INTRODUCTORY 7
the Benue, of which the administration was only assumed by the British Government on the ist of January 1900.
By this occupation an entirely new chapter has been opened in the relations of Great Britain with West Africa. )
Nigeria — as we call our latest dependency — is not properly a name. It cannot be found upon a map that is ten years old. It is only an English expression which has been made to comprehend a number of native states cover-
ing about 500,000 square miles of territory in that part of the world which we call the Western Soudan. Ancient geographers called the same section of Africa sometimes
Soudan, sometimes Ethiopia, sometimes Nigritia, some-
times Tekrour, sometimes and more often Genewah or Genowah — which, by the European custom of throwing the accent to the fore part of the word, has become Guinea ; sometimes they called it simply Negroland. Always, and in every form, their name for it meant the
Land of the Blacks. Genowah, pronounced with a hard
G, is a native word signifying "black." It is so generally used to designate blacks that at the present day, among
the Arabs of Egypt and the Moors of Morocco — that is, at both exits from the desert — I have myself heard it applied to the negroes of the Soudan. From the earliest periods of which we have any knowledge, Blackland has stretched, as it stretches now, from the west coast of
Africa to the east, along that line of successive waterways which begins with the mouth of the Senegal, and ends only at the southern mouth of the Red Sea.
If the north of Africa be considered as a whole it
divides itself into three great main sections, all of which run, like the Land of the Blacks, east and west. There
is first, outside the tropics and within the zone of winter
rains, the historic coast strip stretching along the Medi-
terranean shore from the mouths of the Nile to Cape Spartel. A range of mountains at its back receding towards the western end separates it from the deserts and gives to its fertile lands the shelter and the water