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CHAPTER II

THE NIGER DELTA

What is now known as Southern Nigeria comprises 77,200 square miles, and includes the whole seaboard of the Nigerian Protectorate, some 450 miles long, and the marvellous delta region whose network of waterways and surpassing wealth in economic products must be seen to be realized. Pursuing its southward course, the Niger, after its journey of 2,550 miles across the continent from west to east, bifurcates just below Abo into the Forcados and the Nun. This is the apex of the delta, and here the Niger is, indeed, majestic. From each of these main channels of discharge spring countless others, turning and twisting in fantastic contours until the whole country is honeycombed to such an extent as to become converted into an interminable series of islands. The vastness of the horizon, the maze of interlacing streams and creeks, winding away into infinity, the sombre-coloured waters, the still more sombre unpenetrable mangrove forests—here and there relieved by taller growth—impress one with a sense of awe. There is something mysterious, unfathomable, almost terrifying in the boundless prospect, the dead uniformity of colour, the silence of it all. It is the primeval world, and man seems to have no place therein.

Small wonder that amidst such natural phenomena, where in the tornado season which presages the rains the sky is rent with flashes only less terrific than the echoing peals of thunder, where the rushing wind hurls forest giants to earth and lashes the waters into fury, where for months on end torrential downpours fall until man has no dry spot upon which he can place his foot; where nature in its most savage mood wages one long relentless war with man, racking his body with fevers and with ague, now invading his farms with furious spreading plant life, now swamping his dwelling-place—small wonder the inhabitants of this country have not kept pace with the progression of more favoured sections of the human race. It is, on the contrary, astonishing, his circumstances being what they are, that the native of the Niger delta should have developed as keen a commercial instinct as can be met with anywhere on the globe, and that through his voluntary labours, inspired by the necessities and luxuries of barter, he should be contributing so largely to supply the oils, fats, and other tropical products which Western industrialism requires. Trade with the outer world which the merchant—himself working under conditions of supreme discomfort, and in constant ill-health—has brought; improved means of communication through the clearing and mapping of creeks and channels, thereby giving accessibility to new markets which the Administration is yearly creating—these are the civilizing agents of the Niger delta, the only media whereby its inhabitants can hope to attain to a greater degree of ease and a wider outlook.

The outer fringe of the delta is composed entirely of mangrove swamps, whose skeleton-like roots rise up from the mud as the tide recedes, and from whose bark the natives obtain, by burning, a substitute for salt. For untold centuries the mangrove would appear to have been encroaching upon the sea, the advance guard of more substantial vegetation springing up behind it with the gradual increase of deposits affording root-depth. Apart from the deltaic system proper, produced by the bifurcation of the Niger and its subsequent efforts to reach the ocean, the seaboard is pierced by several rivers, of which the Cross, navigable for stern wheelers of light draught in the wet season for 240 miles and in the dry for forty, is the most important. The Benin River links up with the deltaic system on the east, and on the west with the lagoon system of Lagos, into which several rivers of no great volume, such as the Ogun and Oshun, discharge themselves. So continuous and extensive are these interior waterways that communication by canoe, and even by light-draught launches, is possible from one end of the seaboard to the other—i.e., from Lagos to Old Calabar.