THE SOUDAN CLOSED 319 moment concerned. There have been evidently three stages in the history of West Africa, to which three great religious movements have corresponded. There was a first and very early period of what I may call pure negroidism, to which the religion of the fetish corresponded. During this period pigmy races occupied the Middle Niger, and fetish worship prevailed upon its banks. There was a second period, still very early, of occupation by peoples whose origin is variously stated to have been from India, Babylon, Persia, ancient Egypt, and Phoenicia, and with this occupation came a form of paganism of which the rites, still practised, have points of similarity with what we know of the worship of Astarte, Jupiter-Ammon, and Isis. There was a third period of Arab influence and subsequent conquest, of which the beginning may be placed in the ninth or tenth century of our era, that was accompanied by the spread of the Mohammedan religion.

The Soudan, under the higher form of paganism, attained, as its parent nations in the north and east had attained, to a relatively high stage of civilisation. Indeed, the Fulani conquerors of Haussaland in the nineteenth century put forward the unfounded claim that, up to the period of their conquest, Mohammedanism was scarcely known in the great cities of the Haussa States. This, as has been shown in the chapters upon Haussaland, was not the case, but undoubtedly paganism of the finer type continued to flourish for a long period, and is now, after a thousand years of Mohammedanism, still to be met with side by side with the faith of Islam. The difference between these two was not so great as the difference between paganism and fetishism. It was fetishism, and fetishism only, which was banished with the lower negroid races to the jungle belt of the coast.

These considerations of the general movement of civilisation in West Africa bring us to an important development in its history. The first chapter of European settlement in the country was opened at a critical moment.

During the latter half of the fifteenth century, while the