Readers are probably already familiar with aerial reconnaissance photographs from the 1914-1918 conflict. What are missing from this example are any trenches. The image was taken from a Royal Flying Corps B.E.2c, flying not over France or Belgium but in Darfur. The straight open strip of land in the centre of the image is not an airfield but rather a section of a wadi (dry riverbed) running through the capital of the then Sultanate, Al-Fashir. It was taken in the dry season, in May 1916, during the invasion of Darfur by Anglo-Egyptian forces from Sudan to the East.
This little-known campaign, in which Darfur was annexed to Sudan, is this month the subject of ‘The Forgotten Campaign’, an exhibition at the Oriental Museum in Durham curated by Dr Chris Vaughan. The exhibition draws on collections in the Sudan Archive, comprising official and personal papers of Sudanese government and military personnel, and particularly on photographic material such as this.
The decision to invade Darfur in March 1916 swung on a complex of factors, geo-political, regional, financial, and personal. These led in March 1916, on the orders of Governor-General Wingate, to the invasion of Darfur by a force led by Lieutenant-Colonel Philip J. V. Kelly, and culminated in the occupation of Al-Fashir on 23 May and on 6 November in the killing of Sultan Ali Dinar and two of his sons.
Before the bombs that made the craters in this image were dropped the R.F.C. distributed leaflets denouncing Ali Dinar and promising good government and religious freedom. After a defeat at Beringia, confronted with overwhelming military force Ali Dinar lost support sufficient to defend his capital, and so abandoned his palace and withdrew to the south-west. In Britain, the speed and extent of the campaign’s territorial gains, in contrast to the bloody war of attrition in Flanders, drew some press attention, though it otherwise had little impact on the course of the war.
In addition to many official records of the Sudan Government recording the decision-making process that led to the invasion and the course of the campaign itself, for example those in the Wingate collection, the Sudan Archive also contains several photograph albums of British members of the Sudan force that took part. This image comes from an album in the collection of J. Angus Gillan, then Assistant Political and Intelligence Officer with the Sudan Western Frontier Force, and later Civil Secretary of Sudan. It was Gillan who, writing in 1939, described the campaign as “an infinitesimal sideshow in the Great War”. But its consequences in the region were more profound and long-lasting, violently binding a region of almost half a million square kilometres and several different ethnic groups within the Sudanese state, of which it remains a troubled part today.
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