400 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY subject in the south profited by every opportunity to assert their independence.

On the western border of Bornu some Fulani states also made good an independent position ; desert tribes raided from the north, and Bornu proper became, in the course of fifty years, a mere section of the Bornu Empire as it was ruled by Mohammed el Kanemi. Barth, who entered Haussaland from Tripoli in 1850, and travelled through Bornu, gives some account of troubles already tending to overthrow the power and dignity of Bornu.

By various causes, of which perpetual slave-raiding was not the least active, the country was gradually desolated. Its trade was almost destroyed, its agriculture ruined, and towards the end of the century it fell an easy prey to a native military adventurer known as Rabbeh Zubeir, who, marching with a large army from Darfur, subdued for a time the whole Mohammedan belt to the east of Chad. In 1893 Rabbeh overthrew the existing dynasty of Bornu, and continued to rule the country under a military tyranny till in April of 1900 he in turn was overthrown, not by the British, but by the French. French troops encountered his forces upon the border of what is now German territory, and having placed their own nominee on the throne of Bornu, their commanders were actually levying tribute in British territory at the moment when British administration was established in Northern Nigeria. The fortunes of Bornu had never in all its history been so low ; the pride of its rulers, represented by an unhappy puppet held captive in foreign territory, was in the dust.

In the remainder of Haussaland a no less disastrous condition of affairs had been produced by the convulsive efforts of some of the Haussa States to cast off the rule of the Fulani, of others to aggrandise themselves at the expense of weaker neighbours, and of the pagans to maintain their cherished independence against all Mohammedan and slave-raiding powers alike ; while above the seething mass of discontent, rebellion, and civil war.