[42]In the case of Tamgak.
[43]Chudeau, op. cit., p. 57.
CHAPTER II
THE SOUTHLANDS
Until about twenty years ago it was easier to reach the Western Sudan and Central Africa around Lake Chad from the north than from the Gulf of Guinea, notwithstanding a journey of many months across the Sahara, involving all the considerable hardships and dangers of desert travelling. The objectives which Barth, Foureau, Lamy and their predecessors all had in view were not the exploration of the Sahara, but the penetration of the Sudan. By following the trade routes along which slave caravans used to reach the Mediterranean coast, the explorers of the nineteenth century reached the wealthy Niger lands more easily than they would have done had they attempted to pass through the tropical forests of the West Coast. On the sea-board European penetration at that time was confined to the neighbourhood of a few factories on the shore or the estuaries of certain rivers. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did this country, first among the nations of Europe, realise that the potential markets and supplies of raw material which the Sudan afforded were on a scale far surpassing those which had been dreamt of by the early pioneers on the coast. It was about thirty years ago that communication was eventually opened up between the coast and the Moslem interior, but there is no doubt that the accounts of the Sudan in 1850 brought back by Barth after his memorable journey were directly responsible for the British penetration from the coast of those countries which are now called Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria. The movement reached its culmination in the opening years of the twentieth century, when the northern provinces of Nigeria were occupied under the guidance of Sir F. Lugard, while at about the same time the three French columns had met near Lake Chad. With these years the expansionist period closed and a phase of development, which still continues, commenced. British expansion into Northern Nigeria, coming as it did during the South African war, passed comparatively unnoticed in this country except in official circles, where the campaigns of Sir F. Lugard’s small columns aroused considerable anxiety. But because the policy was successful the public heard little of the operations which formally annexed the outlying Emirates of Kano, Katsina and Sokoto. The new countries which we then acquired were of colossal wealth, and contained a population of many millions of people living as thickly in certain parts as the Egyptians in the Nile Delta. The closing years of last and the first few years of this century involved the addition to the British Empire of some of the greatest of the Sudanese cities, which are the terminal points and therefore the raisons d’être of the two central Saharan trade roads which come from the Mediterranean by way of Kawar and Air.
| F. R. del. | Emery Walker Ltd. sc. |
[To face p. 36.
The Sudan, though geographically in Central Africa, belongs to the Mediterranean civilisation. The great empires of the Niger, Melle and Songhai, the Fulani Empire of Sokoto, the Emirates of Kano and Katsina, and the Empire of Bornu, were all products of contact with the north. Commercially and culturally, the Sudan faced north with its back against an impenetrable belt of tropical forest inhabited by savage negro tribes, through whose dripping and steaming jungles there was little or no access to the sea. This orientation explains the high degree of civilisation which Barth found already past its “floruit” in 1850. It is obviously also the reason why the early explorers came from the north rather than from the nearer coast of the Atlantic between Sierra Leone and the mouths of the Niger.