CHAPTER I

NIGERIA

ITS PEOPLES AND ITS PROBLEMS

[Illustration: A BORGU CANOE-MAN.

(_Copyright._) (_Photo by Mr. E. Firmin._) _Frontispiece._]

NIGERIA

ITS PEOPLES AND ITS PROBLEMS

BY

E. D. MOREL

EDITOR OF “THE AFRICAN MAIL”

AUTHOR OF “AFFAIRS OF WEST AFRICA,” “THE BRITISH CASE IN FRENCH

CONGO,” “KING LEOPOLD’S RULE IN AFRICA,” “RED RUBBER,” “GREAT

BRITAIN AND THE CONGO,” “THE FUTURE OF THE CONGO,” ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE

1911

_All rights reserved_

TO THE MEMORY OF MARY KINGSLEY WHO POINTED THE WAY

PREFACE

I have to express, in the first place, my indebtedness to the Editor and

Management of the _Times_ and of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permission

to reproduce the articles and maps which appeared in the columns of those

newspapers, and to all those who have so generously helped me to overcome

an accident to my camera by placing their own admirable photographic work

at my disposal.

In the second place, I desire to record my sincere appreciation for the

courtesy I received from the Colonial Office in connection with a recent

visit to Nigeria; and to Sir Walter and Lady Egerton, Sir Henry Hesketh

Bell, Mr. Charles Temple (Acting-Governor of Northern Nigeria) and their

Staffs for the kindness and hospitality extended to me while there.

Also to the Management and Staff of the Southern and Northern Nigeria

railways; in particular to the Director of the Public Works Department

of the Northern Protectorate, Mr. John Eaglesome and to Mrs. Eaglesome,

and to Mr. Firmin, the Resident Engineer of the Southern Nigeria line at

Jebba.

My travels in the country were facilitated in every way possible, and the

kindness everywhere shown me in both Protectorates far transcended any

claim which ordinary courtesy to a stranger might have suggested.

To the British merchants established in Nigeria I am under similar

obligations, more particularly to Messrs. John Holt & Co., Ltd., who were

good enough to place their steamers at my disposal. To Messrs. Elder

Dempster & Co. I am similarly indebted.

My special thanks are due to my friends Mr. and Mrs. William A. Cadbury

and Mr. John Holt and his sons, for much personal kindness in connection

with my journey. I am indebted to Mr. Trigge, of the Niger Company, Mr.

W. H. Himbury, of the British Cotton Growing Association, and many others

who have responded with unwearied patience to my importunate questionings.

I have also to express my sense of obligation to the Native Community of

Lagos—Christian, Mohammedan and Pagan—for the cordial public reception

they accorded to me in that place; and for the address with which they

were good enough to present me. Also to the leading Native gentlemen

of Freetown for the kind hospitality they extended to me during my

short stay at the capital of Sierra Leone, and to the Mohammedan

Chiefs representing many different tribes of the hinterland, who there

foregathered, under Dr. Blyden’s roof, to bid me welcome, and for the

addresses they presented to me.

West Africa is a land of controversy. There is not, I think, any question

of public interest concerned with it that does not give rise to acute

differences of opinion into which some influence—the climate, perhaps—and

the fact that the country is going through a difficult transition stage,

seems not infrequently to infuse a measure of bitterness. I fear it is

unavoidable that some of the opinions expressed in this volume, if they

give pleasure in certain quarters, will give displeasure in others. I

can only ask those who may be affected in the latter sense to believe

that the writer has really had no other object in view than that of

setting forth the facts as he saw them, and to draw from those facts the

inferences which commended themselves to a judgment no doubt full of

imperfections, but able, at any rate, to claim sincerity as its guiding

motive.

E. D. MOREL.

_August, 1911._

INTRODUCTION

My chief object in presenting to the public in book form a collection

of articles recently published in the _Times_[1] as revised, together

with additional matter, has been that of increasing—if haply this should

be the effect—public interest in the greatest and most interesting of

our tropical African Protectorates. It has been my endeavour throughout

not to overload the story with detail, but to paint, or try to paint, a

picture of Nigeria as it is to-day; to portray the life of its people,

the difficulties and tasks of its British governors, and the Imperial

responsibilities the nation has contracted in assuming control over this

vast region.

Parts II., III., and IV. consist of an attempt at a serious study of

these things.

Part I. consists of a mere series of pen and ink sketches, so to speak;

impressions jotted down in varying moods. The value, if, indeed, they

have any value at all, of these disjointed ramblings lies in the glimpse

they may afford of native character and the nature of the country, thus

helping, perhaps, to bring Nigeria a little nearer to us.

I ought, perhaps, to apologize for not having incorporated a history

of the British occupation of Nigeria. But, apart from the circumstance

that Captain Orr, now Colonial Secretary for Cyprus, and for many years

Resident in Northern Nigeria, is, I understand, about to publish a volume

on that subject written with the inside knowledge which he so peculiarly

possesses: the thing has already been done by others.

It seemed to me that if any public utility at all were to be attached to

my own modest effort, it could more fittingly be sought in the direction

of handling, from an independent outsider’s point of view, problems of

actuality in their setting of existing circumstances and conditions; and

in emphasizing a fact sometimes apt to be forgotten. I mean that in these

Dependencies the Native is the important person to be considered, quite

as much from the Imperial as from any other standpoint, interpreting

Imperialism as personally I interpret it, to signify a good deal more

than painting the map red and indulging in tall talk about “possessions”

and about “inferior races.” In Nigeria, the Nigerian is not, as some

persons appear to regard him, merely an incidental factor but the

paramount factor. Nigeria is not a Colony; it is a Dependency.

The West African native has two classes of enemies, one positive, the

other unconscious. The ranks of both are not only recruited from members

of the white race: they are to be found among members of the West

African’s own household. The first class corresponds to the school of

European thought concerning tropical Africa, whose adherents object to

the West African being a land-owner, and whose doctrine it is that in the

economic development of the country the profits should be the exclusive

appanage of the white race, the native’s _rôle_ being that of labourer

and wage-earner for all time.

In the fulfilment of the _rôle_ thus assigned to him, some of the

adherents of this school, those with the longest sight, would be quite

prepared to treat the individual native well; others would cheerfully

impose their will by brutal violence. That is a temperamental affair

which does not touch the essence of the deeper issue.

To this class of enemies belong some of the educated or half-educated

Europeanized natives whom our educational and religious system divorces

from their race, and who, having no outlet and bereft of national or

racial pride, betray the interests of their country into the hands of its

foes.

The second class is to be met with among the ranks of those who, by

striking at slavery and abuse, have rendered enormous benefit to the West

African, but who were also unwittingly responsible for fastening upon his

neck a heavy yoke, and who, not only with no motive of self-interest,

but, on the contrary, with the most generous desire to minister to his

welfare, are to-day in danger of ministering to his undoing. It is not

easy to affix any particular label to those influences which, in the

political field, contributed so powerfully in handing over the Congo to

Leopold II. (afterwards strenuously co-operating in freeing its peoples

from his grasp) and in placing two million West Africans in Liberia under

the pettily tyrannous incompetence of a handful of American Blacks. They

are partly educational, partly philanthropic, partly religious. The

basis of sentiment animating them appears to be that a kindness is being

done to the West African by the bestowal upon him of European culture,

law, religion and dress, and that, having thus unmade him as an African,

those responsible are in duty bound to support the product of their

own creation in its automatic and inevitable revolt against authority,

whether represented by the Native Ruler or by the European Administrator.

In the form it at present takes, and in the circumstances too often

accompanying it, this is not a kindness but a cruel wrong.

Let me try to make my meaning perfectly clear in regard to this latter

case. I make no attack upon any organization or body. I criticize the

trend of certain influences, and I willingly admit, as all must do, even

those who most dread their effects, that these influences have their

origin in centres imbued with genuine altruism. Also that of one side of

them nothing but good can be said—the destructive side, the side which

is ever prepared to respond to the call of human suffering. Neither do

I suggest that education can, or should be, arrested. I simply lay down

this double proposition. First, that educational and allied influences,

whose combined effect is to cause the West African to lose his racial

identity, _must_ produce unhappiness and unrest of a kind which is not

susceptible of evolving a compensating constructive side. Secondly, that

in no period of time which can be forecast, will the condition of West

African society permit of the _supreme_ governing power being shared

by both races, although short of the casting vote, so to speak, policy

should everywhere be directed towards consolidating and strengthening

Native authority.

Still less do I make any reflection upon the educated West African

as such. Among these Westernized Natives are men to be regarded with

the utmost respect, for they have achieved the well-nigh insuperable.

They have succeeded, despite all, in remaining African in heart and

sentiment; and in retaining their dignity in the midst of difficulties

which only the most sympathetic alien mind can appreciate, and, even

so, not wholly. To Mary Kingsley alone, perhaps, was it given to probe

right down to the painful complexities of their position as only a woman,

and a gifted woman, specially endowed, could do. Of such men the great

Fanti lawyer, John Mensah Sarbah, whose recent and premature death is a

calamity for West Africa, was one of the best types. The venerable Dr. E.

Wilmot Blyden, whose race will regard him some day as its misunderstood

prophet, is another. One could name others. Perchance their numbers are

greater than is usually supposed, and are not confined to men of social

distinction and learning. And these men wring their hands. They see, and

they feel, the pernicious results of a well-meaning but mistaken policy.

They appreciate the depth of the abyss. But they lack the power of

combination, and their position is delicate to a degree which Europeans,

who do not realize the innumerable undercurrents and intrigues of

denationalized West African society are unable to grasp.

Between these two schools of thought, the “damned nigger” school and the

denationalizing school (that, without appreciating it, plays into the

hands of the first), which threaten the West African in his freedom, his

property and his manhood, there is room for a third. One which, taking

note to-day that the West African _is_ a land-owner, desires that he

shall continue to be one under British rule, not with decreasing but

with increasing security of tenure; taking note that to-day the West

African _is_ an agriculturist, a farmer, a herdsman, and, above all,

to the marrow of his bones, a trader, declines to admit that he should

be degraded, whether by direct or indirect means, to the position of

a hireling; taking note that customary law it is which holds native

society together, calls for its increased study and demands that time

shall be allowed for its gradual improvement from within, deprecating its

supersession by European _formulæ_ of law in the name of “reform,” for

which the country is not ripe and whose application can only dislocate,

not raise, West African social life. A school of thought which, while

prepared to fight with every available weapon against attempts to impose

conditions of helotism upon the West African, earnestly pleads that those

controlling the various influences moulding his destinies from without,

shall be inspired to direct their energies towards making him a better

African, not a hybrid. A school of thought which sees in the preservation

of the West African’s land for him and his descendants; in a system

of education which shall not anglicize; in technical instruction; in

assisting and encouraging agriculture, local industries and scientific

forestry; in introducing labour-saving appliances, and in strengthening

all that is best, materially and spiritually, in aboriginal

institutions, the highest duties of our Imperial rule. A school of

thought whose aim it is to see Nigeria, at least, become in time the home

of highly-trained African peoples, protected in their property and in

their rights by the paramount Power, proud of their institutions, proud

of their race, proud of their own fertile and beautiful land.

E. D. MOREL.

_August, 1911._

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PART I

THOUGHTS ON TREK

I. ON WHAT HAS BEEN AND MAY BE 3

II. ON THE GREAT WHITE ROAD 8

III. ON THE CARRIER 14

IV. ON AFRICAN MODESTY AND AFRICAN COURTESY 19

V. ON THE MEANING OF “RELIGIOUS” 24

VI. A RAGOÛT OF THINGS SEEN AND FELT 29

VII. THE SALLAH AT ZARIA 35

PART II

SOUTHERN NIGERIA

I. NIGERIA’S CLAIM UPON PUBLIC ATTENTION 45

II. THE NIGER DELTA 49

III. THE FOREST BELT 56

IV. THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN PROVINCES 62

V. LAGOS AND ITS PORT—THE FUTURE BOMBAY OF WEST AFRICA 71

VI. THE YORUBAS AND THEIR COUNTRY 76

VII. BRITISH POLICY IN YORUBALAND 82

PART III

NORTHERN NIGERIA

I. THE NATURAL HIGHWAY TO THE UPLANDS OF THE NORTH 91

II. NORTHERN NIGERIA PRIOR TO THE BRITISH OCCUPATION 98

III. THE INDIGENOUS CIVILIZATION OF THE NORTH 103

IV. THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE—THE LONG-DISTANCE TRADER 107

V. THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE—THE AGRICULTURIST 111

VI. THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE—THE HERDSMAN AND THE ARTISAN 118

VII. THE CITY OF KANO AND ITS MARKET 123

VIII. A VISIT TO THE EMIR OF KANO 130

IX. GOVERNING ON NATIVE LINES 136

X. THE FOUNDATIONS OF NATIVE SOCIETY—THE TENURE OF LAND 140

XI. THE FOUNDATIONS OF NATIVE SOCIETY—THE ADMINISTRATIVE

MACHINERY 145

XII. THE PRESERVATION OF THE NATIONAL LIFE 151

XIII. A PAGE OF HISTORY AND ITS MORAL 155

XIV. A SCHEME OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 160

XV. COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT 166

XVI. MINING DEVELOPMENT AND THE BAUCHI PLATEAU 175

XVII. THE NECESSITY OF AMALGAMATING THE TWO PROTECTORATES 187

XVIII. RAILWAY POLICY AND AMALGAMATION 194

XIX. AN UNAUTHORIZED SCHEME OF AMALGAMATION 201

PART IV

ISLAM, COTTON GROWING, AND THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC

I. CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM IN SOUTHERN NIGERIA 213

II. THE COTTON INDUSTRY 222

III. THE COTTON INDUSTRY—_continued_ 232

IV. THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC IN SOUTHERN NIGERIA 245

INDEX 263

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A BORGU CANOE-MAN _Frontispiece_

_Photo by Mr. E. Firmin (Copyright)_

FACING PAGE

“THROUGH PLAIN AND VALLEY AND MOUNTAIN SIDE” 6

“WE HAVE TREKKED TOGETHER” 6

A GROUP OF TUAREGS 8

A BORNU OX 8

“MAGNIFICENT SPECIMENS OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM” 10

DUG-OUT ON THE KADUNA MANNED BY NUPES 30

“SILHOUETTING PERCHANCE A GROUP OF PALMS” 30

THE HOE-DANCERS (THE HOE-DANCE IS A HAUSA AGRICULTURAL DANCE OF

GREAT ANTIQUITY) 34

THE “JAFFI” OR MOUNTED SALUTE 36

_Photo by Captain Mance._

THE EMIR OF ZARIA 38

THE EMIR OF KATSINA 38

JU-JU ISLAND NEAR JEBBA 46

_Photo by Mr. E. Firmin (Copyright)_

SHIPPING PALM OIL ON THE NIGER AT HIGH WATER 46

THE TROPICAL BUSH 56

ONE OF THE COMMUNAL RUBBER PLANTATIONS (FUNTUMIA ELASTICA) BENIN

CITY 66

_Photo by Mr. A. H. Unwin._

A SCENE IN YORUBALAND 66

_Photo by Mr. A. H. Unwin._

BENIN CITY TO-DAY. BINI CHIEFS SITTING OUTSIDE THEIR NEW COURT

HOUSE 68

_Photo by Sir Walter Egerton._

ONE OF THE SACRED STONE IMAGES AT IFE, THE SPIRITUAL CENTRE OF

YORUBALAND 78

_Photo by Mr. A. H. Unwin._

ONE OF THE SONS OF THE SHEHU OF BORNU 78

ENTRANCE TO THE “AFIN” OR RESIDENCE OF THE ALAFIN OF OYO,

SHOWING TYPICAL YORUBA THATCHING 82

_Photo by Mr. A. H. Unwin._

VIEW OF LOKOJA AND NATIVE TOWN FROM MOUNT PATTEY LOOKING S.E.,

THE BENUE IN THE DISTANCE 96

A NIGERIAN HUNTER STALKING GAME WITH THE HEAD OF THE GROUND

HORNBILL AFFIXED TO HIS FOREHEAD 108

_Photo by Mr. E. Firmin (Copyright)_

A TRADING CARAVAN 110

_Photo by Mr. Charles Temple._

FRUIT SELLERS 112

WATER CARRIERS 112

A GWARRI GIRL 116

A HAUSA TRADING WOMAN 116

A FULANI GIRL 118

_Photo by Mr. Charles Temple._

PANNING FOR IRON 120

_Photo by Mr. A. H. Unwin._

DYE-PITS 120

A VIEW OF A PART OF KANO CITY (INSIDE THE WALL) 124

ONE OF THE GATEWAYS TO KANO CITY, SHOWING OUTER WALL 128

ANOTHER OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE CITY 128

INSIDE KANO CITY 132

THE EMIR OF KANO ON THE MARCH 134

CORNER OF A NATIVE MARKET 148

_Photo by Mr. Freer-Hill._

ANOTHER CORNER 148

_Photo by Mr. Freer-Hill._

IRON SMELTERS 164

FULANI CATTLE 164

_Photo by Mr. Charles Temple._

SCENE IN THE BAUCHI HIGHLANDS 184

_Photo by Mr. Charles Temple._

SCENE ON THE SOUTHERN NIGERIA (EXTENSION) RAILWAY 194

_Photo by Mr. Freer-Hill._

PLATE-LAYING ON THE NORTHERN NIGERIA RAILWAY 194

_Photo by Captain Mance._

LANDING PLACE AT BARO 196

GROUP OF RAILWAY LABOURERS—BARO 196

VILLAGE HEAD-MEN 198

WOMEN COTTON SPINNERS 232

MEN WEAVING 232

MAPS

MAP OF SOUTHERN NIGERIA 46

” NORTHERN NIGERIA 92

” ILLUSTRATING AN UNAUTHORIZED SCHEME OF AMALGAMATION 204

PART I

THOUGHTS ON TREK

CHAPTER I

ON WHAT HAS BEEN AND MAY BE

After trekking on horseback five hundred miles or so, you acquire the

philosophy of this kind of locomotion. For it has a philosophy of its

own, and with each day that passes you become an apter pupil. You learn

many things, or you hope you do, things internally evolved. But when you

come to the point of giving external shape to them by those inefficient

means the human species is as yet virtually confined to—speech and

writing—you become painfully conscious of inadequate powers. Every day

brings its own panorama of nature unfolding before your advance; its

own special series of human incidents—serious, humorous, irritating,

soothing—its own thought waves. And it is not my experience that these

long silent hours—for conversation with one’s African companions is

necessarily limited and sporadic—induce, by what one would imagine

natural re-action, descriptive expansiveness when, pen in hand, one seeks

to give substance to one’s impressions. Rather the reverse, alack! Silent

communing doth seem to cut off communication between brain and pen. You

are driven in upon yourself, and the channel of outward expression dries

up. For a scribbler, against whom much has been imputed, well-nigh all

the crimes, indeed, save paucity of output, the phenomenon is not without

its alarming side, at least to one’s self. In one’s friends it may well

inspire a sense of blessed relief.

