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.
A GWARRI GIRL.
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.