Chapter XVI: Mining Development and the Bauchi Plateau

There appears to be no doubt that Nigeria is a highly mineralized country. Iron exists in considerable quantities and in many districts, in Southern but more particularly in Northern Nigeria. In the Southern Protectorate large deposits of lignite have been discovered 40 miles inland from Onitsha, and require more than a passing mention.

Lignite, as is well known, stands about halfway between wood and coal. It forms an excellent combustible, and if it can be produced in the proper form for the purpose, it would be invaluable for the Nigerian railways and for the steamers and steamboats plying up and down the river, besides saving the Administration, which is a large importer of coal, much expense. The first experiments made with the raw material, as extracted, by the Marine Department, the Northern Nigerian Railway, and the Niger Company were not altogether satisfactory, which is, perhaps, not surprising. The Imperial Institute in London is giving close attention to the matter. That the deposits are of commercial value is undoubted. An analysis of the Nigerian lignite and a personal investigation of lignite deposits in Bohemia and elsewhere, conducted by Professor Wyndham Dunstan, the Director of the Institute, have shown that the Nigerian article is virtually identical with the German and Austrian. Lignite is extensively used in Germany, where it is manufactured into briquettes, and excellent briquettes have been made by a German firm from specimens of the Nigerian lignite supplied by the Institute. It is probable that the difficulties experienced locally in utilizing the material in its raw state would vanish if the necessary machinery for the manufacture of briquettes could be erected at or near Asaba. Meantime the Administration has had a road constructed from Asaba to the lignite-fields.

Great importance is attached locally to the Udi deposits, specimens of which I was able to examine. To the non-expert eye they have every appearance of rather dirty-looking coal. Credit for this discovery is wholly due to the mineral survey party sent out by the Imperial Institute under Mr. Kitson. I am told that the deposits cover an area of no less than five square miles. To work them commercially a railway between Onitsha and Udi will, of course, be necessary. The Udi district can hardly be described as “open” at the moment, but a metalled road to connect it with Onitsha is in a fair way of being completed.

There can be little doubt that in these deposits the Administration has a valuable source of potential revenue, and that the Colonial Office will be called upon before long to come to a decision as to the best means of reaping advantage therefrom. It is an open secret that demands for prospecting licences and even for concessions are already being made. In some quarters the opinion is entertained that the home and local authorities would be well advised to refuse to part with control over the fields, but, for some years to come at any rate, to let the Southern Nigeria Administration itself develop them. There seems to be no reason why these deposits of fuel should not be made to play as important a part in the future economy of West Africa as the Nile Sudd appears likely to do in the economy of Egypt and the Sudan.

Mineral oil has also been discovered in the Southern Protectorate, but the extravagant hopes held out of being able to work the latter at a profit seem in a fair way of being abandoned, and the financial assistance lent by the Administration has not so far justified itself. West Africa is a peculiar country and is apt to turn the tables upon the company promoter with a disconcerting completeness. In the Northern Protectorate salt exists in Bornu, Sokoto, Muri, and Borgu. Monazite has been found, although not in large deposits, in Nassarawa and Ilorin. Mica and kaolin occur in Kano. Tourmaline has been found in Bassa. Kabba contains limestone deposits favourably reported upon by the officers of the Imperial Institute as suitable for agricultural purposes and the preparation of mortar. Certain parts of Muri are rich in galena, containing lead and silver. I am told that quite recently extensive supplies of silver have been discovered in the same district, the natives of which have, of course, been trading in both silver and in lead for many years. Rumours of the existence of gold and copper have not so far, to my knowledge, been justified. Of precious stones, I have only heard of small garnets being won, although I was shown a handful of inferior diamonds supposedly discovered in Southern Nigeria, and the blue clay formation certainly exists in some parts of Bauchi. A number of mineral surveys have been carried out by the Imperial Institute, but the potentialities of the vast bulk of the country are still unknown.

The chief discoveries have been concerned with tin. The industry was originally, and in restricted form, a native one, and has a somewhat romantic history. Its brief outlines, obtained from conversation with the native authorities of Liruei-n-Kano and Liruei-n-Delma, are as follows. Some eighty years ago the people of the former place, a small town in the south-east of Kano Province, whose inhabitants carried on an iron smelting industry under the direction of an able woman, _Sariki_, found the white metal. They ascertained that it possessed a trading value. They invented an ingenious but simple method of treating and producing it in an exceedingly pure form, which remained a secret among the members of the ruling family and their adherents, but which was explained to me by them in detail, by the side of one of their furnaces at Liruei-n-Kano. After honeycombing the neighbourhood of Liruei-n-Kano with vertical pits, they wandered in course of time over the whole stanniferous area, washing and digging in the beds, as far south as the tenth parallel. Further than that they could not move owing to the hostility of the pagan tribes. Tin, in thin, rounded rods, became a regular article of sale in the markets.

