wingate’s Sudan career, 1899–1916. 52 boxes. Papers covering the short period of Kitchener’s Governor-Generalship and the death of the Khalifa, 1899; and Wingate’s service as Governor-General of the Sudan and Sirdar of the Egyptian army from 1899 to 1916. Irrigation. 3.5 boxes. Papers relating to irrigation in the Sudan and Egypt. These include correspondence, telegrams and reports on Dongola Province basin cultivation, the Gezira irrigation scheme, cotton growing at Tokar, and Nile control. Papers relating to Wingate’s career in Egypt, 1917–19. 21.5 boxes. Papers concerning Egyptian affairs from 1913 and, more particularly, Wingate’s High Commissionership, 1916–19. The papers cover all aspects of Egyptian administration. In addition there is a great deal of material on the progress of the war in the Middle East and of the Arab revolt, the crisis of 1919 and the Milner Mission. Abyssinian Affairs. 2 boxes. Papers relating to affairs in Abyssinia, 1897–99, including the British Mission to the court of King Menelik, 1897, and correspondence, reports, etc. concerning frontier delimitation (see also section 1e), operations against frontier tribes, the Tsana Commission, Italian involvement in Abyssinia and political. Personal Papers. 27 boxes. Chiefly correspondence of a more personal nature, but includes letters to and from serving officials and therefore many official matters are covered, particularly the crisis in Egypt in 1919. There are detailed letters from Wingate to his wife during the campaign in the Nile valley, 1889 and describing his experiences at Omdurman and Fashoda, 1898. Inspection tour to Aswan, 1888; Khedive’s visit to the frontier, 1894; battle of Omdurman and Fashoda incident, 1898; expedition against the Khalifah, 1899; inspection tour of Mongalla Province and the Lado Enclave, 1902; inspection tours of the White and Upper Nile areas, 1903. 106/18/1-26 Memorandum on the occupation of the Sudan (1896?). 263/1/45-101 Egyptian Army Correspondence, 8-29 Nov. 1896. 263/1/164-213, Egyptian Army Correspondence, 2–24 Dec. 1896. 263/1/214-304, 263/1/393-448, 262/2/1-75, 263/1/449-492, 263/1/534-592, 101/21/8-9, 263/1/646-712, 267/1/34-84, 267/1/85-217, 266/2/11-31, 112/8/1-38, 109/3/1-14, 112/7/1-27, 108/14/1-18, 112/5/1-23, 109/4/1-32, 112/9/1, 112/4/1-83, 112/3/1-65, 108/15/1-76, 112/1/1-251, 267/1/424-473, 266/9/1-31, Sudan Correspondence, Sep. 1898. 109/2/1-235, 109/1/1-290, 156/5/1-15, 108/61; 108/3 Sudan Government; Gezira irrigation Scheme; Report of the Delegates appointed to represent the Sudan Government in London in 1917, Khartoum: The Sudan Printing Press (Confidential). 122/10/1-39, Précis of Information obtained by the British Mission to Abyssinia March– Jun. 1917. Proofs. 266/1/1-49, Sudan Correspondence, Jan. 1898 266/1/149-266/7/-39, Sudan correspondence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

425

Libraries National Library and Archives, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. All Nile material available in European languages at the University Library and archive. All Ph.D. and MA theses produced related to the Nile question gone through. See Tvedt 2000 for a more comprehensive overview. Consulted in 1994. Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources Library, Giza, Greater Cairo Library, Cairo, Egyptian National Library and American University Library, Cairo. No access to the archives, but reports and official documents that have been difficult to obtain elsewhere gone through. The libraries were consulted in 1983, 1987 and 2000. Sudan Library, Khartoum, and University of Juba Library, Juba. In the mid-1980s these libraries had a fairly good collection of official reports (Annual Reports by the Governor-General, annual reports from the Intelligence Departments, Sudan Notes and Records, Sudan Pamphlets etc. The libraries were consulted in 1983–85. Makerere University Library, Kampala, Uganda. The library has some holdings on the Nile water question seen from a more Ugandan perspective, but very little, if anything, to add to information collected elsewhere (consulted in 1996 and 1999).

R E P O RT S A N D G OV E R N M E N T P U B L I C AT I O N S

Below are listed the cited official reports published by governments in the Nile valley regarding Nile control and Nile utilisation (articles written by government waterplanners are found under ‘Books and articles’). Due to the political importance of the question and the strong political influence most of the water-planners had, these reports are crucial sources on the continuities and discontinuities of hegemonic ideas about Nile control in the twentieth century. To underline this aspect, they are organised chronologically. For a more complete list of official reports on Nile projects, see Tvedt 2000, 187–315. Willcocks, W., 1894. Report on Perennial Irrigation and Flood Protection of Egypt, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Sudan Intelligence Report, 1897–1924. Monthly, nos 51–365, Khartoum: Sudan Collection. Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General (from 1914: High Commissioner) on the Finances, Administration and Conditions of Egypt and the Sudan (annual reports), London: HMSO. Garstin, W., 1899. Note on the Soudan, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Garstin, W., 1899. Report on the Soudan, HMSO Parliamentary Accounts and Papers, no 112: 925–51, London (inclosed in a Despatch from Her Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General at Cairo, and presented to both Houses of Parliament, June 1899). A slightly different version published as ‘Note on the Soudan’, 1999, Cairo.

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Garstin, W., 1900–6. Report upon the Administration of the Public Works Department for 1899–1905. With reports by the officers in charge of the several branches of the Administration, 7 vols., 1900–6, Cairo. Garstin, W., 1901. Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General Cairo Enclosing a Report as to Irrigation Projects on the Upper Nile, Foreign Office, Blue Book, Egypt no. 2, London. Garstin, W., 1901. Report as to Irrigation Projects on the Upper Nile, Foreign Office, Blue Book Egypt no. 2, in Despatch from His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General Cairo. Garstin, W., 1904. Report upon the Basin of the Upper Nile, with proposals for the improvement of that river, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Dupuis, C.E., 1904. Report upon Lake Tana and the Rivers of the Eastern Soudan, attached to Garstin, 1904. Dupuis, C.E., 1907. Annual Report, Ministry of Public Works 1906, Cairo: National Printing Department. Dupuis, C.E., 1908: Annual Report, Ministry of Public Works 1907, Cairo: National Printing Department. Cromer, 1907, Despatch from the Earl of Cromer respecting the Water Supply of Egypt, Egypt, no 2, 1907, London. Garstin, W., 1907. Report upon the Administration of the Irrigation Services for 1906, in Public Works Department, 1907: Reports upon the administration of the irrigation services in Egypt and the Sudan, pp. 1–19, Cairo: National Printing Press. Garstin, W., 1907a. ‘Note on the Sudan Irrigation Service’, in Reports of the Finances, Administration and Conditions of the Sudan 1906, Enclosure 2, 1907, London. Garstin, W. 1907. ‘Note upon the Egyptian Water Supply’, 3, Despatch from the Earl of Cromer respecting the Water Supply of Egypt, Egypt, no. 2, London. Dupuis, C.E., 1908. Project for Irrigation of the Gezira Plain, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Tottenham, P.M., 1910. Annual Report 1909, Ministry of Public Works, Cairo: National Printing Department. Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General [from 1914: HM High Commissioner] on the Finances, Administrations and Conditions of Egypt and the Soudan, for the years 1898 to 1920. Garstin, W., 1918. Notes on Water Required and Available for the Sudan Gezira Scheme, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. MacDonald, M., 1920. Nile Control. A Statement of the Necessity for Further Control of the Nile to Complete the Development of Egypt and Develop a Certain Area in the Sudan, with Particulars of the Physical Conditions to be Considered and a Programme of the Engineering Works Involved, 2 vols, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Dupuis, C.E. 1922. Notes on the Gezira Canal Scheme, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Dupuis, C.E., 1923. Report on the Position and Activities of the State Service of Irrigation in Egypt: Programme of Work for the Agricultural Development of the Country, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works Ministry of Public Works, 1923. Index to Annual Reports, Irrigation Department, 1884–1920, 1923, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Report by the Governor-General on the Finances, Administration and Conditions of the Soudan [from 1923 Sudan], for the years 1921 to 1951/52. After 1948 the GovernorGeneral’s annual report was entitled Report on the Administration of the Sudan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

