Before dawn on 26 January 1885, some 50,000 Mahdist warriors poured into Khartoum. By sunrise the city had fallen, its entire garrison was dead, and the most famous British general of the age lay beheaded on the steps of his own palace. An African army that London had dismissed as a rabble had just handed the British Empire one of the most humiliating defeats of the Victorian age.
The man sent to leave
Four years earlier, a Sudanese religious leader named Muhammad Ahmad had proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the awaited redeemer of Islam, and raised a revolt against Turco-Egyptian rule in Sudan. His followers, the Ansar, swept aside Egyptian armies sent to crush them. By early 1884, the Egyptian government in Cairo, itself under British control, decided to abandon Sudan altogether.
To manage the withdrawal, London sent Major-General Charles George Gordon. Gordon knew Sudan well. He had governed it from 1876 to 1879 and was famous in Britain as "Chinese Gordon" for his campaigns in China. His orders were simple: evacuate the Egyptian garrisons and their families, then leave.
Gordon reached Khartoum on 18 February 1884. But instead of evacuating, he stayed. He believed Sudan could still be held, and he set about fortifying the city. Within weeks, the Mahdi's forces had surrounded it.
317 days under siege
The siege began on 13 March 1884. Inside the walls were about 7,000 Egyptian troops and some 27,000 civilians. Outside, the Mahdist army grew until it numbered around 50,000. For ten months, Gordon held out with dwindling food, dwindling ammunition, and messages smuggled out begging London for help.
The British government of Prime Minister William Gladstone had no wish to send an army into Sudan. For months it dithered while Gordon's position worsened. In his journal on 14 December 1884, Gordon wrote what amounted to a farewell: "Now mark this, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than 200 men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good bye."
London did eventually send a relief force, the Nile Expedition under General Garnet Wolseley. But it moved slowly up the river, and Wolseley split it to send a fast column across the desert. The Mahdi knew the relief was coming. He decided to take the city before it arrived.
The night the city fell
On the night of 25 to 26 January 1885, the Nile was at its lowest, shallow enough in places to cross on foot. The Mahdist army attacked before midnight, forcing a gap in the ramparts along the river and bursting through the Masallamiyyah Gate. Within hours the defence collapsed. The entire garrison was killed, along with some 4,000 of the city's men. Many women and children were carried off into slavery.
Gordon died at the governor's palace. The exact details are disputed. In the most famous version, repeated in paintings and films for a century, he came out onto the palace steps in full dress uniform and was speared to death without raising a weapon. Other accounts say he was shot in the street as he tried to reach the Austrian consulate. What is certain is that his head was cut off, mounted on a pike, and delivered to the Mahdi as a trophy. The Mahdi himself had ordered Gordon taken alive.
Two days too late
On the afternoon of 28 January, two Nile steamers carrying the vanguard of the relief force reached Khartoum. They came two days too late. After a brief exchange of fire with the Mahdist defenders, the steamers turned back downriver. The main British force was still far away.
News of the disaster reached London on 5 February, and the public fury was immense. Gordon had been a national hero, and his death looked like the price of a government that had delayed and dithered. Gladstone's government never recovered. It fell later that year.
What Khartoum changed
The Mahdi did not live long to enjoy his victory. He died in June 1885, five months after Khartoum fell. The state he founded survived him for another thirteen years, until a British army under Lord Kitchener destroyed it at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.
But the fall of Khartoum had already done its damage to the myth of empire. For a decade, Victorian Britain had told itself that its armies could not be beaten by African forces. In one night in January 1885, Sudan proved otherwise. The empire got its revenge at Omdurman, but it never got back the certainty it lost at Khartoum.