One day holds much—so much of time, so much of space, so much of change.

The paling stars or the waning moon greet your first swing into the

saddle, and the air strikes crisp and chill. You are still there as

the orange globe mounts the skies, silhouetting, perchance, a group of

palms, flooding the crumbling walls of some African village, to whose

inhabitants peace has ceased to make walls necessary—a sacrifice of the

picturesque which, artistically, saddens—or lighting some fantastic peak

of granite boulders piled up as though by Titan’s hand. You are still

there when the rays pour downwards from on high, strike upwards from

dusty track and burning rock, and all the countryside quivers and simmers

in the glow. Sometimes you may still be there—it has happened, to me—when

the shadows fall swiftly, and the cry of the crown-birds, seeking shelter

for the night on some marshy spot to their liking, heralds the dying of

the day. From cold, cold great enough to numb hands and feet, to gentle

warmth, as on a June morning at home; from fierce and stunning heat,

wherein, rocked by the “triple” of your mount, you drowse and nod, to

cooling evening breeze. You pass, in the twenty-four hours, through all

the gamut of climatic moods, which, at this time of the year, makes this

country at once invigorating and, to my thinking, singularly treacherous,

especially on the Bauchi plateau, over which a cold wind often seems to

sweep, even in the intensity of the noontide sun, and where often a heavy

overcoat seems insufficient to foster warmth when darkness falls upon the

land.

So much of time and change—each day seems composed of many days. Ushered

in on level plain, furrowed by the agriculturist’s hoe, dotted with

colossal trees, smiling with farm and hamlet; it carries you onward

through many miles of thick young forest, where saplings of but a few

years’ growth dispute their life with rank and yellow grasses, and thence

in gradual ascent through rock-strewn paths until your eye sees naught

but a network of hills; to leave you at its close skirting a valley

thickly overgrown with bamboo and semi-tropical vegetation, where the

flies do congregate, and seek, unwelcomed, a resting-place inside your

helmet. Dawning amid a sleeping town, heralded by the sonorous call of

the Muslim priest, which lets loose the vocal chords of human, quadruped

and fowl, swelling into a murmur of countless sounds and increasing

bustle; it will take you for many hours through desolate stretches,

whence human life, if life there ever was, has been extirpated by long

years of such lawlessness and ignorance as once laid the blight of

grisly ruin over many a fair stretch of English homestead. Yes, you may,

in this land of many memories, and mysteries still unravelled, pass,

within the same twenty-four hours, the flourishing settlement with every

sign of plenty and of promise, and the blackened wreck of communities

once prosperous before this or that marauding band of freebooters

brought fire and slaughter, death to the man, slavery to the woman and

the infant—much as our truculent barons, whose doughty deeds we are

taught in childhood to admire, acted in their little day. The motive

and the immediate results differed not at all. What the ultimate end

may be here lies in the womb of the future, for at this point the roads

diverge. With us those dark hours vanished through the slow growth of

indigenous evolution. Here the strong hand of the alien has interposed,

and, stretching at present the unbridged chasm of a thousand years, has

enforced reform from without.

And what a weird thing it is when you come to worry it out, that this

alien hand should have descended and compelled peace! Viewed in the

abstract, one feels it may be discussed as a problem of theory, for a

second. One feels it permissible to ask, will the people, or rather

will the Governors of the people which has brought peace to this land,

which has enabled the peasant to till the soil and reap his harvest

in quietness, which has allowed the weaver to pursue and profit by

his industry in safety, which has established such security throughout

the land, that you may see a woman and her child travelling alone and

unprotected in the highways, carrying all their worldly possessions

between them; will this people’s ultimate action be as equally beneficial

as the early stages have been, or will its interference be the medium

through which evils, not of violence, but economic, and as great as

the old, will slowly, but certainly and subtly, eat into the hearts of

these Nigerian homes and destroy their happiness, not of set purpose,

but automatically, inevitably so? I say that, approached as an abstract

problem, it seems permissible to ask one’s self that question as one

wanders here and there over the face of the land, and one hears the

necessity of commercially developing the country to save the British

taxpayers’ pockets, of the gentlemen who want to exploit the rubber

forests of the Bauchi plateau, of the Chambers of Commerce that require

the reservation of lands for British capitalists, and of those who

argue that a native, who learned how to smelt tin before we knew there

was tin in the country, should no longer be permitted to do so, now

that we wish to smelt it ourselves, and of the railways and the roads

which have to be built—yes, it seems permissible, though quite useless.

But I confess that when one studies what is being done out here in the

concrete, from the point of view of the men who are doing it, then it is

no longer permissible to doubt. When one sees this man managing, almost

single-handed, a country as large as Scotland; when one sees that man,

living in a leaky mud hut, holding, by the sway of his personality,

the balance even between fiercely antagonistic races, in a land which

would cover half a dozen of the large English counties; when one sees

the marvels accomplished by tact, passionate interest and self-control,

with utterly inadequate means, in continuous personal discomfort,

short-handed, on poor pay, out here in Northern Nigeria—then one feels

that permanent evil cannot ultimately evolve from so much admirable work

accomplished, and that the end must make for good.

[Illustration: “THROUGH PLAIN AND VALLEY AND MOUNTAIN SIDE.”]

[Illustration: “WE HAVE TREKKED TOGETHER.”]

And, thinking over this personal side of the matter as one jogs along up

hill and down dale, through plain and valley and mountain side, through

lands of plenty and lands of desolation, past carefully fenced-in fields

of cotton and cassava, past the crumbling ruins of deserted habitations,

along the great white dusty road through the heart of Hausaland, along

the tortuous mountain track to the pagan stronghold, there keeps on

murmuring in one’s brain the refrain: “How is it done? How is it done?”

Ten years ago, nay, but six, neither property nor life were safe. The

peasant fled to the hills, or hurried at nightfall within the sheltering

walls of the town. Now he is descending from the hills and abandoning the

towns.

And the answer forced upon one, by one’s own observations, is that the

incredible has been wrought, primarily and fundamentally, not by this or

that brilliant feat of arms, not by Britain’s might or Britain’s wealth,

but by a handful of quiet men, enthusiastic in their appreciation of the

opportunity, strong in their sense of duty, keen in their sense of right,

firm in their sense of justice, who, working in an independence, and with

a personal responsibility in respect to which, probably, no country now

under the British flag can offer a parallel, whose deeds are unsung, and

whose very names are unknown to their countrymen, have shown, and are

every day showing, that, with all her faults, Britain does still breed

sons worthy of the highest traditions of the race.

CHAPTER II

ON THE GREAT WHITE ROAD

You may fairly call it the Great White Road to Hausaland, although

it does degenerate in places into a mere track where it pierces some

belt of shea-wood or mixed trees, and you are reduced to Indian file.

But elsewhere it merits its appellation, and it glimmers ghostly in

the moonlight as it cuts the plain, cultivated to its very edge with

guinea-corn and millet, cassava and cotton, beans and pepper. And you

might add the adjective, dusty, to it. For dusty at this season of the

year it certainly is. Dusty beyond imagination. Surely there is no dust

like this dust as it sweeps up at you, impelled by the _harmattan_

blowing from the north, into your eyes and mouth and nose and hair?

Dust composed of unutterable things. Dust which countless bare human

feet have tramped for months. Dust mingled with the manure of thousands

of oxen, horses, sheep and goats. Dust which converts the glossy skin

of the African into an unattractive drab, but which cannot impair his

cheerfulness withal. Dust which eats its way into your boxes, and defies

the brush applied to your clothes, and finds its way into your soup

and all things edible and non-edible. Dust which gets between you and

the sun, and spoils your view of the country, wrapping everything in a

milky haze which distorts distances and lies thick upon the foliage. The

morning up to nine, say, will be glorious and clear and crisp, and then,

sure enough, as you halt for breakfast and with sharpened appetite await

the looked-for “chop,” a puff of wind will spring up from nowhere and in

its train will come the dust. The haze descends and for the rest of the

day King Dust will reign supreme. It is responsible for much sickness,

this Sahara dust, of that my African friends and myself are equally

convinced. You may see the turbaned members of the party draw the lower

end of that useful article of apparel right across the face up to the

eyes when the wind begins to blow. The characteristic _litham_ of the

Tuareg, the men of the desert, may have had its origin in the necessity,

taught by experience, of keeping the dust out of nose and mouth. I

have been told by an officer of much Northern Nigerian experience,

that that terrible disease, known as cerebro-spinal meningitis, whose

characteristic feature is inflammation of the membranes of the brain, and

which appears in epidemic form out here, is aggravated, if not induced,

in his opinion—and he assures me in the opinion of many natives he has

consulted—by this disease-carrying dust. In every town and village in

the Northern Hausa States, you will see various diseases of the eye

lamentably rife, and here, I am inclined to think, King Dust also plays

an active and discreditable part.

[Illustration: A GROUP OF TUAREGS.]

[Illustration: A BORNU OX.]

The Great White Road. It thoroughly deserves that title from the point

where one enters the Kano Province coming from Zaria. It is there not

only a great white road but a very fine one, bordered on either side

by a species of eucalyptus, and easily capable, so far as breadth is

concerned, of allowing the passage of two large automobiles abreast. I,

personally, should not care to own the automobile which undertook the

journey, because the road is not exactly what we would call up-to-date.

Thank Heaven that there is one part of the world, at least, to be found

where neither roads, nor ladies’ costumes are “up-to-date.” If the Native

Administration of the Kano Emirate had nothing else to be commended

for, and under the tactful guidance of successive Residents it has

an increasing account to its credit, the traveller would bear it in

grateful recollection for its preservation of the trees in the immediate

vicinity of, and sometimes actually on the Great White Road itself. It

is difficult to over-estimate the value to man and beast, to the hot and

dusty European, to the weary-footed carrier, to the patient pack-ox, and

cruelly-bitted native horse, of the occasional shady tree at the edge of

or on the road. And what magnificent specimens of the vegetable kingdom

the fertile soil of Kano Province does carry—our New Forest giants,

though holding their own for beauty and shape and, of course, clinging

about our hearts with all their wealth of historical memories and

inherited familiarity, would look puny in comparison. With one exception

I do not think anything on the adverse side of trivialities has struck me

more forcibly out here than the insane passion for destroying trees which

seems to animate humanity, White and Black. In many parts of the country

I have passed through the African does appear to appreciate his trees,

both as shade for his ordinary crops and special crops (such as pepper,

for instance, which you generally find planted under a great tree) and

cattle. In Kano Province, for instance, this is very noticeable. But in

other parts he will burn down his trees, or rather let them burn down,

with absolute equanimity, making no effort to protect them (which on

many occasions he could easily do) when he fires the grasses (which,

_pace_ many learned persons, it seems to me, he is compelled by his

agricultural needs to do—I speak now of the regions I have seen). I have

noticed quantities of splendid and valuable timber ruined in this way.

The European—I should say some Europeans—appears to suffer from the same

complaint. It is the fashion—if the word be not disrespectful, and Heaven

forfend that the doctors should be spoken of disrespectfully in this part

of the world, of all places—among the new school of tropical medicine

out here to condemn all growing things in a wholesale manner. In the

eyes of some, trees or plants of any kind in the vicinity of a European

station are ruthlessly condemned. Others are specially incensed against

low shrubs. Some are even known to pronounce the death-warrant of the

pine-apple, and I met an official at a place, which shall be nameless,

who went near weeping tears of distress over a fine row of this fruit

which he had himself planted, and which were threatened, as he put it, by

the ferocity of the local medical man. In another place destruction hangs

over a magnificent row of mango trees—and for beauty and luxuriousness

of foliage the mango tree is hard to beat—planted many years ago by the

Roman Catholic Fathers near one of their mission stations; and in still

another, an official, recently returned on leave, found to his disgust

that a group of trees he especially valued had been cut down during his

absence by a zealous reformer of the medical world.

[Illustration: “MAGNIFICENT SPECIMENS OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM.”]

In the southern portions of Southern Nigeria, where Sir Walter Egerton

is a resolute foe of medical vandalism, I am inclined to think that

the doctors will find it about as easy to cope with plant growth as

King Canute is reputed to have found the waves of the seashore. But

in Northern Nigeria and in the northern regions of Southern Nigeria

it is a different matter, and one is tempted to query whether the

sacrifice of all umbrageous plants in the neighbourhood of official and

other residences because they are supposed to harbour—and no doubt do

harbour—the _larvæ_ of all sorts of objectionable winged insects, may not

constitute a remedy worse even than the disease. I can imagine few things

more distressing for a European in Northern Nigeria, gasping in the

mid-day heat of the _harmattan_ season, to have nothing between his eyes,

as he gazes but beyond his verandah, but the glare of the red laterite

soil and the parched-up grasses and little pink flowers springing up

amidst it; and one feels disposed to say to the devoted medicos, “_De

grâce, Messieurs, pas de trop zèle_.”

In the particular part of the country of which I am now writing, another

aspect of the case strikes you. In very many rest-camps, and mining camps

one comes across, the ground is cleared of every particle of shade-giving

tree—cleared as flat as a billiard table. There is no shade for man or

beast. Now a grass-house is not the coolest place in the world with an

African noon-day sun beating down upon it—I mean an all-grass-house, not

the cool native house with clay walls and thatched roof, be it noted—and

... well, I content myself with the remark that it would be much cooler

than it is with the shade of a tree falling athwart it. Then they—the

Public Works Department—have built a road from Riga-Chikum to Naraguta.

I will say nothing about it except that it is, without exception, the

hottest road and the one more abounding in flies that I have struck

in this part of the world. And I assign a proper proportion of both

phenomena to the—to me—inexplicable mania of the builders thereof to hew

down the trees on the side of the road.

To come back to our Great White Road. What a history it might not tell!

For how many centuries have not Black and Brown men pursued upon it

the goal of their trade and their ambitions; have not fled in frantic

terror from the pursuer, ankle deep in dust. What tragedies have not been

hurried along its dusty whiteness. To-day you will meet upon it objects

of interest almost every hour. Now, a herd of oxen on their way to doom,

to feed the Southern Nigerian markets; now, a convoy of donkeys going

south, in charge, maybe, of Tuareg slaves from far-distant Sokoto, or the

Asben oases. These will be loaded with potash and tobacco. And even as

you pass this one going south, another convoy of donkeys, going north,

loaded with salt and kolas, will be trudging along behind you. Anon, some

picturesquely-clothed and turbaned horseman will be seen approaching,

who, with ceremonious politeness, will either dismount and salute, or

throw up his right hand—doing the “jaffi,” as it is termed.

The African is credited with utter callousness to human suffering. Like

most generalities concerning him, it is exaggerated. Life in primitive

communities (and to get a proper mental grasp of this country, and

its people, you must turn up your Old Testament and read Exodus and

Leviticus) is much cheaper and of less account than in more highly

civilized ones. That is a commonplace too often forgotten by people who

accuse the African of ingrained callousness. As a matter of fact, I have

noticed many sights on the Great White Road which show how rash such

generalities can be. I have seen water handed from one party to another

under circumstances which spoke of kindly appreciation of a want. I have

frequently seen fathers, or elder brothers, carrying small children on

their backs. The Residents have known cases of men found injured on the

road who have been tended and taken home by utter strangers; the Good

Samaritan over again, and in his old-world setting.

CHAPTER III

ON THE CARRIER

“Some Africans I have met”—the words conjure up a series of powerful

chiefs, or fantastic “witch doctors,” or faultlessly-attired barristers

from some centre of light and learning on the Coast. I shall be

content—if only by recording my gratitude for much amusement and no

little instruction—with jotting down a brief line or two which shall

be wholly concerned with a type of African to whom not the greatest

Negrophile that ever lived would dream of applying the epithet

distinguished. I refer to the carrier.

To-morrow I part with my carriers. We have trekked together for exactly

four weeks—one little man, indeed, with a goatee beard and a comical

grin, has been with me six weeks, having rejoined from my original

lot. And at the end of four weeks one gets to know something of one’s

carriers. Presumably, by that time they have their own opinions of you.

Whence do they come, and whither do they go, these vagrants of the road,

flotsam and jetsam that we create? Runaway slaves, ne’er-do-weels,

criminals, driven from their respective folds, unsuccessful farmers, or

restless spirits animated by a love of travel and adventure—_la vie des

grands chemins_. Reckless, improvident, gamblers, wastrels; they are

altogether delightful people. As an ecclesiastical friend invariably

winds up with a description of the man (or woman) he is interested in,

who has broken most of the commandments, and would have broken the

others had circumstances allowed: “X—— is the very best of creatures

really, and I love him (or her)”—so it is impossible not to like the

carrier. For with all his faults, he attracts. His spirit of independence

appeals somehow. Here to-day, gone to-morrow. And, like the sailor, with

a sweetheart at every port, somebody else’s sweetheart will do quite

as well at a pinch. Then consider his cheeriness. Be the load heavy or

light, be the march long or short, he has always a smile and a salute for

you as you pass along the line. I speak as I have found, and many men

will bear me out. Some men may have a different tale to tell, sometimes

with justification, sometimes, I think, without. For if there is the bad

type of carrier—and there is: I have found two in my crowd, but their

“little games” have fallen foul of the views of the majority—there is

also the type of European who, shall we say, forgets. He gets into camp

a long way ahead of his men, tired and hungry maybe, and curses them

for a pack of lazy scoundrels. He forgets, or long custom has blunted

perception, the potency of that sixty-pound load. Think of it! Sixty

pounds—the regulation load. Sixty pounds on your head for anything from

fifteen to thirty miles.

