Qualla: Fashoda Incident

Fashoda Incident: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Omicroñ'R, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Shilluk had been here for centuries when Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived on the White Nile in July 1898 with 120 men and a collapsible steamboat. The Egyptian army had founded the fort at Fashoda in 1855, in a boggy spot where one of the few landings was possible. By the 1870s it was a market town. When Marchand arrived, the fort was deserted and in ruins. The Shilluk remained - farming, fishing, trading, doing whatever Shilluk people had always done on the river. That the map-makers in Paris and London, and eventually the war-rooms of two continental empires, spent four months negotiating over this piece of Shilluk country without consulting the Shilluk at all - this is the part of the Fashoda Incident that the incident's chroniclers almost never get to.

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Image: Omicroñ'R | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fashoda Incident: The Kingdom at the Crossing

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Fashoda sits in the heart of the Shilluk kingdom, one of the oldest continuously-functioning political institutions in this part of Africa. The kingdom is organized around the reth, a sacred king whose lineage the Shilluk trace back to their founding ancestor Nyikang. Shilluk soc...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Fashoda Incident: Two Lines on a Continent

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edward Linley Sambourne, Public domain. Draw a line from Cape Town to Cairo - the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes's dream - and another from Dakar to French Somaliland on the Red Sea - the French equivalent - and the lines cross in eastern South Sudan near Fashoda. That geometric accident gave the town a strategic imp...

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Image: Edward Linley Sambourne | Public domain

Fashoda Incident: The Small Room Where It Almost Happened

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, 1898, Public domain. Marchand's expedition left Brazzaville in a borrowed Belgian steamer. They steamed up the Ubangi to its head of navigation, then marched overland - 100 tons of supplies on porters' heads, including the disassembled parts of a collapsible steel steamboat with a one-ton boiler. The...

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Image: Unknown, 1898 | Public domain

Fashoda Incident: The Shilluk, Meanwhile

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. While European editors wrote leaders about national honor, the Shilluk community at Fashoda continued its daily rhythms. The fishermen went to the nets. The cattle moved between wet-season and dry-season pastures. The reth held court at the sacred village upriver. Kings had come ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Fashoda Incident: What the Bridge in Lyon Commemorates

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sandstein, Public domain. The French withdrew on 3 November 1898. Marchand took the long route home via Abyssinia and Djibouti rather than accept the quick steamer down the Nile. In France, Fashoda became a wound - 'Fashoda syndrome,' a foreign-policy reflex of asserting French influence where British inf...

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Image: Sandstein | Public domain