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A Black Corps d'Élite

An Egyptian Sudanese Conscript Battalion with the French Army in Mexico, 1863-1867, and in Subsequent African History

Michigan State University Press

Background to the Egyptian Sudanese Presence in Mexico

1. The Sudanese Battalion

The African soldiers who fought so gallantly in Mexico were, in one sense, pawns in a Euro-American imperial conflict. But they were not demeaned by it. Their story not only highlights some of the differing perceptions that prevailed about the institution of slavery—Egyptian, French, American—it also shows how the men themselves transcended their narrow lot. In Mexico, and in their later service in Africa, they took pride in all they did. They had been converted to and shared the faith of Islam, but their origins were African.

In the 1860s, what is now called the Sudan was a loosely administered colony of the Ottoman province of Egypt. From its grassy plains and forests, licensed agents, whether foreign, Egyptian, or Northern Sudanese, collected ivory and ostrich plumes for fashionable Europeans and slaves for comfortable Ottoman households. Many of the slaves eventually became soldiers and subsequently formed the crack battalion whose epic we here relate. They were "lent" to Emperor Napoleon III and sent to support the establishment of a French influence in troubled Mexico.

The soldiers became disciplined and tempered as they fought the Republican Mexicans in the congenial company of French officers. The Republicans accused them of brutality. Their adventures and exploits were recalled and embroidered many years later by a Shilluk veteran. He told his tales in Arabic to a young English officer who wrote them down in English translation. Both men were active officers in the new Egyptian army during the campaigns which made possible the foundation of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

2. Slavery

Centuries of confusion have resulted from the misuse of the term slavery as an omnibus word to denote two disparate forms of it; the first, plantation and domestic slavery, the second, life-long military conscription.

Slavery in the first sense was taken for granted in the ancient Middle East and was accepted as a social and economic institution by Christianity and Islam, inheritors of the wisdom of the preceding civilizations of Mesopotamia. It was recognized that, if slavery were suddenly abolished, civilized society would collapse. Christian thinkers sought to improve the conditions of slaves rather than abolish the institution itself. Islam likewise neither condemned nor approved of slavery but recognized it as a category of labor. In both Christianity and Islam the voluntary manumission of slaves was considered a pious act.

The expansion of Christianity from the Mediterranean basin into the European hinterland, combined with changes in land tenure, eroded the advantages of slave-based economies in Europe. Not long afterward, the discovery and subsequent occupation of the Americas by European immigrants resulted, in the warmer regions, in a revival of plantation slavery but of a type different from its European predecessor. The new slave-owners, born of the European Renaissance and Reformation and their energetic commercialism, brushed aside any religious restraints imposed by the medieval Church and converted slavery into an impersonal machine of repression in the interest of profit. Apologists sought scriptural justification for the system.

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the formal, elegant, aristocratic European culture began to question the relevance of some of its own cherished values in a world being brusquely assaulted by technical and industrial revolutions which produced problems beyond the wit of the existing wisdom to solve. Some called the Romantic movement a spontaneous release of human emotions—enthusiasm, imagination, and questioning—which influenced the main fields of human endeavor: religion, morals, literature, and the arts. Slavery and the slave trade did not escape scrutiny, first among the Quakers and Methodists in England closely followed by the Evangelical wing of the Church of England concerned with British involvement in the African slave trade.

It was the anti-slavery movement in the United States that reflected the strengths and the weaknesses of the Romantic approach to social wrongs. The abolitionists were deeply religious, but they also partook of the prevailing strict social inhibitions of their day. In 1863, under President Lincoln's judicious tutoring, Congress concentrated on a politically possible and emotionally satisfying legal emancipation of the slaves. This form of emancipation not only satisfied the consciences of the great majority of abolitionists in the United States but was welcomed abroad. In Britain, Uncle Tom's Cabin had been widely read; in France, the educated liberal classes had also been moved by La Case de l'oncle Torn. In February 1863, Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie attended a public performance based on the book. Lincoln could rest assured that, with this timely gift of international good will, there would be no armed interference from Britain or France to bolster the Confederacy notwithstanding some internal commercial interests in both nations not averse to a Southern victory.

The year 1865 marked the zenith of active public interest in the end of slavery in the United States. The Union was victorious, and the slaves were freed. The matter was closed. Whether in North America or in Europe, the public feeling was the same: benevolent support of Negro emancipation coupled with a reluctance to even consider the idea of completing emancipation by preparing for an eventual partnership of white and black citizens in a free, equal, integrated society. It was not so much a matter of white opposition to the principle as utter disbelief in its possibility.

3. Muhammad 'AH: Creation of a New-Model Army, al-Nizam al-Jadid

The black Muslim battalion of lifelong conscripts, combined with a few volunteers who had joined the French army in Mexico in 1863, represented a type of slave altogether unlike those emancipated by the American Civil War.