I say consider that under these conditions the man is cheerful. Nay,

he is more. He is full of quips and jokes ... at the expense of his

companions, and quite as much at the expense of himself. If you have

a special peculiarity about you, ten to one he crystallises it into a

name, and henceforth you are spoken of not as the “Baturi” the White

man, but as “the man with a back like a camel,” or “white hair,” or the

“hump-backed man of war,” or “red pepper,” or “hot water,” or as the

“man with a face like a woman,” and so on. It is this extraordinary

cheeriness which appeals to the average white human. That a creature of

flesh and blood like yourself, carrying sixty pounds on his head for

hours and hours in the blazing sun, dripping with perspiration, pestered

by flies, and earning sixpence a day—threepence of which is supposed to

be spent in “chop”—and doing this not for one day, but for day after day,

sometimes for over a week without a sit-down, can remain cheerful—that is

the incredible thing. One hopes that it is a lesson. Assuredly it ought

to be an inspiration. These votaries of Mark Tapley are severely tried

at times. Yesterday, after a tramp from six-thirty to half-past twelve,

the camp aimed for was found to be tenanted by other white men and their

carriers. There was nothing for it but to push on another eleven miles to

the nearest village and stream. Just as dusk began to sweep down upon the

land, the first carrier straggled in—smiling. “No. 1,” a long-limbed man

with the stride of an ostrich, who always goes by that name because he is

always the first to arrive, delighted at having kept up his reputation;

“Nos. 2” and “3” equally pleased with themselves for being close at his

heels, and coming in for their share of the prize money in consequence.

And then, in twos and threes, dribbling up, some unutterably weary,

others less so, all galvanised into new life by a chance joke, generally

at their own expense; joining in the acclamation which invariably greets

the strong man of the party—the mighty Maiduguli, to wit—who, because of

his muscles, carries the heaviest load, and whom Fate decrees, owing to

that load’s contents, shall be the last to start, both at the opening of

the day and after the breakfast halt, but who manages to forge ahead, and

to turn up among the first six, chaffing the tired ones on their way,

and stimulating them to fresh exertions. And when all had reached their

destination they had to stick up a tent by the light of the moon.

I have asked you to consider the carrier’s cheeriness and powers of

endurance—and my lot at least are not, with the exception of the mighty

man of valour already mentioned, big men physically. I ask you now to

consider his honesty—honesty in the literal sense and honesty in the

fulfilment of a bargain. For hours this man is alone—so far as you are

concerned—with your goods. You may, you probably are, either miles

ahead of him, or miles behind him. The headman—“Helleman,” as he is

termed by the rank and file—is at the rear of the column. Between the

first man and the “Helleman” several miles may intervene, and so on,

proportionately. During these hours of total lack of supervision, your

property is absolutely at the carrier’s mercy. Your effects. The uniform

case in which, he knows, you keep your money. The uniform case, of which

he knows the lock is broken. The “chop-box,” of which he knows the

padlock is missing. But at the end of every day your things are intact.

I have not lost a matchbox, except a few dozen or so that white men have

stolen (I may say it is the local fashion—I have caught it myself, and

steal matches regularly whenever I get the chance). The only thing I

have lost is something I lost myself. You may say “Yes, but think of the

risk and the difficulty of breaking open a uniform case on the road.” As

for the difficulty, there is little or none. A vigorous fling upon one

of these granitic boulders, and there would be precious little left of

your uniform case. As for the risk, well, in many parts of the country

I have traversed, a carrier could get clear away with his loot, and not

all the _Sarikuna_ and _dogari_ in the country would set hands on him.

Faithfulness to the bargain struck. Well, I have passed through the

mining country. Some of the mines declare they are short of labour—those

that do not suffer from that complaint declare that those that do have

themselves to thank for it—and the mines pay ninepence a day for work

which is much lighter than that of a carrier, who gets sixpence. The

few shillings a carrier would sacrifice by deserting, he would recoup

at the mines in ten days, or less. I have not had a desertion. The only

man of the crowd who has absconded, did so openly. On a certain spot on

the line of march he suddenly got a fit of fanaticism, or something

unhealthy of that kind, and declared himself to be proof against sword

cuts. Whereupon, being laughed at, he “gat unto himself” a sword and

smote himself with much vigour upon the head, with the natural result of

inflicting a deep scalp wound nearly seven inches long. The next morning,

finding his load incommoded him in consequence, he returned homewards, a

sadder, and, presumably, a wiser man.

If I were a poet I would write an ode to the African carrier. I cannot do

justice to him in prose. But I place on record this inadequate tribute

to the reckless, cheery, loyal rascal, who seems to me a mixture of the

knight of the road and the poacher—for both of whom I have ever conceived

a warm affection ... in books—and with whom I shall part to-morrow with

regret, remembering oft in days to come that cheery “_Sanu zāki_” as I

passed him, footsore, weary and perspiring, on the road.

CHAPTER IV

ON AFRICAN MODESTY AND AFRICAN COURTESY

Each twenty-four hours brings its own series of events and its own

train of thoughts following upon them. A new incident, it may be of the

most trivial kind, sets the mind working like an alarum; a petty act, a

passing word, have in them revealing depths of character. Nature seems

such an open book here. She does not hide her secrets. She displays them;

which means that she has none; and, in consequence, that she is as she

was meant to be, moral. The trappings of hide-bound convention do not

trammel her every stride like the hobble skirts of the foolish women who

parade their shapes along the fashionable thoroughfares of London. What

quagmires of error we sink into when we weigh out our ideas of morality

to the African standard—such a very low one it is said.

Well, I have covered a good deal of ground in this country—although I

have not been in it very long, measured in time—and I have seen many

thousands of human beings. I have seen the Hausa woman and the bush

Fulani woman in their classical robes. I have seen the Yoruba woman

bathing in the Ogun, clad only in the natural clothing of her own dusky

skin. I have seen the scantily-attired Gwarri and Ibo woman, and the

woman of the Bauchi highlands with her bunch of broad green leaves

“behind and before,” and nothing else, save a bundle of wood or load of

sorts on her head, or a hoe in her hand. I have visited many African

homes, sometimes announced, sometimes not, at all hours of the day, and

sometimes of the night. I have passed the people on the beaten track, and

sought and found them off the beaten track. I have yet to see outside our

cantonments—where the wastrels drift—a single immodest gesture on the

part of man or woman. Humanity which is of Nature is, as Nature herself,

moral. There is no immodesty in nakedness which “knows not that it is

naked.” The Kukuruku girl, whose only garment is a single string of beads

round neck and waist, is more modest than your Bond Street dame clad in

the prevailing fashion, suggesting nakedness. Break up the family life of

Africa, undermine the home, weaken social ties, subvert African authority

over Africans, and you dig the grave of African morality. It is easy,

nothing is easier, and it may be accomplished with the best intentions,

the worthiest motives, the most abysmal ignorance of doing harm. Preserve

these things, strengthen them, and you safeguard the decencies and

refinements of African life.

Here is a homily! Its origin one of those trivialities of which I have

spoken. One had pushed on ahead, desiring to be alone. With that curious

intuition which the African seems to possess, one’s mounted escort had,

somehow, gathered that, and a good half-mile separated one from one’s

followers. The sun was at its zenith, and danced over the dusky track.

But there were broad grateful trees on either side, and low bushes with

white sweet-scented flowers. A bend in the road brought into view a

little cameo of natural life. By a tree, straight-backed and grave-faced,

an elderly Fulani woman, supporting on her lap the head and shoulders of

a younger woman, who lay outstretched. At her feet a small child trying

to stand upright, with but indifferent success. For a moment one was

not perceived, both women’s eyes being fixed on the infant’s resolute

efforts, and one’s approach being quietened by the deadening dust under

foot. For a moment only. Then all three looked up. From her position the

younger woman’s limbs were more uncovered than a Hausa or Fulani woman

considers compatible with modesty before a stranger, and, with a sight of

that stranger, the instinctive movement came—the position was slightly

shifted, the robe drawn down, with no fuss or precipitancy, but calmly,

with dignity and decision.

We strayed yesterday. Starting off early we struck across country,

leaving the road, the red-and-green dressed gentleman and I; having

arranged to meet the rest ... somewhere. It does not matter where,

because, as a matter of fact, we didn’t. An imposing person the aforesaid

_dogari_, with a full black beard and fierce sword. It was good to get

away from the road, despite its varied interests, and for a couple of

hours one gave one’s self wholly up to the charms of the crispness of the

morning, the timid but sweet song of the birds, the whiffs of scent from

the mimosa bushes, the glimpse of some homestead farm in the distance,

the sight of a group of blue-robed women with biblical earthenware

pitchers on their heads issuing from a neatly thatched village, or

congregated in a circle round one of the wells whose inner rim is lined

and rendered solid by thick branches to prevent earth from falling in

and fouling the water. Their laughing voices were wafted across the

cultivated fields towards us, as cheery as the antics of the little brown

goats skipping over the ground. What a world of simple happiness in this

agricultural life of the _talakawa_—the common people—of Hausaland. And

then, well we were clearly at fault. No signs of any of the men. No

signs of breakfast, I mean of the person by whom breakfast is supposed

to be produced—and nearly eight o’clock. The gentleman in red and green

twisted his turbaned and bearded visage to right and left. He looked at

me expressively, which look I returned—with equal gravity, the substance

of our power of communicativeness. Then he turned his broad back and his

white horse’s head, and ambled on, and I followed. It is queer how you

accommodate yourself to philosophy, or how philosophy accommodates itself

to you. After all, every road leads to Rome; and there is a certain

amount of exhilaration in not knowing what particular Rome it may be, or

through what twists and turns the track may lead you on the way thither.

No homesteads now, and the risen sun had warmed the birds into silence.

One notices that, by the way. In the early mornings the timid notes are

heard, and as the sun’s rays pierce through the mists and burn them up,

they cease. It is a melodious little ode to the great Life-giver, and

when it has served its purpose it quavers, quivers, and is no more.

On a sudden the thunder of hoofs behind us, and an elderly,

aristocratic-looking horseman with an aquiline nose, short grey beard

and piercing eyes, gallops up over the deep furrows, followed by three

attendants also on horseback. An imposing figure of a man he is,

splendidly mounted on a chestnut stallion, with a heavy cloak of dark

blue cloth flung across his shoulders, the red crest of a fez just

showing through the top of his dark blue turban. An animated conversation

ensues between him and the gentleman in red and green. The Chief—for

one knows he must be such from his bearing and the sharp ring of his

tones—waves a long, thin hand to right and left. The _dogari_ listens

respectfully, somewhat crestfallen in appearance (perhaps he was hungry

too!). The mounted attendants career away in different directions, one, I

learn afterwards, to trace the main body of carriers, the other to find

the cook, the third to call for milk and firewood from some neighbouring

village. Then the Chief bows low over his horse’s neck, places himself

between the _dogari_ and myself, and we proceed once more along the

narrow pathway, cut at frequent intervals by small streams, now mostly

dry, with precipitous banks that need some negotiating. The courtesy of

that grey-bearded old aristocrat—every inch a ruler of men—the Fulani

who has become the statesman and the lord over many! He is the Governor,

I learn later, of one of the principal districts of Kano province, and

he looks it from head to foot. At the approach of every stream, half

hidden with tangled creepers, wherever the path is broken or impeded by

some natural obstacle, he half turns his horse towards one in warning,

then waits on the other side until he is satisfied that the difficulty

is overcome. Does the over-hanging branch of some tree threaten a blow

to the careless rider? He either breaks it off short in its passage,

or, if it be too formidable for that, points with uplifted finger. And

when, at last, in an open space a small group under a tree proclaims

the much perturbed—his usual condition—cook, busy boiling milk and

cocoa, another low bow, and the old gentleman retires at an appropriate

distance, turning his back with the politeness required of tradition

and custom, but not before another rapid order has been given, and the

quite unnecessary attention of clearing a piece of ground where you may

conveniently partake of your meal is in process of accomplishment.

And soon from out of nowhere come shouts and laughter, and the jangle of

bits and the confused hum of approaching men and horses. The bush and the

grasses cave outwards and your people appear, a little wondering whether

the white man is grumpy or not; very pleased to know they have pitched

on the right road at last; rather enjoying the adventure and thoroughly

happy with themselves and the world in general. Off-saddle and hobble the

beasts! Down with the loads! Out with the “chop!” And all as merry as a

marriage bell. So another morn has dawned and gone, bringing with it its

lessons and its thoughts.

CHAPTER V

ON THE MEANING OF “RELIGIOUS”

It was dusk, dark almost. The road glimmered dimly in the distance. Over

the deep furrows the shadows crept, and the little path between them

mingled with the gathering gloom.

I became aware of a vague white figure standing out from the sombre

background some little distance off. Presently it seemed to sink

downwards and assume formlessness. My route back to the camp took me

within perhaps a dozen yards of it. A nearer view disclosed a man, whose

bent back was turned to me, making his solitary evening prayer to God.

Alone. Yet not alone, perhaps.

That night I passed through my sleeping camp at the foot of the giant

_bombax_, bathed in the silvery beams of a full moon shining out of a

velvet sky; and trod the road again, trying to puzzle it out.

What does the word “religious” mean, I wonder? This white-robed figure of

a man was religious as one generally interprets the word. Yet we are to

suppose that he really wasn’t, because his religion is not the religion

we, in Europe, practise. But is that what “religious” infers? One kind of

religion?

What a queer mixture the Anglo-Saxon is. Probably it would be impossible

to convince the average Englishman that the African is a more religious

being than himself; or that there is anything incongruous in himself,

the Englishman, being at one and the same time the Imperialist ruler of

these dark races and their spiritual uplifter. And yet, to what vital

extent do spiritual influences mould the society or the policy of Europe?

Has not religion—official religion—there taken upon itself very largely

the character of a social force, and lost its spiritual significance?

Is not its whole trend social rather than spiritual? Has Europe, in any

racial sense, an inner spiritual life, as has the East? The “law of

Christ,” says the Church, in the matter of relations between the sexes

_everywhere_, commands monogamy. But the law of Christ commands, in a

far more definite manner than any words that may be culled from His

sayings in regard to this, many other things which the religion of Europe

absolutely, entirely, and wholly ignores, because the customs of Europe

and the laws of Europe, and the social life of Europe do not square with

it.

I was told the other day that a great Emir in these parts was informed of

the intended visit—this happened some years ago—of a great White _Mallam_

who was coming to uplift the spiritual life of the people. The Emir and

his councillors looked over the wide plain. “Surely,” they said to one

another, “as the White man is so strong in war, so cunning in invention,

so mighty in knowledge, then the White man’s _Mallam_ must be very, very

near to _Allah_.” Soon they saw a cloud of dust. Marvelling somewhat,

the Emir, nevertheless, sent out messengers. The messengers sped swiftly

onwards. They looked for a solitary figure, the figure of an ascetic,

bearing stamped upon features, lined and worn with thought, and in gaunt

form, the imprint of holiness; in whose eye, illumined with the fire of

inspiration, they would read intimate communing with God. What they saw

was a long file of weary carriers, conveying boxes full of food, drink,

apparel, and camp furniture. Behind them, quite an ordinary looking

White man on horseback. “Is this the great White preacher?” they asked

the interpreter, who headed the caravan. “Is this the _Mallam_ who is

to uplift our souls?” “Even so,” replied the interpreter. So two of the

Emir’s messengers off-saddled, and when the preacher came along they

bowed low, as is the custom of the country. But the third messenger had

turned back. He prostrated himself before the Emir, and he told what he

had seen.

The Emir drew his flowing cloak a little closer round him, for the sun

was about to set, and the air grew chill. Then he turned himself towards

Mecca, and lowered his forehead in the dust, followed by his councillors.

It is difficult to write plainly of Christian missionary effort in

West Africa. The individual missionary may be an influence for good in

the best sense. He may not be. He does not go into the country to make

money. He is, as a rule, singularly selfless. His life is often, perhaps

generally, a work of essential self-sacrifice. In the category of human

motives gravitating towards West Africa, his, it must be conceded,

takes front rank. Than the apostolic missionary there is no grander

figure, whether in West Africa or elsewhere. But it is the genesis of

the effort, not the man, that most counts fundamentally. If the effort

itself is out of perspective the work of the individual must feel the

effect. I say it is difficult to write about missionary effort. It seems

to be regarded as taboo. You must not touch it lest you hurt people’s

feelings. But nowadays, one sphere of human activity cannot be ruled out

of discussion, Christian effort out here seems to me to have forgotten in

many cases that Christ was the servant of the people, not their master.

It is intolerant of native customs; native religions irritate it; native

law it regards with contempt. I walked one evening along the Niger banks

with a missionary. We passed some native huts. In one was a fetish with a

votive offering at its feet. My companion jerked his stick disdainfully

towards the object, and with scorn in his voice declaimed against the

“idol.” Yet he knew, or ought to have known, that it was not the thing of

wood that was worshipped, but its indwelling spirit. That gesture was so

characteristic of much one sees and hears out here. I exclude the Roman

Catholics from that remark. Amongst them I have met the broad, tolerant

spirit of generosity and true kindliness of heart. I can hear now the

cheery, warm-hearted, jovial laughter of the Onitsha priests, their

sunniness, their infecting optimism.

There is so much that is dark and dismal about this missionary effort,

inwardly I mean. All the African world is black to it, black with

sin, black with lust, black with cruelty. And there is its besetting

misfortune—it is alien. It preaches an alien God; a White God, not a

Black God. The God that is imported here has nothing African about Him.

How can He appeal to Africa?

I saw a week ago in an English paper (about two months old) that there

is to be a crusade against Islam in Nigeria. Emissaries are to come out

and check this poisonous growth. That, too, is very strange to read ...

out here, as one listens to the call to God in the evening, and in the

morning, pealing out to the stars. These people are worshipping the God

of Africa. It seems they ought to worship the God of Europe; and yet

there is more evidence of spiritual influence out here, than in our great

congested cities. With the cry of the African priest, the faithful bows

his body to the earth—out here. The day before I left England, I heard

the bells ringing out in an old cathedral city. Their note was both

beautiful and sad. It was a spacious building, arched and vaulted, noble

in proportions. It might easily have held seven hundred worshippers.

There were many people in the streets. Yet, when the bells had ceased to

ring, there were less than a dozen worshippers within.

Yes, it is a great puzzle.

