Fashoda incident

The Fachoda Incident or Fachoda Crisis is the name given to the episodes that took place in 1898 when France and the United Kingdom decided to build separate lines of communications aimed at connecting their respective African colonies on a continuous basis. The English goal was a north-south union and the French one was west-east. The UK was developing Cecil Rhodes' project, the Pan-African Highway, and sought to build a continuous line of British colonial possessions from Egypt to South Africa, or "From the Cape to Cairo" (From Cape to Cairo) as commented in the most expansionist British circles. Britain had made Egypt a de facto protectorate since 1881 and aspired to enjoy the same sovereign rights that the Egyptian government possessed over Sudan, even though Egypt's effective authority over those territories was weak. and this required a British military presence.

In the town of Kodok, in present-day South Sudan, there was a meeting of two military expeditions, a French one that arrived from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and a British one that advanced from Egypt following the course of the Nile, which upon meeting they entered into a dispute over the rights of their respective nations over the Nile basin. This lawsuit, although it did not reach an armed confrontation, mobilized public opinion in France and Great Britain in defense of the imperialist interests of both countries.

In March of the following year, a Franco-British Agreement was signed in London that established the limits of the respective zones of influence in Central Africa.

Context

Caricature of the Cairo Railroad Project to Cape Town of Cecil Rhodes in 1892. Founder of the Beers Mining Company, one of the first diamond companies, Rhodes was also the owner of the South African British Company, who forged Rodesia alone. He wanted to "paint the map of red (British)" and said, "all these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If he could, he would annex other planets."

Berlin Conference (1884)

Mahdist War

The Congo-Nile mission

France longed to connect its colonies by a continuous land line across North Africa, crossing the Sahara desert and linking the port of Djibouti (a French possession on the shores of the Indian Ocean) with the ports of Brazzaville and Douala, French possessions on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. However, the French government understood that after the agreements of the Berlin conference of 1884 it was necessary to first ensure a military occupation of the territories to be claimed, and thus impose "rights" in a region of Africa before other European powers.

Cape Town to Cairo Railway

Development

Contemporary illustration of Marchand's walk through Africa.

Arrival of Anglo-Egyptian troops to Fachoda (1898).

The city of Fachoda, on the banks of the Nile in present-day South Sudan, located at the intersection of two lines of imperialist expansion, thus becomes the scene of the Franco-British confrontation.

A French troop of 150 tirailleurs, or African riflemen, with a dozen European officers, set out from Brazzaville in the Congo River Basin in May 1897 under Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand with order to settle in the Fachoda area and declare it a protectorate of France. Once there, the French officers would have to wait for two military expeditions under French command, which would be sent as reinforcements from Djibouti, crossing Ethiopia.

After 14 months of marching through jungles, swamps, and deserts, in the very center of Africa, Marchand's expedition reached Fachoda, on the banks of the Nile, on July 10, 1898, but they did not find the expedition Frenchwoman who had departed from Djibouti. Said column, the "Bonchamps Expedition", did not reach its destination because the Ethiopian clans refused to let them cross their territory. Ignoring this situation, Marchand and his men established a small camp in Fachoda to await an expedition that would never arrive.

On September 18, 1898, Marchand and his men sighted a well-armed flotilla of British gunboats also arriving at Fachoda, led by Major Horatio Kitchener. A joint army of British and Egyptians had just defeated the troops of the Sudanese leader Muhammad Ahmad (the Mahdi) in the Battle of Omdurman and therefore the British had dedicated themselves in those months to reinsuring their dominance over Sudan, which Kitchener communicated to the French officers, politely requesting that Marchand's expedition withdraw. Both sides entrenched themselves in their positions and built two separate camps, since neither agreed to abandon the land; Despite this, Marchand and Kitchener maintained calm and cordiality at all times, avoiding all violence between their forces, both calmly insisting on the "right" of their respective countries about Fachoda.

When news of this meeting of antagonistic European troops at a remote point in Africa reached Europe, via telegraph from Egypt, even though not a single bullet had been fired, popular opinion in France and Britain erupted into mutual accusations of hostile expansionism, and in manifestations of exacerbated jingoism against the rival power. The press of both countries encouraged the most passionate imperialism. This generated a strong climate of international tension throughout the month of October 1898, in addition to evaluating the possibility of mobilizing for an armed conflict by both governments.

Resolution

Colonial division of Africa on the eve of World War I (1914).

The relationship of forces at the naval level was fully favorable to the United Kingdom, which had the best armed navy in the world, while the French war fleet had poor organization and less power in its ships. The French army was then larger and better armed than the British, but this factor was of less importance in the case of fighting a war far from Europe.

The British naval superiority was considered by French politicians as a very important deterrent, which led the French government to order its troops to withdraw on November 3, 1898, ending the incident. The French withdrew from the conflict due to the naval superiority of the British. This fact meant the final defeat of France's trans-African aspirations.

Marchand and his men set out on the return path as soon as they received the respective order from Paris, arriving in Brazzaville in mid-1899. Marchand immediately received orders to head with his officers to metropolitan France, arriving in Toulon at the end of June 1899 and receiving a national homage on the festivity of July 14 of the same year.

Consequences

Relations between France and the United Kingdom improved considerably in the following years. For if France's real foreign policy priority at the time was to recapture Alsace and Lorraine, annexed by the German Empire in 1871, the French could not afford to alienate their English neighbor. Thus, in April 1904, the signing of the agreements known as the Entente Cordiale made the two countries allies. An alliance that came into play during the First World War (1914-1918) in which France and England will fight against the Germans.