The first sample of tin ore was sent home by Sir William Wallace, then Acting High Commissioner, in 1902. It was examined by the Imperial Institute and was found to contain over 80 per cent. of tin di-oxide, equal to about 64 per cent. of metallic tin. From that time onwards the Niger Company which, under the arrangement contracted with the Imperial Government at the time of the abrogation of the Charter, stands to gain very largely through the development of the mineral resources of the Protectorate, has spent considerable sums—at first without return—in proving and in encouraging the industry. To the company is due the fact that the field has been opened out at all. It is but fair to state this because the company is the butt of much criticism in Northern Nigeria, and in some respects, I think, criticism inspired by jealousy of its own remarkable enterprise. In the last three or four years no fewer than eighty-two companies have been floated to exploit Northern Nigeria tin with a total capital of £3,792,132.[10] Hardly a week passes but that some fresh company is not floated, or the attempt made to do so. It has, therefore, become a very big thing indeed, and an outside non-expert opinion may be of some use from the point of view of the “man in the street” at home. The country is flooded with prospectors, on the whole of a much better type than is usually attracted to a new mining region, and the Government, under guarantee from the Niger Company, are now building a light railway in the direction of the principal deposits.

Needless to say, there has been the usual amount of swindling, and, perhaps, more than the usual amount of lying. Tin has been located in districts where there never was and never will be the slightest vestige of tin; imaginary “bore-holes” have been sunk and companies have been formed in London on the strength of utterly fraudulent reports. Statements have been issued proclaiming that the country is self-supporting for the white prospector in the matter of supplies, which is totally untrue; and that it is a health resort, which is equally false. Young fellows have been sent out on agreements which are a disgrace to those who drew them up, and in some cases, their bones are rotting in the ground. An unpleasant feature of the affair has been the indecent precipitancy with which in certain instances ex-Government officials have identified themselves with syndicates formed in London, a practice which appears to be growing and which is to be deprecated in the interest of the high standard and general purity of our public service.[11] No doubt these incidents are common in the initial stages of every such enterprise. They are none the less to be deplored.

The western portion of the Bauchi province is the true centre of the nascent industry. The country about here is wild and beautiful, broken by mountain ranges which cannot always be negotiated on horseback, and rising to a considerable height, up to 5000 feet round about Bukuru and Pankshin. Anything more at variance with the forest regions of the south it would be impossible to imagine. The whole province is well watered, and the mineral section lies in the watershed of three fluvial systems, one feeding the Chad of which the Delimi (or Bunga) is the most important; another the Benue, of which the Gongola, Kaddera and Sango are the principal contributory offshoots; another the Niger, through its tributary the Kaduna which branches out into a fan of numerous lesser streams. Naraguta, on the Delimi—where most of the mining is actually concentrated—is situate almost at the heart of these three systems. There appears to be no bed of tin-bearing wash over the whole country, but for centuries upon centuries hundreds of feet of rock—chiefly granite of sorts, with gneiss and basalt—have been denuded by the action of the weather, and the tin discovered is the concentration of the tin disseminated throughout those rocks which has been washed into the beds of the rivers. Practically (there is one known exception, perhaps two) all the tin as yet discovered is alluvial, and there is virtually no alluvial tin except in the river-beds themselves. It occurs in patches, which explains, although it does not excuse, the flamboyant statements issued on the strength of specific returns, over a given area, from washings. A company may have secured a licence, or a lease, over a wide area in one particular corner of which one or more of these patches has been met with. The returns from washings in these patches, some of which are very rich, are made to apply in prospectus-framing to the whole area, when the bulk of it may be virgin not only of tin in payable quantities, but of any trace of tin at all.

