190 FROM THE NIGER TO THE NILE 



On August 5 we arrived at Nassarawa, the trade centre 

 and capital of the province of that name. It is a large town, 

 peopled with Hausa and Fulani, but it has the gloomy 

 appearance of a place that has seen better times, with houses 

 deserted and dilapidated, and the corners of the streets 

 thronged with beggars. The great walls, once the pride of 

 kings which required the labour of thousands of slaves to 

 build and keep in repair, are now crumbling away and sub- 

 siding with neglect and successive seasons of rain. 



In the days of slave-trading Nassarawa was a flourishing 

 city with a powerful Fulani king and many big men, who 

 owned large herds of cattle and sheep and great numbers of 

 slaves to tend them. It was under the dominion of the 

 Sultan of Sokoto, to whom its people had to pay an enormous 

 annual tribute in slaves. But, with the abolition of slavery 

 their wealth has gone, they can no longer keep up the 

 large numbers of their herds, and the big men attended 

 by only one or two personal slaves sit in empty houses, 

 mere shadows of their former greatness. 



The Fulani are an interesting people of Eastern origin, 

 who are believed to have settled in Egypt from farther East, 

 and to have been driven out of their adopted country during 

 the Theban Dynasty, 2500 years ago. This is the opinion 

 of Mr. Morel, whose learned and convincing speculations on 

 the probable history of the race I found borne out by all the 

 observations I was able to make. Being the owners of large 

 herds of horses, cattle, and sheep, it naturally followed that the 

 Fulani would take a course where food and water would be 

 most easily obtained for their beasts, so, doubtless, by the way 

 they came they avoided the desert as much as possible and 



