Al-Zubayr Rahma

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Al-Zubayr Rahma (born Al-Zobeir Rahman Mansur, also known as Al-Zobeir Rahma Pasha or Rahama Zobeir), (born 1830), was a Sudanese Arab slave trader who rose to become an Egyptian pasha and Sudanese governor. He came from the Gemaab section of the Jaalin tribe in Northern Sudan, and was a member of a family that claims descent from the Koreish tribe through Abbas, uncle of Muhammad.

[edit] Rise to power

Zobeir was a businessman who established a large personal empire in central Africa whose whose raison d'etre was the slave trade. Setting out from Khartoum in 1856 with a small army of hired soldiers, he set up a network of trading forts known as zeribas. This network eventually controlled the Bahr el Ghazal as well as some of what is today the Central African Republic and southern Chad. This network bought or forcibly seized large quantities of ivory and slaves from the local inhabitants and shipped them north to Cairo. He became prominent as the most energetic and intelligent of the Arab ivory and slave traders who circa 1860 established themselves on the White Nile and in the Bahr-el-Ghazal.

Nominally a subject of Egypt, he raised an army of several thousand well armed blacks and became a dangerous rival to the Egyptian authorities. In 1871, at the height of his power, Zobeir was visited by Georg Schweinfurth. Schweinfurth found him surrounded with a court which was little less than princely in its details (Heart of Africa, vol. ii., chap. xv.). In 1869 an expedition sent from Khartum into the Bahr-el-Ghazal was attacked by Zobeir and completely defeated, its commander being slain. Zobeir represented that he was blameless in this matter, received a pardon, and was appointed governor of Bahr el Ghazal in 1873 in return for an annual tribute of ivory.

In 1873 he attacked the sultan of Darfur and conquered the Sultanate of Darfur in 1874. In return, the khedive Ismail Pasha gave him the ranks of bey and pasha, and sent him reinforcements.

Soon thereafter, the arrival of Charles George Gordon as governor of the Sudan led to a campaign to suppress the slave trade upon which Zubayr's empire depended. Zubayr traveled to Cairo to complain, and to press his claim for the governorship of the newly conquered Darfur, but once in Cairo the Eqyptian authorities refused to permit his return to the Sudan, though he was allowed to go to Constantinople at the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War.

[edit] War with the United Kingdom

In 1878 his son Suleiman, having got possession of the Bahr-el-Ghazal, and acting on instructions from his father, defied the authority of General Gordon, the new governor-general of the Sudan. Gordon sent Romolo Gessi against Suleiman, who was subdued after an arduous campaign and executed. During the campaign Zobeir offered, if he were allowed to return to the Sudan, to restore order and to pay a revenue of 25,000 a year to the khedive. Gordon declined this help, and subsequently, for his instigation of the revolt, Zobeir was condemned to death, but the trial was a farce, the sentence was remitted, and he remained at Cairo, now in high favor with the khedival court.

While deeply angered by his son's death, Zobeir remained loyal. When the Mahdist revolt broke out in Sudan, Gordon, who had been sent to Khartoum to effect the evacuation of the Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan, recognized that only Zobeir had the military skill and the connections in the region to defeat the uprising. In March of 1884, Gordon astonished Europe by requesting that the same Zobeir, whose son he had overthrown and whose trade he had ruined, should be sent to Khartum as his successor. Zobeir, described by Sir Reginald Wingate, who knew him well, as a quiet, far-seeing, thoughtful man of iron will, a born ruler of men (Mahdiism and the Egyptian Sudan, book v.), might have been able to stem the mahdist movement. But to reinstate the notorious slave-dealer was regarded in London as too perilous an expedient, even in the extreme circumstances then existing, although Colonel Stewart (Gordon's companion in Khartum), Sir Evelyn Baring and Nubar Pasha in Cairo, and Queen Victoria and Mr Gladstone, all favored such a course.

The British, however, were worried about a possible alliance between Zobeir and the Mahdi. In March of 1885 Zobeir was arrested in Cairo by order of the British government for treasonable correspondence with the Mahdi and other enemies of Egypt, and was interred at Gibraltar. In August 1887 he was allowed to return to Cairo, and after the 1899 reconquest of the Sudan was permitted to settle in his native country. He established himself on his estates at Geili, some 30 miles North of Khartum.

In retirement Zubayr wrote his memoirs, which were translated into English as Black Ivory: Or, the Story of El Ziebeir Pasha, Slaver and Sultan, as Told By Himself.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Winston Churchill, The River War: An Account Of The Reconquest Of The Sudan, 1902, available at Project Gutenberg (Churchill spells his name 'Zubehr')