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Dervish: The Rise and Fall of an African Empire
'Dervish' is the vivid and colorful story of one of the more remarkable episodes in the ‘high Empire’ period of British history. The Mahdi’s rising in the Sudan in the 1880s starting as a localized Holy War against the ‘decadent’ Turkish/Egyptian overlords, engulfed a million square miles of arid territory and forced the British Liberal Government to get involved after the early disasters of the Hicks expedition and Gordon’s death at Khartoum.
The narrative, which makes excellent use of the first-hand diaries and reports, including those of Rider Haggard’s brother Andrew and of Father Ohrwalder (the Austrian missionary who spent ten years of captivity in the Mahdi’s camp), brilliantly describes the growth and strength of the Mahdist movement and the extraordinary devotion and discipline of the Dervish troops. Facing such opponents with stoic endurance were the British, Egyptian and Sudanese Negro soldiers, and the resulting military engagements evoked amazing feats of courage and derring-do on both sides. The Dervish Empire outlasted the Mahdi by thirteen years. It ended in the battle of Omdurman and Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan, which was well supported by Reginald Wingate’s military intelligence operations. It lasted a comparatively brief span of time, but it had been established at the expense not only of the neighboring Abyssinians but also of the European white man, at a time when Britain was approaching the zenith of its imperial power.
The narrative, which makes excellent use of the first-hand diaries and reports, including those of Rider Haggard’s brother Andrew and of Father Ohrwalder (the Austrian missionary who spent ten years of captivity in the Mahdi’s camp), brilliantly describes the growth and strength of the Mahdist movement and the extraordinary devotion and discipline of the Dervish troops. Facing such opponents with stoic endurance were the British, Egyptian and Sudanese Negro soldiers, and the resulting military engagements evoked amazing feats of courage and derring-do on both sides. The Dervish Empire outlasted the Mahdi by thirteen years. It ended in the battle of Omdurman and Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan, which was well supported by Reginald Wingate’s military intelligence operations. It lasted a comparatively brief span of time, but it had been established at the expense not only of the neighboring Abyssinians but also of the European white man, at a time when Britain was approaching the zenith of its imperial power.
235 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
About the author
Philip Warner
89 books9 followersPhilip Warner (1914 - 2000) was an outstanding military historian, and for the last 13 years The Daily Telegraph's peerless Army obituarist. Indeed, he played a vital role in setting the standard for the modern Telegraph obituary. He had a relish for the piquant detail and an understanding that a good story should never be overdressed.
He was a master of the laconic, lapidary phrase. Warner's direct, uncluttered and transparent prose, was a reflection of the man. Above all, he felt deep admiration for the lives he celebrated. His own character, always strong, had been tempered by his terrible experiences at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War.
One of the Allied soldiers rounded up and imprisoned after the fall of Singapore on February 15 1942, he spent some time in the infamous Changi jail, and worked on the Railway of Death. For every sleeper laid on the 1,000 miles of track through Malaya, Burma and Thailand, a prisoner of war was lost. Philip Warner was saved by his tough-mindedness and by his belief in the virtues of loyalty. To help his fellow prisoners forget their troubles, he organised plays, talks and debates.
Afterwards, he never liked to mention his ordeal. He felt he owed his survival to his physical condition (he performed 30 minutes of exercises every day of his life), his scrupulous hygiene (hard to stick to when one is starving), and to his strong sense of belonging to his family back in Britain. At night he would look at the moon, and think of it passing over Warwickshire.
In 1944 Warner and other able-bodied PoWs were stowed under deck in a troopship (he enjoyed the irony of being almost torpedoed by the Americans), and taken to Japan, where he worked in the copper mines, in dark, hot and dangerous conditions.
As the Americans closed in, he and his fellow PoWs had the unnerving experience of being herded into caves, while the Japanese guards set up machine-guns outside. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably saved the prisoners from massacre.
At the beginning of the war Warner had weighed 14 stone; in 1945 he was 4.5 stone. In 1,100 days of captivity, he only received half a Red Cross parcel. He was never among those inclined to bestow easy forgiveness upon the Japanese. The maltreatment which he had endured increased his natural reticence. Although he set great store by loyalty, he gave his trust warily.
Once certain that he could rely on someone, he would do anything for them; should anyone abuse his trust, he was slow to forgive. "There are six billion people in the world," he was wont to say, "and when this person gets to the top of the pile again, I will give him another chance." After the war Warner taught at Sandhurst and became a prolific writer, turning out more than 50 books.