427

Sudan Government, 1921–1951/52. Report by the Governor-General on the Finances, Administration and Conditions of the Soudan [from 1923 Sudan]. After 1948 the Governor-General’s annual report was entitled Report on the Administration of the Sudan. Great Britain. Foreign Office, 1924. Correspondence Respecting the Gezira Irrigation Project, Soudan, no 1 (1924) Parliament. Papers by command. Cmd. 2171 Cmd. (Great Britain. Parliament); 2171, London: HMSO. Roberts, W.D. and R.M. MacGregor, 1925. Note on Certain Points Connected with the Workings of the Gezira Scheme, Khartoum: Sudan Government. Grabham, G.W. and R.P. Black, 1925. Report of the Mission to Lake Tana, 1920-1921, Cairo: Government Press. Nile Commission, 1925. Report of the Nile Commission (report by R.M. MacGregor and Abdel Hamid Suleiman), Sudan Pamphlets 89. Newhouse, F., 1926. Summary of Hydrographical Data Collected in the South Sudan up to the End of the Year 1923, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Newhouse, F., 1926. Summary of Hydrographical Data in the Southern Sudan to the End of the Year 1923, 1-15, Cairo: Government Press. Tottenham, P.M., 1926. Upper White Nile Mission, Interim Report 1923, Cairo: Government Press. Hurst, H.E. and D.A.F. Watt, 1928. The Measurement of the Discharge of the Nile through the Sluices of the Aswan Dam: Final Conclusions and Tables of Results, Ministry of Public Works, Egypt, Physical Department, Physical Department Paper no 24, Cairo: Government Press. Hurst, H.E., 1927. The Lake Plateau Basin of the Nile, Ministry of Public Works, Egypt, Physical Department Paper 23, Cairo: Government Printing Press. Tottenham, P.M., 1927. The Irrigation Service, its Organisation and Administration, 1927, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Pontecorvo, L., 1928, Report on the Aswan Hydro-electric Power Scheme, Cairo: Government Press. Newhouse, F., 1929. The Problem of the Upper Nile, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works, Government Press. Hurst, H.E. and Phillips, P., 1931. The Nile Basin, I, General Description of the Basin, Meteorology, Topography of the White Nile Basin, Cairo. Office of Director-General, Southern Nile, 1932. The Veveno-Pibor Scheme, in Upper Nile Projects, 1938, Cairo. Ahmad, Abdel-Aziz, 1934. Aswan Dam Hydroelectric Scheme, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. MacGregor, R.M., 1934. Gezira Canal Regulation Handbook, Wad Medai: Department of Irrigation. Butcher, A.D., 1936. The Jonglei Canal Scheme, Upper Nile Projects, 1938, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Butcher, A.D., 1938. Bahr el-Gebel Banking Scheme, Upper Nile Projects, 1938, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Butcher, A.D., 1938. The Sadd Hydraulics, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works Sudan Government, 1939. Annual Report of the Public Works Department 1929–38, London. Simaika, Y.M, 1940. The Suspended Matter in the Nile: Report on Investigations Relating to the Aswan Reservoir, Ministry of Public Works, Physical Department Paper no 40, Cairo: Schindler’s Press.

428

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Ministry of Irrigation. 1944–51. Annual Report, Khartoum (annual reports for the years 1948 and 1949 not found), Khartoum: Ministry of Irrigation. Sudan Government, 1945. The Advisory Council for the Northern Sudan: The Proceedings of the First Session, held at the Palace, Khartoum, from 15 to 18 May, 1944, Khartoum: McCorquodale & Company Ltd. Hurst, H.E., R.P. Black and Y.M. Simaika, 1946. The Nile Basin, VII, The Future Conservation of the Nile, Cairo: Ministry of Public Works. Jonglei Investigation Team, 1946. First Interim Report, 1946, Khartoum: Survey Department. Jonglei Investigation Team, 1947. Second Interim Report, 1947, Khartoum: Survey Department. Jonglei Investigation Team, 1948. Third Interim Report, 1948, Khartoum: Survey Department. Jonglei Investigation Team, 1949. Progress Report 1948–1949, Khartoum: Survey Department. Amin, M. and H.G. Bambridge, 1948. The Modified Jonglei Canal and Over-Year Storage Schemes, Cairo: Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. Abdel Aziz Bey Hamid, W.J.E. Binnie, S.B. Donkin, Mustafa Bey Fathy, H.E. Gruner, G.F. Kennedy and Ahmed Bey Khairy, 1947. Report on Economic Utilisation of Energy Available from the Aswan Dam and Nile Barrages Hydro-Electric Schemes, Hydro-Electric Power Commission, Ministry of Public Works, Egypt, Cairo: Government Press. 39 pages, appendixes and tables and one map. Gives the final report of the committee established by the Council of Ministers on 2 June 1945. Hamid Suleiman Bey, Under-Secretary of State, Public Works Ministry, 1947. Lake Albert Reservoir: Project (also in FO 371/63023). Westlake, C.R., 1947. Uganda Electricity Survey, 1947, London (sn). Sudan Government, 1948. A Record of Progress 1898–1947, Khartoum. Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners, 1954. Estimation of Irrigable Areas in the Sudan, 1951–53, a Report, Khartoum: Sudan Government. Jonglei Investigation Team, 1954. The Equatorial Nile Project and its Effects in the Anglo– Egyptian Sudan, 5 vols, Khartoum. Introduction and Summary. Vol. I: A Survey of the Area Affected. Vol. II: The Equatorial Nile Project: Its Effects and Remedies. Vol. III: Special Investigations and Experimental Data. Vol. IV: Maps and Diagrams. Southern Development Investigation Team, 1954. Natural Resources and Development Potential in the Southern Provinces of the Sudan: A preliminary Report, London: Sudan Government. Sudan Government, 1955. Natural Resources and Development Potential in the Southern Provinces of the Sudan: A Preliminary Report. London. Ministry of Irrigation, 1959. The Nile Waters Question: The Case for Egypt and the Sudan’s Reply, by the Republic of the Sudan, Khartoum.

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B O O K S A N D A RT I C L E S

Abadi, Jacob, 1983. Britain’s Withdrawal from the Middle East, 1947–71: The Economic and Strategic Imperatives, Princeton NJ. Abbas, M., 1952. The Sudan Question: the Dispute over the Anglo–Egyptian Condominium 1884–1951, London: Faber & Faber. Abdallah, I.H., 1971. ‘The 1959 Nile Waters Agreement in Sudanese–Egyptian Relations’, Middle Eastern Studies, 7: 329–42. Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Centro Studi per l’Africa orientale italiana, 1938. Missione di studio al lago Tana, 6 vols, Roma: Reale Accademia d’Italiabes. Acheson, Dean, 1969. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, New York: Norton. Adamthwaite, A., 1988. ‘Suez revisited’, International Affairs (Great Britain), 64 (3): 449–64. Allan, W.N. and R.J. Smith, 1948. ‘Irrigation in the Sudan’, in J.D. Tothill (ed.), Agriculture in the Sudan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alvares, Francisco, 1961. The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, Being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, translated by C.W. Beckingham and G.W.B. Huntingford, 2 vols, 114–15, Cambridge: Hakluyt Society. Aster, Sidney, 1976. Anthony Eden, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Baer, George W., 1976. Test Case: Italy, Ethiopia and the League of Nations, Hoover Institution Publication, 19, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Baeyens, Jacques, 1976. Un coup d’épée dans l’eau du canal, Paris: Fayard. Baker, S., 1867. The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of the Nile and Explorations of the Nile Sources, 2 vols, London: Macmillan. — 1871. The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia and the Sword Hunters of the Hamran Arabs, London: Macmillan. — 1874. Ismailia, A Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave Trade: Organised by Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 2 vols, London: Macmillan. — 1884a. ‘Egypt’s Proper Frontier’, Nineteenth Century, July: 27–46. — 1884b. ‘An Interview with Sir Samuel Baker’, Pall Mall Gazette, ‘Extra’ no 8, 12 March, in Sudan Pamphlets, 28. — 1888. Three articles in The Times, 9, 17 and 25 October. Bar-Zohar, M., 1964. Suez: Ultra Secret, Paris: Fayard. Barblan, Andris, 1974. L’image de l’Anglais en France pendant les querelles coloniales, 1882–1904, Berne: Herbert Lang. Barcley, T., 1914. Thirty Years, Anglo–French Reminiscences (1876–1906), New York: Mifflin & Co.. Baring, E., Earl of Cromer, 1908. Modern Egypt, 2 vols, London: Macmillan. Barnett, Correlli, 1986. The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation, London: Macmillan. Bates, Darell, 1984. The Fashoda Incident of 1898: Encounter on the Nile, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beal, John R., 1957 (1959). John Foster Dulles 1888–1959, New York: Harper. Beaufre, André, 1969. The Suez Expedition, London: Faber & Faber.

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Index

This index registers all names of persons and places mentioned in the book, with two exceptions. It does not register words like ‘Egypt’, ‘Sudan’, ‘Ethiopia’, ‘Uganda’, ‘London’, ‘the Nile’, ‘the Blue Nile’, ‘the White Nile’, ‘the British Government’, ‘the Egyptian Government’ etc. because these words appear so often throughout the whole book that a register of them would not be helpful. Personal names mentioned in the footnotes as mere senders/recipients of letters and telegrams are not included either, for two reasons: these names will be mentioned in the text if they are important to the understanding of a specific issue or development; the reader can consult the notes if thought necessary, and an index of all the recipients and senders of letters would have made the listing less useful for the reader. In addition to names of places and persons, some key analytical concepts are indexed, as well as some historical events and geographical, hydrological and water-control factors.

