Qualla: First and second battles of El Teb

First and second battles of El Teb: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The march began at dawn on 4 February 1884, along the coast road to Tokar. Valentine Baker - Baker Pasha to the Egyptian army he commanded - had 3,500 men and orders to relieve a garrison trapped somewhere beyond the dunes. Most of his infantry were Egyptian gendarmes who had enlisted for civil duty in the Nile Delta and woke up one morning to find themselves shipped to Sudan. They did not want to be there. Halfway to Tokar, at a dry wadi called El Teb, roughly 1,000 Sudanese fighters rose out of the scrub. The gendarmes fired a single volley, then broke. By the end of the morning, of 3,500 men, barely 700 returned.

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First and second battles of El Teb: How Sudan Became Everyone's Problem

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Britain had not meant to be in Sudan. It had meant to be in Egypt, quietly protecting the Suez Canal after putting down Urabi Pasha's revolt in 1882. But the Khedive of Egypt, whose rule now depended on British bayonets, nominally governed Sudan too - and Sudan was in revolt. Muh...

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First and second battles of El Teb: The Rout at El Teb

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Baker chose Osman Digna's ground by accident. He had ferried his men from Suakin to Trinkitat and set off inland in a loose mass - the Egyptians were not trained to march in square. When Digna's fighters charged, every European officer who tried to rally the line was killed. Bake...

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First and second battles of El Teb: Graham Comes Back Heavy

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. In Britain, the defeat at El Teb turned the political tide. Lord Wolseley's imperialist faction demanded regulars. Gladstone reluctantly agreed, and on 21 February a 4,500-strong column under Sir Gerald Graham - Royal Irish Fusiliers, York and Lancasters, Marines, and three batta...

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First and second battles of El Teb: The Dead, Counted and Uncounted

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. By day's end on 29 February, roughly 2,000 Mahdist fighters were estimated dead, though only 825 bodies were counted on the field. British casualties were light. The dead at El Teb on the first day - Baker's Egyptian gendarmes, nearly three thousand of them, abandoned in their pa...

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First and second battles of El Teb: The Road That Led to Omdurman

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. El Teb was not a famous battle. Isandlwana happened five years before, Rorke's Drift too; Omdurman and Kitchener's reconquest were still fourteen years away. But the two days at El Teb compressed the entire story of the Sudan war into a single landscape: a hinterland people fight...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain