THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE—THE AGRICULTURIST
_Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!_ The sonorous tones perforate the mists
of sleep, heralding the coming of the dawn. _Ashadu Allah, ila-allahu,
ila-allahu!_ Insistent, reverberating through the still, cold air—the
night and first hours of the day in these latitudes are often very cold.
A pause. Then the unseen voice is again raised, seeming to gather unto
itself a passionate appeal as the words of the prayer flow more rapidly.
_Ashadu an Muhammad rasul ilahi! Haya-al essalatu! Haya al el falahi!
Kad Kamet essalatu!_ Another pause. The myriad stars still shine in the
deep purple panoply of the heavens, but their brilliancy grows dimmer.
The atmosphere seems infused with a tense expectancy. _Allahu Akbar!
Allahu Akbar! La illaha, ila-Allahu, ila-Allahu. Muhammad Rasul ilahi.
Salallah aleiheiu, ... Wassalama._ The tones rise triumphant and die
away in grave cadence. It thrills inexpressibly does this salute to the
omnipotent Creator ringing out over every town and village in the Moslem
Hausa States. “God the Greatest! There is no God but _the_ God!” And
that closing, “Peace!” It has in it reality. Surely it is a good thing
and not a bad thing that African man should be reminded as he quits his
couch, and as he returns to it, of an all-presiding, all-pervading,
all-comprehending Deity? His fashion may not be our fashion. What of
that? How far are we here from the narrow cry of the “Moslem peril”!
Whom does this call to God imperil? The people who respond to it and
prostrate themselves in the dust at its appeal? Let us be quite sure that
our own salvation is secured by our own methods, that the masses of our
own people are as vividly conscious of the Omnipotent, as free and happy
in their lives, as these Nigerian folk, ere we venture to disturb the
solemn acknowledgment and petition that peal forth into the dusk of the
Nigerian morn.
[Illustration: FRUIT-SELLERS.]
[Illustration: WATER-CARRIERS.]
And now a faint amber flush appears in the eastern sky. It is the signal
for many sounds. A hum of many human bees, the crowing of countless
roosters, the barking of lean and yellow “pye” dogs, the braying of the
donkey and the neigh of his nobler relative, the bleating of sheep and
the lowing of cattle. The scent of burning wood assails the nostrils
with redolent perfume. The white tick-birds, which have passed the night
close-packed on the fronds of the tall fan-palms, rustle their feathers
and prepare, in company with their scraggy-necked scavenging colleagues
the vultures, for the useful if unedifying business of the day. Nigerian
life begins, and what a busy intensive life it is! From sunrise to
sunset, save for a couple of hours in the heat of the day, every one
appears to have his hands full. Soon all will be at work. The men driving
the animals to pasture, or hoeing in the fields, or busy at the forge,
or dye-pit or loom; or making ready to sally forth to the nearest market
with the products of the local industry. The women cooking the breakfast,
or picking or spinning cotton, or attending to the younger children, or
pounding corn in large and solid wooden mortars, pulping the grain with
pestles—long staves, clubbed at either end—grasped now in one hand, now
in the other, the whole body swinging with the stroke as it descends,
and, perhaps, a baby at the back, swinging with it; or separating on
flat slabs of stone the seed from the cotton lint picked the previous
day. This is a people of agriculturists, for among them agriculture is
at once life’s necessity and its most important occupation. The sowing
and reaping, and the intermediate seasons bring with them their several
tasks. The ground must be cleared and hoed, and the sowing of the staple
crops concluded before the early rains in May, which will cover the
land with a sheet of tender green shoots of guinea-corn, maize, and
millet, and, more rarely, wheat. When these crops have ripened, the
heads of the grain will be cut off, the bulk of them either marketed or
stored—spread out upon the thatch-roofed houses to dry, sometimes piled
up in a huge circle upon a cleared, dry space—in granaries of clay or
thatch, according to the local idea; others set aside for next year’s
seeds. The stalks, ten to fifteen feet in height, will be carefully
gathered and stacked for fencing purposes. Nothing that nature provides
or man produces is wasted in this country. Nature is, in general, kind.
It has blessed man with a generally fertile and rapidly recuperative
soil, provided also that in the more barren, mountainous regions, where
ordinary processes would be insufficient, millions of earth-worms
shall annually fling their casts of virgin sub-soil upon the sun-baked
surface. And man himself, in perennial contact with Nature, has learned
to read and retain many of her secrets which his civilized brother has
forgotten. One tree grows gourds with neck and all complete, which need
but to be plucked, emptied and dried to make first-rate water-bottles.