Abbas Hilmi II: opposition to the British 34, 336; ‘re-occupation’ of the Sudan 35, 47; opening of the Aswan Dam 75 Abd al-Hamid al-Sharif: French loan to Aswan High Dam 396 Abd al-Hamid Pasha Sulayman: Nile Water Commission 142 Abd al-Khaliq Tharwat (Sarwat) Pasha: draft treaty with London 143, 145, 364, 366 Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi: Umma Party 266; Sudan plebiscite 283; water schemes 309–310; British ally 310 Abd Allah ibn Muhammad: Wingate 336 Abdel Fattah Yehia Pasha 373 Abdul Aziz Ahmed: Nile Waters Agreement 312 Abdul Rahman Abdoun: Roseiris Dam 250; opposition to Egyptian influence in the Sudan 282 Aboukir Company 145, 366 Abu Hamed: traditional irrigation 70, 71 Acholi 82 Adam, Ronald 374 Adams, P.D.G. 290, 390, 403, 404 Adams, Sherman 399, 419 Adamthwaite, A. 406, 429 Aden 200 Adigrat 339 Adly Yeghen Pasha: negotiations with London 99; resignation 143 Adwa: Italian road 123; Italian bombing of 172 Adwa, Battle of 40, 131: British relations with Italy after 35, 40; Italian revenge 117 Afghanistan 202

443

Afkar 354 Agordat 256 Ahmad Urabi Pasha 47, 324 Ahmad Ziwar Pasha: Nile ultimatum of 1924 111, 141, 365 Ahmed Bey Khairy 428 Ahmed Hussein 298, 299 Ahmed Selim 271 Ahmed Yousif Hashim 280 Akasha 35 Akobo 61 Al-Matammah 37 Alafa: Ethiopia 258 Alexander Mikhailovitch, Grand Duke: Tana Dam 125, 126 Alexander the Great 5, 59 Alexandria 5, 12, 13, 19, 95, 143, 150, 201, 203, 282, 303, 329, 407 Ali Abd al-Latif 7: White Flag League 100 Ali al-Mirghani 266 Ali Maher 203 Ali Shawki 198 Allan, J.A. 434 Allan, William N.: ultimate water requirements in the Sudan 199; opposition to hydroelectric scheme at Tisisat Falls 239; Lake Tana project 244–246; meeting with American experts 252, 382; oil exploration in Semliki area 388; Southern Sudan 389; sources on Nile discussions 419–423 Allen, R. 384, 385, 391, 393–395, 429 Allenby, Lord Edmund Henry 15: Special High Commissioner of Egypt 89–90;

444

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Milner Mission 90; Egyptian water demands 95; Nile Projects Commission 97–98; threatens to resign 99; in the Sudan 101; Gezira Scheme 107–108, 118; Nile ultimatum 110–111, 303, 357; Lake Tana 117, 120–121; Upper White Nile surveys 137–138; Nile negotiations 140–143 Alur 82 Amazon 3, 4, 346 Anglo-Abyssinian Treaty of 1897 41 Anglo–Egyptian Agreement of 1899 (Condominium agreement): background to 51; British assessment of 104–105; abrogation of 201; Cromer’s memorandum on 345 Anglo–Ethiopian Agreement of 1902: description of 113–115; assessment of 122, 241; status of 179–180, 183; literal translation of 257 Anglo–Ethiopian Agreement of 1942: Haile Selassie’s position 178; negotiations for 182; Anglo–American rivalry 183 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 1936: Britain’s position 14, 150; assessments of 150; Suez base 197; abrogation of 201, 265, 281 Ankole 5, 33 Anti-Slavery Society: slavery in the Sudan 31 Anuak 352 Arab League 211, 396 Armstrong, W. 386, 389, 406 Arnaud, J.P. 46 Ashley, Vern 126 Asmara 40, 123, 182, 392 Asquith, Herbert Henry 94 Assab 173, 182, 184, 392 Aster, Sidney 406, 429 Aswan Dam: Cromer’s plans 24–26, 31, 35, 36; symbol of British power 148, 260, 264, 283, 284; description of 74–75, 330; Willcocks on 354 Aswan High Dam 3, 12, 15: and the Suez issue 189–193; historical perspectives on 190–191; British and American intentions 205–208; Nasser’s aims 258; idea of Adrian Daninos 260; conflicts of interests 262–265; Sudan’s attitude 265–267, 304; Anglo–American rivalry 268–276; Soviet offer 271; Anglo–American offer 276–280; water distribution 280–288; negotiations 288–298; assessment of silt problem 396; French mission 398; US loan 399; British guarantees 400; British consortium 403 Aswan power scheme: background to 148–149; tender for 149; Anglo–Egyptian treaty 150; Egyptian

Government 150–151; British conflict of interests 152–154; cost of 368 Atbara 26, 38, 40, 61, 62, 68–70, 183, 238, 267, 313, 335, 349, 350 Atbara, Battle of 36 Atem river 77 Attlee, Clement: and the Suez Canal 197; ‘Nile Valley Authority’ 387 Austria 410 Awash River 253, 254, 255, 325 Awsa 173 Babus 258 Badoglio 177 Bagamoyo 43 Baghdad Pact 294 Bagungu 82 Bahir Dar: the Emperor’s new capital 237; British opposition 256 Bahr al-Arab 64, 67, 346, 352 Bahr al-Ghazal 37, 45, 60, 67, 71, 76, 79, 136, 157, 158, 216, 224, 342, 346, 349, 417 Bahr al-Homr 67 Bahr al-Jabal 12, 28, 37, 46, 60, 62–64: hydrology of 66–68; plans for 68, 72, 157; assessment of 77–79, 224; surveys of 136–138; Nile system 158; impact of the Jonglei Canal 235 Bahr al-Zaraf 37, 64: hydrology of 67; plans for 68, 72, 157; surveys of 136–138; Nile system 158; impact of the Jonglei Canal 235; Marno’s travel 352 Bahrain 200 Bailey, R.W. 289, 388, 391, 397 Baker, Samuel White 25, 27, 28, 332, 338, 339, 341, 342, 353, 429: on occupation of the Sudan 38, 42; Fashoda geography 46; Nile discovery 60–61, 63; Gezira plan 71, 92; Bari country 80; importance of upstream control 311; Willcocks and 331 Balas: Ethiopia 69, 257, 258 Baldwin, Stanley: negotiations with Mussolini on Lake Tana 171; partition of Ethiopia 171; Hoare–Laval Pact 173 Balfour, Lord Arthur J. 100: Tripartite Agreement 122; Upper Nile survey 137; presentation of 364 Bambridge, H.G. 229, 350, 386, 428 Bandung conference 276 Barakat 93 Bari 80, 236 Barker, T.C. 395 Baro 61, 68, 136, 157, 313, 358, 417 Barrois, M. 334 Barton, Sidney (British Minister Addis Ababa): Tana negotiations and relations to Italy 165, 166; Tana negotiations and relations to Ethiopia 371–374

INDEX

Baruli 82 Basoga 82 Batunal-Haggar 32 Beaufre, André 430 Bedden 233 Begemdir 116, 168 Behera 145 Beke, Charles T.: upstream control 38, 311, 430 Belatingeta Heroui 161 Belgian Congo 285, 402 Belgium: relations with Britain in the Nile basin 19, 42–44, 243; Agreement of 12 May 1894 340 Ben-Gurion, David 309 Benn, Wedgewood 128, 129 Bentinck, C.H. (British Minister in Addis Ababa): the Zeyla concession 125, 126; new text of the Chamberlain–Mussolini agreement 128–132, 174, 357, 360–364, 372, 376, 377 Berber 32, 36, 38, 41, 71, 97, 136, 337, 338 Bermuda 204, 207, 383 Berri Hill, Ethiopia 258 Berry, L. 421 Bevin, Ernest: relations with Haile Selassie 176; relations with US 194–196, 380; relations with Colonial Office 217–218; Owen Falls Dam 217–222; secret plan for hydropower in Ethiopia 239; Tana Dam 243, 245, 247, 248; Nile waters plan 280; US contracts in Uganda 388 Bigge, Arthur J. (Lord Stamfordham) 132, 338, 363 Binnie, W.J.E. 428 Biri 67 Black, Eugene (President of the World Bank): aid to Egypt 205; considering loan for Aswan High Dam 262, 263; tender for construction work 273; water needs of the Sudan 283; negotiations on High Aswan Dam 289–293; the US and the Bank 396, 403–405 Black, R.P. 125, 193, 237, 267, 350, 360, 398, 427, 428 Boma 120 Bonchamps, Charles de: French Nile mission 41, 340 Bongo 67 Boothby, E.B. 401 Bor 64, 68, 77, 79, 416, 422 Boro 67 Boyle, Edward 396 Bowie, R.R.: diplomacy of Aswan offer 405–406 Brazil 202 Bridges, E.E. 378 British Commonwealth 207, 209 British East Africa Company: occupation of Uganda 33, 43

445

British Somalia 360 Brogan, C. 430 Bromley, T.E. 395, 398, 400–402, 404 Brown, C.A. 381 Bruce, James: source of the Blue Nile 60, 430 Bruce-Gardyne, I.M. 421 Buache, Phillippe 350 Buganda 5: treaties 33, 34; western frontier 66; Egypt and 338 Bunyoro 5, 66 Bureau de l’Institut Égyptien 27 Burma 200, 244 Burton, Richard 60 Burundi 16, 325 Busk, D.L.: assessment of Americans 253–258, 394, 395 Butana irrigation scheme: relocate Wadi Halfa District population 267 Butcher, A.D.: on Upper White Nile 144, 156, 157; on Lake Tana project 164, 181; Jonglei Canal Diversion Scheme 229, 350; political position of 365–367 Butiaba 214 Buxton, A.C. 398 Byroade 289, 400 Cadogan, Arthur 378 Caisse de la Dette 21, 35, 278 Cameron 406 Campbell, Ronald I. 219–221, 241, 242, 246, 358, 372, 375, 387, 388, 391, 393 Cassel, Ernest: financial support for Aswan Dam 337 Cawtorn, W.J. 376 Cecil, Lord Edward 41, 334, 336, 352 Chamberlain, Austen 11, 100: secret deal with Mussolini 126–131; revision of the text 128–130, opposition to US influence 134; Nile Waters Agreement 143–145 Chamberlain, John 355 Chamberlain, Neville: Aswan Dam power and nitrate scheme 152; Anglo–Italian Agreement over Ethiopia (Perth–Ciano Pact) 171, 175, 375, 376, 377 Chapman-Andrews, Edwin 177, 397, 408, 411 Chara Chara rapids 256 Chavanne, Josef: Nile hydrology 62, 348, 430 Cheesman, R.E.: knowledge of Blue Nile 61; Foreign Office 181; circulation of diary 362 Chélu, Alfred J.: hydrological knowledge 46, 62, 348; water-measuring stations 331; importance of the Ethiopian rivers 339, 431 Chick, A.L. 386, 401 Chile: Chilean nitrates and Aswan plans 149, 151

