HAUSALAND AND ITS PEOPLE.
[From a report of a lecture by Rev. C. H. Robinson, M.A., in African Times.] AFRICA has been crossed and recrossed so often that it is hard to realize that there is still a people (forming one per cent. of the entire population of the world) about whom we know practically nothing, and whose country is equally unknown. The Hausas are in every way the most highly civilized and remarkable people which central Africa contains. One reason that so little is known of this country is the difficulty of access. One has either to cross the Sahara or be prepared to travel some hundreds of miles through malarial swamps. In his own case, after spending a year in north Africa, learning the language, the Turks refused him permission to start from Tripoli, and the French from Tunis. In consequence, he went out two years ago to west Africa with two English companions, determined to reach the country by ascending the Niger. The peculiarity about the roads in this region was their narrowness; the average road was six or eight inches wide, just room enough to place one foot in front of the other. The Hausas were the strongest race in Africa, and the English offered them every inducement to enlist. One of the men in his presence carried about a mountain gun on his head, and an English officer had told him that the man had carried it for twenty-two miles. The town of Kano was the most important, and was known throughout the whole of the northern part of the continent. Its population might be anything over 100,000, the great mass of whom were engaged in the manufacture of cloth; and if their written history was to be believed, they were engaged in it at the time of the conquest of England. Tens of thousands of pounds worth of this cloth was woven every year, and it could be obtained at Suakin, Tunis, Tripoli, or on the west coast, so extensive were the tradings with outside tribes. The market place at Kano was probably the largest in the world, and often from 20,000 to 30,000 assembled there. Education had reached a fairly high level; there were thirty or forty schools, all of which were Mohammedan. One-third of the people professed to be Mohammedans, but they had no public worship, and there seemed to be an absence of the bigotry which usually characterized Mohammedans. There was no part of the world where slave-raiding went on to such an extent, and at a low computation there were 5,000,000 slaves in the country—or, to put it in another way, one out of every three hundred people living in the world was a Hausa-speaking slave. When they remembered that the whole of this was in British territory, or, at any rate, within the sphere of English influence, they realized the greatness of the responsibility that rested upon the English people. If a king wanted money, all he had to do was to make a slave-raid. If the English Government was prepared to spend one-half or a quarter of what they spent on the east coast to put down slavery, it could be entirely put down in Hausaland. One of the most obvious ways was by making a railway into the heart of the country, and he was glad to know that since the present government came into office Mr. Chamberlain had authorized the construction of the first hundred miles. If a railway to Uganda could pay its way, a railway to Kano, with all the resources of the country, ought to pay three or four times over. The Hausa Association was not entirely a missionary society; they desired to open up the country and promote its civilization. One of their chief objects was to make the introduction of Christianity possible, and having regard to the climate and the fact that a white man ought not to remain there for longer than two years at a time, it was essential that any missionary should be able to learn the language before he went. The Hausa Association hoped to be able to open a training school at Tripoli. They were now publishing portions of the New Testament, a grammar, a dictionary, and other literature in the Hausa language. The Hausa people are practically vegetarians and were all teetotalers, the Royal Niger Company refusing to allow any spirits to be imported into the country.