Fashoda Incident

In the second half of 1898 a small French expedition and a much larger Anglo-Egyptian force faced each other at Fashoda, a ruined Egyptian fort on the White Nile in what is now South Sudan. No shots were fired, but for several weeks Britain and France came close to war over who should control the upper Nile. France backed down in November, and the settlement that followed cleared the way for the Anglo-French friendship of the early twentieth century.

The confrontation grew out of the Scramble for Africa. France was building an empire eastward from Senegal across the Sahel and hoped to link it to its small colony at Djibouti on the Red Sea, creating a belt of territory across the continent. Britain, which had occupied Egypt since 1882, wanted a chain of possessions running north to south, the "Cape to Cairo" vision associated with Cecil Rhodes. The two lines crossed in the upper Nile valley, near Fashoda. Some French politicians also hoped that a foothold on the Nile would give them leverage to force Britain out of Egypt.

Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand reached Libreville, in Gabon, in June 1896 with about 120 Senegalese tirailleurs and a dozen French officers and staff. From Brazzaville they travelled up the Ubangi River and then overland, hauling around 100 tons of supplies, including a steamboat that could be taken apart. After a gruelling trek of some 14 months they reached Fashoda on 10 July 1898. Expeditions meant to join them from the east, through Ethiopia, never arrived.

Meanwhile Herbert Kitchener was leading the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of Sudan during the Mahdist War. After his victory at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September, he steamed upriver with five gunboats carrying some 1,500 British, Egyptian and Sudanese troops. He met Marchand on 19 September, dressed in Egyptian uniform, and the Egyptian flag was raised at a distance from the French one. Marchand accepted this on condition that it did not settle the territory's status.

On the spot the two officers behaved courteously, sharing whisky and agreeing to await instructions. In Europe, however, the news caused uproar, with each country accusing the other of aggression. Through September and October the Royal Navy prepared for war and called up reserves. The French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, recognised that Britain held the naval advantage and wanted British goodwill against Germany. "They have soldiers. We only have arguments," he is reported to have said. On 3 November France ordered Marchand to withdraw, and he marched out eastwards through Abyssinia to Djibouti instead of going down the Nile through Egyptian-held territory.

In France the retreat was felt as a national humiliation, deepened by the bitter divisions of the Dreyfus affair. In March 1899 an Anglo-French agreement fixed the boundary between their spheres along the watershed of the Nile and Congo rivers, ending French hopes of a continuous east–west empire. Fashoda was the last serious colonial clash between the two powers, and most historians see its peaceful settlement as paving the way for the Entente Cordiale of 1904. The town was later renamed Kodok. The phrase "Fashoda syndrome" came to describe a French readiness to resist British influence in later crises.

Our 1900 map shows the outcome, with Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian control and France's African territories, later organised as French Equatorial Africa, stopping short of the Nile basin.