446

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Churchill, Winston 3, 25: reports on opposition to Aswan Dam, 31, 102; on Uganda railway 34, 47; on Egypt’s geopolitical situation 37; on Nile potential in Uganda 81–83; on appeasement in Nile valley and Foreign Secretary Eden 189, 201–202, 208–211; Anglo–American rivalry 204–207; Owen Falls Dam 222–223; division of Nile waters 262, 267 Ciano, Count Galeazzo 175 Clark, T.A.: Ethiopia, an American water report 252–255 Clayton, Gilbert F. 353–355, 421 Clutton, K.L. 386, 387, 392, 401 Cobb, S. 434 Coca 254, 255 Cohen, Andrew B. 305, 402, 407 Cohen, Edgar 399 Colli, Count 128, 130 Colville, J.R. 377 Congo 43, 83, 221, 341, 343, 349 Congo river 2, 61, 67 Coolhaas, C. 397 Coolidge, Calvin 134 Cooper, Hugh 367 Cory, Harry Thomas: Nile Projects Commission 97; Cory proposal for Nile sharing 354 Craig, J. 329, 352, 431, 441 Crawford, W.F. 387, 395, 396, 421 Creswell, M.J. 384, 394 Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring) 11, 14: assessment of water demands in Egypt; 21–23, 32–39; hydraulic regime 29–30; importance of irrigation 29–30; upstream reservoirs 31–34; occupation of the Sudan 34–39, 335–336; Blue Nile policies 40–42; White Nile policies 42–44, Fashoda crisis 47–50, 343–344; river imperialism 51–53; Nile strategy 51–54, 58, 91, 92, 105, 120–121, 136, 349; hydraulic research 37, 62, 346, 348; Upper Nile projects 69, 70, 72, 350; cotton production 75; King of the Nile Waters 87, 88; relations with Ethiopia 113–115; Nubar Pasha 329; on Garstin 330, 350; Salisbury on 340; on Rodd mission 339–340; memorandum on the Condominium 345; Italy and Nile control 356 Cumberbatch, A.N. 395 Cumming, D. 394 Cummins, J.W. 421 Currie, James: the cotton industry and the Tana Dam 118, 126, 128; on Lake Albert reservoir as a political lever 121, 126, 128; Chamberlain on 356; Italy and water control 356; presentation of 356

Curzon, Lord George Nathaniel: plans for Gezira Scheme 95; knowledge of Nile Projects Commission 98; concern for the cotton industry 107–109; British policy on Lake Tana 119, 122, 123 Cyprus 200, 201, 210 Czechoslovakia 377, 380 da Gama, Vasco 6 Dabus 69 Damietta 20, 23, 71, 75, 329 Danakil 173, 182 Daninos, Adrien: letter to Nasser about the Aswan High Dam 260–261 Danube 3, 346 Dar es Salaam 57 Davies, C.G. 384 Davies, M.J. 386 de La Motte 22, 24 De La Warr, Lord 377 Debra Mariam 256 Debra Markos 253 Dedessa 253 Deim Ziber 48, 342 Delcassé, Théophile: Anglo–French relations 49, 50; relation to Prompt 341; presentation of 344 Delgi 119 Delta Barrage: Muhammad Ali 20, 23; repair of 30 Denaut, M. 334 Didessa river 69, 258 Dillon, Douglas 419 Dinder 69 Dinka 4, 5: and Upper Nile projects 76, 77, 210, 226–228, 231, 234, 351, 352 Dire Dawa 254 Disraeli, Benjamin: the Suez Canal 327 Dixon, A.H. 356 Dixon, E.J.C. 381, 384 Djibouti 122, 126, 173, 256, 392 Dodds, J. Hugh 117, 358, 359 Dodds-Parker, Douglas 281, 290, 310, 315, 401, 404–406, 410, 411, 432 Dongola: Mohammed Tawfiq Pasha 31: strategic importance 31, 32, 36, 339, 340; the fall of 35; hydraulic importance 62; funding of Dongola expedition 337, 339 Donkin, S.B. 428 Doughty-Wylie, Charlie 115 Douglas-Home, Alec 382 Dowson, E.M.: Nile control as a weapon 88, 121; presentation of 354; on Egypt’s independence 355, 359 Drava 410 Drew, F.G. 392 Dreyfus Affair 50, 344 Drummond, Eric 375, 415

INDEX

Dueim 198 Dufferin, Marquis de 335 Dufilé 348 Dulles, Allen W. 419 Dulles, John F.: withdrawal of Aswan offer; 189–192, 379–380; European imperialism 200, 207; Anglo–American relations 204–206, 263, 384, 399; Soviet offer 271, 278; Nasser 192 (a ‘tin-horn Hitler’), 276, 278, 279; Aswan diplomacy 296–299, Suez crisis 302; presentation of 379 Dunbar, R. 363, 364 Dupuis, Charles G.: hydrological research on Sobat River 64; hydrological research Lake Tana 69, 92; meetings in Foreign Office 117; opposition to ‘Garstin Cut’ 137–138, Upper Nile plans 156, 350–351; Board of control 315; Lake Tana 360 Dutton, E. Rowe 391 Eden, Anthony 3, 11, 65: Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 1936 150; support to English Electric Group for the Aswan power scheme 150, 152; League of Nations, on the ‘Abyssinian question’ 170–172; on Italian assurances 175, Haile Selassie and 176–177, 378; Ethiopian protectorate 177–179; Tana Dam and the Emperor 182–184; post-war Nile strategy 185; Churchill on 189, 202, 210; Suez and hydropolitics 189–192, 197, 300–312; Egyptian expansionism 202–203; on aid to Egypt 204–206; Anglo–American relations 207; Harris–Haile Selassie 257; Aswan High Dam 262–268, 271–282, 288–289; Egypt’s water vulnerability 281; ‘twopart strategy’ 290–293, 400; negotiations 294–297; Upper Nile diversion scheme 302–312; Nile Valley Conference 316; English Electric and Aswan High Dam 367; government meeting on the Abyssinian question 375–376, Ethiopian frontier adjustments 378; on Dulles’s withdrawal of Aswan offer 380; on Wafd Party 382; meeting with Sir Cecil Campbell 383; on Churchill 385; Eisenhower and 399; reactions to US policy on Suez 407 Edmonds, R.H.G. 388, 393, 401 Eggirbar 258 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 3, 7, 190: a gift to Neguib 204; and Churchill 207, 208, 384; Anglo–American relations 274–280, Aswan High Dam offer 276–280, 294, 299; development aid 394; and Eden 399 El Emary 262, 265

447

Elizabeth II, Queen: Eden on Queen’s role in the Sudan 203; official opening of Owen Falls Dam 223–224 Emin Pasha (Eduard Schnitzer): relief expedition 43; Nile observations 62; Egyptian administration 136 English Electric Group: tender for Aswan power project 149, 367; commitment of British government 150–151, 368–369; contract for Aswan power project; 152–154; Aswan High Dam 268; consortium(s) 269–270; tender for the High Aswan Dam 271–274; description of 367 Epstein, Leon D. 406, 432 Eritrea: Italian occupation of 40, 42, 116, 131, 172, 339; railway/road corridor 115, 122, 123, 127; impact on Anglo–Egyptian negotiations 126; Eritrea as Lake Tana compensation 182–183, 243–247, 381; Egyptian ambitions 237, 381; Gash water issue 251, 392; US policies on 252, 254, 255, 258 Ernst, Menzen: Nile discovery 347 Esna 12, 90 Euphrates and Tigris 2, 4, 346 Evans-Pritchard, E.E.: on the Nuer and water 77, 160, 351, 371, 389, 432 Ewbank, R.W. 381 Famaka 64 Farouk I, King: Aswan nitrate project 151; King of the Nile Waters 202–205; and recognition by states 202–203; and British opposition to 203; Owen Falls Dam 222; communism and Nile waters question 242; criticism by Ethiopia 247 Farquhar 391 Farrer, C.C. 363, 364 Fashoda 5, 24, 27, 36, 39, 43–51, 76, 328, 335, 340–345, 424 Fatiko 80 Fayum 75 Fellows, Perry 295 Fergusson, W. 351, 432 Fincha 69 Findlay, Mansfeldt 349, 352 Flett, M.T. 400 Fola rapids 66, 81 Food and Agricultural Organisation 243 Forester, Weld 391 Fourth Cataract 36, 261, 419, 420 Fowler, John 24 France 19: Fashoda 24, 25, 39; Bonchamps’s mission 41; exaggeration of French threat 41–50, 328, 338, 340, 341, 343, 345; Grey’s speech 44; Prompt 44–47; Monteil’s expedition 47–48; Liotard’s

