64 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



the Sonrhay 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 



"omfnaiit amongst all the peoples of Negroland. No doubt 



Social early in the nineteenth century the historical Hausa 



Position. 



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 1 /' 

 for they have even largely assimilated them physically to their own 

 type, and while the Fulah political ascendancy is already tottering, 

 the Hausa nationality is again under British auspices asserting its 

 natural social, industrial and commercial predominance through- 

 out Central and even parts of Western Sudan. 



It could not well be otherwise, seeing that the Hausas form a 

 compact body of some twenty 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 2 , Katsena, Yacoba, whose 

 intelligent and law-abiding inhabitants are reckoned by many tens 



of thousands. Their melodious tongue, of which 



Hausa 



Speech and the Rev. C. H. Robinson has given us a far too 



Mental Quali- ,. 



ties. meagre account , has long been the great medium 



Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes 

 Intulit agresti Latio. Hor. Epist. n. i, 156-7. 



The epithet agrestis is peculiarly applicable to the rude Fulah shepherds, 

 who were almost barbarians compared with the settled, industrious, and even 

 cultured Hausa populations, and whose oppressive rule has at last been relaxed 

 by the intervention of England in the Niger-Benue lands. 



1 " One of their towns, Kano, has probably the largest market-place in the 

 world, with a daily attendance of from 25,000 to 30,000 people. This same 

 town possesses, what in central Africa is still more surprising, some thirty 

 or forty schools, in which the children are taught to read and write " (Rev. 

 C. H. Robinson, Specimens of Hausa Literature, University Press, Cam- 

 bridge, 1896, p. x). 



3 This authority seems uncertain whether to class Hausa with the Semitic 

 or the Hamitic family, or in an independent group by itself, and it must be 



