To the four lawful wives of the late Sovereign, a separate house, with a suitable establishment, is granted by the reigning Monarch; and such of his numerous concubines as were not slaves, are at liberty to return to their several friends; and, together with leave to retain their cloaths, and all their ornaments, which are often valuable, have free permission to marry.
In the empire of Bornou, as in all the Mahometan States, the administration of the provinces is committed to Governors, appointed by the Crown; and the expences of the Sovereign are partly defrayed by his hereditary lands, and partly by taxes levied on the people.
The present Sultan, whose name is Alli, is a man of an unostentatious plain appearance; for he seldom wears any other dress than the common blue shirt of cotton or of silk, and the silk or muslin turban, which form the usual dress of the country. Such, however, is the magnificence of his seraglio, that the ladies who inhabit it are said to be five hundred in number; and he himself is described as the reputed father of three hundred and fifty children, of whom three hundred are males; a disproportion which naturally suggests the idea that the mother, preferring to the gratification of natural affection, the joy of seeing herself the supposed parent of a future candidate for the empire, sometimes exchanges her female child for the male offspring of a stranger.
Equally splendid in his stables, he is said to have 500 horses for his own use, and for that of the numerous servants of his household.
In many of the neighbouring kingdoms, the Monarch himself is the executioner of those criminals on whom his own voice has pronounced the sentence of death; but the Sultan of Bornou, too polished, or too humane, to pollute his hands with the blood of his subjects, commits the care of the execution to the Cadi, who directs his slaves to strike off the head of the prisoner.
The Military Force of the Sultan of Bornou consists in the multitude of his horsemen; for his foot soldiers are few in number, and are scarcely considered as contributing to the strength of the battle.[29] The sabre, the lance, the pike, and the bow, constitute their weapons of offence; and a shield of hides composes their defensive armour. Fire-arms, though not entirely unknown to them, for those with which the Merchants of Fezzan occasionally travel, are sufficient to give them an idea of their importance and decisive effect, are neither used nor possessed by the people of Bornou.
When the Sovereign prepares for war, and levies an army for the purpose, he is said to have a custom, (the result of idle vanity or of politic ostentation) of directing a date tree to be placed as a threshold to one of the gates of his capital, and of commanding his horsemen to enter the town one by one, that the parting of the tree in the middle, when worn through by the trampling of the horses, may enable him to judge of the sufficiency of their numbers, and operate as a signal that his levy is compleat.
In their Manners, the people of Bornou are singularly courteous and humane. They will not pass a stranger on the road till they have stopped to salute him: the most violent of their quarrels are only contests of words; and though a part of the business of their husbandry is assigned to the women, yet, as their employment is confined to that of dropping the seed in the furrows, and of removing the weeds with a hoe, it has more of the amusement of occasional occupation, than of the harshness of continued labour.
Passionately attached to the tumultuous gratifications of play, yet unacquainted with any game but drafts, they often sit down on the ground, and forming holes to answer the purpose of squares, supply the place of men with dates, or the meaner substitute of stones, or of camel’s dung. On their skill in the management of these rude instruments of the game, they stake their gold dust, their brass money, and even their very cloaths; and as the bye-standers on these occasions constantly obtrude their advice, and sometimes make the moves for the person whose success they wish, their play is usually accompanied by that conflict of abuse, and vehemence of scolding, which mark and terminate the sharpest of their quarrels.
Such is the amusement of the lower classes of the people; those of a superior rank are devoted to the more difficult and more interesting game of chess, in which they are eminently skilled.