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Officer or a Resident to advise you how to do it better, and stop you slave-raiding and things like that, and show you how to collect your taxes more fairly. And we’ll pretend you are still the real rulers and we’re just advisers, only you’d jolly well better do what we advise!” So that was alright.
    We got to Kiti almost last of all—it’s always been a complete back­water—and we found Kama Boi calling himself Sarkin Kiti, which means King of Kiti so we thought we’d do the same thing here. We made him Emir and gave him an adviser and told him to carry on. Only things were a bit different here, which we didn’t realise. You see, there are three sorts of people in Kiti. There are the Emir and his lot at Kiti Town. They’re Hausa. There are the river people, who are the usual mixed bag of fishermen and farmers and traders and so on. And there are the Kitawa, who are a quite big tribe who live inland and don’t wear any clothes and keep themselves to themselves as far as they can. What we didn’t realize when we told Kama Boi he was Emir now and had to collect taxes from everyone was that he wasn’t really ruler of anything except Kiti Town. The Kitawa simply weren’t used to paying taxes to anyone.
    About a hundred years ago, you see, there was a terrific war in the north, and one lot called the Fulani beat another lot called the Hausa and made themselves emirs. Then one of the beaten Hausa who was Kama Boi’s great-grandfather came south with his men and crossed the river and said to the Kitawa, “Look, if you let me build a fort at Kiti Rapids, which is the only good crossing-place for miles, and give me some land to farm, I’ll stop the soldiers from Soko slave-raiding you across the river.”
    The Kitawa must have thought this was a good idea, ’cos there’d been a lot of slave-raiding (it was the emirs’ favourite sport, like fox-hunting in England). So they made a treaty with Kama Boi’s great-grandfather and to show how sacred it was they held a juju ceremony (human sacrifice, Ted says!) at the holiest place in Kiti, and they did the same for his successors, including Kama Boi. Nothing’s written down, of course, but Ted says it’s just as binding as a treaty between France and England, and still matters tremendously. He’s had a lot of trouble with it ’cos Kama Boi is not a good ruler and Kaduna are always trying to send for him to tell him to pull his socks up, only he refuses point blank to cross the river. He says part of the juju is that he must never leave Kiti, and that’s that!
    Well, Kiti’s such a backwater that at first Kaduna only grumbled a bit about the taxes not getting paid, and Kama Boi grumbled back at them about not being allowed to slave-raid into Soko so how were he and his people going to run their farms, but nothing happened till a man called Harry Bestermann was sent here as D.O. He was a real goer, Ted says. (Ted’s got a little song—“Harry was a goer. Harry’s been and gone. Tick fever.” Rather horrid—Ted isn’t a goer, you see. More of a stayer, really. That’s rather good—better not tell him, tho’—he’s sensitive about things sometimes.)
    Well, Mr Bestermann bullied Kama Boi into taking his spear-men and his dogarai —they’re the Native Authority police, fearful ruffians, Ted says—out into the bush and going from village to village and making the Kitawa pay up, and next thing the quiet, peaceful Kitawa were in revolt! Their women got hold of five dogarai and gave them drugged beer and did frightful things to them and then put them in a hut and set fire to it, and before you could say Jack Robinson all KB’s men had to come scuttling out of the bush and shut themselves up in Kiti Town.
    Then of course KB came to Mr Bestermann and said, “Now look what’s happened,” and Mr Bestermann persuaded