316 Omdurman, Battle of from investments in cloves made the sultan and his entourage very rich Cloves had become so dominant that many other crops in Zanzibar were cleared away to grow them The sultan decreed in the 1840s that three clove trees should be planted for every coconut palm Any landowner failing to so would have his property confiscated By 1841 the sultan appointed his elder son to rule in Oman while he concentrated on Zanzibar By 1850 Zanzibar/Pemba accounted for 80 percent of world’s clove production In 1856 the sultan died of dysentery On his death, his younger son was proclaimed sultan as the new ruler of Zanzibar and the East African coast while the older brother ruled Oman The Omani empire had ended, but the Omani dynasty continued until 1890, when Britain took over Zanzibar as a protectorate The heritage of the Omani empire of East Africa in the first half of the 19th century was a depopulated East and East-Central Africa The advent of independence in 1964 saw the overthrow of the oligarchy that had grown rich during the heyday of the clove trade See also slave trade in Africa Further reading: Bhacker, M R Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar London: Macmillan, 1992; Davidson, Basil A History of East and Central Africa to the Late Nineteenth Century Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1969; Nicholls, C S The Swahili Coast Politics, Diplomacy, and Trade on the East African Coast 1798–1856 London: Allen & Unwin, 1971; Said-Ruete, Rudolph Said bin Sultan (1791–1856) Ruler of Oman and Zanzibar; His Place in the History of Arabia and East Africa London: Alexander Ousely, 1929 Norman C Rothman Omdurman, Battle of At the Battle of Omdurman the British, led by Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the sirdar or commander in chief of the Egyptian army, decisively defeated the Mahdist forces led by the Khalifa ‘Abdullahi Kitchener’s force of about 25,000 mostly Egyptian soldiers with British officers met the Mahdist forces, also known as dervishes in Europe, of some 50,000 men, on the battlefield of Karari outside the Mahdist capital of Omdurman To facilitate the movement of troops and supplies Kitchener had had the railway from Cairo to southern Egypt extended to the northern Sudan He also had armored gunboats Armed with machine guns, Kitchener’s forces easily killed over 10,000 attacking Mahdist forces, many of whom were armed with spears At least another 20,000 Mahdist soldiers were wounded and many of those subsequently died from lack of medical care Kitchener’s gunboats also fired on Omdurman, destroying the imposing tomb of the Mahdi whose remains were scattered by the victors The Khalifa managed to escape but was ultimately killed in battle some months later by British forces led by F (Francis) Reginald Wingate who had been director of military intelligence and Kitchener’s subordinate Kitchener was appointed governor general over the Sudan, and Khartoum, a city on the other bank of the Nile River from Omdurman, became the new Sudanese capital However, Kitchener only held the position for a short time before he was dispatched to assist in the British military efforts during the Boer War in South Africa Wingate succeeded him as the new governor-general in 1899 and went on to consolidate British control over the Sudan under the AngloEgyptian Condominium, the rather cumbersome arrangement the British devised to legitimize their rule over the country See also Sudan, condominium in Further reading: Asher, Michael Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure New York: Viking, 2005; Featherstone, Donald Omdurman, 1898: Kitchener’s Victory in the Sudan New York: Praeger, 2005; Stevens, G W With Kitchener to Khartoum London: Blackwood & Sons, 1898; Zulfu, Ismet Hasan Karari, the Sudanese Account of the Battle of Omdurman London: F Warne, 1980 Janice J Terry