East Africa, part 2
Khaled Abdel Nour, Africa’s Great War (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2005)
… No one has ever proven Egypt’s complicity in the Zanzibari provincial rebellions of February 1937, and it is unlikely that the question will be settled anytime soon. Egyptian intelligence documents are still classified, many of the rebellious provinces’ records were lost in the chaos that engulfed the region during the 1940s, and the periodic confessions by those who claim to have been involved are suspect and often self-serving. The truth may be lost forever amid the fog of war and nationalist mythmaking.
The timing of the revolts
might have happened by chance – many of the interior provinces had been chafing under Zanzibar’s rule for years, and the empire’s involvement in a foreign war might have seemed like an opportune time to strike. But if it were chance, it could hardly have been a chance more favorable to Egypt. The revolts erupted at a time when Ethiopia and its allies had taken Shambe and the Egyptian armies were struggling to retreat through and around the Sudd swamp. And the provinces that rose up were not in the Nile basin – those had swung in Zanzibar’s favor, at least temporarily, when Egypt’s plans for the watershed were revealed – but in several other fringe areas, forcing the Sultan’s army to put out multiple fires at once. The semi-independent Somali vassals, the eastern Congolese, several Free Provinces and feudal holdings in western Tanganyika, were all aflame with rebellion by the end of the month.
The outbreak hit the allied war effort like a hammer. Within two weeks of the uprisings, Zanzibar had pulled out more than half the troops it had committed to the White Nile theater, often in a pell-mell fashion that left Ethiopia struggling to close gaps in the line. The Great Lakes states, too, withdrew many of their troops to guard against the possibility that the fighting might spill over their borders. Their withdrawal was more orderly, but they had been a key part of the Ethiopians’ defense in depth, and there were suddenly many fewer units available to conduct raids behind the Egyptian lines.
Nor was this the only crisis that Ethiopia faced. Although it had prepared for the Nile conflict for years beforehand, it had exhausted its stockpiled resources, and the lengthy war was draining its coffers. Also, the aid Ethiopia was receiving from Russia came by a far longer and more circuitous route than the help the Ottomans gave to Egypt, and perforce, the Russians were able to deliver less of it. That hadn’t mattered as much during the early months of the war, when Ethiopia had ample supplies of fuel and ammunition, but it had much greater impact now.
The result was a reversal of everything the Ethiopian alliance had gained during the past three months. By mid-March, Egypt had retaken Bor, and although its advance slowed as its supply lines lengthened, Juba changed hands again in early April. The Egyptian armies pushed south into Buganda, with their leading elements advancing to within 30 miles of Kampala and bringing the city under artillery fire.
But in early May, the Egyptian military council made a serious miscalculation: ironically, the same one that President Ramzi Elmasry had made the year before. With the White Nile all but taken, and with their supply lines more secure than at any time since the first weeks of the war, the junta decided that it was time to launch a massive attack on the highlands and deliver a knockout blow to Ethiopia. Nearly all the remaining Egyptian reserve forces, as well as regiments that might have been better used on the Buganda front, were committed to the assault.
These troops would discover, yet again, that the highlands were poor terrain for the kind of rider-intensive mobile warfare that Egypt favored. They would also learn that Russian aid to Ethiopia had come not only in fuel and weapons but in technical knowledge. Russia had recently developed an experimental, wagon-mounted short-range rocket battery, and it had given Ethiopia the design. These rockets could be made quickly and cheaply by Ethiopia’s light industrial plant, and although less accurate than artillery, they could deliver saturation bombardment more effectively than field guns, and could also move much faster.
Russia had never used these rockets in the field, and the development team had never named them, but they would get a Russian name anyway: within days after they were deployed, Ethiopian soldiers called them “Anastasias.”
Between the Anastasias and the rough terrain, the Egyptian advance bogged down: it got no closer than 100 miles from Gondar, and the casualty lists lengthened steadily. In the meantime, a Zanzibari diplomatic team headed by Paulo Abacar the Younger was holding emergency talks with the rebellious provinces, promising that if they stood down, amnesty would be granted and the future of the empire would be put on the table after the war. Paulo had won the trust of many provincial leaders during the past fifteen years as the Sultan’s liaison officer, and the very fact that the empire was engaging in diplomacy with its own provinces lent credibility to the pledge that its future would be open to discussion. Not all the rebel provinces agreed to this proposal, but enough did that Zanzibar was able to begin moving troops back to the White Nile.
This was also the time when the fighting in the western Congo basin spread into German-controlled regions, bringing Germany into the conflict. Its military involvement was limited to occupying the border region, and it declined to become a belligerent on either side, but it put pressure on Stamboul and St. Petersburg to resume their peacemaking efforts. It also began a peace campaign of its own, supported by unsubtle reminders that its troops in Ubangi-Shari were in a position to strike at both the Ethiopian and Egyptian forces.
It would take more months before these peacemaking efforts bore fruit. At first, the Egyptian junta still saw victory in its grasp, and later – when an allied offensive from east and south, supported by land and waterborne Anastasia batteries, turned the White Nile flank and retook Juba and Bor – the generals feared for their own position if they agreed to a ceasefire under circumstances that the public would view as defeat. But the situation did not improve: by now, Egypt too was running out of resources, it was unable to produce light rockets fast enough to counter the Ethiopian batteries, and the allied armies moved steadily northward.
By December, Egyptian troops had been expelled from Ethiopian territory, and on January 11, 1938, with allied armies threatening Khartoum and the Porte threatening to cut off aid unless the shooting stopped, the junta threw in the towel. A ceasefire in place was agreed the following day, and a formal armistice was approved by the Ethiopian and Egyptian parliaments on January 19. The war was over, and the task of forging a peace began…
Mikael Garang, “War and Peace on the Nile,” African History Quarterly 53: 102-11 (Spring 1999)
… From the beginning, the Nile War was a conflict over water rather than land, with both Egypt and Ethiopia disclaiming any desire for each other’s territory. The Egyptian war aims were simple: secure sole ownership of the Nile watershed. Those of Ethiopia and its allies were more complicated. Initially, Ethiopia’s goal was to stop Egypt, but as the war became wider in scope, the allies began to consider more ambitious plans for the management of the Nile. By 1937, it was apparent that a return to the status quo would create only a temporary peace: the underlying disputes over water rights would still be there, and as the Nile riparian states became more populous and industrialized, conflicts over each nation’s use of its territorial waters would intensify.
It was Paulo the Younger who suggested a third possibility: that a regional problem needed a regional solution. Others had proposed an international court, similar to the Court of Arbitration but specific to the Nile, that would have mandatory jurisdiction over water disputes, but Paulo argued that this would not be enough. What was needed instead was a governing body: something capable not only of resolving disputes as they arose but managing the water supply to prevent them, as far as possible, from arising.
He took his inspiration from the Turkestani constitution, which made the federal government responsible for navigation on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, but proposed an agency with a much broader remit and on an international scale. The watershed and aquifers of the Nile basin would be detached from the sovereignty of
any nation and made an entity in its own right, with the capacity to represent itself in international affairs and to sue and be sued in the Court of Arbitration. This entity – the Nile Basin Authority – would have a parliament elected by the people of all the riparian countries, a board of managers consisting partly of delegates from those countries’ governments and partly of experts chosen by the parliament, and its own police and courts. It would have the power to regulate the watershed’s use and set taxes and fees, the duty to manage it in a manner fair to all, and – critically – the obligation to assess compensation for any use that decreased the downstream water supply.
This idea was a radical one for the time, and initially met with resistance from the Ethiopian delegation, but thirty years of experiments with joint and overlapping sovereignty made it thinkable in a way that it would not have been in the nineteenth century. As the war dragged on and the costs of further conflict over the Nile were driven home, the Ethiopian monarchy and parliament warmed to the idea, and they eventually agreed after safeguards were built in to ensure that the authority could not hold the water supply hostage or bootstrap its sovereignty over the watershed into control of related domestic matters. With Ethiopia on board, the Great Lakes states fell into line – a regional management system would give them access to joint conservation and development projects that they could never afford on their own – and at a conference in Gondar in July 1937, the authority was officially adopted as an allied war aim.
With the allies holding the initiative at war’s end, and with the great powers supporting the authority, it was a foregone conclusion that it would be included in the final peace settlement. In fact, Egypt hardly even protested. The junta had fallen by the time the peace conference began, the government was in crisis, and President Elmasry was far more preoccupied with shoring up his domestic authority than seeking a confrontation with the great powers over a regional one. He put up enough show of resistance to negotiate a compensation schedule more favorable to Egypt, secure an ironclad guarantee against interference with existing uses, and ensure that Egypt would get a share of the revenue from any dams or canals built on its soil, but nothing beyond that. With the Treaty of Berlin on September 12, 1938, the Nile Authority was born.