448

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

mission 48; Marchand’s mission 48–50; Delcassé and London 49–50; Tripartite Agreement of 1906 between Britain, Italy and France 115, 117, 357–358; Tana negotiations 120–123, 127–131, 134, 360, 371; League of Nations 170–173, 375; Aswan High Dam 203, 205, 207, 268, 273, 274, 278, 396, 403; Tana Dam 257; Suez war 310; Anglo–French relations over Suez 327; Robinson and Gallagher’s theory of French rivalry 328; irrigation service in Egypt 334; Langer’s theory of French rivalry 338; Bates’s theory of French rivalry 341–342; Collins’s theories of French rivalry 341, 343; Taylor’s theories of French rivalry 345 Fuad I, King: ‘King of Egypt and the Sudan’ 100–102; dissolving parliament 145; Jabal Auliya 369 Fuad Serag el-Din 201 Gaitskell, Arthur: Gezira Works Contract 356–357, 421, 433 Gallabat 119, 240 Galsworthy, A.N. 386, 408, 409 Gamal Saleh 260 Gambeila 174, 313 Ganges 2, 346 Garner, John Nance 387 Garnett, B.J. 394, 395 Garstin, William 14: Egyptian Dams in the Sudan 24; Aswan Dam 25; Nile knowledge 26–27; importance of White Nile 27–28; Public Works Department 29; report on the Nile cataracts 36; Nile control 54, 105; Nile surveys and plans 37, 64–81, 82–84, 92, 136, 137, 224, 351; praise of 113, 330, 350; legacy of 321–323; King Leopold’s plans 348 Garvey, T.W. 404 Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Robert A.J. (Marquis of Salisbury) 384, 385, 406 Gash 251, 356: Gash water Agreement 392 Gay, P.A. 421 Gebbie, John F. 97, 98 Gebel Silsila 22 Geneva 171, 172, 410 George V, King George VI, King 124 Germany 19: Britain and the Upper Nile 42–44; siding with the Ottomans 89; and Haile Selassie 130; Aswan nitrate project 151; Junker’s plans 340; German agents on Lake Tana 353 Gessi, Romolo: mapping of Bahr al-Ghazal 60–61, 332, 433 Gezira Scheme 14, 15: V. Prompt’s vision 45; and the Egyptian revolution 90, 95;

plans for 80, 88, 92–94, 106, 108, 109, 372; British criticism of 95–97; and Nile ultimatum 110–111; importance of Tana Dam 115, 116, 140, 362; Sudan water rights 145, 157–160, Gezira Works Contract 356; water requirements 365–366, 401 Ghaba Shambé 66, 68 Gibgebit 238 Gillan, J.A. 421 Gladstone, William E.: Nile control 29; East African Company and Uganda 33; presentation of 333 Glaves-Smith, F.W. 399 Gleichen, Albert E.W. 41, 332, 337, 347, 349, 433 Godfrey, W. 398, 399 Gojjam 116, 168, 178, 377 Gondar 123, 132, 248, 255, 256, 392 Gondokoro 60, 68 Gordon, Charles: the problem of sudd 28; Cromer on 31, 35; Gordon ‘myth’ and British policies in the Sudan 43, 50, 62, 136, 331, 332 Gowers, W.F. 367 Grabham, G.W.: Tana mission 125; report on Lake Tana 360, 363, 427 Graham, J.A.N. 404 Graham, Ronald 126–129, 360, 361, 363, 392 Grant, James 28, 60, 62 Greece 202 Greenhalgh, W.H. 252, 253 Greenhill, D.H. 381, 392 Grey, Edward 44, 171, 341, 344, 355, 356, 358 Griffin, A.E. 370 Grogan, E.S. 67, 433 Gruner, H.E. 428 Guatemala 244 Gwynne, Llewellyn Henry 357 Habtewold Aklilou: Lake Tana project 244–246; Lake Tana project and Eritrea 247, 250, 393, 395 Hag Abdulla 365 Hagerty, James 419 Haile Selassie I (Ras Tafari Makonnen) 2, 3, 14, 15, 114: as perceived by London 116; Tana Dam negotiations 118–120, 122–127, 129–135, 160, 163–169, 178–184, 192, 237, 377; European tour 123–124; meeting with Prime Minister MacDonald 124; the Grand Duke 125–126; British treatment of his daughter 132; own plans for Tana Dam 144, 199; appeal at League of Nations 167; leaving Ethiopia 173; in Bath 176–177; returning to Addis Ababa 177; Eritrea and Dam 243–247, 381; new

INDEX

capital 255–256; US support 256–259; memory 359; British public support 377; description of Nile 377; and Eden 378 Halfa District 267, 316, 397, 421 Halifax, Lord Edward 152, 175, 368 Hall, John Hathorn: Governor of Uganda 192; hydropower development 212; opposition to Equatorial Nile project 213–223; Owen Falls Dam 213–215, 219–224; Nile basin issues and Nile agreements 237, 242, 386, 400; Foreign Office’s criticism 241; on Middle Eastern War Council 378 Hall-Patch, Edmund 396, 397 Hamid Suleiman Bey 428 Hamilton, J.A. de C. 370, 434 Hammadi Barrage 98 Hancock, P.F. 405 Hankey, M.P.A. 171, 204, 383, 401 Hanotaux, Gabriel 47, 343 Harding, J. 374 Harlow, Bryce E. 419 Harrington, J. 114, 162, 178, 363 Harris & Gard of Birmingham: plans for Bahir Dar 256–257 Harza 263 Hathaway, Gail 397 Hawes, C.W.: Irrigation Advisor, Uganda Government 212; surveys 386; topsecret Nile memorandum 304–305, criticism of report 307, 310; Uganda Electricity Board 388 Hayman, P.T. 394, 395 Hayter, W.G. 355 Helm, Alexander 402 Henderson, K.D.D. 364, 372, 378, 422 Hennings, R.O. 404 Herodotus 346, 434 Herui, W.S. 373 Hervey, Herbert 358 Hillard, J.R. 370 Himbury, William H. 356 Hitler, Adolf: Aswan scheme 151; Pierre Laval and 376 Hoare, Samuel 170, 171, 173, 367, 372, 375 Hoare–Laval Pact: British arguments for 171; leaked to the press 173 Hoover, Herbert 258, 289, 395, 400, 402, 403 Hornik, M.P. 340 Hotine, M. 362 Howe, Robert G. 180–183, 198, 209, 245, 378, 379, 385, 386, 391, 394, 397, 398 Howell, Paul P.: Nuer expert 230, Jonglei Canal’s strategic importance 230–235; the Equatorial Nile report 233–236; Aswan Dam and East African waters 285; Nile sharing 314; role of Uganda 388, 410 Huang He 4

449

Huddleston, Hubert J.: Governor-General of the Sudan 162; Tana Dam 181, 239, 241; post-war Nile strategy 185, 303, 379; Sudan’s water requirements 98, 239, 241 Humphrey, George 288, 400, 402 Hungary 192 Hunt, Leigh 353 Hurst, H.E.: occupation of the Sudan and hydrological research 59, 332; Century Storage Scheme 193; Ugandan lakes, Jonglei project and Century Storage Scheme 211, 213, 215–216, 224–225, 350; Lake Tana and Century Storage Scheme 237–239; Upper White Nile projects 350, 434 Hussein Sirri Pasha: Sudan territory for the Tana Dam 179; meeting with English Electric 369 Ilg, Alfred: presentation of 339; exchange of notes on the Blue Nile 363 Iliff, W.A.B. 283, 380 Imperial Chemical Industries: contract for Aswan nitrate scheme 149, 150 India 19, 199, 202, 329, 396, 397 Indonesia 202 Indus 2, 263, 396 Iraq 194, 200, 202 Irrigation: basin irrigation, 21–22, 57–58; perennial irrigation 22–25; corvée labour 329 Isaacson, R.S. 403 Isango 341, 349 Isis 22 Ismail al-Azhari: Leader of National Unionist Party 210; union with Egypt 266, 281; opposition to Aswan High Dam 285; Nile waters sharing 285, 293, 295 Ismail Bey Sirri 334 Ismail Pasha: estates of 21; importance of Upper Nile 74, 136; Suez Canal 327; Nubar Pasha 329; Charles Gordon 331; occupation of Upper Nile 338; Cromer 345 Ismail Sidky Pasha: support of Jabal Auliya Dam 154; Tana Dam 164; draft treaty 194 Ismailia 12, 201, 202 Israel 201, 206, 210, 211, 309, 396, 410 Issawi, Charles P. 434 Italian Somaliland 115, 116, 122, 123, 127, 167, 172 Italy 2, 13, 14, 15, 19, 35, 39–42, 53, 65, 115–117, 120, 122–135, 141, 150, 160–184, 196, 202, 244, 248, 250, 251, 257, 323, 335, 336, 339–341, 356–358, 360–363, 371, 374–376, 392, 424 Ivory Coast 47

450

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

J.G. White & Co.: Tana Dam 133–135, 140, 144, 161, 162, 164–166, 168, 181, 183, 243, 257, 258, 372, 392 J.P. Morgan & Co: Tana Dam 135, 364 Jabal Auliya Dam: MacDonald’s proposal 97; Nile Projects Commission 98; Dupuis’s plea 138; Egyptian nationalists 146, 303; Nile Waters Agreement 147; assessment of 154, 155; priority of water rights 166; operation of 199; Nile diversion 307–309; Nile Valley Plan 313; role of 323–324; foundation stone 369 Jackson, C.D. 419 Jackson, H.C.: Nuer 389, 434 Japan 200 Jau 67 Jessen, B.H.: Blue Nile explorer 61 Jimma 360 Jinja 81, 309, 324 Johnston, M.E. 396, 403 Jones, A. Creech 386, 388 Jones, George Lewis 392 Jonglei Canal 3, 12: Garstin’s 1904 plan 67–68, 76–81; 1925 proposal, 158; strategic importance of 159, 228–229, 293, 313, 316, 324, 390; Equatorial Nile Project 216–217, 218, 224–225; description of 1946 proposal 224–225; assessment of impact 229–237, 389; Aswan High Dam 233 Jonglei Investigation Team: establishment 229; tasks of 229–233; Jonglei Report 233–237, assessment of 390 Jordan 200, 202, 210, 410 Jordan river 2 Juba 76, 159, 227, 233, 234: Juba Political Committee 236 Julius Caesar 59 Junker, William J.: Emin Relief Expedition 43, 61, 62, 340, 435 Jur 67, 136, 346, 352 Kafu 66 Kagera 65, 325 Kalabalah 30 Kamel Pasha Nabih 239 Kampala 10, 12, 327 Kano Plain 214, 386 Karagwe 65, 338 Karnak temple 323 Kashmir 397 Kassala 40, 339, 421 Kelly, D.V. 368 Kenana plain; plans for 250, the Managil extension 408 Keneh 72 Kennedy, M. Ralston: criticism of M. MacDonald 95–98

