March 1, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 27


A reader writes: “I have been trying for many years to find the exact words of Winston Churchill to this effect: ‘The newsboy pronounces the strange names of this or that potentate and then the next day other names.’ I think it is from The River War but cannot find it in my abridged edition.”

The following paragraph, whose words echo those originally penned by Churchill in his thirteenth of fifteen dispatches from the Sudan after the Battle of Omdurman, written on 12 September 1898, appears on pages 217–18 of the second volume of the first edition of The River War in 1899, in the twenty-first chapter, “After the Victory,” a chapter that was dropped from the abridged edition published in 1902. It has never since been reprinted (which is why you couldn’t find it in your abridged edition):

The calm assurance of the statement, not less than its incongruity, might well provoke a smile amid the horrors of war. But other reflections lie behind. We may consider how strange and varied are the diversions of an Imperial people. Year after year, and stretching back to an indefinite horizon, we see the figures of the odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms continually are turned. They pass in a long procession:— The Akhund of Swat;1 Cetewayo,2 brandishing an assegai as naked as himself; Kruger,3 singing a psalm of victory; Osman Digna,4 the Immortal and the Irretrievable; Theebaw,5 with his Umbrella; Lobengula,6 gazing fondly at the pages of Truth;7 Prempeh,8 abasing himself in the dust; the Mad Mullah,9 on his white ass; and, latest of all, the Khalifa10 in his coach of state. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane. These extraordinary foreign figures—each with his complete set of crimes, horrible customs, and ‘minor peculiarities’— march one by one from the dark wings of barbarism up to the bright footlights of civilisation. For a space their names are on the wires on the world and the tongues of men. The Sovereign on the Throne, the Minister in his Cabinet, the General in his tent, pronounce or mispronounce their styles and titles. A thousand compositors make the same combination of letters. The unusual syllables become household words. The street-boy bellows them in our ears. The artisan laughs over them at night in his cottage. The child in the nursery is cajoled into virtue or silence by the repetition of the dread accents. And then the world-audience clap their hands, amused yet impatient, and the potentates and their trains pass on, some to exile, some to prison, some to death—for it is a grim jest for them—and their conquerors, taking their possessions, forget even their names. Nor will history record such trash.

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The footnotes below, abridged here to save space, appear in full in my forthcoming edition of the book, to be published by St. Augustine’s Press in association with The Churchill Centre.
—JAMES W. MULLER


Abridged Footnotes

1. Akhund Abd al-Ghafur (c. 1794–1877), now known as Saidu Baba, a buffalo herder who devoted himself to a religious life at the age of eighteen. Usually conciliatory to British rule in India, he joined the tribal war against Britain in 1863 but after the battle at Umbeyla Pass helped to make peace.

2. Cetshwayo kaMpande (1832–1884), ruler of Zululand from 1873; in 1879 he defeated the British at Isandhlwana, but was then defeated at Ulundi.

3. Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (1825–1904), president of the Transvaal, 1883–1902; born in the Cape Colony, he trekked to the Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal with his fellow Boers, winning a reputation in the first Anglo-Boer War, 1881, that led to his appointment as head of the provisional government. After gold was discovered on the Rand, he protected the Boer state by refusing civil rights to the British settlers called “Uitlanders.”

4. Uthman ibn abi Bakr Diqna (c. 1840–1926), Mahdist amir. He joined the cause of Muhammad Ahmad in 1883. Though present at the Battles of Atbara and Omdurman in 1898, he took no active part. He fled afterwards to the Red Sea hills, where he was captured in 1900.

5. Thibaw Min (1858–1916), the last king of Burma, 1878–85; he lost his kingdom when it was annexed to the British Empire by Churchill’s father Lord Randolph, who was then secretary of state for India. On Nov. 28, 1885, Mandalay fell; Thibaw, with his two principal queens, was led in pouring rain under an umbrella to a British steamer bound for Rangoon on his way to exile in India, where he later died.

6. Lobengula Khumalo (1845–1894), last ruler of the Ndebele kingdom. After his capital of Bulawayo was attacked in 1893, he died of small-pox while retreating.

7. The anti-imperialist newspaper founded in 1876.

8. Agyeman Premph (c. 1871–1931), 13th king of Asante, 1888–96, whose territory was in the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana). He made war on the British in 1893–94 and again in 1895–96. After the first war, his kingdom became a British protectorate; after the second war, he was deposed. but was permitted to return in 1924.

9. Muhammad Abdille Hassan (1856–1920), religious and military leader who for a quarter-century led his Dervish warriors in defense of Somaliland against Ethiopian and European influence. He should not be confused with Mulla Sad Allah Sartor, leader of the 1897 Malakand rising, who was also styled by the British the “Mad Mullah.”

10. Abd Allahi Muhammad Turshain, Khalifat al-Mahdi (1846–1899). Commander of the Mahdist forces and ruler of the Mahdist dominions in the Sudan, 1885–99; military ruler of the Sudan after the Mahdi’s death in June 1885.

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