This would be Paulo the Younger’s greatest diplomatic triumph, and it would be his last. He had been sick for two years – most likely stomach cancer, although it was never diagnosed at the time – and he was exhausted by the strain of wartime diplomacy, and three weeks after the treaty was signed, he died at the age of 66. The treaty would be a legacy that went well beyond the Nile. Not only would it make possible projects such as the Aswan dam and the exploitation of the Nubian fossil aquifer, both of which are key to the Nilotic states’ energy and water security, but it would be replicated along the Mekong, in the South China Sea, in Antarctica and in several European and Latin American watersheds. From the ashes of the Nile War, and the graves of its million dead, would come the beginnings of modern regional government…
Aishwarya Trivedi, East Africa Under the Omani Raj (Zanzibar Univ. Press, 2007)
… 1938 would also see the death of the Sultan of Zanzibar, and Paulo the Younger’s promise to put the empire’s future on the table suddenly became an acute concern. Under Tippu Tip’s constitution, the provincial nobles would choose a new Sultan from among the nearly four hundred princes. This would ordinarily be bargained for and arranged well in advance, but with the provinces deeply divided on whether the empire should even continue to exist, the succession this time would be wide open. The prince who could promise a majority of provinces the future they wanted would be elected, and nearly any of them might have the chance to build such a majority.
The maneuvering began even before the war ended. By general agreement, the election was deferred until after the peace was signed and a regency council was appointed in the meantime, but the candidates lost no time in staking out positions. And they would maneuver on a much broader field than in any previous election. The number of Free Provinces – in which feudal title was held by the people as a whole and which elected their delegates to the parliament – was now more than thirty, and even in the holdings governed by more traditional nobles, public opinion often mattered. The candidates politicked among the nobles as they had always done, but the canny ones also went out into the countryside and campaigned. They didn’t go to the provinces still in rebellion, but in most of the others, the people had a chance to greet the candidates and solicit their views on the empire’s government.
The two overriding issues quickly became secession and democracy: would the provinces who viewed the empire as a colonial master be free to leave it, and would there be an elected legislature alongside (or even in place of) the parliament of nobles? By the time the peace treaty was finished, it was clear that there was a critical mass in support of both. A near-majority of provinces either wanted to leave or wanted their neighbors out, and even most of those that preferred to keep the empire together didn’t want to do so at the price of endless war. And the past twenty years had taught even many nobles that old-style feudalism was no longer viable.
The parliament convened in Zanzibar in January 1939, and Prince Faisal – ironically a member of the old Omani royal family, but one who had been educated in India and had decidedly leftist leanings – quickly became the front-runner. At the first ballot, he fell 46 votes short of a majority but more than 100 ahead of his nearest rival. By the fourth day, policy concessions and under-the-table bribes had secured him the remaining votes. It was agreed that Zanzibar would have a lower house elected by universal suffrage, but that the nobles’ house would retain its existing powers and their provinces’ internal autonomy would be guaranteed, and that by the end of the year, each of the interior provinces would hold a referendum on whether to remain part of the empire. The agreement was denounced by its opponents as a surrender, and in some ways it was, but Zanzibar had grown exhausted with the effort of holding onto its hinterland, and the Sultan’s throne went to the candidate who promised an end to the struggle.
The referenda, which were held in November, went widely as predicted. The Yao kingdom voted overwhelmingly to stay, as did the southern tier of provinces which looked to Zanzibar for protection against Portuguese ambitions. All but two of the Congolese provinces voted to leave, as did the Somalis. In Tanganyika, about half the provinces stayed, with the empire retaining most of the nearer regions and a solid bloc of provinces in the Rift Valley, and several of the surviving African vassal kings opted for a more independent form of clientage.
The results of the referenda took effect on January 1, 1940, and the initial transfer of power and withdrawal of troops was peaceful. The aftermath, however, would be far less so, as the newly independent provinces began to squabble over borders…
Actually, IIRC, the Pacific islands mostly ended up as mandates IOTL, though I'm honestly not sure which is the shadier deal - if for no better reason than at least ITTL, a class of local administrators might arise that has the knowledge and the ambition to do more for their respective nations (a la the Copperbelt?).