As a category of bonded men this Muslim force had a long history. The first recognizable prototypes of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha's conscript regular army of the early nineteenth century were the Mamluks of Egypt. The Mamluks had governed the province for almost three centuries as independent rulers and then, from 1516 to 1798, as agents of the Ottoman sultans. They were originally slaves procured in their native homelands in Central Asia or from Circassia north of the Caucasus, and sent to Egypt for sale to the reigning sultan and his high officials. They were given a rigorous military training and an Islamic education. Upon "graduation," they would be manumitted by their owners—to whom they remained bound by ties of patronage and a quasi-family relationship with continuing family loyalty, as between father and son.

Their descendants were superb horsemen and swordsmen in the traditional heroic cavalry combat. But in 1798, a portentous event occurred. The Mamluks clashed in two battles at the gates of Cairo with a French army commanded by General Napoleon Bonaparte and were routed. For the first time in over a thousand years al-Qahira al-Mahrusa, the God-Protected Cairo, had fallen to an infidel commander who introduced the Muslim enemy to a revolutionary way of fighting.

Napoleon's triumph in 1798 made a deep impression on the Ottoman Captain Muhammad 'Ali when he arrived in Egypt in 1801. He brought a draft of Macedonian reinforcements to campaign against the Mamluks who were reasserting their anarchic strength in the military vacuum caused by the French withdrawal from Egypt. By cunning as much as soldiering, Muhammad 'Ali survived until 1805 when the Ottoman sultan appointed him governor-general of Egypt. This gave him access to the Cairo citadel, but it did not lessen the constant threat of Mamluk rebellion in the provinces. By 1811, he felt strong enough to eliminate the last Mamluk opposition with a general massacre in Cairo and the provinces. Only then could he turn to planning an Egyptian version of military reform, which in Istanbul had fomented so serious an opposition from the traditional forces that an attempt at reform had cost Sultan Selim III his throne and his life in 1807.

The nation chosen by Muhammad 'Ali to transform the Egyptian army was a foregone conclusion: the French. Although the military might of the Emperor Napoleon had been broken at Waterloo in 1815, there was a prevailing opinion in Europe that French military organization and quality of arms and armament were superior to any other. It had taken almost all Europe to beat Napoleon.

Muhammad 'Ali appointed a junior officer from the debris of Napoleon's Grande Armée, J. A. Sève, who had joined his service in 1816, to command the infantry officers' school. The first intake of cadets contained many youths from Muhammad 'Ali's own family and those of leading Mamluks unused to the drudgery of marching like automata and drilling a La fraflçaise.

For the rank and file of the new infantry, Muhammad 'Ali had no choice but to follow the ancient Islamic tradition of enlisting African blacks; they could be had for the taking. In the course of 1820-1821, he dispatched two pre-reform armies into the Sudan. The first, advancing up the left bank of the Nile and crossing the White Nile to the Blue Nile Valley, occupied the region of Sinnar. The second, ascending the Nile Valley as far al-Dabba, crossed the steppe into central Kordofan. Both forces encountered and crushed opposition on the way. Within a few months, a stream of captured blacks was being dispatched to Upper Egypt where training camps had been set up for their reception.

A grand passing-out parade of the first six regiments of the Nizam infantry was held near Asyut in December 1823. Muhammed 'Ali Pasha himself was present; his son, Ibrahim, the general in command; and Colonel Sève, director of the officers' corps, along with a few invited guests including the English and French consuls-general, H. Salt and B. Drovetti. After the inspection each regiment formed square, facing inwards with the officers inside. The imams then intoned prayers for the triumph of the Ottoman dynasty and every officer took the oath of loyalty. A standard was presented to each battalion standard bearer who thrust his hand into the blood of a slaughtered ram and with a finger made a small blood stain on the banner ribbon. A salvo of artillery completed the solemnity.

On 5 January 1824 the First Regiment of the Line, commanded by Colonel 'Uthman Jarkas, appropriately named al-Birinji (the First), perhaps after his regimental Number One, set out on its long march to Sinnar and Kordofan.

The officer cadre of the regiment in its early days included the sons of many former Mamluks who had made their peace with Muhammad 'Ali and who took the European novelty with resignation. While their elders called their battalion by the Turkish word al-orta, the young preferred the more expressive Arabic al-tabur, conveying the meaning of a file of troops marching in step, one behind the other, at its best "The Drill," at its worst "The Grind."

As the years passed, a few Europeans serving the Egyptian government reported incidents between the Nizam and the Sudanese public which gave some inkling of the relations between them. In 1839 Louis Lefèvre, a French mineralogist in Egyptian government employ, was prospecting for gold near the Ethiopian border. A corporal in charge of a working gang of local men threatened them with his loaded musket. The gun accidentally fired killing two of them. The gang wanted to kill the corporal there and then but their makk (here the local head of the tribe) dissuaded them; so the men brought the corporal to his colonel, Farhad Bey, in command of the 8th Nizam regiment protecting the gold workings, and demanded justice. A court martial condemned the corporal to death but added an extenuating plea. The other shaykh of the place explained that it was impossible to save him; blood must be paid for by blood. The lex talionis (the law of suchness) as the lawyers in Europe called it, a life for a life, was the universally accepted punishment in the Sudan. The corporal was executed the next day

Upon enlistment, the slave-recruit would be provided with uniform, rifle and bayonet, rations, and a capricious issue of low pay. As a conscript, he would be fed and sheltered for life in a world where life was hard and his needs were simple, and as a symbol of his new standing, he would be initiated into the official religion of Islam.

