The Structure of a Legacy: Military Slavery in Northeast Africa

This article examines the impact of a military institution on civilian life in Northeast Africa. Slave armies used by a series of states during the conquest of the Sudan and East Africa drew on societies on the periphery of the state and spread networks of military and military-derived communities, all defining themselves by reference to the state but retaining links with those groups which supplied them. These networks are still active. The institution of military slavery has been neglected in the study of slavery in Africa. Historians acknowledge the existence of individual slave soldiers but tend to overlook the institution of military slavery which produced them and defined their status (Johnson I988). There have been detailed studies of the origins of military slavery in the early Muslim polity (Crone I980; Pipes I98I), of the activities of slave armies in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Sudan (Spaulding 1985; Kapteijns I985), and even of the fate of Sudanese slave soldiers who settled in Uganda (Meldon I908; Soghayroun I981). But the study of the institution itself is fragmented by academic demarcations between "medieval" and "modern," "Middle Eastern" and "African," "precolonial" and "colonial." There is as yet no general recognition among historians of the continuity of the institution of military slavery in the Nile Valley in modern times; nor is there yet an explicit awareness of the legacy of the institution in the development of colonial and postcolonial armies and urban centers in East Africa. There have been studies of ethnicity and slavery as part of social history, and of ethnicity and armies as part of political science, but there has yet to be a study of ethnicity, slavery, and armies combined as part of the enduring social and political history of Northeast Africa. Military slavery and institutions derived from it have a long history Ethnohistory 36:1 (Winter i989). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc oo14-I8oI/89/$I.5o. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 05:15:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Military Slavery in Northeast Africa in the Islamic Middle East. Just when military slavery disappeared from the Islamic heartlands with the massacres of the Mamluks in Egypt in i8II and the Janissaries in Turkey in i826, it was given new life and vigor through Muhammad Ali's invasion of the Sudan in 1820. The independent Sudanese kingdoms of Sennar, Tegali, and Darfur had all used slave soldiers before the Egyptian conquest, and a significant proportion of Egypt's army from I8zi to I9z5 consisted of Sudanese slave soldiers. They played a major role in most of Egypt's military ventures in the nineteenth century, and as a result of these ventures rifle-armed slave soldiers appeared elsewhere in the Central Sudan and East Africa. During a period of about a century these Sudanese soldiers were sent to many parts of the world. They fought in Greece on the side of the Ottoman Sultan, and in Syria against him; some were lent to Napoleon III as part of Maximilian's army in Mexico; some were sold to the Germans in i888 to put down the Bushiri rising in Tanganyika; some manned Egyptian garrisons in Somalia, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Independent slave armies raised by Sudanese merchants and often incorporating slave soldiers from the Egyptian army, carved out their own empires, the most famous being that of Rabih ibn Fadlallah in what is now Chad, defeated by the French in 900o. Slave soldiers deserted to the Mahdi in the Sudan, or fought stubbornly on the side of Egypt. Sometimes the same soldiers did both. One isolated regiment of Sudanese soldiers held out in the Egyptian outposts of Equatoria after the fall of Khartoum until they were recruited by Lugard into the service of the Imperial British East Africa Company in I891, becoming the ancestors of the Ugandan army. In the twentieth century, descendants of slave soldiers continued to serve in the colonial and postindependence armies of the Sudan and Uganda (Johnson I988). It is a long history of varied service. Yet beneath this multitude of armies and nations rests the same institution, and in many cases the same soldiers. It was an indigenous institution which was taken over and used by a series of imperial powers (Egypt, Britain, and Germany, to name but three). In using it they changed it, but they also adapted themselves to it. The survival and transformation of military slavery had very important consequences for the conquest and pacification of the Sudan and East Africa, and it has had equally important social and political consequences for two nations, the Sudan and Uganda, since independence. The survival and transformation of the institution has been obscured by the way in which modern scholarship has studied and described colonial armies, and by the fact that the continuity of Sudanese military slavery is difficult to trace through the histories of the many nations in which it is found. A proper study of Sudanese military slavery will require a careful search through a variety of sources: the official records relating to Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya in the Public Records Office; the unoffi73 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 05:15:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms