386 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY years, from i860 to 1863, when It was taken and held by the Toucouleurs, a half-breed Fulani people, the true Fulani continued to hold it up to the moment of its conquest by the French in 1893. The Toucouleurs, who remained masters of a portion of the Niger Valley, and who also submitted to France in 1893, were a people in whose veins Fulani blood predominated to so great an extent that their ascendancy on the upper river may be accepted as representing for that part of the country the general ascendancy of the Fulani races.

The history of the Fulani conquest of the Haussa States, where another Sheikh, as famous as Ahmadou, founded a Fulani Empire, is comparatively well known. The country was, we have seen, permeated with Fulani influence. Cow Fulani fed their cattle in every province. The principal towns had their Fulani quarters ; Fulani teachers had for six hundred years spread the doctrines of Mohammed ; distinguished members of the Fulani race occupied high places as councillors, judges, high priests, and men of war. Zaria had had, according to one account, a Fulani king from the year 1780. The western provinces of Bornu were also full of Fulani. The conquest of Haussaland by the Fulani may therefore be said to have been half achieved In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the same time that the Fulani were rising In power throughout the whole Soudan.

It was not, however, till the opening years of the nineteenth century that the military and political conquest was completed. It will be remembered that, at the end of the eighteenth century, the still pagan state of Gober had established a military ascendancy over the more northerly Mohammedan states of Haussaland. It had conquered Zanfara and subdued Kano. Katsena alone had been able successfully to resist its power. Throughout this period the Fulani would seem to have greatly increased in numbers in Gober, and under their own chiefs and religious teachers they began to form a community of which