It is unwise to dogmatize about a new country where further discoveries may give a different complexion to the situation. But in the present state of our knowledge, the statements describing Northern Nigeria as the “richest tin field in the world,” are, to put it mildly, a manifest exaggeration, and the happiest thing which could happen to the country and to the industry would be a cessation of the “boom.” It may be fairly urged that the Government’s business is not the protection of the home investor. All the same, it is not in the public interest that Northern Nigeria should get a bad name, through wild-cat schemes and dishonest finance. Five years hence a boom may be justified by results. At present it is not. Disinterested expert opinion on the spot estimates the eventual output of the discovered field at 5000 tons per annum. It is always possible that further and valuable deposits may be struck. On the other hand, the life of an alluvial tin mine is, by general consent, a short one, and ten years will probably cover the life of the existing mines. Under the circumstances it is very evident that a great number of the companies which have been floated are over-capitalized and will never pay an honest dividend. Companies with a small capital, whose property is a good one and favourably situated, have every chance of doing so. For the small man, working with a modest capital, who is fortunate enough to select a good site and who is prepared to come in and do the actual mining, the prospects, I should say, are distinctly good; and prospectors of that sort could count upon receiving every assistance from the Administration, which is anxious to encourage them. For two energetic men—it is always better to be _à deux_ out here—a capital of £3000 would be ample, and the conditions made to licence and lease-holders are not onerous, although the staff for dealing with applications is too small, entailing vexatious delays. There is no serious labour trouble, and there is not likely to be any, provided the natives are properly treated. The representative of the Niger Company, who has considerable knowledge of the country and whom I saw at Joss—a beautiful station reflecting the greatest possible credit upon the company and its local staff—was very emphatic on this point, and his views were borne out by the most experienced people I consulted. In this connection I feel impelled to remark that both from the political point of view, as from the standpoint of the interests and progress of the industry itself—not to mention other considerations—it is absolutely essential that abusive acts, such as the incident which occurred at the close of last year at Maiwa, should be punished with exemplary severity. On that occasion the guilty party escaped with a substantial fine. Should anything of the sort recur, expulsion from the country ought to accompany the fine. The Bauchi province is not yet entirely “held,” and much of it is peopled by very shy and timid pagan tribes. These are amenable under just treatment to regular labour on short terms and prompt pay, as has been proved in the final stages of the completion of the Riga-Chikum-Naraguta road, although such labour is quite foreign to them. Harsh and unjust handling would send them flying to the inaccessible hills. While on this subject I am also bound to say that the political staff of the Bauchi province is hopelessly and dangerously undermanned, or was when I left the country last January. It is tempting Providence to allow three hundred white prospectors to go wandering over the face of a vast country like this (27,000 square miles) with a political staff amounting to no more than thirteen all told; and that number, a purely nominal one, be it stated. Twenty political officers at least should be permanently on duty in the province.

The question of transport has been a difficult one and still remains so. The situation has been somewhat alleviated by the construction of a road connecting Naraguta with the Baro-Kano railway at Riga-Chikum, although, following that road for its whole (then) completed length, I fail to see for my part that it will be of much use in the rains without a series of pontoons over the rivers which cut it at frequent intervals, and no measure of the kind was in contemplation last January. Possibly the situation has changed since. The scarcity and the distance of the villages and, consequently, of food supplies for men and beasts, from the road is also a drawback. But doubtless the road will fall into disuse and turn out to have been more or less a waste of money with the completion of the railway which, mercifully, be it said, has been started from Zaria instead of following the deserted country from Riga-Chikum as was originally proposed. This railway is being constructed in the direction of Naraguta. But not to Naraguta itself, which is wise, for the development of the industry in that immediate neighbourhood is still a sufficiently doubtful quantity to permit at least of the supposition that the centre of gravity may shift to Bukuru or some other spot. The railway traverses the region where the Kano tin deposits are situate—virtually the only ones not entirely alluvial in character. At the present time the road chiefly used for the transport of the tin is that opened and maintained by the Niger Company between the mines and Loko on the Benue, a distance of 180 miles. The Niger Company have established ferries across the rivers and organised a system of carriers and donkeys. But at best the route is not an ideal one, costs a great deal to keep open, and is hardly capable of dealing with more than 500 tons _per annum_. I found complaints rife as to the alleged favouritism shown by the company in its management of the transport, but I failed to discover any specific facts justifying them. Of course the company enjoys a complete monopoly of that road, even the Government, it seems, having to apply to the company for carriers; and a monopoly is always undesirable in theory and sometimes very irritating in practice. (Apparently the same situation has come about in regard to the Riga-Chikum road.) But it is difficult to see how any tin at all could have been got down, or machinery and stores got up, to and from the river if it had not been for the company’s enterprise and far-seeing methods. Certainly the loudest of its local critics would have been quite unable to have coped with the problem.

