Britain’s bloody history in Sudan

A 72 hour truce between rival military factions has been brokered in Sudan’s civil war by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But whether this one holds, or falls apart like the previous ones, the history of one of Africa’s largest countries is a troubled one. It is also not the first time that an emergency evacuation of British citizens has caused a British political storm. 

In 1884, just as today, a British prime minister was under intense pressure to rescue British citizens from savage fighting in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. So violent was the criticism of the ‘dithering’ in Downing Street then, that it almost destroyed the career of the grand old man of Victorian politics, the great Liberal statesman William Gladstone.

A stern critic of imperialism at the height of the British Empire, Gladstone had resisted getting involved in the Sudan in the first place.