All is silent in the camp. The fires have gone out. Over the thatched

roofs the _bombax_ towers upwards to the majestic heavens. The whole

countryside is flooded with a soft, delicate effulgence, and the Great

White Road appears as a broad ribbon of intenser light, winding away,

away into the infinite beyond.

It is eleven o’clock. One wonders if London is looking quite so spiritual

just now, with its flaming lights, its emptying theatres, its streets

thronged with jostling, restless crowds.

CHAPTER VI

A RAGOÛT OF THINGS SEEN AND FELT

Some things detach themselves, as it were, from the general background,

rooting themselves in memory. Such, the rise in the road beyond which

the first of the great Mohammedan towns of the north lay concealed.

Bida, the capital of the Nupes, the centre of an active trade, known

for its handsomely embossed, if unsubstantial, brassware; known, too,

for its rough glass bangles of black or dull blue, made out of nothing

more romantic than old bottles melted in native furnaces kept going by

the blowers who, when the stuff is sufficiently liquid, twirl it round a

stick until the desired shape is attained; known, too, for its special

species of kola—the _labozhi_, highly esteemed throughout Nigeria,

requiring shade and a rich, deep loamy soil to bring it to perfection.

Until the British occupation the cultivation and sale of the _labozhi_

kola were the prerogative of the ruler, the Emir, who must now be content

with a tenth of the crop, and let his subjects have a chance. Past a

Fulani cattle encampment; past flat country covered with rice fields;

past rustling fields of guinea corn ready for the cutter, with heads

towering eleven feet in height; past clumps and dotted specimens of shea

butter trees, in the branches of many of which are fixed calabashes for

the bees; past the weird red clay monuments of the white ants dotting the

plain; along the rough pitted, red dusty road, and so on until the rise.

And then, between us and the rambling city, with its decaying walls, its

wide central avenue, and its umbrageous trees, its masses of blue robed

men and women with their henna-dyed teeth and picturesque head-dress, a

cloud of dust, and borne down the wind blowing towards us the blare of

trumpets and the rattle of drums.

[Illustration: DUG-OUT ON THE KADUNA MANNED BY NUPES.]

[Illustration: “SILHOUETTING PERCHANCE A GROUP OF PALMS.”]

The great Mamodu himself, once a notorious slave raider and the

perpetrator of innumerable infamies, has elected to ride out and meet us.

Surrounded by two or three dozen notables and officers of his household,

by a scarlet and green robed bodyguard, by four mounted drummers and

two mounted trumpeters; ambling gently beneath a large umbrella of many

colours held over his head by an attendant, and clad from head to foot

in green-grey robes, with a turban of the same colour, Mamodu’s tall,

powerful figure and olive complexion—a Nupe with Fulani blood—emerges

from the crowd. Trumpets—long thin trumpets blown lustily and not

inharmoniously—blare, drums beat, horses curvet and try to bite one

another’s necks. Mamodu and his escort dismount and do their _gaisua_

(salutation). We dismount also, advance, shake hands, and become the

target for a hundred pairs of dark pupils in bloodshot, whitish-yellow

balls, which glare at us over the lower part of dark blue turbans swathed

across chin and mouth and nose, while the introduction formally proceeds

to the accompaniment of many a guttural “_Ah! Um, Um, Um!_” At a word

from the stalwart gentleman in grey we could be cut down in a couple of

minutes with these long, fierce, leather-sheathed swords which hang at

every hip. In point of fact, we are a great deal safer on this African

road than we should be crossing Trafalgar Square. Presently we shall see

the process, here conducted by one Englishman—trusted, and even liked for

his own sake, by the people—aided by an assistant, of turning _ci-devant_

slavers and warriors into administrators. In his work this Englishman

relies for the pomp and panoply of power upon three policemen, one of

whom is old and decrepit. The Bida division covers 5,000 square miles,

and Bida itself counts 35,000 souls. The facts suggest a thought or two.

* * * * *

A long, broad stretch of golden sands. Winding through them the clear

green water of the reduced Kaduna. Several dug-outs, manned by Nupes,

magnificent specimens of muscular development, cross backwards and

forwards with men, women, and children conveying wares to market. Small

mites, naked and tubby, splash and rollick about on the water’s edge.

Lower down stream fishermen are getting out their nets, and, at a

shallow ford, shepherds are piloting a flock of sheep across, from whose

scattered ranks a chorus of loud bleating arises. A file of pack donkeys

stream across the sands to the village on the opposite bank. We watch the

sight from the foot of a great tree, from which hang sundry charms, and

as we sit there—it is a rendezvous, it seems, and a small market-place

in its way—several young women stroll towards us bearing wares in grass

platters which they spread close to us on the ground, conversing in low

tones broken now and again by the jolly African laughter—the mirth of the

child of nature with few cares and fewer responsibilities. The winding

river, the golden sands, the blue sky, the two villages—one on either

side of the crossing—with their conical thatched roofs, the green of the

trees and of the water, the peaceful, quiet human life, combine to make

as pretty and as harmonious a picture as you would wish to see.

* * * * *

Tramp, tramp, tramp! The stamping of innumerable feet. The murmur of

innumerable voices. The waving of arms, the jangle of iron anklets, and

the rising cloud of dust beneath the trampling of bare toes. The dancers

range themselves in a wide circle, which slowly revolves in the light of

the moon, now lighting up this part, anon the other part, giving a grey

and ghostly look to the naked shoulders and close-cropped heads. _Aah!

Aah! Aah!_ The chant rises and falls, monotonous, barbaric. Bracelets and

anklets, amulets and charms clash and clang again as the wearers thereof

bend this way and that, crouching, stooping, flinging the upper part of

their bodies backwards, raising high the knee and bringing down the leg

with thunderous stamp, shaking themselves from head to foot like a dog

emerging from his bath. Naked bodies, but for a strip of jagged leather

falling athwart the hips; naked, lithe bodies on which the moon sheds her

beams. _Aah! Aah! Aah!_

And with it the sound of the drum, the everlasting drum; stimulus to

labour, spirit of the dance, dirge at the death-bed, call to the feast,

frenzy-lasher at the religious ceremonial, medium of converse, warner of

peril, bearer of news, telephone and telegraph in one. Go where you will,

you cannot escape the drum—where human life is. The everlasting drum

which heralds the setting sun, which ushers in the morn, which troubles

your sleep and haunts your dreams. Borne across the silent waters,

booming through the sombre forest, rising from the murmuring town,

cheering on the railway cutters—the fascinating, tedious, mysterious,

maddening, attractive, symbolic, inevitable, everlasting African drum.

* * * * *

I suppose they must be thirsty like every other living thing in the

glare of the sun and the heat of the sky and the dust of the track,

for they crowd thick and fast about the _kurimi_, the narrow belt of

vegetation (a blessed sight in the “dries”) where the stream cuts

the road. _Pieridæ_ with white and yellow wings; _Lycaenæ_ shot with

amethyst and azure; _Theklas_, too, or what I take for such, with long,

fragile, waving extremities, infinitely beautiful. Now and then a black

and green _Papilio_, flashing silver from his under wing, harbinger of

spring. Or some majestic, swift-flying _Charaxes_ with broad and white

band on a centre of russet brown—not the _castor_, alas! nor yet the

_pollux_—I have yet to live to see _them_ afloat ’neath the African sun.

Narrow veins of muddy ooze trickle from the well-nigh dried-up bed.

And here they congregate in swarms, proboscis thrust into the nectar,

pumping, pumping up the liquid, fluttering and jostling one another for

preferential places even as you may see the moths do on the “treacles” at

home. The butterfly world is much like the human world after all in its

egotism.

But if you want to see it at its best, plunge into the cool forest glades

before the sun has attained his _maximum_ (when even the butterflies

rest) and watch the green and gold _Euphædra_ dodging in and about the

broad green leaves or tangled creepers. See him spread his glorious

panoply where that fitful sunbeam has somehow managed to pierce the

vault. A sight for the dear gods, I tell you—is the _Euphædra_ sunning

himself on a Niger forest path. Men and politics become as small fry.

The right perspective asserts itself. You almost forget the beastly,

clogging, mentally muddling helmet (how the Almighty has blessed the

African by granting him a thick skull which he can carry on his neck,

shaved—shaved, mind you (the bliss of it even in thought!),—and as clean

as a billiard ball at that) as you watch the _Euphædra_, and absorb the

countless other delights the forest contains, foremost amongst them

silence, silence from humans at least. “These are the best days of my

life. These are my golden days.”

* * * * *

The floods have fallen and a thousand dark forms are building up the

muddy, slippery banks against the next invasion, with saplings rough

hewn in the forest; the men chopping and adjusting these defences, the

women carrying up earth from below in baskets. Beneath, the fishermen

are making fast their canoes and spreading out their nets to dry—all

kinds of nets, ordinary cast nets, nets resembling gigantic hoops, stiff

nets encased in wood somewhat after the pattern of the coracle. The broad

river fades away into the evening haze. For the swift wings of night

are already felt, and the sun has just dropped behind the curtain of

implacable forest.

One by one, in twos and threes, in struggling groups, the workers

scramble up the slope on to the path—or what remains of it from the

floods—which skirts the village. It grows dark. One is vaguely aware of

many naked, shadowy, mostly silent figures on every side of one; wending

their way along the path, or flitting in and out among the houses. Eyes

flash out of the semi-obscurity which is replete with the heavy, dank

odour of African humanity when African humanity has been busily at work.

In the open doorways a multitude of little fires spring into life, and

with them the smell of aromatic wood. The evening meal is in preparation,

and presently tired and naked limbs will stretch themselves to the warmth

with a sense of comfort. The lament of a child serves to remind you how

seldom these Niger babies cry.

And now it is the turn of the fireflies to glow forth. Thick as bees,

they carpet the ground on every marshy spot where the reeds grow—vivid,

sentient gems. Patches of emeralds: but emeralds endowed with life;

emeralds with an ambient flame lighting them from within. They hover

above the ground like delicate will-o’-the-wisps. They float impalpable,

illusive, unearthly beautiful in the still night air, as some rare and

fleeting dream of immortality, some incarnation of transcendent joy

towards which dull clay stretches forth arms everlastingly impotent.

[Illustration: THE HOE-DANCERS. (THE HOE-DANCE IS A HAUSA AGRICULTURAL

DANCE OF GREAT ANTIQUITY.)]

CHAPTER VII

THE SALLAH AT ZARIA

All Zaria is astir, for this is December, the sacred month, the month

when the pilgrims to Mecca are offering sacrifices, and to-day the Sallah

celebrations begin. At an early hour masses of men began to swarm out of

the great Hausa city, dressed in their best gowns, driving before them

bullocks, sheep, and goats to be sacrificed on the hill—even Kofena,

the hill of many legends, the old centre of Hausa “rock worship,”

beyond the city walls—to the sound of invocations to Almighty God.

For days beforehand people have been pouring in from the villages in

the surrounding plain. Long files of oxen, sheep, and goats have been

passing through the gates. Every household has been busy getting together

presents for friends, making provision for poor relations, bringing

forth the finest contents of their wardrobes, preparing succulent dishes

for entertainment. Every class of the population has been filled with

eager anticipation, agriculturists and weavers, blacksmiths and tanners,

dyers and shoemakers. The barbers have plied an active trade, and the

butchers likewise. Every face has worn a smile, and the hum of human

life has been more insistent than usual. A city of great antiquity

this, boasting a long line of fifty-eight Hausa kings before the Fulani

dynasty arose, and thirteen since that event early in last century. It

rises out of an enormous plain, cultivated for many miles around, dotted

here and there with fantastic piles of granite, resembling mediæval

castles. Its reddish clay walls, crumbling in parts, twenty to thirty

feet high in others, and many feet in thickness at the base, enclose a

sea of compounds and tortuous picturesque streets, above which wave the

fan-palms, the paw-paw, the beautiful locust-bean tree, and the graceful

tamarind. In the plain itself the gigantic _rimi_, or cotton tree, is

a conspicuous landmark, and its rugged staunchness is the subject of

a legend uncomplimentary to the ladies of Zaria: _Rimayin Zaria sun

fi matan Zaria alkawali_, meaning that the old _rimi_ trees are more

dependable than the fickle beauties of the town.

But the outstanding feature of the day approaches. It is ten o’clock,

and the procession from Kofena hill is winding its way back again to

the city. Here the Emir will arrive in state after the performance of

his religious devoirs, and will address his people. Here, in the great

open square flanking the mosque, the district chiefs and notables will

charge down upon him in the traditional “jaffi,” or mounted salute.

As we enter the gates of the city, after a two miles canter from the

Residency down a long and dusty road, we find almost deserted streets.

Every one is congregating in the square. Soon we enter into it, to

see a vast concourse of people clothed in white and blue. They form a

living foreground to the walls on either side of the Emir’s residence,

which stands at one extremity of the square. Around the mosque, on the

left, they are as thick as bees, and, opposite the mosque, some broken

hillocky ground is covered with a multitude. At its further extremity

the square narrows into the road leading through the city to Kofena, and

towards the opening of this road as it debouches into the square all eyes

are directed. The brilliant sun of tropical Africa smites downwards,

giving a hard line to lights and shadows, and throwing everything into

bold relief. With the exception of a few denationalised Hausa wives

of our own soldiers, the crowd is exclusively one of men and youths,

for, according to custom, the women will not put in an appearance until

later in the day. We three White men,—the Resident, much respected, and

wise with the wisdom which comes of long years of experience of this

fascinating country, and with a knowledge of Mohammedan law which fills

the wisest _mallams_ with astonishment—his assistant, and the writer take

our stand on the right of the Emir’s residence. Behind us a few mounted

men in gallant array, and immediately on our left a charming group of

the Emir’s sons, or some of them, in costly robes of satin. One little

fellow, eight years old, perhaps, with a light olive complexion, glances

rather bored looks from under a snow-white turban. Another rather bigger

boy, clad in dark yellow satin, is an imposing figure.

[Illustration: THE “JAFFI,” OR MOUNTED SALUTE.]

A deep “Ah” comes from the throats of the assembled thousands as the

blare of trumpets resounds faintly in the distance, and a cloud of

dust rises from the road. From out of it there emerge a dozen horsemen

charging down the square at break-neck speed, their right arms raised,

their multi-coloured robes flying out behind them. With a shout they rein

up their steeds in front of the Emir’s residence, then wheel swiftly, and

are off again whence they came—the _avant-garde_ of the procession. The

sound of drums and trumpets gets louder. The head of the procession comes

in sight, or, to be more accurate, the dust solidifies itself into a

compact mass, flashing and glittering with a thousand shades. First, many

hundreds walking on foot, who, as they enter the square, deploy right

and left and mingle with the waiting crowd. Behind them more horsemen

detach themselves and gallop towards us, backwards and forwards. Each

man is dressed according to his own particular fancy. Some in red, some

in blue, some in white, some in green, others in vivid yellows, but most

of them, it would seem, wearing half a dozen different colours at the

same time, both as to robes and turbans. Their leather boots, thrust

into shovel-headed stirrups, are embroidered with red and green; their

saddle-cloths and bridles are also richly embroidered and tasselled.

The majority, we observe, wear long cross-handled swords in leather

scabbards. Some carry thin spears in their hands; one fierce-looking

warrior a battle-axe. He seems to have stepped out of the Middle Ages

does this particular chief, his horse wearing a metalled protection

as in the old days of the Crusaders. But the heart of the procession,

moving up slowly, puts an end to these evolutions, and the horsemen range

themselves up on either side of the Emir’s residence, their gallant

beasts, curvetting and prancing as the “Ah” of the crowd changes into a

great roar of sound. As a trial of patience I commend the effort to take

a photograph over the ears of a horse who is making strenuous efforts to

stand up on its hind legs, while a fine and smarting white dust rises in

clouds, entering eyes and mouth, and all round you are people in a fine

frenzy of excitement, mingled with apprehension, lest your mount takes

it into his head to ride amuck in the midst of them, which he has every

appearance of wishing to do.

Rattle, rattle, come the drums, mingled with the long-drawn-out notes

of the tin or silver trumpets. Suddenly a loud shout arises, a shout

of merriment, as a monstrous figure, clad in skins of beasts, and,

apparently, hung round with bladders, in his hand a long stick, dashes

out of the advancing throng, clearing the intervening space between it

and the Emir’s residence in a succession of frantic bounds. This is the

Court fool, and his appearance is quite in setting with the piece. For

this whole scene is a scene out of the Arabian Nights, and, really, one

would hardly be astonished at the appearance of Jins, or even of Eblis

himself. At last, here is the Emir and his immediate bodyguard, and

the drummers and the trumpeters. The air resounds with prolonged “Ah!

Ah! Ahs.” There is a vast tossing of arms, and prancing of horses, and

glittering of spears, a climax of sound and colour—and dust.

[Illustration: THE EMIR OF ZARIA.]

[Illustration: THE EMIR OF KATSINA.]

The Emir Aliu is a fine looking man, with a good straight nose,

intelligent, rather cruel-looking eyes. His mouth we cannot see, for

the folds of the turban are drawn across the lower part of his face. A

dark, indigo-dyed purple turban and under-cloak; over it a snow-white

robe of silk with a tasselled cape which half hides the turban—these

are the principal coverings to voluminous robes of many tints. His feet

are encased in beautifully embroidered boots, and his saddle is richly

ornamented. On the forefinger of his left hand is a heavy silver ring.

Halting, he turns and faces the multitude. His attendants, one on either

side, wave the dust away from his face with ostrich feather fans. Others,

dressed in red and green, and carrying long staves, range themselves in

front of him and shout his praises in stentorian tones. Four figures

on foot advance, three of them are clad in skins and carry drums. The

fourth is a crouching creature with a curious wizened face bearing a

drawn sword in his hand. A sword dance ensues, the four going round and

round in a circle. The gentleman with a sword contorts himself, prods

viciously at imaginary foes, and every now and then makes a playful

attempt to smite off one of the drummers’ legs. This performance being

terminated—accompanied the while by incessant shouting on the part of

every one in general—the actors retire, and the Emir holds up his thin

aristocratic hand.

Instantly a silence falls. The change is singularly impressive. The Emir

begins to speak in a low voice to a herald mounted on a raised platform

at his side. The herald, the perspiration pouring down his face, shouts

out each sentence as it falls from the Emir’s lips. As the speech

proceeds the Emir becomes more animated. He waves his arm with a gesture

full of dignity and command. And now the silence is occasionally broken

with sounds of approval. Finally he stops, and it is the turn of the

Resident who smilingly delivers himself of a much shorter oration which,

as in the previous case, is shouted to the assemblage by the herald.