Something remains to be said of the Bauchi province. The province consists of the Bauchi and Gombe Emirates, the Ningi Division, an independent community half Muslim, half pagan, of erstwhile noted freebooters and fighters, and the purely pagan section, of which the Hill Division is the most important. The total population is about half a million. In no part of Africa probably is there such a conglomeration of different tribes—Angass, Sura, Tangali, Chip, Waja, Kanna, Bukurus, etc., etc.—as is to be found in the pagan division of Bauchi which, for centuries, has been the refuge of communities fleeing from Hausa, Fulani and Beri-Beri (Kanuri) pressure. No fewer than sixty-four distinct languages—not dialects—are said to have been noted within it. The men are an upstanding race, lithe rather than muscular, great archers and in many cases daring horsemen, riding bare-backed, covering immense distances in a phenomenally short space of time and shooting accurately (with the bow) while mounted. Most of them go about absolutely naked but for a sanitary adornment of special character. For a picture of primitive man commend me to the spectacle of a naked Bauchi pagan carrying a bow in his hand, on his back a quiver of arrows; on his head, its horns sticking out on either side, the gory and newly severed head of an ox—the “Boar of the Ardennes” in variation and in an African setting of rugged mountains and dying sun! I observed this sight one evening riding into Naraguta from a distant mining camp, passing, ten minutes later, a gorgeously attired Mohammedan _Sariki_ in his many coloured robes on a richly caparisoned horse. Northern Nigeria is a land of extraordinary contrasts, which to some extent no doubt is the secret of its fascination. The women’s clothing is also of the scantiest, consisting of a bunch of broad green leaves fixed round the waist and falling over the hips and lower abdomen. Their chastity is proverbial even among the dissolute camp-followers.

Among these people many customs of great anthropological interest must linger, many religious practices and philological secrets that might give us the key to much of which we are still ignorant in the history of the country, and assist us in the art of government. It seems a pity that their gradual Hausa-ising, which must be the outcome of the _pax britannica_, should become accomplished before these facts have been methodically studied and recorded. The pagan division of Bauchi is a unique corner of Africa, and it would be well worth the while of Government and of some scientific body at home to prosecute research within it. The Administration has no money to spare. But it is really a misfortune that public opinion in England is so lax in these matters. We wait in order to understand the ethnological lore of our African dependencies, until German scientists have gone through them and told us what they contain of anthropological value, incidentally sweeping the country bare of its ethnological treasures. In these things we appear to have no national pride whatever. If any British scientific body should be stung by these mild remarks into some sort of action, I would advise its communicating with Captain Foulkes, the Political Officer until recently in charge of the Hill Division, who is keenly interested in the people and their customs which he has more knowledge of than any one else.

The soil of the province is supposedly poor, but I observed it to be covered in many places with millions of casts of virgin soil flung up by earthworms, and these must, when the rains come, enrich its recuperative properties. The province would probably grow wheat. The pagan cultivation is very deep and remarkably regular, and these communities, for all their primitiveness, weave grass mats of tasteful finish, colouring and design; grow cotton which they manufacture and sell, and tobacco which they smoke, and snuff, and smelt iron. They are also readily taking to the rubber trade and learning how to tap the rubber trees which, in some parts, are to be met with in every village, without destroying the tree. In the plains there are large herds of cattle, which form the principal wealth of the inhabitants, and an abundance of good grazing land. The Fulani herdsman, ubiquitous as ever, may be seen tending his beasts.

On all hands the Bauchi plateau is looked upon as an eventual sanatorium where officials can recoup, and thanks to which the term of service may be ultimately prolonged, which, with the keenness which distinguishes this service, they all seem to want—the Politicals, I mean. Even now they play hide-and-seek with the doctors, and keep uncommonly quiet when the time comes round for furlough, lying low like Brer Rabbit. I hesitate to strike a discord where so much unanimity prevails. No doubt it is a generally accepted maxim that the bracing air of a mountainous region, its cool nights and mornings, have recuperative effects upon the system undermined with malaria and other ills, and it may well be—I devoutly hope so—that in course of time the plateau will become the Nigerian Simla and may also contain a population of white settlers engaged in stock-raising and, perhaps, agriculture. But the period within which these things can come about strikes me as still remote. If they are to be, it will mean the expenditure of much money, and, under existing circumstances of transport and housing, the climate of Bauchi has been over-praised. You have always the tropical African sun to reckon with, and there appears to be some subtly dangerous quality about it which even men who have lived in other tropical lands find very trying.