A NIGERIAN CARAVAN

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 97, 14 October 1911, Page 11

A NIGERIAN CARAVAN

Northern Nigeria is a country about two and a-half times larger than New Zealand, and with a population seven times greater. In popular imagination, it is a country tilled with- a fierce and savage race, whose delight is in intertribal war. A special correspondent of the London Times gives a much more attractive picture of life in that part of Africa. He thus describes a caravan en route:—"Droves of cattle, among them the monstrous horned oxen from the borders of Lake Chad, magnificent beasts, white or black for the most part. Flocks of Roman-nosed, short-haired, vacant-eyed sheep—white with black patches. Tiny, active, bright brown goats, skipping along in joyful ignorance of their impending fate. Pack-, bullocks, loaded with potash, cloth, hides, and dried tobacco leaves, culinary utensils, and all manner of articles, wrapped in skins or "in octagon-shaped baskets, made of parchment, tight drawn in a wicker framework, which, later —on the return journey—will be packed with kolas, carefully covered with leaves. A few camels, skinny and patchy, and much out at elbows, so to speak, similarly burdened. The drivers move among their beasts. Keeping in the rear, with lengthy staves outstretched on over the animal's back, they control any tendency to straggle across the road. Tall, spare men, for the most part, these drivers, small-boned, tough and sinewy; Hausas mainly, good-featured, not unfrequently bearded men, often possessed of strikingly handsome profiles, with clean-sha,ven heads, and keen, cheerful looks. Women, too, numbers of them, splendid of form and carriage, one or both arms uplifted, and balancing upon the carrying pad (gammo) a towering load of multitudinous contents neatly held together in a string bag. Their raiment is the raiment of antiquity, save that it has fewer folds, the outer gown, commonly blue in color, reaching to just below the knees, the bosom not generally exposed, at least in youth, and, where not so intended, gravely covered as the alien rides by; neck, wrists and ankles frequently garnished with silver ornaments. Many women bear in addition to the load upon the head a baby on the back, its body hidden in the outer robe, its tiny shaven head emerging above, sometimes resting against the soft and ample maternal shoulders, sometimes wobbling from side to side in slumber at the imminent risk, but for inherited robustness in that region, of spinal dislocation. A gay, dusty crowd, weary and footsore, no doubt, tramping 20 miles in a day carrying anything from 401b to 1001b—but, with such consciousness of freedom, such independence of gait and bearing! The mind flies back to those staggering lines of broken humanity, flotsam and jetsam of our great cities, products of our 'superior' civilisation, dragging themselves along the Hertfordshire lanes in the. hop-pick-ing season! What a contrast! And so the trading caravan, bound for the markets of the south, for Lokoja or Bida—it may well be, for some of its units, Ibadan or Lagos—passes onwards, wrapped in ' its own dust, which presently closes in and hides it from sight. Throughout the dry season the trades routes are covered with such caravans and with countless pedestrians in small groups of in twos or threes—l am told by men who have lived here for years, and by the natives themselves, that while highway , robbery is not unknown, a woman, even unattended (and I saw many such), is invariably free from molestation—petty traders and itinerant merchants, some coming north loaded with kolas, salt and cloth, others going south with butchers' provender, potash, cloth, grass and leatherware, etc., witness to the intensive internal commerce which for centuries upon centuries has rolled up and down the highways of Nigeria."