HAUSSALAND 265 politics, but also in learning and in literature. It seems to have been regarded as a sort of university town. The Haussa language attained here, it is said, to its greatest richness of form and refinement of pronunciation, while at the same time the manners of Katsena were distinguished by superior politeness over those of the other towns of Haussaland.

During the rise of Katsena in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Kano recovered in part from its prostration. But it was subjected to many indignities, and the end of the seventeenth century was marked by a war with the then rising power of Zamfara on the north-west, in which the troops of Kano were beaten with great slaughter at Argaye, and so utterly dispersed that few were able to find their way home.

The eighteenth century in Haussaland was distinguished especially by the intrusion and rise to power among the more southerly states of Gober — a state which, it will be remembered, occupied a position on the extreme north of Haussaland, and at an earlier period of its history had extended into the desert as far north as Ahir or Asben. At a comparatively early period the more northerly portions of the territory of Gober had been conquered by a Berber combination known as the "five tribes." Whether these were the five tribes of the Morabite invasion led eastward by Abou Bekr at the end of the eleventh century, or five other Berber tribes from the north, is a matter of dispute. The fact alone is undisputed that they established the Mohammedan religion in Asben, and drove the people of Gober, who maintained the higher type of paganism, farther south. Gober was made tributary to them, and the feuds arising between the two races kept the people of Gober constantly occupied upon their northern frontier. In the first half of the eighteenth century the hereditary antagonists of Gober were themselves conquered by the Kellowi, a fine race of North African Berbers. The ultimate consequence was to