CHAPTER XXIX HAUSSALAND TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The Moorish conquest, for reasons which will presently be told, affected the Haussa States so much less than it affected the more westerly portions of the Soudan that it will, I think, be excusable to abandon the strictly chronological order of narration, and to say here what remains to be said of the history of Haussaland, even though it carries us somewhat beyond the era of the great convulsion which severed the connection of the Soudan with the civilised world.

I wish that I had the material which will perhaps some day be discovered for a history of the interesting pagan states, especially Nupe and Kororofa, which lay on or to the south of the tenth parallel of latitude, peopling both banks of the Benue, and clustering about the confluence of the Niger with that river. We know of the inhabitants of Kororofa who occupied the eastern end of this belt, that they were long-haired, and apparently of the higher physical type which was brought to perfection in the Songhays. At a very early period we hear of them and of the people of Nupe as practising the arts of smelting, of smith's work, of weaving, dyeing, &c., and as being well clothed in neat cotton robes. Their local civilisation would appear to have preceded the more northern civilisation of the Haussa States proper. Though they were pagan, their paganism was of the order of the goddess- worship of the Haussas, and as far removed from the fetish worship of the coast as their industrial and social habits were removed from those of the Dem-Dem cannibals, whom they partly drove southwards across the 258