Kenya 16, 83, 100, 120, 136, 147, 200, 227, 287, 293, 309, 314, 377, 386 Khasm al-Girba 313 Khidr Hamad 402 Khor Bilnyang 231 Khor Lait 351 Khrushchev, Nikita S. 318 Killearn, Lord see Lampson, Miles Killick, J.E. 394, 411 Kimberley, Lord 329, 333, 334, 336 King, G.R. 156, 422 Kirkpatrick, Ivone: presentation of 303; turning Nile against Nasser 303–305, 308, 310, 406–408 Kisumu (Kenya) 214: local development and Nile control 370, 386 Kitchener, General Sir H.H.: preparation for occupation of the Sudan 32, 34, 42; occupation of the Sudan 34–39, 42; Fashoda 48–52, 56, 63, 101; Gezira Scheme 93; Tana Dam 113, 115; Upper White Nile projects 224; Robinson and Gallagher 328; presentation of 335; Marchand 343-344 Klöden, Gustav Adolph von: Nile hydrology 61, 62, 348, 435 Kodok 5 Korean War 204, 383 Korosko 34 Kosti 155, 225, 309, 423 Kyr 64 Lado 342, 348, 424 Lake Albert 3: perceived importance to Egypt 27; perceived political importance to Britain 38, 121; European discovery of 60, 73, 340, 347; hydrological description of 65, 66, 308, 409; Garstin’s plans and the lake 65–66, 72, railway line to (Churchill) 81; hydrological surveys of 137, 386; Juba–Nimule road and the Albert Dam 159; Governor Hall and the lake 211–215; the Equatorial Nile project and the lake 215–216; Morrice’s Nile Valley plan and the lake 312–313; Willcocks’s plans and the lake 333; Anglo–Belgian agreement 1906 and the lake 341 Lake Edward: H.M. Stanley and discovery of 60–61, 340, 347 Lake George 66, 73 Lake Kwania 65 Lake Kyoga: sudd 65; navigation 214; Owen Falls Dam 215; control of 218, 220; regulating effect 308; downstream regulator 312 Lake No; hydrology of 67, 68, 79; irrigation services at 137; sudd harvesting south of 158

INDEX

Lake Salisbury 65, 73 Lake Superior 347 Lake Tanganyika 60 Lake Victoria 3, 5, 12, 20: gauge establishment 26; hydrological plans for 26–28, 65, 137, 193, 211–215, 218, 221, 223, 224, 286, 293, 312–313, 317; political control of 34, 47; ‘sphere of influence’ 43; Prompt on 46; rainfall patterns 57; European ‘discovery’ of 60, 73; hydrological description of 66, 76; using the lake against Nasser 304, 308–310; Willcocks on 332–333; Lugard on 336; Cromer on 350; Hawes on 386, 409 Lampson, Miles (Lord Killearn): Anglo–Egyptian Treaty 150; Aswan power and nitrate scheme 150–153; Tana Dam 180–182, 185; Anglo–American rivalry 193–194, 303; assessment of 368 Langi 82 Lansdowne, Charles: Garstin reports 72, 333–334, 349, 350; presentation of 334 Lapping, Brian 406, 435 Lardner, Henry A. 392 Lascelles, Daniel W.: diplomacy of bluff 244–245; Tana Dam 245–247, 249–251, 393, 394 Laval, Pierre 172, 371, 376 League of Nations 2, 15, 122–124, 127–130, 140; theories on the collapse of 160–161; appeal of Haile Selassie 167; British policy on Ethiopia 170–173, 321, 361, 373–375, 377 Lebanon 202 Ledward, R.T.D. 383 Leigh, R.G. 363 Lennox-Boyd, Alan 309, 402, 409 Leopold II, King; Anglo–Congolese Agreement (1894) 43, 65: background to 1906 agreement 66, 348, 349 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 327 Leward, R.T.D. 394, 397 Liaquat Ali Khan 397 Libya 167, 196, 201, 210 Lij Iyasu: Tana negotiations 115; deposed 116 Linant de Bellefonds, Louis M.A. 22, 329, 332, 339, 435 Lindsay, Ronald C. 99–100, 355, 356, 359, 371, 372 Liotard, Victor 48 Livingstone, David 347 Lloyd, Albert B. 87, 435 Lloyd, J.O. 400 Lloyd, Lord George A. 11: upstream control 100; opening of Sennar Dam 112; Chamberlain–Mussolini notes 128; US and Tana Dam 134; Nile Waters

451

Agreement of 1929 141, 143–145, 147, 286, 305, 315, 325; Harrison–Ilg notes 363; personnel in Egyptian Ministry of Public Works 366 Lloyd, Selwyn 11, 190: Anglo–American rivalry 204; Jonglei Canal 225; Sudan unity 236; Nasser and Soviet Union 278; Aswan High Dam 279–281, 294, 295, 400; Nile sharing 288–289, 292; Suez crisis 302; Nile as weapon against Nasser 306, 309–311; Nile Waters Commission 315; presentation of 382 Lloyd, Thomas 387 Lloyd George, David 94, 99, 122, 353, 354 Lombardy 27, 61 Loraine, Percy L. 164, 367, 369, 372, 373 Luce, W.H. 395, 398, 401, 402 Lugard, Frederick J.D.: British East Africa Company 33; plans for damming the Nile in Uganda 34, 336, 338; Paris 342; Tana Dam 377 Lugbara 82 Lusk, W.C. 368 Luxor 74, 323 Lyons, H.G. 62, 349: rainfall information 364; term ‘sudd’ 388; 389, 433, 436 MacDonald, Murdoch 82: Gezira 91–94; criticism of 95–98, 107, 142, 354, 365, 401; resignation and Allenby 98; Upper White Nile projects 136, 137; Jabal Auliya 154; Jonglei Canal 156, 157, 224, 225, 390; Tana Dam 376, 378, 388; clandestine meetings 365 MacDonald, Ramsay: Nile ultimatum 111; meeting Haile Selassie 123–124; Tana Dam 124, 127, 129 MacDonald, Roderick 396, 397 MacGregor, R.M. 126, 142, 154, 161, 162, 164, 166, 174, 181, 334, 357, 362, 365, 372, 373, 378, 390, 401, 423, 427, 436 Mackenzie, K.E. 398, 399 Mackworth-Young, R.C. 383, 384, 393–395 MacMichael, H.A. 228, 369, 370, 372, 389, 436 Macmillan, Harold 190, 262, 272, 276, 280, 285–287, 300, 302, 395, 399, 402, 406, 436 Macmillan, W.N. 61 Macneill, Ronald John (Baron Cushendun) 363 Maffey, John Loader 102, 146, 147, 168, 169, 174, 225, 367, 369, 372, 374, 375 Magdala 125 Mahdists 5, 26, 27, 31, 35–39, 41, 43, 44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 59–63, 328, 330, 344 Mahmud Mohammed Gadein 411 Mahmudiyya Canal 329 Maitland, Donald J.D. 221, 386–388, 392

452

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Makins, Roger M. 207, 265, 272–275, 288, 289, 317, 384, 397, 399, 400, 402, 403, 415 Malakal 66, 102, 157, 228, 233, 417 Malaya 200 Malet, Edward 341, 414 Malka-Kakla 258 Malkin, W. 355, 376 Malko-Dibo 258 Malta 200, 201 Manchester 7, 19 Manen, Princess 132 Marchand, Jean-Baptiste 39, 48–51, 101, 335, 342–344 Marchar Marshes 159 Marib 172 Marno, E. 61, 352, 437 Martin, L. 422 Martin, Workneh 133, 134 Martonne, Emmanuel de 62 Masai 4, 314 Masindi Port 215, 218 Mason-Bey 26, 331, 332, 437 Massawa 170, 184, 196, 237, 241, 243, 247, 256, 392 Mathieson, W.A.C. 402, 404, 410, 411 Mekong 2, 4 Mekki Abbas: Nile Waters Agreement of 1929, condemnation of 198 Menelik II, Emperor (Sahle Miriam): Treaty at Wuchale 40; relations with Italy 40–41; relations with Britain 40–41, 53, 70; Tana Dam 113; Anglo–Ethiopian Agreement 1902 114, 357; death of 116; Nile Waters compensation 161–163, 178; presentation of 339; Harrington–Ilg notes 363 Menes, King 58 Meroe 36 Merowe Dam 247 Metu 82 Mex Pumping Station 30 Millard, G.E. 391, 395, 398, 401, 402, 404 Miller, Edington 420 Miller, J.W.E 386, 391 Milner, Alfred 29, 90, 92, 99, 102, 225, 300, 331, 333, 334, 348, 355, 437 Milner Mission/Report 90, 99, 111, 333, 424 Minford, L.M. 383 Miralai Abdullah Bey Khalil 280 Mogadishu 170 Mohammed Rashid Sid Ahmed 411 Mohammed Tawfiq Pasha 31, 334, 336, 351 Mohrad Fahmi 262 Mombasa 47, 57, 60, 88 Moncrieff, Anthony 406, 430 Mongalla 67, 214, 233, 305, 308, 417, 422–424 Monroe, E. 437