With the mounting expenses of the Syrian wars and occupation, the black army of the Sudan carried out more and more responsibilities as expensive Ottoman units were disbanded or withdrawn. In 1835, 'Ali Khurshid Pasha, governor-general of the Sudan, proposed to Cairo to admit Sudanese to the junior commissioned ranks. Muhammad 'Ali overruled objections from the Egyptian War Office and permitted his governor-general to accept a few outstanding youths who had a grounding in reading and writing Arabic for training and selection as officers. The financial inducements were modest. After 20 years of its existence, the pay differentials between the highest and the lowest in a Nizam regiment bore little comparison with relative pay rates in contemporary American and European armies.

The sterling exchange rate was then 971/2 Egyptian piastres. 100 piastres = £l Egyptian.

The misgivings of the Egyptian War Office over commissioning illiterate blacks were justified, to some extent, on rational grounds. Unlike packs of wolves, human troops at war are dependent on planning and written orders for their movements and operations; they cannot fight a battle by instinct alone.

But black illiteracy was not the only obstacle. The Ottoman disliked service in the Sudan, but deeper in his breast was his dislike of the European military system. It made him, a warrior, subject to military discipline like a slave. In the early years of the Nizam formations, some Ottoman officers had already served in the old, unreformed army as Mamluks in the retinue of some Mamluk bey. As a Man of the Sword, a Mamluk saw nothing but dishonor from the efforts of the European military reformers to force him to become also a Man of the Pen, like some despised Christian clerk. The prejudice ran so deep that the so-called "headquarters" of Ibrahim Pasha during the great Syrian campaigns was still little more than a secretariat with the commander-in-chief making all the decisions. Youthful French drill instructors could scarcely have presumed to give orders to senior officers of the New Model army.

The entry of junior Sudanese officers into the Ottoman officer cadre introduced no serious linguistic complication as a result of their ignorance of Turkish—still the first language of the higher echelons of Ottoman Egyptian military society. The use of Turkish in the Nile Valley was in decline; the Khedive Isma'il encouraged the use of Arabic in the fighting services for his own dynastic reasons. He authorized a change in the language of military commands from Turkish to Arabic. While the Turkish spelling of military ranks and other terms was retained, they were increasingly pronounced in Sudanese or Lower Egyptian colloquial Arabic. The Turkish names of ranks, some in quaint Arabic, French, and English deviations, persisted until the end of the Egyptian Monarchy in 1952.

The proportion of Turco-Egyptians to Sudanese in the career structure was another matter; "Turco-Egyptian" was an ethnic, no longer a linguistic, description of an amalgam of "foreigners" whose common language was Turkish. With the growth of Egyptian national identity, Arabic had taken over. In 1863, however, the transition to equality of opportunity in the commissioned grades was still denied to black officers. There had been a significant improvement among the other ranks as shown by the following table of the career structure in 1866 of the 1st Regiment of the Line, which had served continuously in the Sudan since 1826.

If life in the Nizam regiments was bearable for the general run of Sudanese conscripts, lifelong conscription could be difficult on exceptional men of a different origin. Such was Sergeant-Major Ahmad of No. 1 Company, 4th battalion, of the 1st Sudanese Regiment, who in 1853 appeared before the Austrian vice-consul at Khartoum with an unusual story. He announced himself as Constantine Bilo, a Greek, captured as a child about 27 years before in Chios by Egyptian troops of Ibrahim Pasha's army in the war of Greek independence. He was sold to one Sulayman Kashif, who in turn sold him to Ahmad Menikli Pasha (then governor-general of the Sudan), who gave him a certificate of manumission and in 1844 enrolled him in the army of the Sudan. Nine years later he asked his colonel, Hasan Bey, for discharge from the army owing to sickness. Hasan Bey beat him full sore. So, manumission certificate in hand, he approached Vice-Consul Reitz for Austrian protection. Reitz formally accorded him Austrian protection and wrote a stiff letter to Colonel Hasan warning him to cease maltreating the Chiote company sergeant-major, an Austrian protected subject.

The records from many quarters leave no doubt that the Sudanese got on well with their French allies in Mexico. Yet, the military experience of each was altogether different from that of the other. The Sudanese could not look back to memories of la grande guerre like the French troops whom they met at Veracruz and on patrol in the Tierra Caliente—men with memories of Sebastopol, Magenta, Solferino, great battles, much heroism, much pain.

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Excerpted from A Black Corps d'Élite by Richard L. Hill, Peter C. Hogg. Copyright © 1995 Richard L. Hill and Peter C. Hogg. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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