Fashoda Incident

Fashoda Incident , 1898, diplomatic dispute between France and Great Britain. Toward the end of the 19th cent., while Britain was seeking to establish a continuous strip of territory from Cape Town to Cairo, France desired to establish an overland route from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. To make good their claim the French dispatched (May 1, 1897) Major J. B. Marchand with a small force from Brazzaville, in the face of a British warning. After crossing over 2,000 mi (3,200 km) of almost unexplored wilderness, Marchand reached (July 10, 1898) the village of Fashoda (now Kodok ) on the Nile in the S Sudan. Beating off a Mahdist attack, he stopped there to await an expected Franco-Ethiopian expedition from the east. Meanwhile, Lord Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army had defeated (Sept. 2) the Mahdists in the N Sudan. When he heard of the French activities, Kitchener led forces upriver to Fashoda and, despite Marchand's presence, claimed (Sept. 19) the town for Egypt. The French government resisted for a time, but, fearing war, ordered its mission to withdraw on Nov. 3. In Mar., 1899, France yielded its claim to the upper Nile region and accepted part of the Sahara as compensation.

Fashoda incident (18 September 1898) The culmination of a long series of clashes between Britain and France in the “scramble for Africa”. The French objective, to occupy the sub-Saharan belt from west to east, countered the British aim of linking their possessions from the Cape to Cairo. Thus in 1896 the French dispatched a force under General Jean-Baptiste Marchand from GABON to occupy the SUDAN, at the same time that KITCHENER was moving up the Nile to recover Khartoum. Both reached Fashoda during the summer of 1898, and as neither side desired conflict, they agreed that both French and British flags should fly over the fort. The matter was referred to London and Paris, and for a while tension between the two countries was extreme. In December the French ordered Marchand to withdraw, and this enabled an agreement to be reached whereby the Nile and Congo watersheds should demarcate the respective spheres of influence by the two countries in Africa.