Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

with Arabs, Fulahs or Hausas[173], so that exclusively Songhai communities are now somewhat rare. But the bulk of the race is still concentrated in Gurma and in the district between Gobo and Timbuktu, the two chief cities of the old Songhai empire.

They are a distinctly negroid people, presenting various shades of intermixture with the surrounding Hamites and Semites, but generally of a very deep brown or blackish colour, with somewhat regular features and that peculiar long, black, and ringletty hair, which is so characteristic of Negro and Caucasic blends, as seen amongst the Trarsas and Braknas of the Senegal, the Bejas, Danakils, and many Abyssinians of the region between the Nile and the Red Sea. Barth, to whom we still owe the best account of this historical people, describes them as of a dull, morose temperament, the most unfriendly and churlish of all the peoples visited by him in Negroland.

This writer's suggestion that they may have formerly had relations with the Egyptians[174] has been revived in an exaggerated form by M. Felix Dubois, whose views have received currency in England through uncritical notices of his Timbouctou la Mysterieuse (Paris, 1897). But there is no "mystery" in the matter. The Songhai are a Sudanese people, whose exodus from Egypt is a myth, and whose Kissur language, as it is called, has not the remotest connection with any form of speech known to have been at any time current in the Nile Valley[175]. Nor has it any evident affinities with any group of African tongues. H. H. Johnston regards the Songhai as the result of the mixing of "the Libyan section of the Hamitic peoples, reinforced by Berbers (Iberians) from Spain," with the pre-existing Fulah type and the Negroids; as also from the far earlier intercourse between the Fulah and the Negro[176].

The Songhai empire, like that of the rival Mandingans, claims a respectable antiquity, its reputed founder Za-el-Yemeni having flourished about 680 A.D. Za Kasi, fifteenth in succession from the founder, was the first Muhammadan ruler (1009); but about 1326 the country was reduced by the Mandingans, and remained throughout the fourteenth and a great part of the fifteenth century virtually subject to the Mali empire, although Ali Killun, founder of the new Sonni dynasty, had acquired a measure of independence about 1335-6. But the political supremacy of the Songhai people dates only from about 1464, when Sonni Ali, sixteenth of the Sonni dynasty, known in history as "the great tyrant and famous miscreant," threw off the Mandingan yoke, "and changed the whole face of this part of Africa by prostrating the kingdom of Melle[177]." Under his successor, Muhammad Askia[178], "perhaps the greatest sovereign that ever ruled over Negroland[179]," the Songhai Empire acquired its greatest expansion, extending from the heart of Hausaland to the Atlantic seaboard, and from the Mossi country to the Tuat oasis, south of Morocco. Although unfavourably spoken of by Leo Africanus, Askia is described by Ahmed Baba as governing the subject peoples "with justice and equity, causing well-being and comfort to spring up everywhere within the borders of his extensive dominions, and introducing such of the institutions of Muhammadan civilisation as he considered might be useful to his subjects[180]."

Askia also made the Mecca pilgrimage with a great show of splendour. But after his reign (1492-1529) the Songhai power gradually declined, and was at last overthrown by Mulay Hamed, Emperor of Morocco, in 1591-2. Ahmed Baba, the native chronicler, was involved in the ruin of his people[181], and since then the Songhai nation has been broken into fragments, subject here to Hausas, there to Fulahs, elsewhere to Tuaregs, and, since the French occupation of Timbuktu (1894), to the hated Giaur.

Hausas. In everything that constitutes the real greatness of a nation, the Hausas may rightly claim preeminence amongst all the peoples of Negroland. No doubt early in the nineteenth century the historical Hausa States, occupying the whole region between the Niger and Bornu, were overrun and reduced by the fanatical Fulah bands under Othman Dan Fodye. But the Hausas, in a truer sense than the Greeks, "have captured their rude conquerors[182]," for they have even largely assimilated them physically to their own type, and the Hausa nationality is under British auspices asserting its natural social, industrial and commercial predominance throughout Central and even parts of Western Sudan.

It could not well be otherwise, seeing that the Hausas form a compact body of some five million peaceful and industrious Sudanese, living partly in numerous farmsteads amid their well-tilled cotton, indigo, pulse, and corn fields, partly in large walled cities and great trading centres such as Kano[183], Katsena, Yacoba, whose intelligent and law-abiding inhabitants are reckoned by many tens of thousands. Their melodious tongue, with a vocabulary containing perhaps 10,000 words[184], has long been the great medium of intercourse throughout Sudan from Lake Chad to and beyond the Niger, and is daily acquiring even greater preponderance amongst all the settled and trading populations of these regions.

But though showing a marked preference for peaceful pursuits, the Hausas are by no means an effeminate people. Largely enlisted in the British service, they have at all times shown fighting qualities of a high order under their English officers, and a well-earned tribute has been paid to their military prowess amongst others by Sir George Goldie and Lieut. Vandeleur[185]. With the Hausas on her side England need assuredly fear no rivals to her beneficent sway over the teeming populations of the fertile plains and plateaux of Central Sudan, which is on the whole perhaps the most favoured land in Africa north of the equator.

