uator and south of the twentieth parallel and west of the upper
Nile was then, as it is now, the territory of tribes distinctly described
as Negro. The river Niger, running northward from below Jenne to near
Timbuctoo, and then turning west and south to the Gulf of Guinea, flows
through one of the richest valleys in the world. In richness it is
comparable to that of the Nile and, like that of the Nile, its fertility
depends upon the water of the central stream. Here arose in early times
the powerful empire of Songhay, which disintegrated and fell into tribal
confusion about the middle of the seventeenth century. For a long time
the seat of its power was the city of Jenne; in later days it was
Timbuctoo.

This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of
history. The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the
pages of Barth, the German traveler, who had access to what seemed to him
a credible Arab history. Considerable light is thrown upon it by a recent
volume on Timbuctoo by M. Dubois, a French traveler. M. Dubois finds
reason to believe that the founders of the Songhese empire came from
Yemen, and sought refuge from Moslem fanaticism in Central Africa some
hundred and fifty years after the Hejira. The origin of the empire is
obscure, but the development was not indigenous. It seems probable that
the settlers, following traders, penetrated to the Niger valley from the
valley of the Nile as early as the third or fourth century of our era. An
evidence of this early influence, which strengthened from century to
century, Dubois finds in the architecture of Jenne and Timbuctoo. It is
not Roman or Saracenic or Gothic, it is distinctly Pharaonic. But
whatever the origin of the Songhay empire, it became in time Mohammedan,
and so continued to the end. Mohammedanism seems, however, to have been
imposed. Powerful as the empire was, it was never free from tribal
insurrection and internal troubles. The highest mark of negro capacity
developed in this history is, according to the record examined by Barth,
that one of the emperors was a negro.

From all that can be gathered in the records, the mass of the negroes,
which constituted the body of this empire, remained pagan, did not
become, except in outward conformity, Mohammedan and did not take the
Moslem civilization as it was developed elsewhere, and that the
disintegration of the empire left the negro races practically where they
were before in p