CHAPTER XL ORIGIN OF THE FULANI Before attempting to give any account of the establishment of British administration in Northern Nigeria, there is still a chapter of native history to be told.

We left the Mohammedan states of the Soudan in the seventeenth century, when after the conquest of the Moors they became isolated in the heart of Africa, and fell into the decadence in which we know them. The Tarikh-es-Soudan, of which the chronicle continued to the middle of the seventeenth century, informs us that after the Moors of the Soudan had cut themselves off from Morocco, the government of the Pashas rapidly degenerated. In 1623 it is stated that "excesses of every kind are now committed unchecked by the soldiery, and that the country is profoundly convulsed and oppressed." About the middle of the eighteenth century the Tuaregs, pressing down from the desert upon the Moors, deprived them of the principal towns of Songhay, and established a kingdom of their own upon the Niger. What the Moors had become at the end of the eighteenth century, some thirty years after they had been driven from Gago and Timbuctoo, may be gathered from Mungo Park, who had experience of them in his journey from the coast to the Niger in 1795.

The Moors, he says, are divided into many tribes, each more entirely barbarous and cruel than the other. Each tribe is governed by a separate king, who owns no allegiance to a common sovereign. They pay but little attention to agriculture, purchasing their corn, cotton cloth, and other necessaries from the negroes in exchange 373