With the arrival of the Europeans, ways down to the coast were gradually opened up, until finally in Nigeria seven hundred miles of railway were built from Lagos to Kano. As a consequence trade has left the trans-Saharan roads where the Tuareg were masters. It is now carried to Europe and even to the Mediterranean by steamers sailing from Lagos and Liverpool. In more ways than one the advent of the white man in Central Africa has been disastrous for the Tuareg. Camel-borne trade on a large scale is doomed; caravan broking and long-distance desert transport are gone, never to return; even a trans-Saharan railway, whose commercial value must be as unreal as the dream of its advocates among French Colonial authorities, can never hope to compete with sea-borne traffic. Aircraft alone may one day revive the old camel roads, for they provide lines of watering-points along the shortest north and south routes.
If one may judge by the numbers and size of the market cities, which are the termini of the trans-Saharan routes in the Sudan, the Air road was by far the most important of the two in the centre. In Kano and in Katsina and in Sokoto the commercial genius of the Hausa people developed centres for the exchange of the European goods with the products, and more especially the raw materials, of Central Africa. To these cities also came the negro people of the south, to buy and sell or be sold as slaves. In a thickly populated and extremely fertile country the cities grew to immense size. Though in no sense properly a Tuareg country, Northern Nigeria and the neighbouring lands are visited and lived in by the People of the Veil. Every year it is the habit of many of this people to come from Air to Nigeria during the dry season. They earn a prosperous livelihood on transport work between the cities of Hausaland. They feed their camels on the richer pastures of the south when those in the north grow dry. But before the rains begin they move north again to the steppe and desert, for flooded rivers and excessive damp are conditions which the camels of the Veiled People do not relish. Quite large colonies of Tuareg have settled in some of these cities and have adopted a semi-sedentary life, maintaining their characteristics in inverse measure as intermarriage with the negroid peoples has become more frequent. The influx of Tuareg into Nigeria after the 1917 revolution in Air added considerably to the numbers living permanently under British rule. This migration was not as strange a phenomenon or so entirely the product of the Great War as at first sight it appears to be. The various waves of Tuareg which in succession entered Air have each in turn had the effect of driving the earlier populations further south. The trend of migration in North Africa from the earliest days, when the zone of permanent habitation of the negroid races extended as far as the Mediterranean, has always been southward. It has continued in modern times. The temptation of richer lands in Central Africa has always proved irresistible when local political or economic conditions altered in consequence of growing ethnic pressure to the extent of providing just that impetus necessary to overcome the human disinclination to leave homes which have been occupied for generations. The Kel Geres Tuareg left Air to settle in the country north of Sokoto when the mountains became over-populated; masses of Air Tuareg generally took up their habitation in Katsina and Kano after the unsuccessful revolution against the French during the late war. The motives were not strictly similar, but the effects were identical, and have been observable throughout the ages.
AIR
and the
SOUTHLAND
| F. R. del. | Emery Walker Ltd. sc. |
To-day at Kano, a village of some size named Faji, almost entirely Tuareg in population, has sprung up a few hundred yards from the walls of the city. Here the People of the Veil live like the Hausa in mud houses. They are engaged in retail trade or act as agents and brokers for their relations in Air when the latter come down in the dry season. In Katsina a quarter of the town and the country immediately north are thickly populated with Tuareg, for whom the Emir has a marked partiality, largely on account of his commercial propensities, which are powerfully stimulated by the ownership of several fine herds of camels. The Tuareg of Katsina, drawn from almost every tribe in Air, have formed a new tribal unit known as the Kel Katchena,[44] and are rapidly forgetting their older tribal allegiances. The results of these movements have always been much the same. Progressive mixing with the negroid people of the Sudan, the gradual acquisition of sedentary habits, and the cultivation of fat lands where life is easy, are combining to make these People of the Veil lose their characteristics as a northern race; their language cannot compete with Hausa, which is the lingua franca of the Sudan, as Arabic is that of North Africa. The retention of the Veil is the only exception: in fact many southerners associated with them have adopted it, although the rigorous proscription against revealing the mouth and face is being less strictly observed.
North of the country surrounding the great walled cities of red earth, and more or less coterminous with the northern frontiers of the Emirates of Katsina, Daura, Kano and Hadeija, there is a deep belt of country which marks the beginning of the transition between the Saharan and the Equatorial zones.[45] North of the open country around Kano, with its large trees that for a height of some feet from the ground, like those in English parks, have been stripped of leaves by the grazing flocks and herds, the rock outcrops become less frequent and eventually disappear entirely. They give place to scrub, bush and clearings through which the Anglo-French boundary runs. The frontier from Lake Chad to the Niger was delimited in 1907 and 1908 by an international expedition whose work has been described by Colonel Tilho with a wealth of detail which makes one regret that his labours did not extend a little further north, as far as the edge of the desert where the Saharan zone proper commences. The area mapped by Colonel Tilho hardly extends beyond the northern limit of the Hausa-speaking people. Along the roads leading to Air, or in other words along the great trade route, no work was done beyond the southern fringe of the area called Damergu, and there is consequently to the south of Air a considerable depth of unsurveyed country for which no maps are available.
The area between the international boundary and the somewhat arbitrary limits of Algeria and Tripolitania constitutes the French colony known as the “Territoires du Niger,”[46] the southern part of which is divided into provinces or “cercles,” roughly corresponding to the old native Emirates. French colonial policy in this part of Africa, in contrast with the system so successfully instituted by Sir F. Lugard in Nigeria, has been directed towards the removal of the more important native rulers. They have been replaced by a form of direct administration which is only now in process of being organised under French civilian officials. North of Katsina the Emirates of Maradi and Tessawa[47] have been combined into one province, and here almost the last Sultan of the “Territoires” survives, exercising authority only in the immediate vicinity of Tessawa itself. West of this is the province of Tahua; to the east is the old Emirate of Damagarim with its capital at Zinder, and east again is Gure, the northern part of which is known as Elakkos and Kuttus.
Once the belt of thick bush near the frontier is crossed the country resembles Northern Nigeria again, with park bush and broad open spaces, both cultivated and grass-grown. The villages are of the usual Central African type; the groups of conical huts are surrounded by millet stores, raised on legs like gigantic bee-hives, to contain the grain cultivated in the clearings around the settlements. The inhabitants are Hausa and Kanuri, though of late years a number of lower-caste Tuareg from Air have settled there as well. There is a considerable amount of rock outcrop in the form, round Zinder, of low peaks with great boulders, or, near Gure, of hills which terminate abruptly in a cliff of red rock, north of which is the district called Elakkos.
Through this belt of park bush runs east and west the road recently levelled and rendered passable for light cars in the dry season between Lake Chad and the Niger. The nomadic cattle-breeding Fulani come into this zone from the bush to the north and south; Maradi is a Fulani centre of some importance. A certain number of this people also come to Tessawa, but the Hausa population here have been at feud with them for many generations, and only the advent of European control has put an end to continual wars between the two Emirates.