Word: omdurman
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Across the river, in Khartoum's sister city of Omdurman,*inside a mud-walled courtyard cut off from the street by a corrugated iron door and guarded by a somnolent sentry, an intelligent, tough and tenacious Sudanese politician sat on the edge of a sagging couch, downed numberless cups of coffee as he conferred busily with a steady flow of visitors. His Excellency Sayed Abdullah Khalil wants to win next month's election for his Umma (Nation) Party and keep the post he now holds: Prime Minister of the Sudan...
...Dervishes of the Mahdi killed Britain's famed fanatical General Charles Rogers ("Chinese") Gordon at the end of a ten-month siege in 1885, Lord Kitchener returned for revenge and to forestall French expansion in the area, slew 10,563 Dervishes in a brief pitched battle at Omdurman. Among Kitchener's cavalry subalterns in the battle: Winston Spencer Churchill, then...
...British marched out of India in 1948 with colors flying, pipes skirling, and every upper lip as stiff as Kitchener's the day the dervishes whirled and charged him at Omdurman. But all the pomp and bluster of yesterday were missing last week when the last British soldiers pulled out of another great outpost of Empire. Five days before the deadline set by the Anglo-Egyptian agreement, Brigadier John H. S. Lacey handed over the keys of his Suez Canal headquarters to Lieut. Colonel Abdullah Azouni of the Egyptian army and quietly led the last 91 of Britain...
Thus Winston Churchill, a dashing young subaltern in the 21st Lancers, describes the Battle of Omdurman, one of those minor actions which made the British Empire great in the days of Queen Victoria. For 80 years, Egyptian armies had spread fire and confusion among the ancient kingdoms of Kordofan, Darfur and Nubia, immediately south of Egypt, part of a vast area south of the Sahara desert called by the Arabs Bilad-as-Sudan, meaning Country of the Blacks. When the British army occupied Egypt (1882), an attempt was made to bring order also to these vassal states...
...more than two years ago, without a struggle of any kind, the British agreed to withdraw from the Sudan as soon as an independent provisional government could "Sudanize" the administration and write its own constitution. Last November, 57 years after Sandhurst-trained Winston Churchill charged into the Battle of Omdurman, the regimental band of the Roy al Leicestershires played God Save the Queen and the last British soldier left the Sudan...