He would produce two volumes a year, not to mention up to 200 obituaries and many book reviews - all with an absolute minimum of fuss. He worked on the principle that, once he had covered a page with writing, he could always cross it out. He was a firm believer in the virtues of perseverance - "Stick at the wicket and the runs will come" - and in early starts: "One hour in the morning is worth two in the afternoon, is worth three in the evening."
In the 1970s he was seriously ill, but under his colossal labour he throve as never before. Without it, he used to say, he would have had to play golf every day; and, useful player though he was, that was not his idea of a tolerable life.
Though the last man to preach, Philip Warner set a supreme example of how to tackle old age. While eager to enjoy himself, and, still more, to see that his friends enjoyed themselves, he instinctively understood that pleasure is best courted against a background of disciplined endeavour.
Philip Arthur William Warner was born at Nuneaton on May 19 1914, the last in
He was a master of the laconic, lapidary phrase. Warner's direct, uncluttered and transparent prose, was a reflection of the man. Above all, he felt deep admiration for the lives he celebrated. His own character, always strong, had been tempered by his terrible experiences at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War.
One of the Allied soldiers rounded up and imprisoned after the fall of Singapore on February 15 1942, he spent some time in the infamous Changi jail, and worked on the Railway of Death. For every sleeper laid on the 1,000 miles of track through Malaya, Burma and Thailand, a prisoner of war was lost. Philip Warner was saved by his tough-mindedness and by his belief in the virtues of loyalty. To help his fellow prisoners forget their troubles, he organised plays, talks and debates.
Afterwards, he never liked to mention his ordeal. He felt he owed his survival to his physical condition (he performed 30 minutes of exercises every day of his life), his scrupulous hygiene (hard to stick to when one is starving), and to his strong sense of belonging to his family back in Britain. At night he would look at the moon, and think of it passing over Warwickshire.
In 1944 Warner and other able-bodied PoWs were stowed under deck in a troopship (he enjoyed the irony of being almost torpedoed by the Americans), and taken to Japan, where he worked in the copper mines, in dark, hot and dangerous conditions.
As the Americans closed in, he and his fellow PoWs had the unnerving experience of being herded into caves, while the Japanese guards set up machine-guns outside. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably saved the prisoners from massacre.
At the beginning of the war Warner had weighed 14 stone; in 1945 he was 4.5 stone. In 1,100 days of captivity, he only received half a Red Cross parcel. He was never among those inclined to bestow easy forgiveness upon the Japanese. The maltreatment which he had endured increased his natural reticence. Although he set great store by loyalty, he gave his trust warily.
Once certain that he could rely on someone, he would do anything for them; should anyone abuse his trust, he was slow to forgive. "There are six billion people in the world," he was wont to say, "and when this person gets to the top of the pile again, I will give him another chance." After the war Warner taught at Sandhurst and became a prolific writer, turning out more than 50 books.
He would produce two volumes a year, not to mention up to 200 obituaries and many book reviews - all with an absolute minimum of fuss. He worked on the principle that, once he had covered a page with writing, he could always cross it out. He was a firm believer in the virtues of perseverance - "Stick at the wicket and the runs will come" - and in early starts: "One hour in the morning is worth two in the afternoon, is worth three in the evening."
In the 1970s he was seriously ill, but under his colossal labour he throve as never before. Without it, he used to say, he would have had to play golf every day; and, useful player though he was, that was not his idea of a tolerable life.
Though the last man to preach, Philip Warner set a supreme example of how to tackle old age. While eager to enjoy himself, and, still more, to see that his friends enjoyed themselves, he instinctively understood that pleasure is best courted against a background of disciplined endeavour.
Philip Arthur William Warner was born at Nuneaton on May 19 1914, the last in
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 23, 2023
Philip Warner's Dervish is a short volume about the Mahdist uprising in 1880s Sudan, that much-dramatized and sensationalized war between a millenarian Islamic sect, the tottering Egyptian khedivate and a British government reluctant to directly involve themselves fighting a far-flung rebellion. Warner, writing in the 1970s, makes some effort to provide a more fleshed-out record of this conflict than most English language accounts, using memoirs of Mahdist generals and other Sudanese sources alongside familiar British narratives of the war. He takes time to sketch the life of Mohammed Ahmed, the self-educated son of a Sudanese boat builder, who through his readings became convinced he was the Mahdi and merged his cause with nationalist grievances against the Egyptians who'd occupied the Sudan since the 1820s. Indeed, the strength of Warner's book is that he does a respectable job sketching Madhism's initial appeal when the alternative was domination either by corrupt Egyptians or infidel foreigners, showing the government as a functional if repressive state that endured for over a decade. Though not for want of folly; while the Mahdi's forces conquered Khartoum, killed General Gordon and defeated several attempts at reconquest, after his death his successors plunged the Mahdiya into near-unending war against rebellious tribes, Egyptian border garrisons and neighboring Abyssinia, gradually wearing down its power and weakening its strength. By the time Kitchener's reconquest arrived in the 1890s the Khalifa, the Mahdi's successor, had done much to squander the fruits of his earlier victory; and at Omdurman a well-armed, impeccably organized Anglo-Egyptian army proved a foe that the Mahdists, for all their fanatical bravery, couldn't hope to defeat.
