The Fashoda Crisis

Fashota is a small town in south sudan. The egyptian army built a base there in 18 55, supposedly a base for suppressing the slave trade. By the mid 18 seventies, fashoda is described as a bustling market and administrative town. If you want a railway or a tele graph that runs all the way across africa from west to east, that line also goes pretty close to fashoda. So you have these two competing dreams, both of them a little fantastic ret obviously, this is the sort of thing that you have to be sitting in an office in london or paris looking at a huge map of africa.