A vigorous ground creeper yields enormous pumpkin-shaped fruit whose
contents afford a succulent potage, while its thick shell scraped and
dried furnishes plates, bowls, pots, and dishes of every size, and put
to a hundred uses: ornaments, too, when man has grafted his art upon its
surface with dyes and carved patterns. A bush yields a substantial pod
which when ready to burst and scatter its seeds is found to contain a
fibrous substance which resembles—and may be identical with, I am not
botanist enough to tell—the loofah of commerce, and is put to the same
uses. From the seeds of the beautiful locust-bean tree (_dorowa_), whose
gorgeous crimson blooms form so notable a feature of the scenery in the
flowering season, soup is made, while the casing of the bean affords a
singularly enduring varnish. The fruit of the invaluable _Kadenia_ or
shea tree is used for food, for oil, and medicinally. The bees receive
particular attention for their honey and their wax, the latter utilized
in sundry ways from ornamenting Korans down to the manufacture of
candles. As many as a dozen oblong, mud-lined, wicker hives closed at
one end, the other having a small aperture, may sometimes be seen in a
single tree. Before harvest time has dawned and with the harvesting, the
secondary crops come in for attention. Cassava and cotton, indigo and
sugar-cane, sweet potatoes and tobacco, onions and ground-nuts, beans
and pepper, yams and rice, according to the locality and suitability
of the soil. The farmers of a moist district will concentrate on the
sugar-cane—its silvery, tufted, feathery crowns waving in the breeze are
always a delight: of a dry, on ground-nuts: those enjoying a rich loam
on cotton, and so on. While the staple crops represent the imperious
necessity of life—food, the profits from the secondary crops are expended
in the purchase of clothing, salt and tools, the payment of taxes, the
entertainment of friends and chance acquaintances (a generous hospitality
characterizes this patriarchal society), and the purchase of luxuries,
kolas, tobacco, ornaments for wives and children. It is a revelation to
see the cotton-fields, the plants in raised rows three feet apart, the
land having in many cases been precedently enriched by a catch-crop of
beans, whose withering stems (where not removed for fodder, or hoed in as
manure) are observable between the healthy shrubs, often four or five
feet in height, thickly covered with yellow flowers or snowy bolls of
white, bursting from the split pod. The fields themselves are protected
from incursions of sheep and goats by tall neat fencing of guinea-corn
stalks, or reeds, kept in place by native rope of uncommon strength.
Many cassava fields, the root of this plant furnishing an invaluable
diet, being indeed, one of the staples of the more southerly regions, are
similarly fenced. Equally astonishing are the irrigated farms which you
meet with on the banks of the water-courses. The plots are marked out
with the mathematical precision of squares on a chess-board, divided by
ridges with frequent gaps permitting of a free influx of water from the
central channel, at the opening of which, fixed in a raised platform,
a long pole with a calabash tied on the end of it, is lowered into the
water and its contents afterwards poured into the trench. Conditions
differ of course according to locality, and the technique and industry
displayed by the farmers of one district vary a good deal from the next.
In the northern part of Zaria and in Kano the science of agriculture has
attained remarkable development. There is little we can teach the Kano
farmer. There is much we can learn from him. Rotation of crops and green
manuring are thoroughly understood, and I have frequently noticed in the
neighbourhood of some village small heaps of ashes and dry animal manure
deposited at intervals along the crest of cultivated ridges which the
rains will presently wash into the waiting earth. In fact, every scrap
of fertilizing substance is husbanded by this expert and industrious
agricultural people. Instead of wasting money with the deluded notion
of “teaching modern methods” to the Northern Nigerian farmer, we should
be better employed in endeavouring to find an answer to the puzzling
question of how it is that land which for centuries has been yielding
enormous crops of grain, which in the spring is one carpet of green,
and in November one huge cornfield “white unto harvest,” can continue
doing so. What is wanted is an expert agriculturist who will start out
not to teach but to learn; who will study for a period of say five years
the highly complicated and scientific methods of native agriculture, and
base possible improvements and suggestions, maybe, for labour-saving
appliances, upon real knowledge.
Kano is, of course, the most fertile province of the Protectorate, but
this general description of agricultural Nigeria does not only apply to
Kano Province. I saw nothing finer in the way of deep cultivation (for
yams and guinea-corn chiefly) than among the Bauchi pagans. The pagan
Gwarri of the Niger Province have for ages past grown abundant crops in
terraces up their mountainsides whither they sought refuge from Hausa and
Fulani raids. The soil around Sokoto, where the advancing Sahara trenches
upon the fertile belt, may look arid and incapable of sustaining annual
crops, yet every year it blossoms like a rose. But the result means and
needs inherited lore and sustained and strenuous labour. From the early
rains until harvest time a prolific weed-growth has continuously to be
fought. Insect pests, though not conspicuously numerous in most years,
nevertheless exist, amongst them the locusts, which sometimes cover the
heavens with their flight; the caterpillar, which eats the corn in its
early youth; the blight (_daraba_), which attacks the ripening ear. In
some districts not so favoured, the soil being of compact clay with a
thin coating of humus, intensive cultivation has proved exhausting, and
it is a study to note how every ounce of humus is tended with religious
care. Very hard work at the right time is the secret of success for the
Nigerian agriculturist. It is little short of marvellous that with all he
has to do he somehow manages to build our railways and our roads. Indeed,
if that phenomenon has in many respects its satisfactory, it has also
its sombre, social side. One can but hope that the former may outweigh
the latter as the country gradually settles down after the severe demands
placed upon it these last few years.
[Illustration: A GWARRI GIRL.]
[Illustration: A HAUSA TRADING WOMAN.]
Truly a wonderful country, and a wonderful people, a people who with
fifty years’ peace will double its numbers, a people whom it is our
paramount duty to secure for ever in the undisturbed occupation and
enjoyment of the land, precluding the up-growth of a middle-man class of
landlord from which the native system is free, and being so free need
never be saddled with.