Monson, Edmund 49, 50, 343–345 Monteil, Pierre 47, 341–343 Mopair 231 Morrice, H.A. 229, 257, 258, 264, 266, 284: criticism of Aswan High Dam 290, 291, 298, 303, 304, 310; Nile Valley plan 312–316, 317, 389, 390, 395, 398, 404, 410, 411, 420 Morris, W. 385, 401 Morrison, Herbert S. 381, 382 Mosley, Leonard 377, 378, 437 Moussa, F.M. 374 Moyne, Lord 378 Mpanga 66 Muhammad Ahmad 24: presentation of 330; killing of Gordon 330–331 Muhammad Ali 4: perennial irrigation 20; Egyptian upstream influence 51, 345; Sudan expeditions 60, 74, 136; corvée 329 Muhammad Mahmud Pasha 145, 315, 325, 365 Muhammed Amin 229, 350, 386, 428 Muhammed Eff 198 Muhammed Mabrouk el-Zani 102 Mulut 67 Murchison Falls 82, 212 Murrat 34 Murray, F.R.H. 402 Murray, John 99, 100, 107, 120, 124, 126, 129, 130, 132, 166, 352, 354, 355, 357–367, 371–373, 381 Mussolini, Benito 3, 7, 15, 117, 122, 126–131, 134, 140, 160–184, 324, 361, 374, 375, 377, 392 Mustafa al-Nahhas Pasha 145, 182, 200, 201, 379 Mustafa Bey Fathy 428 Mustafa Fahmi 336 Mutir 212, 215, 216, 218 Mwanga, King of Buganda: Carl Peters, Treaty of protection 33, 43; treaty with British Imperial East African Company 34 Nag Hammadi barrage 147 Nairobi 214, 386 Napoleon 329 Nasir 61, 64, 156 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 2, 3, 7, 13, 15, 16: hydropolitics and Suez 190–193; Anglo–American rivalry 203–204, 211; Sudan 203–205; foreign aid 205–208; revolution 204; Nile as weapon against 222, 306; Aswan High Dam 260, 261, 276–280, 287–303, 380, 396, 403, 405, 407; Nile sharing 267, 280–282, 285, 306, 307, 312, 313, 316, 317; Eden 383, 398; Churchill 385

INDEX

Neguib, Muhammed 192: gift from Eisenhower 204; Sudan policy 205, 208; Nile dam 262; Churchill 385 Nehru, Jawaharlal 397 Nelson, G.H. 368 Nero, Emperor 57 Newbold, Douglas: and the exchange of territory for the Tana project 179; and Southern policy 226 Newhouse, F.: report on the Upper White Nile 157, 350, 364, 397, 409 Newsam, R.W. 388 Niger 2 Nile civilisation: discussion of 57–58 Nile hydrology: see individual tributaries and lakes; general 26–28, 364; and imperialism 26–28 Nile Project Commission: initiation and background 97, 98; Blue Nile Dam 107; Upper White Nile Water Commission: appointment and purpose 142, water division principles 142–143, 147 Nile Waters Agreement 1929: negotiation of 141–148; description of 145–146; assessment of 144, 366; the agreement and the south of the Sudan 157; Sudan 166, 184, 266, 267, 280–282; 292, 298; Ethiopia 245, 248; Uganda and the East African territories 286, 287, 291–294, 298; aftermath of Suez crisis 305, 306, 310, 312, 314, 318, 325, 355 Nimule 66, 81, 136, 137, 159, 213, 233, 308 Nixon, Richard: European imperialism 200 Northedge, F.S. 406, 438 Norway: UN Commission of Enquiry regarding Ethiopia 244 Nubar Pasha 329 Nubians 4 Nuer 5, 12: the Nuer and water 77, 160, 351, 371, 389; bombardment of 228; impact of Jonglei Canal 158, 160, 210, 226–232, 234, 314, 351, 352, 370, 389 Nuri Pasha 202 Nutting, Anthony 385, 400, 405, 406, 438 Nyerere, Julius 325 O’Malley, C. 374 Ogaden 173 Omdurman 5, 36, 37, 41, 63, 210, 340 Omdurman, Battle of 37, 52, 81, 335, 424 Omer Mohamed Ali Mohamed 437 Orabi rebellion 20 Ord Johnstone, M.M. 399, 406 Oromo 4 Osiris 22 Osman El-Gader 198 Osman Pasha 182 Otto Wolff/Siemens Group 151

453

Ottoman Empire 44, 89, 353, 414 Owen, Roland 399 Owen Falls Dam: Uganda’s proposal 212–213, 314, 330; description of 212–214, 215; Egypt’s counter-proposal 214; politics of the Dam 215, 304–312, 409, 410; Century Storage Scheme 215–216; negotiations 217–224, 260–261; Egyptian agreement 244; Egyptian officers at 305 Paez, Pedro 347 Pakistan 202, 244, 247, 396, 397, 399 Palestine 197, 200, 203, 353 Palmer, Elwin 334 Palmer, Joseph II 392 Palmerston, Lord 38 Panama Canal 342 Pankhurst, Sylvia 176, 377 Parker, G. 157, 366, 423 Partition of Africa and the occupation of the Sudan; theories: the role and interpretation of Samuel Baker 338; theories of Taylor 345; British Nile sphere 358: Robinson and Gallagher’s theory 328; ‘defensive paradigm’ 338 Peake, M. 63, 64, 349, 433 Peel, Sidney 46, 337, 346, 350, 438 Perham, Margery 377 Persia 202 Persian Gulf 200, 210 Perth, Lord 175 Perth–Ciano Pact 175 Peters, Carl 33, 43, 340 Petherick, John: mapping of Bahr al-Ghazal 60–61 Petridis, Pierre: Tana Dam proposal 258, 314; Tana Dam report 395; presentation 395 Petterson, R.S. 355 Philae: inundation of 25, 27 Phillips, J.P.S. 409–411 Pibor 69, 136, 157 Pirie, J.G. 374 Pitblado, D.B. 406 Poland 377 Port Said 327 Port Sudan 135, 175, 335 Portal, Gerald 33 Portugal 202 Potter, A.K. 398, 399 Poyton, Hilton 304, 408 Prompt, Victor: perceived role of 44–47, 341–343; Nile plans 45–47 Quena province 90 Rahad 69 Rajjaf 66

454

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Ramsden, C.O.I. 404, 406, 409 Ras Gugsa Welle 124, 162 Ras Hailu of Gojjam 124, 177 Ras Makonnen, Governor of Harrar 116 Ras Mulugeta Yeggazu 165 Rednall, J.E. 410 Reid, R. 438 Reining, C.C. 438 Rejaf 348 Reynolds, C.B. 399, 409 Rhine 3 Riaz Pasha 338 Riches, D.M.H. 209, 210, 381, 385, 401 Richmond, J.C.B. 395 Ricket, D.H.F. 396, 397, 399 Ripon Falls 60, 81, 212 Rizeigat 346 Roberts, J.K. 401 Roberts, W.D. 138, 158, 370, 427 Robertson, James W. 208, 209, 384, 385, 388, 422 Roda Island 348 Rodd, James Rennell 41, 339, 343, 344 Rodi 67 Rogeri, D. 363 Rome 5, 10 Roosevelt, F.D. 175, 193 Rosebery, Archibald 29, 31, 333–336 Roseires 26, 72, 238, 240, 250, 258, 266, 267, 281, 291, 297, 304, 307, 313, 347, 410, 420 Rosetta 20, 71, 329 Ross, Archibald D.M.: Nile as weapon against Nasser 303, 308, 407, 409 Ross, Justin C.P.: upstream reservoirs 24–27, 329, 330, 332, 438 Rowan, Leslie 407 Royal Geographical Society 33, 60 Rubin, Arne 347 Rumbek 156 Russell, Claud: Tana negotiations 119, 120, 123, 358, 359, 360; Kenyan territory to Italy 120 Russia 344 Rustem Pasha 335 Ruwenzori 66, 340, 347 Rwanda 16, 65, 325 Ryder, C.F. 354 Sadat, Anwar 306, 380, 438 Sadiq al-Mahdi 192 Salah Hilal 284 Salah Salem: Southern Sudan 236; Nile Waters Agreement of 1929 282, 285, 293 Salih Jabr 194 Salisbury, Lord (Edward Cecil): mission to Addis Ababa 1897 41 Salisbury, Lord (Robert Cecil) 19: strategic importance of the Nile, 29–32, 36–38,

76; the reservoir question 30–31, Nile policies and relations to Italy 40; with Ethiopia 42; White Nile policy 42–44; relations with France and Fashoda 48–51; presentation of 333; water management staff in Egypt 334; correspondence with Cromer 335–337, 348, 351; Rodd mission 339–340 Sandford, Daniel 177, 371 Schnitzer, E. see Emin Pasha Schrivener 378, 381, 391 Schuster, George 126, 360, 362, 364 Schweinfurth, Georg August 46, 62, 439 Scotland 27 Scott-Moncrieff, Colin: upstream water projects 24, 25, 27, 28 Seligman, C.G. 439 Selous, G.H. 367 Semliki 61, 66, 340, 341, 348, 349, 386 Sennar 88, 97, 104, 112, 142, 145, 154, 166, 179, 198, 261, 285, 365, 420 Sennar Dam 3: MacDonald’s proposal 92, 96–98; politics of 99–100, 303; building of 103; Nile ultimatum 110–111; religious praise 111–112; water balance in 178–179; Egyptian observers 180, 388; Sudanese nationalism 198–199; British legacy 323 Serpell, D.H. 385 Setit 61, 70, 325 Seychelles 110 Seyyid Abdoun 244 Shambe 158, 423 Shendi 57 Shepilov, Dmitri T. 192 Shilluk 5, 76, 226, 228, 234, 341: meaning of 351, 352 Shimabbo 256 Shuckburgh, Evelyn 189, 368, 379, 382–385, 399, 400, 402, 405–407, 439 Silsileh 30 Simaika, Y.M. 193, 237, 267, 350, 427, 428 Simon, John: pressure on Haile Selassie 167, the foundation stone for Jabal Auliya Dam 369; 373, 374 Simpson, G.C. 97, 98 Simpson, K.J. 397 Sinnot Bey Hanna 354 Smith, R.J. 251, 389, 390, 394, 396, 420–422, 429 Smith, W.B. 419 Snow, T.M. 357 Sobat 46, 61, 64, 68, 69, 76, 77, 114, 136, 157, 169, 183, 216, 225, 229, 342, 357, 418, 422 Société Khédival de Géographie: discussions of Nile hydrology 26, 28; discussions of upstream Nile control 352 Somalia 360

INDEX

Southern policy: description 226; relation to the Nile issue 226–227 Southern Sudan: water plans for 68–69; strategic value, British conceptions 77–79, 225–228 Soviet Union 190–192, 271–279, 290, 294–299, 380, 405 Spain 202 Speke, John 27, 28, 60, 62–65, 324 Spencer, John 249, 254 Sperling, Rowland A.C. 358, 359, 365 Sri Lanka 346 Stack, Lee 94, 100, 105, 108: assassination of 110, 117, 118, 120, 281, 315, 356, 359 Stafford, F.E. 393 Stanley, Henry M. 27, 43, 60, 61, 347 Steel, Christopher 394 Stevens, Dorsey 397 Stevenson, Ralph C.S. 248, 383, 385, 391, 393, 395, 401, 402 Stewart, M.N.F. 388, 392 Stokes, R.R. 396 Strang, W. 392 Suakin 40 Sudan Plantation Syndicate: agreement with the Sudan Government 92; Gezira Scheme 93–95, 107–109 sudd; description 57, 63–65, 79, 136–138, 158, 184, 193, 224, 323, 332, 352, 354, 388, 397, 416, 418, 423; history of 350 Sueh 67 Suez Canal 13, 15, 16, 19, 29, 30, 32, 37, 47, 51, 84, 87, 100, 101, 119, 159, 161, 167, 170, 194, 196–206, 208, 211, 223, 266, 276, 279, 280, 300–302, 306, 308, 309, 311, 312, 316, 322, 325, 327, 328, 342, 384–386, 400, 406, 407, 414, 415, 418 Suez crisis 2, 9, 13, 15, 16, 148, 189, 190, 192, 262, 300–318, 326, 327, 375, 380, 382, 399, 406, 407, 419 Surur Mohammed Ramli 198 Susenyos, Emperor 347 Symes, George 100, 224, 353, 354 Syria 200, 202, 353 Tambura 48 Tana Dam 15: Aitken’s proposal 113; Cromer 113–115; Gezira 116; political asset 117–118, 228, 249–252; cotton industry 118; British disagreement 121–122; negotiations 121–133, 160–184, 243–247, 249–252; secret deal with Mussolini 126–131; American rivalry 133–136, 160–162; Nile Waters Agreement 146; local opposition 162–163; Italian plans 193; Haile Selassie’s plan 199; Eritrea 243–247, 257; Petridis’s proposal 258

455

Tanganyika 57, 83, 100, 140, 147, 214, 286, 287, 293, 309, 317, 377, 385 Tanzania 16, 314, 325 Taufikia 137 Tayiba 93 Temperley, Arthur C. 355 Tennessee Valley 185, 221, 346 Terakeka 225, 229 Theodore II, Emperor (Tewodros) 125 Thesiger, Wilfred 115, 245, 358, 439 Thomas Houston Company 149, 153 Thompson, G.H. 368, 373–375, 377 Tigrane Pasha 334 Tigray 115, 123, 173, 182 Tinné, Alexandrine-Pieternella-Françoise 342 Tisisat 238, 324 Tokar 40, 356, 423, 424 Tonga 76 Toniolo, E. 439 Tonj 67 Toro 33 Torretta 359 Tothill, John D. 389, 439 Tottenham, Percy M.: and the Foreign Office 117; opposition to Garstin Cut 137; survey from Nimule to Lake Albert; Upper Nile plans 156, 365; Lake Tana survey 360 Toura 368 Treaty of London 116 Treaty of Wuchale 40, 41 Trevelyan, Humphrey 272, 289, 292, 294, 295, 306, 308, 315, 316, 382, 398, 400, 402–406, 408, 409, 411, 440 Troutbeck 372, 386 Truman, Harry S. 249 Turkey 21, 211, 385 Twi 64 Ubangi 47 Uganda Electricity Board 219, 220, 222, 223, 306, 386, 388 Ukara Island 214 Umar Tusun 111 United States: and the Tana Dam 124, 125, 133–135, 161–165, 178, 180, 183, 184, 237, 248, 252–259; and the Aswan High Dam 189–196, 204–209, 211, 262–264, 268–280; European imperialism 200; the American Loan Agreement 380; Nile basin authority 387 Upper White Nile: geographical exploration 60–61; hydrological studies 37, 62–70, 136–137, 331–332 Vansittart, Robert G. 171 Victoria, Queen: Nile empire 19; Gladstone and Uganda 33; Salisbury and the

456

T H E R I V E R N I L E I N T H E AG E O F T H E B R I T I S H

Sudan 35, 36; Kitchener and the Sudan 52; Speke and Lake Victoria 60 Vitetti, Leonardo 165 Wad el-Nau 365 Wadi Halfa: Cromer’s idea (in 1891) of a reservoir 30; railway line 32, 335; the Mahdists 51; hydrological research 137; Haile Selassie 177; anti-Egyptian protests 236; Aswan High Dam and flooding 264, 267, 290, 291, 313 Wadi Rayan 22, 30, 251, 329 Wallace, J.H. 386, 388, 409 Walwal incident: description of 167; the League of Nations on 373; British government on 375 Wass, D.W.G. 385, 394 Waterlow, C. 397 Watson, J.H.A. 305, 403–405, 408, 411 Wau 67 Welles, Sumner; ‘the age of empire is dead’ 200 West Germany: attitude to the Egyptian King of the Nile Waters 202, competition for Aswan High Dam 205, 257, 262; German–French–British group 268–274 Westlake, C.R. 388, 414, 428 Westrich 396 Whestley, T.S. 409 White, Silva A. 46, 342, 440 Whitehouse, Cope 22, 24 Whitman, Ann 418 Wilkinson, E.R.: hydroelectric plan for Ethiopia 238, 239, 391 Willcocks, William: the era of reservoirs 24–28; importance of upstream reservoirs 25–26, 352; Cromer’s support 31; Fola rapids 81–82; criticism of MacDonald 95–98; British Consular Court 154; Egyptian question 329; Samuel Baker 331; hydrological knowledge 339, 349; knowledge of Fashoda 342; Nile Projects 354, 418, 425, 440, 441 Williams, W.M. 390, 423 Willis, Charles A. 156: local impact of the Jonglei Canal 158, 226–228, 370, 389, 416, 423 Wilson, Horace 368 Wilson, Woodrow 90, 104 Winder, John: Jonglei Investigation Team 229; local impact of the Jonglei Canal

231; notes and interim reports on the Jonglei Canal 389, 390, 423 Wingate, Orde C. 177 Wingate, Reginald: secret operations 34, 338–339; Addis Ababa mission 41, 339–340; Wingate and Gleichen’s report on the Addis Ababa mission 41; report to Kitchener 42; occupation of the Sudan 42; High Commissioner in Egypt 89; Gezira Scheme 92–94; relations with M. MacDonald 96; Governor General in the Sudan and Nile waters 105, 139, 224; Tana mission 115, 116; Sudd Fuel Company 158, 224; presentation of 336; Italian–Ethiopian relations 336, 338–340, 342–344; British Nile discourse 346; Wingate sources 424 Wiseman, R.A. 374 Witten 399 Wollega 258 Worde, van de 410 World Bank/IBRD: Aswan High Dam offer 190, 267–278, 288–293, 299; foreign aid to Egypt 205; Lake Tana 250, 252; survey of the Nile basin 255, 263–265, 283–285; the Sudan 309; the Indus issue 396–397 World Health Organisation 243 Wright, Dennis A.H. 303, 304, 405, 407–409 Wylde, Jasper W.G. 156 Yangtze 346 Yarmac 410 Yashimabet, Princess 132 Ydlibi 358 Yemen 202 Young, W.C. 251 Yugoslavia 410 Zaghlul, Saad Pasha: autonomy and abolition of Protectorate 89, 196; arrest 89; meetings with Milner 90; Sudan question 99; Nile ultimatum 110, 111, 141, 196; presentation of 353 Zaire 16 Zambezi 2, 328, 346 Zauditu, Empress 162, 163; the Tana Dam 116 Zeidab 353 Zeraf Island 423 Zeriba-Soliman 48 Zeyla 125, 360 Zifta Barrage 75 Zubeir Hamad El Malik 198