CHAPTER LI NIGERIA UNDER BRITISH RULE: JUSTICE AND GENERAL REORGANISATION But if conquest is best when it is speedy, the work of reorganisation must in its nature be always slow. The campaign of 1903 placed Northern Nigeria definitely under the British Crown. It will tax the energies of many generations of Englishmen to develop the territories thus acquired, and to bring them, with the widely varying populations which they carry, to the full realisation of their own best possibilities. In the meantime the work of the existing administration is to carry forward to the best of its ability the extraordinarily interesting work of organising the new fabric of government, of which the elements have been placed in its hands.

I have spoken only of the taxation of Mohammedan areas. These include, of course, the pagan peasantry of those areas, and they also include pagan communities under Mohammedan rule. There remain independent pagan communities, and these are of two classes. States which have histories as old and as respectable as those of the Mohammedan states themselves, though they have never attained to quite the same high stage of civilisation, and which are governed by one chief. Among these may be named Argungu and Jegga, within the geographical limits of the province of Sokoto ; Gorgoram in Western Bornu, possibly a modern development of the old province of Gwangara, Wangara, or Ungara, whose population migrated to this neighbourhood from Ghana ; Kiama in Borgu ; and some of the Jukum cities in Muri. These independent states will be treated, according to their degree, more or less in the same way 476