I was able to obtain, through the courtesy of the Resident, from the

Emir’s _Waziri_ a rendering of the speech of which the following is a

translation—

“The Emir greets you all with thanks to God. He thanks God’s

messenger (Mohammed). He gives thanks for the blessings of his

parents and his ancestors. He gives thanks to the Europeans who

are the gates of his town. He thanks all White men. Next—you

must attend to the orders which the Emir gives you every year.

I say unto you leave off double dealing. Remove your hand

from the people. Let them follow their own courses. Separate

yourselves from injustice. Why do I say ‘Give up injustice’?

You know how we were in former days and you see how we are now.

Are we not better off than formerly? Next—I thank my headmen

who assist me in my work. I thank my servants who are fellow

workers. I thank my young chiefs who are fellow workers. I

thank the men of my town who are fellow workers. I thank my

followers in the town. I thank the village heads. I thank

all the people of the land of Zaria who are helping me in my

work. Next—I wish you to pay attention to the commands of the

English. And I say unto you that all who see them should pay

them respect. He who is careless of the orders of the White

man does not show them respect. Though nothing happens to

him he cries on his own account (_i.e._ his stupidity is his

punishment), for it is his ignorance that moves him. Next—every

one who farms let him pay his tax. Every one who says this man

is my slave, or this woman is my slave, or these people are my

slaves, and uses force against them, let judgment fall upon

him. What I say is this—may God reward us! May God give us

peace in our land! May God give us the abundance of the earth!

Amen. Those who feel joyful can say—‘This is our desire! this

is our desire!’”

After a vain attempt to shake hands with the Emir, our respective mounts

altogether declining to assist, we ride out of the town escorted by a

couple of hundred horsemen. A little way past the gates we halt while

they, riding forward a hundred yards or so, wheel, and charge down upon

us with a shout, reining their horses with a sudden jerk, so near to us

that the ensanguined foam from the cruel bits bespatters us.

As we ride home to the Residency two miles out of the town, uppermost

in the mind at least of one of us is the fascination of this strange

land, with its blending of Africa and the East, its barbaric displays,

its industrial life, its wonderful agricultural development—above all,

perhaps, the _tour de force_ of governing it with a handful of White

officials and a handful of native troops.

PART II

SOUTHERN NIGERIA

[Illustration: MAP OF SOUTHERN NIGERIA SHOWING THE THREE PROVINCES.]

CHAPTER I

NIGERIA’S CLAIM UPON PUBLIC ATTENTION

Nigeria is a geographical expression applied to a territory in West

Africa which by successive stages, covering a period of more than one

hundred years, under circumstances widely differing in character and

incentive, and almost wholly as the result of the initial enterprise

of British explorers and merchants, has passed under the protection of

Britain. With the discovery of Nigeria are associated exploits which

for romantic interest and personal achievements hold a prominent place

in British exploring records. The angry swirl of the Bussa rapids must

ever recall the well-nigh superhuman achievements of Mungo Park, as the

marvellous creeks and channels of the Niger Delta evoke the memory of

Richard Lander[2] and John Beecroft.

You cannot visit the Court of the Emir of Kano without remembering

Clapperton’s account of the awkward religious conundrums with which

the gallant sailor, the first European to enter that fascinating

African city, was amazed and confounded by one of the present Emir’s

predecessors; nor ride over the wide and dusty road into the heart of

Hausaland without thinking that but for Joseph Thomson’s diplomatic

tact in negotiating the early treaties with its potentates, which were

to pave the way for the statesmanship of a Taubman-Goldie and the

organising genius of a Lugard, Nigeria would to-day be the brightest

jewel in the West African Empire of the French. The spirit of MacGregor

Laird, the hardy pioneer who laid the first foundations of British

commerce in this country seems to hover over the broad bosom of the

Niger. The marvellous panorama that unfolds itself before your eyes

at Lokoja (the confluence of the Niger with its tributary the Benue)

conjures up the heroism and tragedy of the Allan-Trotter expedition;

while to negotiate in a dug-out the currents that eddy round the famous

_ju-ju_ rock—still termed Baikie’s Seat—is a reminder that somewhere

in the blue depths below lie the remains of Dr. Baikie’s ill-fated

_Day-spring_.

This land is, indeed, a land rich in heroic memories to men of British

blood. It is the more astonishing that so little appears to be known by

the general public either of its past or, what is much more important, of

the many complex problems connected with its administration.

* * * * *

Nigeria is, at present, arbitrarily divided into two units, “Southern”

and “Northern;” the division corresponds with the historical events

which have distinguished the assumption of British control, and is

to that extent inevitable. But to-day, with internal communications

and administrative control rapidly extending, this situation presents

many drawbacks. In the absence of any considered scheme of general

constructive policy laid down at home, the existence of two separate

Governments with ideals necessarily influenced by the personal

idiosyncrasies of frequently changing heads in a territory geographically

united, through which the channels of a singularly intensive internal

trade have flowed for centuries, must of necessity tend to promote

divergencies in the treatment of public questions, and, therefore,

create numerous difficulties for the future. I propose to deal with this

subject in greater detail later on.

[Illustration: JU-JU ISLAND NEAR JEBBA.

(_Photo by Mr. E. Firmin._)]

[Illustration: SHIPPING PALM-OIL ON THE NIGER AT HIGH WATER.]

Meantime it would seem necessary at the outset to emphasize two facts

which the public mind does not appear to have realized. The first is

that Nigeria, both in size and in population, is not only the most

considerable of our tropical dependencies in Africa, but is the most

considerable and the wealthiest of all our tropical dependencies (India,

of course, excepted). Embracing an area of 332,960 square miles, Nigeria

is thus equal in size to the German Empire, Italy and Holland, while

its population, though not yet ascertained with accuracy, can hardly

amount to less than fifteen millions, being double that of British East

Africa and Uganda with Nyassaland thrown in, and nearly three times as

numerous as the native population comprised in the South African Union.

The second is that nowhere else in tropical or sub-tropical Africa is

the British administrator faced, at least on a large scale, with a

Mohammedan population, already to be counted in millions and increasing

year by year with significant rapidity. Until a few years ago the work

of Great Britain in West Africa, apart from a few trifling exceptions,

was confined to the administration of the Pagan Negro. The position is

very different now. In the southern regions of the Protectorate, where

its progression is a modern phenomenon, Islam is, from the administrative

point of view, a purely social factor. But in the northern regions, where

Mohammedan rule has been established for centuries, under the Hausas, and

in more recent times under the Fulani, Islam has brought its laws, its

taxation, its schools and its learning. It is there a political as well

as a religious and social force, solidly entrenched. This fact which,

administratively speaking, need not alarm us—unless the Administration

is goaded into adopting a hostile attitude towards its Mohammedan

subjects—does, however, invest Nigeria with an additional interest of its

own and does supply a further reason why the affairs of this greatest of

our African protectorates should receive more intelligent consideration

and study at the hands of the public than it has enjoyed hitherto.

CHAPTER II

THE NIGER DELTA

What is now known as Southern Nigeria comprises 77,200 square miles,

and includes the whole seaboard of the Nigerian Protectorate, some 450

miles long, and the marvellous delta region whose network of waterways

and surpassing wealth in economic products must be seen to be realized.

Pursuing its southward course, the Niger, after its journey of 2,550

miles across the continent from west to east, bifurcates just below

Abo into the Forcados and the Nun. This is the apex of the delta, and

here the Niger is, indeed, majestic. From each of these main channels

of discharge spring countless others, turning and twisting in fantastic

contours until the whole country is honeycombed to such an extent

as to become converted into an interminable series of islands. The

vastness of the horizon, the maze of interlacing streams and creeks,

winding away into infinity, the sombre-coloured waters, the still more

sombre unpenetrable mangrove forests—here and there relieved by taller

growth—impress one with a sense of awe. There is something mysterious,

unfathomable, almost terrifying in the boundless prospect, the dead

uniformity of colour, the silence of it all. It is the primeval world,

and man seems to have no place therein.

Small wonder that amidst such natural phenomena, where in the tornado

season which presages the rains the sky is rent with flashes only less

terrific than the echoing peals of thunder, where the rushing wind hurls

forest giants to earth and lashes the waters into fury, where for months

on end torrential downpours fall until man has no dry spot upon which he

can place his foot; where nature in its most savage mood wages one long

relentless war with man, racking his body with fevers and with ague, now

invading his farms with furious spreading plant life, now swamping his

dwelling-place—small wonder the inhabitants of this country have not kept

pace with the progression of more favoured sections of the human race.

It is, on the contrary, astonishing, his circumstances being what they

are, that the native of the Niger delta should have developed as keen a

commercial instinct as can be met with anywhere on the globe, and that

through his voluntary labours, inspired by the necessities and luxuries

of barter, he should be contributing so largely to supply the oils, fats,

and other tropical products which Western industrialism requires. Trade

with the outer world which the merchant—himself working under conditions

of supreme discomfort, and in constant ill-health—has brought; improved

means of communication through the clearing and mapping of creeks

and channels, thereby giving accessibility to new markets which the

Administration is yearly creating—these are the civilizing agents of the

Niger delta, the only media whereby its inhabitants can hope to attain to

a greater degree of ease and a wider outlook.

The outer fringe of the delta is composed entirely of mangrove swamps,

whose skeleton-like roots rise up from the mud as the tide recedes, and

from whose bark the natives obtain, by burning, a substitute for salt.

For untold centuries the mangrove would appear to have been encroaching

upon the sea, the advance guard of more substantial vegetation springing

up behind it with the gradual increase of deposits affording root-depth.

Apart from the deltaic system proper, produced by the bifurcation of

the Niger and its subsequent efforts to reach the ocean, the seaboard

is pierced by several rivers, of which the Cross, navigable for stern

wheelers of light draught in the wet season for 240 miles and in the

dry for forty, is the most important. The Benin River links up with the

deltaic system on the east, and on the west with the lagoon system of

Lagos, into which several rivers of no great volume, such as the Ogun

and Oshun, discharge themselves. So continuous and extensive are these

interior waterways that communication by canoe, and even by light-draught

launches, is possible from one end of the seaboard to the other—_i.e._,

from Lagos to Old Calabar.

The mangrove region is sparsely populated by fishing and trading tribes.

It is curious to come across signs of human life when you would hardly

suspect its possible presence. A gap in the whitened, spreading roots,

a tunnelled passage beyond, a canoe or two at the opening; or, resting

upon sticks and carefully roofed, a miniature hut open on all sides, in

which reposes some votive offering, such are the only indications that

somewhere in the vicinity a village lies hidden. A visit to some such

village holds much to surprise. Diligent search has revealed to the

intending settler that the particular spot selected contains, it may

be a hundred yards or so from the water, a patch of firm land where,

doubtless with much difficulty, a crop of foodstuffs can be raised, and

here he and his family will lead their primitive existence isolated from

the outer world, except when they choose to enter it on some trading

expedition. Further inland somewhat, as for instance, near the opening of

the Warri creek (whose upper reaches, bordered with cocoanut palms, oil

palms, and ferns, are a dream of beauty), one of the many off-shoots of

the Forcados, where behind the fringe of mangroves the forest has begun

to secure a steady grip, neatly kept and prosperous villages are more

numerous. Their denizens are busy traders and there are plentiful signs

of surface civilization. An expedition in canoes to the chief of one of

these Jekri villages led us from a little landing stage cut out of the

mangroves and cleverly timbered along a beaten path through smelling mud,

alive with tiny crabs and insect life of strange and repulsive form,

into a clearing scrupulously clean, bordered with paw-paw trees and

containing some twenty well-built huts. A large dug-out was in process

of completion beneath a shed; fishing-nets were hanging out to dry; a

small _ju-ju_ house with votive offerings ornamented the centre of the

village green, as one might say; a few goats wandered aimlessly about,

and a score of naked tubby children gazed open-eyed or clung round their

mothers’ knees in affected panic. Beyond the _ju-ju_ house a one-storeyed

bungalow with corrugated iron roof and verandah unexpectedly reared its

ugly proportions, and before long we were discussing the much vexed

question of the liquor traffic over a bottle of ginger ale across a

table covered by a European cloth, with an intelligent Jekri host, whose

glistening muscular body, naked to the waist, contrasted oddly with the

surroundings. These included a coloured print of the late King Edward

hanging upon the walls in company with sundry illustrated advertisements

all rejoicing in gorgeous frames. The walls of the vestibule below were

similarly adorned, and through a half-open door one perceived a ponderous

wooden bed with mattress, sheets, pillows, and gaudy quilt (in such a

climate!) complete.

The deltaic region is the real home of the oil palm with its numerous

and still unclassified varieties, although it extends some distance

beyond in proportionately lessening quantities as you push north. No

other tree in the world can compare with the oil palm in the manifold

benefits it confers upon masses of men. Occurring in tens of millions,

reproducing itself so freely that the natives often find it necessary

to thin out the youngest trees, it is a source of inexhaustible wealth

to the people, to the country, to commerce, and to the Administration.

The collection, preparation, transport, and sale of its fruit, both oil

and kernels for the export trade is the paramount national industry of

Southern Nigeria, in which men, women, and children play their allotted

parts. Beautiful to look upon, hoary with antiquity (its sap was used in

ancient Egypt for cleansing the body before embalment), the oil palm is

put to endless uses by the natives—its leaves and branches as roofing

material, for clothing, for the manufacture of nets, mats, and baskets;

its fruit and covering fibre in various forms for food (not disdained

by the resident European in the famous palm oil chop), for light, for

fuel. To the Southern Nigerian native inhabiting the oil-palm area the

tree is, indeed, domestically indispensable, while its product represents

something like 90 per cent. of his purchasing capacity in trade. How

entirely wrong would be any attempt at restricting his free enjoyment of

its bounties needs no emphasizing. The importance of the export trade

in the products of the oil palm may be gauged by the returns for 1910,

which show that Southern Nigeria exported 172,998 tons of kernels and

76,850 tons of oil, of a total value of no less than £4,193,049; and yet

the capacities of the trade, especially in kernels, are only in their

infancy.[3] Many districts, rich in oil palms are unproductive owing to

inaccessibility of markets or lack of transport; in others which supply

oil, the kernels, for sundry reasons, among which insufficiency of

labour to spare from farming operations no doubt predominates, are not

collected, although it is commonly reckoned that three tons of kernels

should be available for every ton of oil. In considering these figures,

realizing the future potentialities of the trade, and realizing, too,

the truly enormous sum of African labour which it represents (every nut

is cracked by hand to extract the kernel), one cannot but reflect upon

the foolish generalities which ascribe “idleness” to the West African

negro, whose free labour in this trade alone gives employment directly

and indirectly to tens of thousands in England and in Europe, from the

merchant and his clerks, from the steamship owner and his _employés_ on

land and sea, to the manufacturer of soap and candles and their allied

trades; from the coopers who turn out the casks sent out from England in

staves for the conveyance of the oil, to the Irish peasants who collect

the stems of the common sedge shipped out to Nigeria from Liverpool for

caulking these casks.

The bulk of the oil is exported to England (£1,191,000 value in 1909),

but nearly the entire kernel crop goes to Germany, where it is treated

by the big crushing mills. It is possible that this state of affairs

may undergo considerable change within the next decade, and the reason

for it is, incidentally, of considerable economic interest, as it is of

moment to Nigeria. Up to within three or four years ago palm kernels

were crushed and the oil almost entirely used by the soap trade, but

chemistry has now found a process of refining and making palm-_kernel_

oil edible, as it may, perhaps, do some day for palm oil itself, as a

base for margarine, for which coprah and ground-nut oil were formerly

employed. This has had as a consequence an enormous widening of the home

market, and the soap trade has now to contend with keen competition for

the supply of one of its staples. The resultant effect is the initiative

of Lever Brothers (Limited), who, finding the need of enlarging and

giving increased security to their supplies of the raw material, are,

with commendable enterprise, erecting three large crushing mills in

Southern Nigeria, the one at Lagos being already in a fair way to

completion. If the numerous difficulties they will have to face are

successfully negotiated, the ultimate result can hardly fail to be that

of transferring the considerable palm kernel crushing industry from the

banks of the Rhine to those of the Niger, besides creating a new export

trade in oil cake from the Niger to England and the Continent.

CHAPTER III

THE FOREST BELT

Beyond the deltaic region proper lies the vast belt of primeval and

secondary forest of luxurious growth, giant trees, tangled vines and

creepers, glorious flowering bushes, gaudy butterflies, moist atmosphere,

and suffocating heat. Beyond the forest belt again lies, with recurrent

stretches of forest, the more open hilly country, the beginning of the

uplands of the North. When an authority on forestry recently wrote

that “British Columbia is the last great forest reserve left,” he

forgot West Africa. That is what West Africa has continually suffered

from—forgetfulness. The resources of the Nigerian forest belt are as yet

far from being fully determined, but sufficient is now known of them to

show that they are enormously rich. Besides the oil palm and the wine

palm (which produces the _piassava_ of commerce) the forest belt contains

large quantities of valuable mahoganies, together with ebony, walnut,

satin, rose, and pear woods, barwood, and other dye-woods, several

species of rubber, African oak, gums (copal), kola, and numerous trees

suitable to the manufacture of wood-pulp. Oil-bearing plants abound

in great quantities, as do also fibres, several of which have been

favourably reported upon by the Imperial Institute. The shea-butter tree,

to which I shall have occasion again to refer, is an inhabitant of the

dry zone.

[Illustration: THE TROPICAL BUSH.]

The soil of this forest region is wonderfully fertile, and forest

products apart, the possibilities of agricultural development are

considerable. The three articles under cultivation by the natives the

Administration has of late years done its best to popularize have been

cotton, cocoa, and maize. For several reasons maize is an uncertain

quantity. The land bears two crops a year, the larger crops ripening

in July, but a wet August will play havoc with harvesting and storing

arrangements, while the amount available for export must always depend

upon local food requirements and available labour. The cultivation of

cocoa, for which the humid atmosphere, rich alluvial soil, and abundant

shade of the forest region seem peculiarly suitable, has, on the other

hand, steadily, if slowly, increased since it was started fifteen years

ago. In 1900 the quantity of cocoa exported was valued at £8,622. It

had risen in 1910 to £101,151. The efforts made within the last few

years by the British Cotton Growing Association, supplemented by those

of the Administration, to revive on a large scale the export trade in

raw cotton started by the Manchester manufacturer, Mr. Clegg, at the

time of the American Civil War, has so far been partially, but only

partially, successful. The industry has progressed, but far less rapidly

than its promoters hoped.[4] Things do not move quickly in West Africa.

In all these questions several factors have to be taken into account,

for which sufficient allowance is not made in Europe. For one thing, the

really immense amount of labour which the Nigerian population is already

required to put forth in order to feed itself and to sustain the existing

export trade is not appreciated.

The idea that the native has merely to scratch the earth or watch

the fruit ripening on the trees in order to sustain himself and his

family is, speaking generally, as grotesque an illusion as that he is

a helpless, plastic creature with no will of his own. The native is on

the whole an active, hard-working individual, the ramifications of

whose domestic and social needs involve him in constant journeyings

which absorb much time, and if his soil is prolific in the bearing of

crops, it is equally so in invading vegetation, which has constantly to

be checked. He is also a keen business man and a born trader, as any

European merchant who has dealings with him will bear witness, and he

will turn his attention to producing what pays him best. In that respect

he differs not at all from other sections of the human race amongst whom

the economic sense has been developed, and he cannot be fairly expected

to devote his attention to raising one particular raw material which

a certain home industry may desire, if he can make larger profits in

another direction. The opening up of the country, the increasing dearness

of food supplies in the neighbourhood of all the great centres, the

intensifying commercial activity and economic pressure so visible on

every side, the growth of population, and the enlargement of the horizon

of ideas must necessarily lead to a steady development in all branches

of production. But the native must be given time, and the country is one

which cannot be rushed either economically or politically.

No sketch, however brief, of the potentialities of the Nigerian forest

belt would be complete without a reference to the labours of the

Forestry Department, which owes its initiation to the foresight and

statesmanship of the late Sir Ralph Moor. Such reference is the more

necessary since the work of the department crystallizes, so to speak,

the conception of its duties towards the native population which guides

the Administration’s policy. No other department of the Administration

reveals so clearly by its whole programme and its daily practice what the

fundamental object of British policy in Nigeria really is, and in view of

the increasing assaults upon that policy by company promoters at home,

on the one hand, and the obstacles to which its complete realization

is subjected in Africa on the other, it is absolutely essential that

public opinion in Britain should become acquainted with the facts and be

in a position to support the Colonial Office and the Administration in

combining equity with commonsense.

Briefly stated, the Forestry Department is designed to conserve forest

resources for the benefit of the State—the State meaning, in practice,

the native communities owning the land and their descendants, and the

Administration charged with their guardianship, and while encouraging

any legitimate private enterprise, whether European or native, to

oppose the wholesale exploitation of those resources for the benefit

of individuals, white or black. It aims at impressing the native with

the economic value of his forests as a source of present and continual

revenue for himself and his children; at inducing native communities to

give the force of native law to its regulations and by their assistance

in applying them, to prevent destruction through indiscriminate farming

operations and bush fires, to prevent the felling of immature trees, to

replant and to start communal plantations. It aims at the setting aside,

with the consent of the native owners, of Government reserves and native

reserves, and at furthering industrial development by private enterprise

under conditions which shall not interfere with the general welfare of

the country. In a word, the Forestry Department seeks to associate the

native communities with the expanding values of the land in which they

dwell, so that for them the future will mean increasing prosperity and

wealth, the essence of the policy being that these communities are not

only by law and equity entitled to such treatment, but that any other

would be unworthy of British traditions. It is what some persons call

maudlin sentiment, the sort of “maudlin sentiment” which stands in the

way of the Nigerian native being expropriated and reduced to the position

of a hired labourer on the properties of _concessionnaires_ under whose

patriotic activities the Nigerian forest would be exploited until it had

disappeared from the face of the earth like the forests of Wisconsin,

Michigan, Minnesota, and Eastern Canada.

Apart from the question of safeguarding the rights of the people of the

land, our wards, the necessity of forest conservation in the interest of

the public weal has been taught by bitter experience, and experience has

also shown that scientific forestry can only be profitably undertaken by

the Government or by bodies whose first obligation is the interest and

protection of the community. The Forestry Department of Southern Nigeria,

short as its existence has been, is already a revenue-making Department,

for in the last ten years it has either planted, or induced the natives

to plant, trees (some of which, like the rubber trees in Benin, are now

beginning to bear) whose present estimated value is £287,526, and has

thus added over a quarter of a million to the value of the capital stock

of the forests without taking into account the indirect effects of the

steps taken to help their natural regeneration. The Department has many

local difficulties to contend with, especially in the Western province,

which I shall have occasion to discuss in connection with the general

administrative problem facing the administration in that section of the

Protectorate.

The character of its work necessitates that, in addition to scientific

training in forest lore, those responsible for its direction shall be

possessed of knowledge of native customs and of considerable tact in

conducting negotiations with native authorities, always suspicious of

European interference in anything which touches the question of tenure

and use of land. The Administration is fortunate in possessing in the

Conservator and Deputy-Conservator two men who combine in a rare degree

these dual qualifications. It is but the barest statement of fact

to say that Mr. H. N. Thompson, the Conservator who went to Southern

Nigeria after many years in Burma, enjoys an international reputation.

As an expert in tropical forestry he stands second to none in the world.

His colleague, Mr. R. E. Dennett, has contributed more than any other

European living to our knowledge of Nigerian folklore, and he understands

the native mind as few men of his generation do. In view of its immense

importance to the future of the country it is very regrettable to have to

state that the Forestry Department is greatly undermanned and its labours

curtailed in many directions by the insufficiency of the funds at its

disposal. No wiser course could be taken by the administration than that

of setting aside a sum of borrowed money to be used, as in the case of

the railways, as capital expenditure on productive forestry work.

CHAPTER IV

THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN PROVINCES

In connection with the internal government of the Protectorate it may

be advisable to refer briefly to the House Rule Ordinance of 1901 which

has recently given rise to some controversy. The House Rule Ordinance is

a measure designed by the late Sir Ralph Moor to prevent social anarchy

from ensuing when slavery was abolished by the British Government. It

gives force of Law to House Rule. House Rule is, in reality, the native

form of government, which has existed in Southern Nigeria for many

centuries. In recognizing the former the Administration acknowledges the

existence of the latter for which it can provide no substitute. Native

society, as already stated, is in the patriarchal state. The foundation

of it is the “Father,” whether of the family, of the community, or of the

tribe. The members of the House are, in a measure, apprentices. Under

native law there are obligations on both sides. It is a transitional

stage, and should be regarded as such, and allowed to reform itself

from within. The one difficulty, in this respect, is lest the Ordinance

should tend to prevent a gradual internal evolution towards a higher

state by sterilizing any healthy influences making for modification. A

much greater danger would be any sudden change which would throw the

whole country into absolute confusion. In the Western Province and in

the Bini district, where native rule has developed more rapidly than

in the Eastern and Central, the Father of the House is subject to the

Father of the district, and he in turn is subject to the Paramount Chief

of the whole tribe—the Supreme Father. There is, therefore, a check upon

despotic abuses by the head of the House. In the bulk of the Central

Province and in the whole of the Eastern Province, the head of the House

is virtually the head of the community, the higher forms of internal

control not having evolved. Any hasty and violent interference which

domestic “slavery,” as it is termed, in a country like the Central and

Eastern Provinces should be strenuously opposed. It would be an act of

monstrous injustice, in the first place, if unaccompanied by monetary

compensation, and it would produce social chaos. But there seems to be no

reason why the House Rule Ordinance should not be amended in the sense

of substituting for Paramount Chieftainship therein—which is virtually

non-existent—the District Commissioners, _aided by the Native Councils_,

as a check upon the now unfettered action of the heads of Houses. To

destroy the authority of the heads would be to create an army of wastrels

and ne’er-do-weels. Native society would fall to pieces, and endless

“punitive expeditions” would be the result.[5]

For purposes of administration Southern Nigeria is divided into three

Provinces, the Eastern (29,056 square miles), with headquarters at Old

Calabar; the Central (20,564 square miles) with headquarters at Warri;

and the Western (27,644 square miles), with headquarters at Lagos, the

seat of Government of the Protectorate. To the Western Province is

attached, as distinct from the Protectorate, what is termed the “Colony

of Lagos,” comprising the capital and a small area on the mainland—Lagos

itself is an island—amounting altogether to 3,420 square miles. The

supreme government of the three Provinces is carried on from Lagos by

the Governor, assisted by an Executive Council and by a Legislative

Council composed of nine officials and six unofficial members selected

by the Governor and approved by the Secretary of State. Each Province

is in charge of a Provincial Commissioner, although in the Western

Province his duties are more nominal than real. In none of the Provinces

is there a Provincial Council. The Central and Eastern Provinces are

sub-divided into districts in charge of a District Commissioner and

Assistant Commissioner, who govern the country through the recognized

Chiefs and their councillors by the medium of Native Councils which

meet periodically and over which the District Commissioner or his

assistant presides. These Native Councils or Courts constitute the real

administrative machinery of the country. They administer native law in

civil and criminal cases between natives. They may not, however, except

by special provision, deal with civil cases in which more than £200

is involved, or with criminal cases of a nature which, under native

law, would involve a fine exceeding £100 or a sentence of imprisonment

exceeding ten years with or without hard labour, or a flogging exceeding

fifteen strokes. Appeal from the Native Courts to the Supreme Court can

be made through the District Commissioners, who have the powers of a

Judge of the Supreme Court with powers of jurisdiction limited by law.

The District Commissioner’s Court is virtually a branch of the Supreme

Court, and deals almost entirely with cases in which non-natives are

concerned.

The Central and Eastern Provinces, which include the deltaic and the

larger part of the forest region, are inhabited by Pagan tribes,

among whom Mohammedanism is at present making but relatively slow

progress (none at all in many districts) and Christianity, which by

fits and starts and with long intervals has been at them since the

fifteenth century, still less. These tribes are of an independent,

sturdy temperament, and in the remoter parts of both Provinces still

uncontrolled, or virtually so. They are, almost without exception, great

traders, and the British merchants who know them best speak highly of

their honesty in commercial transactions.

The problem of governing these peoples offers no complications, which may

be called political, of a serious character. It is rendered easier in the

Central Province, where the authority of the Benin Kingdom, exercised

for so many centuries, has led to the centralization of a strong native

authority; and proportionately less so in the Eastern Province, where no

considerable native power was ever evolved. The Administration levies

no direct tax, and its chief concern is to keep the peace, to open up

the country, and to check barbarous customs. Astonishing progress has

been effected in these respects during the past decade, nor must it be

supposed that because there is an absence of complex political questions,

progress has not been attended with complexities of a different order.

Indeed, people at home can have no conception of the natural difficulties

under which the administrator, the merchant, and, for that matter, the

native also, labour in carrying out their respective tasks and avocations

in the deltaic and forest regions of Nigeria. For six months in the year

a very large portion of the Central and Eastern Provinces is partially

submerged. The Niger overflows its banks, every forest rivulet becomes

a river, the creeks and channels spread their waters upon the land, the

forest is flooded over an enormous area, and the pathways intersecting it

are impassable.

It is in circumstances such as these that District Commissioners have to

keep in touch with their districts, not infrequently spending days and

even nights in dug-outs under conditions which may be better imagined

than described; marching in the rear of weary carriers through reeking,

soaking, steaming forest; negotiating streams swollen into torrents;

camping where and when they can, the boots they remove getting mouldy in

a night, the clothes they hang up wringing wet when they come to put them

on again; add to this a body often plagued with malaria and rheumatism,

poorly nourished with sometimes insufficient and usually untempting

diet, tormented by stinging insects, and a faint idea can be formed of

conditions, during the rainy season, of a life which even in the dry

season calls upon the utmost reserves of a man’s moral fibre, to say

nothing of his physical powers. That the latter give way does not, alas!

need demonstration, for while a favoured few resist, the roll of deaths

and invaliding tells its own tale; and it would not be surprising if the

former proved itself frequently unequal to the strain. Such cases are,

however, extremely rare, and it is but natural if men labouring for their

country under the conditions of hardship I have inadequately sketched

should bitterly resent being portrayed on public platforms at home in the

light of rivets in an administrative machine cynically demoralizing the

natives of the country with drink in order to raise revenue.[6] Assuredly

it is necessary, as a prominent statesman addressing the House of Commons

declared some years ago, that “the more you extend your Empire the more

imperative it is that this House should extract from its agents abroad

the same standard of conduct which we exact at home.” But it is also

necessary that public opinion in Britain should take more trouble than it

does to realize something of the conditions under which its agents in the

most unhealthy tropical regions of the Empire have to spend their lives,

and should extend to them more sympathy than, at present, it seems often

inclined to do.

[Illustration: ONE OF THE COMMUNAL RUBBER PLANTATIONS (FUNTUMIA

ELASTICA), BENIN CITY.]

[Illustration: A SCENE IN YORUBALAND.]

It is in this part of Nigeria, where natural man is perpetually in

conflict with his environment, that you would expect to find those

darker customs and practices connected with the spiritual side of life,

whereby humanity has in all ages sought to propitiate the forces of

Nature; customs which under the modern form of sword-dances, Morris

dances, and the like attest to their former existence in Europe. If we

are honest with ourselves we must admit that the inspiration which has

evolved a sort of misty horror around the peoples of the West Coast of

Africa, has been largely drawn from the setting of swamp and forest where

the sacrificial rites associated with them, more prominently, perhaps,

than they deserve, have been performed. In themselves these rites differ

in no way from those we are familiar with in the records of white peoples

when they had reached a stage of intellectual advancement which the

Nigerian negro has certainly never attained, and which it is doubtful

if any human stock could, or can ever, attain, in such an environment.

Owing to the unconquered and, I think, unconquerable natural forces

surrounding him, the Nigerian of the delta is still in the stage “to

listen to the will of Jove which comes forth from the lofty and verdant

oak”; to seek as the load-star of his spiritual necessities and in his

ceaseless struggle against implacable odds, the conciliation of the

fertilizing spirit through whose assistance alone he can hope to subject

them; to incorporate the personality of protecting deities into man by

oblation and by human or animal sacrifice, the shedding of blood being

the mystic symbol of established contact with the protecting spiritual

elements (the same prompting animates the most sacred of Christian rites)

as it remains the tangible and most potent symbol of human brotherhood.

The sacrificial knife of the Nigerian negro may seem more repulsive to

the modern eye from the setting of black forms framed in the deep shadows

of primeval forest and fœtid swamp, and a double dose of original sin

may with complacency be assigned to him by the superficial. But in

itself and in the motive which raises it quivering over the bound and

helpless victim, it differentiates not at all from the story of Abraham

and Isaac handed down to us in the sacred writings and not, certainly,

in a light other than commendable, given the setting. If some of those

who are so ready to pass shallow judgment upon the social and spiritual

habits of the West African _chez lui_ and who are responsible for so much

misapprehension in the public mind as to his true character, would study

the book of Genesis, they might approach the subject with an exacter

sense of proportion. For a cessation of these practices in their most

repellant forms—already much curtailed, openly at least—time must be

relied upon and the most powerful element in hastening the process is not

the punitive expedition, but increased facility for inter-communication

which trade expansion generates and entails upon Government to provide.

It may be safely predicted that the process will be far more rapid than

it was in Europe.

[Illustration: BENIN CITY TO-DAY. BINI CHIEFS SITTING OUTSIDE THEIR NEW

COURT HOUSE.

(_Photo by Sir Walter Egerton._)]

No more striking object lesson in the capacity for real progress along

indigenous lines possessed by the Southern Nigerian pagan could be sought

than a comparison between the Bini people of 1897 and the Bini people of

to-day. A powerful tribe now numbering some 150,000 and inhabiting the

Central Province, the Binis had long been the slaves, so to speak, of

a theocracy which had succeeded in denaturalizing the original native

state-form and in obtaining an over-mastering hold over the people.

The King’s superstitions made him a puppet in its hands. The murder

of several British officials was followed by the capture of the city,

and the occupation of the country. Though mild in comparison with the

_autodafés_ and kindred pursuits of the Spanish Inquisition and the long

persecution of the Jews which have distinguished other priesthoods in

cultured surroundings that call for a certain sobriety of judgment in

discussing the priesthood of primitive Benin, the latter had succeeded

in inspiring a reign of terror throughout the country. No man’s life

was safe, and Benin city, the capital, was a place of abominations.

The priesthood were rightly broken, but the authority of the chiefs

maintained, and despite one single administrative error, which, if not

repaired, may occasion trouble later on, the Binis have become one of the

most prosperous and law-abiding people in the Protectorate. They have

co-operated so efficiently with the Forestry Department that throughout

the Benin territory no tree can be unlawfully felled without the Forest

Officer being informed. They are planting up their forest land with

valuable timber trees. Supplied by the department with seeds, shown

how to make nurseries and to supervise transplanting, but doing their

own clearing, planting, and upkeep, no fewer than 700 villages have

established communal rubber plantations of _Funtumia elastica_ which they

are increasing year by year. Many of the trees—of which there are one and

a quarter millions whose present estimated value at a low computation is

£165,000—are now of tappable size. Their share in the licence fees paid

by European lease-holders engaged in the timber and rubber industry in

Bini territory supplies the Bini communities with a further source of

income. So greatly do these intelligent people appreciate the efforts of

the Administration to enrich their country that when a little while ago

they started tapping operations in their rubber plantations under the

supervision of the Forestry Officer, the chiefs and villagers insisted

that a third share should go to Government, and, despite the Governor’s

objections, they would consent to no other arrangement. This has now

become embodied in law. The Forestry Department undertakes to dispose of

the rubber from the communal plantations, the profits being divided as to

one-third for the paramount chiefs, one-third for the village community,

and one-third for the Administration. From their increased revenues the

chiefs of Benin city, “the city of blood,” as it used to be termed, have

already built for themselves a substantial court-house of stone and brick

and furnished their capital with a proper water-supply, putting down

four miles of piping—thus saving the labour of thousands of persons who

had daily to trudge to and from the river—and finding the money for a

reservoir, a pumping station, and public hydrants.

Such surprising results in the short space of fourteen years are at once

a tribute to British rule and to the negro of the Nigerian forests. Many

obvious morals suggest themselves.

CHAPTER V

LAGOS AND ITS PORT—THE FUTURE BOMBAY OF WEST AFRICA

Early in the seventies, a decade after the British occupation, Lagos,

for more years than one cares to remember an important export centre of

the slave trade, was a small settlement inhabited by Yoruba and Bini

agriculturists and traders. The Hinterland, threatened by Dahomeyan

invasions from the west and Fulani inroads from the north, distressed

by internal struggles between various sections of the Yoruba people

rebelling against the central authority, was in a state of perpetual

ferment. Severed from the mainland, maintaining themselves from hand to

mouth, and swept by disease, the few British officials led an unenviable

existence. A small three-roomed house protected from the rains by an

iron roof harboured the Governor, and the members of his staff were glad

to accept the hospitality of European merchants earning a precarious if

lucrative livelihood by trading with the natives in palm oil, kernels,

ivory, and cotton.

To-day Lagos is a picturesque, congested town of some 80,000 inhabitants,

boasting many fine public buildings and official and European and native

merchants’ residences, churches, wharves, a hospital, a tramway, a

bacteriological institute, a marine engineering establishment, to say

nothing of cold storage and electric light plant, hotels, a racecourse,

and other appurtenances of advanced civilization. Like every other part

of West Africa that I have seen, Lagos is full of violent contrasts.

Every variety of craft—the tonnage of the place is something like 250,000

tons per annum—is to be observed in the water and every variety of dress

in the busy streets, from the voluminous robes of the turbaned Mohammedan

to the latest tailoring monstrosities of Western Europe. The Yoruba lady

with a Bond Street hat and hobble skirt; her sister in the infinitely

more graceful enfolding cloths of blue or terra-cotta, with the bandanna

kerchief for head-gear; opulent resident native merchants or Government

clerks in ordinary English costume; keen-featured “uneducated” traders

from whose shoulders hang the African _riga_—a cosmopolitan crowd which

includes Sierra Leonean, Cape Coast, and Accra men, attracted by the many

prospects of labour an ever-increasing commercial and industrial activity

offers to carpenters, mechanics, traders’ assistants, and the like. Here

a church thronged on Sundays with African ladies and gentlemen in their

finest array; here a mosque built by the local and rapidly increasing

Yoruba Muslims at a cost of £5,000. Here a happy African family laughing

and chattering in a tumbledown old shanty within close proximity to a

“swagger” bungalow gay with brilliant creepers; there a seminary where a

number of young ladies, looking supremely uncomfortable in their European

frocks, supplemented by all the etceteras of Western feminine wardrobes,

their short hair frizzled out into weird contortions, are learning as

fast as their teachers can make them those hundred and one inutilities

which widen the breach between them and their own beautiful, interesting

land. A certain kind of prosperity is writ large over the place, but

there is good reason to believe that economic pressure in its different

forms, none more acutely felt than the ascending price of foodstuffs, is

beginning to bear hardly upon the poorer classes, and the political and

social atmosphere of the town is not altogether healthy.

Historical circumstances rather than natural advantages have made Lagos

the most important commercial emporium of British West Africa and the

starting-point of a railway into the interior. It is difficult to see,

if the traffic of this railway and its future feeders develops, as

there is every reason to believe it will, how the already crowded and

circumscribed area of Lagos can possibly prove equal to the demands

upon it. Indeed, its physical features are in many respects most

disadvantageous for the _rôle_ of the West African Bombay it appears

called upon to bear, and it is only by the expenditure of millions which,

spread over the Protectorate, would have achieved results of much greater

fruitfulness, that Lagos can be converted into a harbour worthy of the

name. For Lagos is cursed with a bar which vessels drawing more than

fourteen feet cannot cross, and the absurd anomaly, to say nothing of

the expense and loss of time and damage to valuable cargo involved, is

witnessed of vessels with merchandise consigned to the premier port in

Nigeria having to steam 120 miles south of it and there discharge their

freight into branch steamers for conveyance to destination. An elusive

and sinister obstruction is Lagos bar, strewn with wrecks and hitherto

refractory to dredging, which shifts its depths three feet in a single

week, while the position of the channels is continually altering. As one

surveys the coast-line and notes the two, comparatively speaking, deep

and roomy anchorages of Forcados and Old Calabar, one cannot refrain

from marvelling somewhat at the curious chain of events which has

conspired to concentrate effort and expense upon a place so difficult of

access. However, the past cannot be undone, and no doubt there is much

to be said in favour of Lagos, or rather of the happenings which have

ministered to its selection. Be that as it may, the destinies of Southern

Nigeria have for the last five years been in the hands of a Governor

of large ideas and enormous energy. Sir Walter Egerton, who, despite

numerous disappointments and maddening delays, has pursued with dogged

persistence and infinite resource the object dearest to his heart—that

of opening the harbour. A comprehensive scheme of works, entailing the

construction of two stone moles, one on either side of the entrance,

combined with harbour and channel dredging, is proceeding under the

direction of Messrs. Coode, Son, and Matthews, and the constant personal

supervision of the Governor, in the confident belief that its completion

will ensure (combined with dredging) a depth of twenty-seven feet at

high water, corresponding to twenty-four feet at low tide. When I was

in Lagos a month ago[7] the work on the eastern mole had advanced 4,500

feet seawards, but the western mole is not yet started, and will not be,

it is feared, for some time, a further delay having been caused by the

foundering of the _Axim_, with much indispensable material on board.

One must have stood at the extremity of the eastern mole and watched

the greedy, muddy-coloured sea absorbing like some insatiable monster

the masses of grey rock hurled, at all times of the day and every day

in the week, into its depths, to appreciate the colossal difficulties

of a task which, brought to a successful issue, will always remain an

impressive testimony to human perseverance under climatic and other

conditions of perennial difficulty. West Africa has certainly never

seen anything comparable to it. Nature disputes with man for every

inch of vantage. As the work progresses the sand twists and withes

into ever-changing formations; banks arise and disappear only to again

re-form; the foreshore on the outer side of the mole grows and swells

and rises weekly, threatening to become level with the wall itself and

even to overwhelm it; the scour of the sea scoops into the ocean’s

floor, thus forcing the advancing mole into deep water, which demands

a proportionately larger meal of stone. From out the greyness of the

horizon the remains of the _Kano_, _Kittiwake_, _Egga_, and other vessels

that once were, lift lamentable spars above the angry breakers. From

Abeokuta, thirty miles away, these innumerable tons of granitic boulders

must be brought, despatched in “boxes” from the newly-opened quarries to

Ebute-Metta by rail. There the “boxes” are lifted from the waggons and

hoisted by cranes into lighters, the lighters are towed to the wharf,

the “boxes” lifted out of them, run along the mole, and their contents

hurled into the sea. Every foot’s advance requires sixty tons of stone.

At the accelerated rate of progress now ensured the eastern mole will be

finished in four years. The labour and organization required to bring

this great work to its present stage—initial steps in West Africa being

invariably characterized by endless impediments—have been prodigious.

Despite the sombre prognostications one hears in certain quarters, there

seems no reasonable doubt that the bar will yield in time, as the forest

has yielded, to British genius and pertinacity aided by African muscles,

but at a cost which, when the time comes to add up the bill, will prove,

I think, much heavier than generally supposed.

Lagos is joined to the mainland by two substantial bridges, one

connecting the island with another small island called Iddo, which stands

between Lagos Island and the continent, and one connecting Iddo with the

continent itself at Ebute-Metta. From thence the railway starts on its

way northward, traversing the whole of Yorubaland and tapping the Niger

at Jebba.

CHAPTER VI

THE YORUBAS AND THEIR COUNTRY

The administrative problems which confront the Government of Southern

Nigeria in the western, or Yoruba, province are very much more

complicated than any to be met with in the central and eastern provinces.

They arise partly from the character, at once progressive and unstable,

of the Yorubas themselves, partly from the curious divergence in the

political relations subsisting between his Majesty’s Government and

the various sections of the old Yoruba confederation, partly from the

influences working in favour of direct British rule which find favour in

the Lagos Legislative Council, but mainly through neglect, disinclination

to look a situation not without delicacy in the face, and the absence of

any serious effort to map out a definite, consistent policy.

In one respect at least, that of the rapid assimilation of every feature,

good, bad, and indifferent, which comes to them from the West with the

influx of European religious and social ideas, law, and commercial and

industrial activity, the Yorubas (who considerably outnumber them) may

be termed the Baganda of West Africa. If this capacity spells true

progress for a tropical African people, then the Yorubas are infinitely

more progressive than any of the peoples, not of Nigeria merely, but

of Western Africa. It is, nevertheless, worthy of remark that, without

exception, all the native papers published in Lagos which, if not

in every case edited by Yorubas, profess in every case to be the

mouthpieces of the “Yoruba nation,” ceaselessly lament the Europeanizing

of the country, the decay of the national spirit, the decadence of family

authority, and the deterioration of the rising generation without,

however—so far as many years’ perusal of their columns can enable

one to judge—ever making an attempt to grapple with the problem in a

constructive sense, and, in some cases, perhaps unwittingly, contributing

not a little to further the processes which they denounce and deplore. In

this, their notable characteristic, the Yorubas may have been influenced

by environment, for although a considerable portion of the area they

inhabit is forest land, much of it is open park-like country, and the

whole of it lies outside the deltaic region altogether. It is among the

Yorubas that Christian missionary propaganda has obtained most of its

converts in West Africa, although none of the ruling chiefs have accepted

the Christian faith, and although Islam is now making much more headway

than Christianity. Moreover, official Christianity, already represented

in Yoruba by as many sects as we have at home, has been riven by the

defection of a body, some 3000 strong, I believe, which has constituted

itself an independent Church, the real, though not explicitly avowed,

motive being a refusal to abide by the monogamous sexual relationship

which the Church enforces. With Christian missionary teaching Western

education, or, more accurately, and, generally, semi-education (and

indifferent at that) has, of course, gone hand in hand, and it is among

the Yorubas almost exclusively, so far as Southern Nigeria is concerned,

that the problem of the “educated native” and what his part is to be in

the future of the country arises and threatens already to become acute.

Nowhere in Africa, it may be confidently asserted, are so many radically

different influences, policies and tendencies at work among one and

the same people as are observable to-day in this Yorubaland of 28,000

square miles. The situation is really quite extraordinary, and offers

an unlimited field of speculation to the student. The natural aptitudes

of the Yorubas—of both sexes—are husbandry and trade, not soldiering.

But the necessities of tribal defence drove them to concentrate in

large centres. These centres have remained and become the capitals of

separate provinces, allegiance to the original head having mostly fallen

into virtual, in some cases into total, desuetude. Thus we find to-day

a series of native towns which for estimated numbers surpass anything

to be met with in any part of native Africa—such as Ibadan, 150,000;

Abeokuta, 100,000; Oshogbo, 40,000; Ogbomosho, 35,000; Ife, 30,000;

Oyo, 40,000; Ijebu-Ode, 35,000; Iseyin, 40,000; some twelve other towns

with a population of between 10,000 and 20,000; and twice as many more

whose inhabitants number 5000 to 8000. The most surprising contrasts,

illustrative of the divergences referred to, are noticeable in these

agglomerations of human life—for instance, between Abeokuta, Ibadan,

and Oyo. Abeokuta, the capital of the “Egba united Government” (whose

authority extends over 1869 square miles), its mass of corrugated iron

roofs glaring beneath the rays of the tropical sun, spreading around

and beneath the huge outcrop of granitic rock where its founders first

settled a hundred years ago, offers the curious picture of a Europeanized

African town in the fullest sense of the term, but with this unique

feature, that its administration and the administration of the district,

of which it is the capital, is conducted by natives—_i.e._ by the Alake

(the head chief) in council.

[Illustration: ONE OF THE SACRED STONE IMAGES AT IFE, THE SPIRITUAL

CENTRE OF YORUBALAND.]

[Illustration: ONE OF THE SONS OF THE SHEHU OF BORNU.]

It is, of course, true that the British Commissioner wields very great

influence, but he is invested with no legal powers of intervention

whatever, because the British treaty with the Egba section of the Yoruba

people recognizes their independence in all internal affairs; and all

Government notices and pronouncements posted up in the town are signed by

the Alake and the Alake’s secretary. The Commissioner, Mr. Young, finds

himself, indeed, in a position where the utmost tact is required. He has

passed through very unpleasant times, and the confidence and respect he

has ultimately won constitute a veritable triumph of personality. He

has achieved the seemingly impossible task of becoming a real power in

a native State over which, save in its external relations and in civil

and criminal cases affecting “non-Egbas,” the British Government has

no legal jurisdiction. The Alake, a burly African, has not—a matter

of thankfulness—adopted European dress, as the bulk of his officials

have done, but he lives in a two-storeyed European house boasting of

a tennis-court which, I am confident, the ample proportions of its

owner forbid him from using. The whole machinery of administration is

on the European pattern, with its Secretariat, Treasury, Public Works

Department, Police, Prison, Printing Offices, Post Office, etc.—all

managed by Europeanized Africans. I visited most of the Government

departments, the prison, and printing offices, and was impressed with the

industry and business-like air which reigned within them. The revenues,

thanks to the Commissioner, are in a healthy state. Excellent roads have

been and are being constructed. A water supply is being arranged for

out of a loan of £30,000 advanced by the Southern Nigeria Government.

Labour-saving machinery is being introduced at the Commissioner’s

suggestion. An imposing college is in course of erection. It is all very

remarkable and interesting. Whether it is durable is a matter which I

shall have occasion to discuss later on.

Very different is the state of affairs such as I found it early in this

year in Ibadan, capital of a district of 4000 square miles with a dense

population of 430,000 (107 to the square mile), an enormous, straggling,

grass-roofed, rather unkempt town luxuriating in tropical vegetation

and whose neighbourhood abounds with rich and delightful scenery. Here,

administratively speaking, government is neither fish, fowl, nor good

red-herring; neither African, nor European, nor Europeanized-African. All

real influence has been taken out of the hands of the Bale (head-chief)

and nothing has been substituted for it. Treated at intervals with unwise

familiarity and with contemptuous disregard, the present Bale, a man

obviously unfitted for his office, has no authority over his chiefs, who

in council—as I have myself witnessed—openly deride him. The inevitable

consequence is that the chiefs themselves constantly intrigue against

one another and have no prestige with the people, while the people

themselves have no respect either for their own rulers or for the white

man. A visit to the Bale’s Court in company with the recently-appointed

Acting-Resident was a surprising revelation—quite as painful, I am

inclined to believe, to that official as to the writer—of unmannerly

conduct, of total absence of respect for his Majesty’s representative,

of utter lack of decorum and dignity. The “Ibadan Government,” as I

saw it, is a caricature, and a dangerous caricature, of government,

unlike anything, I am glad to say, which I observed in either of the two

Protectorates. The town and the inhabitants are obviously out of hand,

and in my opinion—an opinion which, having felt bound to communicate

it to the responsible authorities in Nigeria, I am the freer to state

here—is that if the whole place be not thoroughly overhauled, events must

arise at no distant day leading to considerable trouble. I am inclined to

think that some people would rather welcome trouble.

Oyo, again, is a singular contrast both to Abeokuta and to Ibadan. The

seat of the Alafin, titular head of all the Yoruba-speaking peoples, Oyo

is a clean, peaceful, sleepy town charmingly situate in open country

and reverentially regarded by many Yorubas. Here the native form of

government has been happily preserved against many assaults from both

within and without. The Alafin’s abode—the Afin—consists of a collection

of spacious compounds beautifully thatched with here grass and surrounded

by a wall. Here the Court is held, distinguished by all the ceremonial

inherent to what was once (and might again become) a wonderfully

efficient national Government. In its courtliness, its simple if barbaric

dignity, the decorum of chiefs and councillors, and the manifest honour

in which the ruling head was held, this Pagan Court recalled the best

type of native government I had previously observed in the Mohammedan

Hausa provinces of Northern Nigeria, although differing radically from

the latter in construction and formulæ. The Alafin himself, a man of

great strength and stature, his head surmounted by the national casque or

crown of heavy native coral, with a curious face which reminded one of

the lineaments of the Egyptian Sphinx (the Yorubas profess to trace their

descent from Egypt), is one of the most striking native personalities

I observed in Nigeria. A notable incident in the State reception I

witnessed was the presence among the prostrated chiefs of several whose

dress showed that they had embraced Islam, doing obeisance to their pagan

lord.

This brief description of the three most important centres of Yoruba life

will serve to show how varied and haphazard are the forms which British

policy takes in the Western Province. I fear that much trouble lies ahead

if steps are not adopted to evolve something more closely approximating

to statecraft in handling the problems of the country. An attempt to show

what might be done and the reasons for doing it will be made in the next

chapter.

CHAPTER VII

BRITISH POLICY IN YORUBALAND

The political situation in Yorubaland, some aspects of which were

briefly sketched in the preceding chapter, is one that, obviously,

cannot last. Its inconveniences are too numerous and too palpable and

it bears within it the seeds of dissolution. The whole relationship of

the different Yoruba States (or, rather, dismembered sections) between

themselves and between them and the British _raj_ as established by

Treaty or by Agreement (which should have equally binding force)

abounds in contradictions, irregularities, and potency for mischief.

In the Abeokuta district we have theoretically no authority, since, as

already mentioned, there is a Treaty guaranteeing the independence of

the Egbas in their internal affairs. But every one knows that, given

an untactful Commissioner or the development of some more than usually

menacing intrigue against the Alake, circumstances might arise at any

time which would compel British intervention. With Oyo we have a treaty

of friendship and commerce and we have a separate treaty of the same kind

with Ibadan, although Ibadan recognizes the paramountcy of, and pays

tribute to, Oyo. In Oyo we have not materially interfered with native

government. In the Ibadan district native government is, in practice, a

myth. Such a state of things leads to singular inconsistencies, and the

Southern Nigeria Administration would find it difficult to reconcile its

actions in certain directions with its actions in others.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE “AFIN” OR RESIDENCE OF THE ALAFIN OF OYO,

SHOWING TYPICAL YORUBA THATCHING.]

Take, for example, the land question. If there is one thing upon which

all the most experienced Nigerian administrators are agreed it is the

absolute essentiality, for the future of the people of the country,

that their use and enjoyment of the land should be secured, not only

against a certain type of European capitalist who covets this rich soil

for his own schemes, and, under the pretence of industrial expansion,

would cheerfully turn the native agriculturist, farmer, and trader into

a “labourer,” but against the class of native who, for his own ends,

for speculative purposes mainly, seeks to undermine native law and to

change the right of user upon which native land tenure is based, into

that of owner at the expense of the community at large. More especially

does this become a question of vital importance to native communities

where, as in Yorubaland, you have a comparatively dense population which

under the _pax Britannica_ is bound to increase at a very rapid rate,

and thus requires every inch of land for its own future uses. But as

matters stand at present, we cannot, in the Egba district, which, being

nearer to Lagos, is more accessible to certain undesirable influences,

both European and native, and to the infiltration of European laws

and customs regulating the tenure of land, take effective measures to

counteract these influences. We could, of course, if we chose, not in

the Egba district only, but throughout Yorubaland. But there has been a

lamentable reluctance both at home and in the Protectorate to foresee

and cope with a predicament which all realize, which some from a natural

bent of mind inclining them to favour the substitution everywhere of

direct for indirect rule, and others who are of the same way of thinking

but from motives of self-interest may secretly rejoice at, but which the

officials whose hearts are really in the country and who have sufficient

experience to understand the endless and disastrous embarrassments

that the disintegration of native law relating to land would produce,

deeply deplore. What has been the result? The Egbas are beginning to

buy and to sell land among themselves in absolute violation of their

own customs and laws, thereby laying up for their country a heritage of

trouble and inserting the thin edge of the wedge of their own undoing by

letting in the land monopolist and speculator. This, according to all its

professions and to its actions in some specific circumstances, for which

it is to be warmly commended, is, in the view of the Administration,

inimical to the public interest of the Protectorate. What is springing up

in Abeokuta to-day will spread to the other districts to-morrow—nay, is

doing so.

Take another example. The welfare of an agricultural community demands,

for many reasons scientifically substantiated, that a stop should be

put to the reckless destruction of timbered areas such as has been

proceeding all over Yorubaland. This is inherently a public interest, and

the Forestry Officer in the discharge of his duties is merely a servant

of the public. But in the Western Province, for the same reasons, we

cannot or are unwilling to put our case to the native authorities for the

protection of the people against themselves with the same moral force

as in the case of the other two provinces. We are confined, or think

we are confined, to simple persuasion. Now, persuasion by the Forestry

Officer alone is one thing, and persuasion by the Forestry Officer

supported by direct representations from the Executive at Lagos is a

very different thing. It is the latter form of persuasion that has been

absent, and very great credit is due alike to the Forestry Officers and

to a Commissioner trusted by the native rulers, Mr. W. A. Ross, as well

as to the intelligence of those native rulers themselves, that in the

Oyo district both State and communal reserves have been created, the

latter of great extent including the entire valley of the Ogun. But

in the Abeokuta and Ibadan districts persuasion has failed hitherto to

secure any really tangible results. It is almost unnecessary to point out

that the interests of the population do not suffer merely indirectly and

potentially, but directly thereby. Not only does Southern Nigeria import

quantities of timber from Europe when the country should itself provide

for all requirements, but even so primitive a necessity as firewood is

beginning to make itself felt round such towns as Ede, Abeokuta, and

Ibadan.

In these problems the policy of the Southern Nigeria Administration has

been to leave the matter to the native authorities, in other words, to

let the land question slide down a perilous declivity, and to allow the

question of forestry preservation to be left to the unsupported efforts

of the Forestry Department. If this policy of non-interference had been

consistently applied in other directions an intelligible case, at least,

might be made out for it. But the facts are notoriously otherwise. To

mention but one instance. Two years ago pressure was put upon the Ibadan

authorities to vote unpopular licensing regulations in the interests

of temperance, and one of the incidents subsequently arising out of it

was the stoppage of the Bale’s stipend by the Acting Resident with the

concurrence of the Executive at Lagos! Only last February a Bill called

the “Foreign Jurisdiction Ordinance, 1911,” was passed through the Lagos

Legislative Council, which provides for the extension of the laws of the

colony to the Protectorate of Yorubaland (except Abeokuta) without the

native authorities being even consulted, the Attorney-General adopting,

in effect, the extraordinary position that the Government could take no

account of “agreements, understandings, or letters” (concluded or written

by previous Governors) with the native chiefs! If the native chiefs

realized what the logical outcome of the Ordinance might mean for them,

by an Executive in Lagos, which adopted the legal argument quoted, there

would be ferment from one end of Yoruba to the other.

It must be clear from what precedes that the time has come when the whole

position of the Yoruba States in relation to the paramount Power should

be reconsidered. The railway and other agencies are causing the country

to move forward very fast, and conditions are being evolved through the

attempt to drive in two directions at once, which can only lead, if

not to the ultimate annexation of Yorubaland, then to what would, if

possible, be even worse—viz. the strangulation by successive stages of

every effective agency in native government, leaving the chiefs and their

councils mere puppets in the hands of the Lagos Legislative Council. Now

neither of these courses is, I am convinced, desired by the Imperial

Government. The drift is, nevertheless, apparent to all that have eyes to

see and ears to hear. There is a strong party in Lagos favouring direct

rule. There is a combination of distinct influences—in many respects

working unconsciously—making for the break-up of native land tenure and

the undermining of native authority. There is the increasing danger of

leaving the land question unregulated and the difficulty attending the

adoption of adequate measures for forest preservation.

Only one course would appear open to the authorities if they desire to

stop the dry rot. The first step would consist in getting the Native

Councils—_i.e._ the Chiefs in Council—of all the districts in the Western

Province to pass an identical measure of national land preservation which

would become known as the Yoruba Land Act. Inalienability of land is the

cardinal principle of Yoruba land tenure. The preamble of the measure

would define Yoruba law and custom in regard to land. The body of the

measure would declare to be illegal all buying and selling of land,

either between natives and natives or between natives and non-natives,

and would establish limitations of area and time for the holding of

leased lands by private individuals or associations, with provision for

revision of rentals at specified periods. The need of such a measure

should be recognized and the action proposed sanctioned by the Secretary

of State, and the matter should be represented to the native authorities

with all the additional weight which in their eyes it would under those

circumstances possess. It cannot be doubted that were the measure fully

and thoroughly explained to the Native Councils and its urgency in

the interests of their people emphasized, little or no trouble would

be experienced in ensuring its adoption. In the improbable event of

difficulties arising it would be the plain duty of the Administration to

overcome them. The Administration should be able to count in a matter

of this kind upon the support of every patriotic educated Yoruban. The

second step would be more far-reaching—viz. the general reconstruction

of the machinery of national government over the whole province, and the

welding together under the headship of the Alafin of Oyo—the “King and

Lord of Yorubaland,” as he is described in the British Treaty—working

with a Council representative of all Yorubaland, of the separate

districts which internal anarchy and external aggression between them

have caused to fall away from the central authority. The existing

Councils of the various districts would, of course, remain, but we should

have what we have not at present, a true “Yoruba Council,” a strong

central native Government through which the development, the progress,

and the common welfare of the country could proceed on definite, ordered,

national lines.

This would be Empire-building of the real kind. It would not be

unattended with difficulty. It would require time, much tact, and, above

all, full and frank exposition and explanation. But it is feasible of

accomplishment, and by a policy of this kind alone can one of the most

interesting and promising races of Western Africa hope to reach, under

our supreme direction, its full development. The elements necessary to

the success of such policy exist. They do not need to be created, but

only to have their vitality revived and their course adjusted and guided.

PART III

NORTHERN NIGERIA

CHAPTER I

THE NATURAL HIGHWAY TO THE UPLANDS OF THE NORTH

A casual visitor provided by private kindness with the hospitality of a

stern-wheeler and not, therefore, exposed to the discomforts (soon, it is

to be hoped, to be a thing of the past, with the completion of railway

communications between Lagos and Zungeru) with which an inexcusably

inefficient service of river-boats afflicts the unhappy official on his

way to Northern Nigeria, packed like a sardine, and feeding as best he

can, may be pardoned for finding much of captivating interest in 400

miles of leisurely steaming, with many a halt _en route_, from Forcados

to Baro, the starting-point of the Northern Nigerian Railway to Kano. The

heat of the afternoons, the myriad insect visitors which are heralded

by the lighting of the lamps, blacken the cloth and invade every part

of the person accessible to their attentions, the stifling nights,

spent, may be, at anchor under the lee of perpendicular banks; these

are trifles not worthy of mention by comparison with the rewards they

bring. Kaleidoscopic varieties of scenic effects enchant the eye as hour

follows hour and day follows day on the bosom of this wonderful Niger,

passing from serpentine curves so narrow that the revolving paddles seem

in imminent danger of sinking into the bank itself or snapping against

some one of the many floating snags, to ever broadening and majestic

proportions with vistas of eternal forest, of villages nestling amid

banana groves, of busy fishermen flinging their nets, of occasional

dark massive heads lifted a brief second from the deeps to disappear

silently as they arose, of brilliant blue kingfishers darting hither

and thither. Now the river flows through some natural greenhouse of

palms and ferns, whose nodding fronds are reflected in the still green

waters, now past a fringe of matted creepers gay with purple convolvulus

pierced at intervals with the grey upstanding hole of the silk cotton

tree. Here its course is broken by long stretches of fine hummocky sand

across whose shining surface stalk the egret and the crane, the adjoining

rushes noisy with the cackle of the spur-winged geese. Here it glides

expanding between open plains bordered with reeds, only to narrow once

more as the plain heaves upward and the tall vegetable growth gives way

to arid granite outcrops, ascending towards the far horizon into high

tablelands. If at dawn the Niger veils its secrets in billowy mists of

white, at sunset the sense of mystery deepens. For that, I think, is the

principal charm of this great highway into the heart of Negro Africa,

the sense of mystery it inspires. Cradled in mystery, for two thousand

years it defied the inquisitiveness of the outer world, guarded from the

north by dangerous shoals and rapids; hiding its outlet in a fan-shaped

maze of creeks. To-day when its sanctuaries are violated, its waters

churned and smitten by strange and ugly craft, it is still mysterious,

vast and unconquered. Mysterious that sombre forest the gathering shades

encompass. Mysterious that tall half-naked figure on yonder ledge,

crimson framed in the dying sun, motionless and statuesque. Mysterious

that piercing melancholy note which thrills from the profundities beyond,

fading away in whispers upon the violet and green wavelets lapping

against the side of the boat. Mysterious those rapid staccato drumbeats

as unknown humanity on one shore signals to unseen humanity on the

other. Mysterious the raucous cry of the crown-birds passing in long

lines to their resting-place in the marshes. Mysterious those tiny lights

from some unsuspected haunt of natural man that spring into life as the

sun sinks to slumber, and darkness, deep unfathomable darkness, rushes

over the land there to rest until a blood-red moon, defining once again

the line of forest, mounts the sky.

[Illustration: OUTLINE MAP OF NORTHERN NIGERIA.]

From the point of view of navigation and of commerce the Niger is a most

unsatisfactory and uncertain river to work. It can be described, perhaps,

as a river full of holes with shallows between them. Its channels are

constantly changing. It is full of sandbanks which take on new shapes and

sizes every year. The direction of the water-flow below Samabri, where

the bifurcation begins, is so unreliable that within a few years the Nun

has become virtually useless, the Forcados gaining what the Nun has lost,

while there are recent indications that the process may again be altered

in favour once more of the Nun to the detriment of the Forcados. In the

course of the year the water level varies twenty-seven feet, the period

of rise being from June in an ascending scale until the end of September,

the fall then commencing, the river being at its lowest from December to

May. In the rainy season the banks are flooded in the lower regions for

miles around. In the dry season the banks tower up in places fifteen feet

above water level. Roughly speaking, the Niger is navigable for steamers

drawing five feet in June, six feet in July, and so on up to twelve feet

in the end of September; from November to April for vessels drawing

between four and five feet. But the conditions of two consecutive years

are seldom alike.

Government has done little or nothing to cope with these natural

difficulties. The Admiralty charts available to the captains of steamers

are ludicrously obsolete, and all wrong. No continuous series of

observations have been taken of the river, and no effort made to tackle

the problem of improving navigation. Four years ago, by Sir Percy

Girouard’s directions, soundings were, indeed, taken over a distance

of 350 miles from Burutu (Forcados) to Lokoja at the junction with the

Benue; with the result that only seven miles of sand-bars were reported

to require dredging in order to secure a six-foot channel all the year

round. The experienced merchant smiled. He is a slightly cynical person,

is the West African merchant who knows his Niger. Anyhow he is still

whistling for his six-foot channel. One dredger, the best which money

could buy, was purchased by the Northern Nigerian Administration. It

did a little dredging round about Lokoja (and the merchants in the

south declare that the performance has made matters worse for them),

has been used as a passenger boat up the Benue, and is now, I believe,

filling up the swamps at Baro; but the six-foot channel still exists as

an attractive theory in the Government Blue Book. There is so much to

praise, administratively speaking, in Nigeria that one feels the freer to

speak bluntly of the failure of Government to handle this matter of Niger

navigation. It is one of the inevitable, one of the many deplorable,

results of dual control over a common territory; one of the consequences

of the long competition between the two rival Administrations, each

quite honestly playing for its own hand and each quite satisfied that

it alone can think imperially. The upshot has been pernicious to the

public interest. The river-service is shocking from the point of view of

efficiency, and enormously costly. The steamers themselves are falling to

pieces. There is no system of public pilotage, or of lighting. Trading

steamers must anchor at night, which involves, in the aggregate, a great

waste of time and money. The two Administrations are so busy squabbling

over their competing railways and manœuvring to frame rates which will

cut one another out, that the great natural highway into the interior is

utterly neglected.

It is impossible that feelings of respect should not go out, not

only towards the official who labours under these conditions in the

Niger waterways but also towards the merchant building up in quiet,

unostentatious fashion the edifice of commercial enterprise upon which,

in the ultimate resort, the whole fabric of Administrative activity

reposes. I do not now speak of the heads of these powerful trading firms

in Europe, many of whom, by the way, have themselves gone through the

mill in their time. To them England is indebted for the Imperial position

she holds in Nigeria to-day, a fact which is too apt to be forgotten.

I refer to the men, mostly young, in charge of trading stations on the

banks of the Niger and its creeks, living a life of terrible loneliness

amid primitive surroundings in a deadly climate, separated in many cases

several days’ journey from another white face, not nearly so well housed

as the officials (I am describing Southern Nigeria, be it remembered),

and not, like them, helped by the consciousness of power or stimulated

by the wider horizon the latter enjoy. Thrown entirely on their own

resources, usually unfitted by their previous life to face the privations

and isolation of an existence such as this, very hard-worked—their lot

is not an enviable one. No doubt the hardships they have to endure are

incidental to a career they freely choose, although often enough with

little or no previous comprehension of its character. No doubt the fibres

of a minority will be toughened by their experiences. No doubt these

hardships are infinitely less severe than those which the early pioneers

were compelled to undergo, many succumbing under the process; but in that

connection it should not be forgotten that the latter had the incentive

of carving out their fortunes with their own hands, whereas the present

generation out in Nigeria are not their own masters. One cannot help

reflecting upon the irony of the contrast between the commiseration so

freely lavished at home upon the spiritual drawbacks of the Nigerian

native, and the total lack of interest displayed by the Church in the

welfare of these young fellows, many of them mere lads, exposed to

all the moral temptations of their savage environment in which only

exceptional natures will detect the broadening spiritual influences. What

an untold blessing would be a periodical visit to their African homes,

fronted by the silent river, invested by the tropical forest, from an

experienced, genial, sympathetic minister of God, who for a day or two

would share their lives and win their confidence.

There is another matter which should be raised. These young men who come

out from England—I refer to the English trading firms only, not having

inquired into the system prevailing among the Continental firms—do so

under a three years’ contract. This is an altogether excessive period

for the Niger. It should be cut down one half. Even then it would be

half as long again as the officials’ term of service. Professors of

tropical medicine and magnates at home may say what they like about the

improvement of health in the large European settlements. The towns are

one thing. The “bush” is quite another. Speaking generally, the climate

of Nigeria, and the conditions under which four-fifths of white humanity

have to live are such as combine, even in favourable circumstances,

to impose the severest strain, both physical and mental, upon all but

a select few. At the end of a year’s continuous residence, the strain

begins to make itself felt in a multiplicity of ways. Not to acknowledge

it, and not to make provision for it, is, on the part of an employer,

penny wise and pound foolish—to put the matter on the lowest ground.

[Illustration: VIEW OF LOKOJA AND NATIVE TOWN FROM MOUNT PATTEY, LOOKING

S.E.—THE BENUE IN THE DISTANCE.]

At Idah we leave Southern Nigeria. That bold bluff of red sandstone

crowned with grey-trunked baobabs and nodding palms—black with roosting

and repulsive vultures—which overhangs the river at this point, stands

out at the dying of the day, a sentinel pointing to the north. Henceforth

the appearance of the country undergoes a remarkable transformation,

more and more accentuated with every hour’s steaming. High valleys,

slopes and tablelands; a sparser vegetation; masses of granite or red

sandstone vomited promiscuously from broken, arid plains and taking on

fantastic shapes; in the distance, mountain ranges and solitary rounded

eminences—on our right, King William’s range rising to 1200 feet, on our

left, Mounts Jervis, Erskine, Soraxte, and many others, varying from

400 to 1000 feet. The river curves, winds and narrows, obstructed here

and there by dangerous boulders, which the falling waters bring into

view. More substantial, better-thatched huts appear upon the banks, and

around them an increasing number of robed Africans. Plantations of yams,

and guinea corn set out on parallel, raised ridges, attest a higher

skill in cultivation. Cattle are seen cropping the green stuffs near

the water’s edge, and canoes pass bearing cattle, sheep and goats to

some neighbouring market. We enter the spreading domain of Mohammedan

civilization, and before long we shall find ourselves in a new world,

as our gallant little vessel, none the worse for a narrowly averted

collision and grounding on a sandbank or two, casts anchor at Lokoja.

Here beneath the wooded heights of Mount Patte the wonderful prospect

afforded by the junction of the Niger and Benue unfolds itself, and

presently we shall mingle with robed and turbaned African humanity, come

from immense distances to this great market of the middle Niger. The

mangroves of the Delta, the awesome grandeur of the forests, these are

left far behind. We have entered the uplands of the North.