According to the national traditions, which go back to no very remote period[186], the seven historical Hausa States known as the "Hausa bokoy" ("the seven Hausas") take their name from the eponymous heroes Biram, Daura, Gober, Kano, Rano, Katsena and Zegzeg, all said to be sprung from the Deggaras, a Berber tribe settled to the north of Munyo. From Biram, the original seat, the race and its language spread to seven other provinces--Zanfara, Kebbi, Nupe (Nyffi), Gwari, Yauri, Yariba and Kororofa, which in contempt are called the "Banza bokoy" ("the seven Upstarts"). All form collectively the Hausa domain in the widest sense.

Authentic history is quite recent, and even Komayo, reputed founder of Katsena, dates only from about the fourteenth century. Ibrahim Maji, who was the first Moslem ruler, is assigned to the latter part of the fifteenth century, and since then the chief events have been associated with the Fulah wars, ending in the absorption of all the Hausa States in the unstable Fulah empire of Sokoto at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the fall of Kano and Sokoto in 1903 British supremacy was finally established throughout the Hausa States, now termed Northern Nigeria[187].

Kanembu; Kanuri[188]; Baghirmi, Mosgu. Round about the shores of Lake Chad are grouped three other historical Muhammadan nations, the Kanembu ("People of Kanem") on the north, the Kanuri of Bornu on the west, and the Baghirmi on the south side. The last named was conquered by the Sultan of Wadai in 1871, and overrun by Rabah Zobeir, half Arab, half Negro adventurer, in 1890. But in 1897 Emile Gentil[189], French commissioner for the district, placed the country under French protection, although French authority was not firmly established until the death of Rabah and the rout of his sons in 1901. At the same time Kanem was brought under French control, and shortly afterwards Bornu was divided between Great Britain, France and Germany.

In this region the ethnical relations are considerably more complex than in the Hausa States. Here Islam has had greater obstacles to contend with than on the more open western plateaux, and many of the pagan aborigines have been able to hold their ground either in the archipelagos of Lake Chad (Yedinas, Kuri, Buduma[190]), or in the swampy tracts and uplands of the Logon-Shari basin (Mosgu, Mandara, Makari, etc.).

It was also the policy of the Muhammadans, whose system is based on slavery, not to push their religious zeal too far, for, if all the natives were converted, where could they procure a constant supply of slaves, those who accept the teachings of the Prophet being ipso facto entitled to their freedom? Hence the pagan districts were, and still are, regarded as convenient preserves, happy hunting-grounds to be raided from time to time, but not utterly wasted; to be visited by organised razzias just often enough to keep up the supply in the home and foreign markets. This system, controlled by the local governments themselves, has long prevailed about the borderlands between Islam and heathendom, as we know from Barth, Nachtigal, and one or two other travellers, who have had reluctantly to accompany the periodical slave-hunting expeditions from Bornu and Baghirmi to the territories of the pagan Mosgu people with their numerous branches (Margi, Mandara, Makari, Logon, Gamergu, Keribina) and the other aborigines (Bede, Ngisem, So, Kerrikerri, Babir) on the northern slopes of the Congo-Chad water-parting. As usual on such occasions, there is a great waste of life, many perishing in defence of their homes or even through sheer wantonness, besides those carried away captives. "A large number of slaves had been caught this day," writes Barth, "and in the evening a great many more were brought in; altogether they were said to have taken one thousand, and there were certainly not less than five hundred. To our utmost horror, not less than 170 full-grown men were mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood, the greater part of them being allowed to bleed to death, a leg having been severed from the body[191]." There was probably just then a glut in the market.

A curious result of these relations is that in the wooded districts some of the natives have reverted to arboreal habits, taking refuge during the raids in the branches of huge bombax-trees converted into temporary strongholds. Round the vertical stem of these forest giants is erected a breast-high look-out, while the higher horizontal branches, less exposed to the fire of the enemy, support strongly-built huts and store-houses, where the families of the fugitives take refuge with their effects, including, as Nachtigal assures us[192], their domestic animals, such as goats, dogs, and poultry. During the siege of the aerial fortress, which is often successfully defended, long light ladders of withies are let down at night, when no attack need be feared, and the supply of water and provisions is thus renewed from caches or hiding-places round about. In 1872 Nachtigal accompanied a predatory excursion to the pagan districts south of Baghirmi, when an attack was made on one of these tree-fortresses. Such citadels can be stormed only at a heavy loss, and as the Gaberi (Baghirmi) warriors had no tools capable of felling the great bombax-tree, they were fain to rest satisfied with picking off a poor wretch now and then, and barbarously mutilating the bodies as they fell from the overhanging branches.

Some of these aborigines disfigure their faces by the disk-like lip-ornament, which is also fashionable in Nyassaland, and even amongst the South American Botocudos. The type often differs greatly, and while some of the widespread Mosgu tribes are of a dirty black hue, with disagreeable expression, wide open nostrils, thick lips, high cheek-bones, coarse bushy hair, and disproportionate knock-kneed legs, other members of the same family astonished Barth "by the beauty and symmetry of their forms, and by the regularity of their features, which in some had nothing of what is called the Negro type. But I was still more astonished at their complexion, which was very different in different individuals, being in some of a glossy black, and in others of a light copper, or rather rhubarb colour, the intermediate shades being almost entirely wanting. I observed in one house a really beautiful female who, with her son, about eight or nine years of age, formed a most charming group, well worthy of the hand of an accomplished artist. The boy's form did not yield in any respect to the beautiful symmetry of the most celebrated Grecian