82 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY and Lake Chad, where, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they established their domination over the Haussa states, will best be given later in a separate chapter.

The history of Ghana and of the Empire of Melle which superseded it constitute the two first chapters of the native history of Negroland. Melle, which extended at one period of its history over the territory of Ghana and also over the Bend of the Niger, gives way in its turn to the extraordinarily interesting history of Songhay — an empire which from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries extended over the entire Bend of the Niger, and even carried its domination for a time to the Atlantic on one side and to Lake Chad upon the other. Contemporaneously with the rise of Melle and Songhay, the Haussa States and Bornu rose to prosperity between the Niger and Lake Chad, while the native states of Nupe, Borgu, Mossi, and some others, appear to have maintained an independent existence from a period of considerable antiquity upon the Niger. To the south of these territories, during the whole period of which we have the record of their history, the country was inhabited in a continuous belt by Pagan cannibals.

As civilisation in the medieval epoch of Negro history would seem to have arisen in the west, and gradually to have crept across towards the east, meeting, in the Bend of the Niger and the Haussa States, that other wave of civilising influence which in earlier days had inspired its life from the east, so it will not be surprising to find that decadence spreads also along the same path and in the same historic order. When the Arabs first visited Negroland by the western route in the eighth and ninth centuries of our era, they found the black kings of Ghana in the height of their prosperity. The countries bordering upon Lake Chad are then spoken of contemptuously as the '* country of the idolaters." But the black kings of Ghana had long passed into oblivion when Edris, one of the greatest of the kings of Bornu, was making gunpowder for the muskets of his army at a period contemporary with Queen Elizabeth.