Fashoda Incident (redirected from Fashoda Affair)

Fashoda Incident (fəshō`də), 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

(Sept. 18, 1898) Climax, at Fashoda, Egyptian Sudan, of a series of territorial disputes between Britain and France. Britain had sought to extend its empire from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own from Dakar to the Sudan. A French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand was the first to arrive at a strategically located fort at Fashoda, soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener. After a tense standoff the French withdrew, but they continued to press claims to other posts in the region. In March 1899 the French and British agreed that the watershed of the Nile and the Congo rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence.