Page:The empire and the century.djvu/890

 Europe from Africa, and the same influence extending southwards made the kingdoms of Mellistine and of Songhay no less renowned in their day, while their principal cities—Timbuktu, Jenne, Katsena, and Kano (the two latter in Northern Nigeria)—became the marts of civilization, and exported their manufactures throughout the then known world. The civilization, therefore, of the Niger Sudan took its origin from the north, derived all its traditions from that direction, and conducted its trade with the Mediterranean coast Its cultured progress ever thrust southwards the barbarian hordes of negro pagans which it encountered on its frontiers. Before the ever-advancing tide of civilization these tribes were compelled to take refuge in the dense and inaccessible jungle of the great 'Forest Belt' which extends south of the eighth parallel of latitude, and between it and the sea, or in the swamps and network of creeks of the deltas of the great rivers. Some few, however, still held their own, and are found to-day amid the forests of the Benue Valley and the inaccessible mountain fastnesses to the north of it.

Following the voyages of Vasco da Gama and the other great ocean explorers of the fifteenth century, the new era of civilization in Europe, which arose after the fall of the Moors and Berbers in Spain, found access to Western Africa from the southern coast instead of across the northern desert. Meanwhile the wealth, splendour, and literary pre-eminence of the Askia dynasty of Songhay was at its zenith in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the life and death struggle of Europe against the Mohammedan Turks and Moors had at this period closed the gates of the North, and for three centuries the Niger Sudan was cut off from contact with Europe by the Northern route, except for a few stray caravans by the more easterly roads. Our Colonies on the West African Coast were located among the lower negroid types, who had been ousted from the interior uplands by the superior and civilized races from the North, and I have already shown that the result for