Fashoda Incident: When Britain and France Almost Went to War in Africa (opens in new tab)

Preoccupied with their increasingly paranoid rivalry, neither the British nor the French governments were very much concerned with the fate of the Africans living in the states they dreamed of controlling. Sudan had very little to offer any colonial power other than prestige, but prestige feeds vanity, and it was this vice, both in Britain and France, that underpinned the game of diplomatic charades played out in the final months of 1898. France had made such a bold opening move in Sudan by o...