492 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY country, and is carried on by the direct operation of barter, supplemented by a currency in cowries.

All trade at present is caravan-borne, partly by means of transport animals, partly by human carriage. A man carries usually about seventy pounds, and in order to deliver this weight of goods in distant portions of the Protectorate he may have to walk for several months. When this has to be done through disturbed countries the risk to life and property is of course great, and to minimise the risk, caravans in old days travelled in great strength, sometimes numbering several thousand persons. The passage of such bodies of men through a country unprepared for their reception was in itself likely enough to provoke disturbance, and it was the habit of the rulers through whose territory they passed to compensate themselves for damage by the exaction of very heavy tolls.

The main routes of trade ran generally north and south through the western portion of the Protectorate, where Ilorin at one end counterbalanced Kano at the other, and east and west through the northern states, where the caravans travelling from Tripoli to Kano usually entered the territories of Haussaland via Lake Chad and Kuka. Upon these main routes Fulani toll stations were established, while the by-roads were rendered impracticable by the brigandage of pagan tribes. The position of a trader was not always enviable under the circumstances. Nevertheless, the whole of the territories were traversed by a network of caravan routes. Besides those which ran from Kano to Ilorin in the south-west, there were others, more dangerous and less frequented, which carried goods to Yola in the southeast. Kano, which was itself a manufacturing centre, and was also a receiving centre for European goods from the Mediterranean coast, sent local manufactures and European products to the country districts, receiving raw materials in exchange. Ilorin, which was not itself so much a manufacturing as a receiving centre, distributed the goods of Kano through the coast districts, and