Warner's book is to be commended for trying to flesh out the story beyond the melodrama of Gordon's fate and the botched relief expedition, which he treats less as "the ultimate imperial adventure" (the title of a recent, celebratory volume about Gordon) than a massive, pig-headed act of folly. He devotes equal time to peripheral skirmishes and conflicts outside the traditional narrative - this book offers the best explication I've read of the botched Hicks Expedition, a hastily-organized Egyptian army sent to crush the Mahdi only to see itself annihilated, a year before Gordon met a similar fate. While Warner stresses their "bravery" he also notes that the Mahdists boasted talented generals, like the much-feared Osman Digna, who possessed a tactical skill that allowed them to win battles against better-armed and organized opponents. He also argues that the Mahdi and Khalifa saw the British more as an irritant than a menace, while devoting the bulk of their men and resources to their bloody war against Abyssinia (a war which, by killing that nation's King John and weakening its political balanced, indirectly caused Italy's first invasion of that country a decade later). While relying heavily on Western sources, including the captivity narratives of Slatin, Neufeld and other Europeans imprisoned by the Mahdi, Warner makes an effort to check their accuracy and question their more sensational claims (one suspects a critic like Edward Said would have a field day with Slatin's stories of the Khalifa's debauchery, which as Warner notes he can't possibly have witnessed). Warner's book does not reinvent the wheel about its subject, nor is it fully balanced; but compared to similar works that even today recapitulate the old Four Feathers narrative of the war, it's a refreshing perspective.
Warner's book is to be commended for trying to flesh out the story beyond the melodrama of Gordon's fate and the botched relief expedition, which he treats less as "the ultimate imperial adventure" (the title of a recent, celebratory volume about Gordon) than a massive, pig-headed act of folly. He devotes equal time to peripheral skirmishes and conflicts outside the traditional narrative - this book offers the best explication I've read of the botched Hicks Expedition, a hastily-organized Egyptian army sent to crush the Mahdi only to see itself annihilated, a year before Gordon met a similar fate. While Warner stresses their "bravery" he also notes that the Mahdists boasted talented generals, like the much-feared Osman Digna, who possessed a tactical skill that allowed them to win battles against better-armed and organized opponents. He also argues that the Mahdi and Khalifa saw the British more as an irritant than a menace, while devoting the bulk of their men and resources to their bloody war against Abyssinia (a war which, by killing that nation's King John and weakening its political balanced, indirectly caused Italy's first invasion of that country a decade later). While relying heavily on Western sources, including the captivity narratives of Slatin, Neufeld and other Europeans imprisoned by the Mahdi, Warner makes an effort to check their accuracy and question their more sensational claims (one suspects a critic like Edward Said would have a field day with Slatin's stories of the Khalifa's debauchery, which as Warner notes he can't possibly have witnessed). Warner's book does not reinvent the wheel about its subject, nor is it fully balanced; but compared to similar works that even today recapitulate the old Four Feathers narrative of the war, it's a refreshing perspective.
August 17, 2025
One of the best written historical books I have read. You can tell the author is passionate about the subject, which helps the story flow along with a quick pace instead of being a slow, dry slog. The large amount of firsthand accounts do a beautiful job of giving insight into what went on in the Sudan and the graphic details underscore how brutal life in Sudan and religious warfare can be. A great book in every metric, if only more history writers could follow Mr.Warner.
May 23, 2013
An excellent amuse bouche for the period, covers the pertinent areas of the conflict as well as the characters, with plenty of references to contemporary sources. Leaves you wanting to read more on the period- I have just purchased 3 books on the period from Amaqzon! Highly recommended for an introduction to the war in the Sudan in the late nineteenth century.
November 4, 2014
Having loved the movie "Khartoum", I enjoyed this good coverage of the background and broader view of those happenings in this book.
May 30, 2026
Excellent narrative, but obvious and unexamined anti-liberal bias. Also several editing mistakes and passages that would be much improved by rearrangement.
March 26, 2017
2.5
Interesting but now a bit dated and very dry to read.
British conquest of Sudan.
Sudan history, which is very interesting.
Interesting but now a bit dated and very dry to read.
British conquest of Sudan.
Sudan history, which is very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews