Hausaland and the Hausas The seat of the Empire, which the Fulani created in the nineteenth century, was Hausaland. To
understand their achievement it is therefore first necessary to survey the geography of that country and to review briefly the origins and history of its inhabitants.
Hausaland forms part of the belt of savannah, which stretches right across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. This belt is sandwiched between the desert in the north and the equatorial forests in the south. By the Arabs it was called the Beled es-Sudan, the land of the blacks, and the Sudan is the generic name by which it is still known. Within it, Hausaland occupies the greater part of the sector between Lake Chad in the east and the Middle Niger in the west.
Hausaland is thus part of a plain that stretches away for fifteen hundred miles to the west and two thousand to the east. It contains no mountains and possesses no natural frontiers. Essentially it is a gently undulating landscape with fertile valleys, populous and cultivated, lying between watersheds and plateaux that are often barren or waterless and therefore empty and clothed in bush. With minor variations this theme repeats itself over hundreds of miles and only occasionally does a chain of reddish hills, a wide shallow river, or a town of flat-roofed houses appear to give variety to the scene.
Climatically the year falls into two distinct parts, The rainy season starts in May or June and lasts until September or October. For the rest of the year, apart from a little irrigated farming, there is not much to be done on the land. The long dry season from November to May has therefore always been a time of opportunity when the people have been free to turn their hands to other pursuits-to their crafts, to trade, to learning, and of course to war.
The geographical position of Hausaland has also proved to be historically significant. There, at the base of the Sahara, it became the meeting place of two distinct ethnic and linguistic strains, the indigenous Sudanic strain and the Hamitic strain 1 from North Africa which, from time to time, flowed across the desert and mingled with it.
To understand the origins of the Hausa people it is first necessary to review the history of North Africa. In the latter part of the Roman era the Mediterranean littoral was populous and civilized. Its peace and prosperity depended upon two conditions, the authority of Rome and the fact that its long southern frontier was protected by the desert. Early in the first millennium, however, this security was undermined by the introduction of the camel into the Sahara and the appearance soon afterwards of predatory, camel-riding nomads. For a time thereafter the legions were still strong enough to keep the nomads at bay, but as the power of Rome waned, unity and order began to give way to fragmentation and chaos. In the sixth
century, it is true, the country was reconquered for the Eastern Emperors, but revolts soon followed and in any case the authority of Byzantium never matched the departed strength of Rome. By the seventh century, therefore, the half-Roman cities of the littoral and the petty Berber principalities of the interior were enjoying a precarious freedom that made them vulnerable .