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Kaduna to let him have something called Bestermann’s Patrol, which meant marching to and fro with forty soldiers and a machine gun showing the Kitawa that if they didn’t let themselves be counted and start paying taxes nasty things would happen to them. We didn’t hear about any of this in England ’cos it was 1916 and we were too busy with the war. Anyway it was all very fair. The patrol only shot people when they tried to fight, and cleared them out of the huts before they burnt them, and when they caught someone they thought might be a ringleader they didn’t hang them straight off but sent them to Lagos to be tried and hanged there. So in the end the Kitawa gave in.
    It’s still all very difficult, Ted says. The taxes are tiny and Kama Boi’s a lot poorer than he used to be and so are his nobles, and Kaduna can’t make up their minds what to do next. After the patrol they allowed Kama Boi to go on being Emir but to show everyone the revolt was really his fault (!) they sort of demoted him by putting Kiti under Soko, which was an absolutely terrible idea, Ted says. The Emir of Soko is a Fulani and so he’s Kama Boi’s hereditary enemy, and his ancestors used to slave-raid the Kitawa so they hate him too, and Kama Boi used to slave-raid the Sokowa. (Suppose I have to make allowances, because if Kaduna hadn’t done it that way Ted would be a Resident instead of just D.O., so naturally he feels a bit sore! Remember the way he laughed about Mr de Lancey when he scribbled on my cartoon?)
    Then we got to Kiti. That was quite exciting. First off you hear the rapids, then you see the river-trees, but before you reach them you come out of the bush into neat Hausa fields and straight ahead there’s one great mud wall, towering up. You think, “Golly! How could natives have built anything so big?” Then you see it’s on a cliff. Actually there’s a ridge of rock running all the way across the river, and that’s what makes the rapids where the river’s smashed it down, but this side it’s a proper cliff. Still, the wall’s pretty impressive even allowing for that, thirty feet high and ten feet thick, Ted says. It’s a bit ruined in places ’cos Kama Boi doesn’t bother to keep it mended now he knows we British will stop the Fulani attacking him. I shall come and do a picture. The most exciting bit is where the track bends and you’re going along almost under the wall and you see the yellow rapids tumbling down beyond.
    That’s where we found Ted’s Messenger, Lukar, waiting for us on his donkey. He’s the head messenger, so he has a capital M—the others are just errand boys, but Lukar’s quite important ’cos he can speak Kiti tho’ he’s a Hausa and he’s been Messenger for years, since before Mr Bestermann’s time. We come and go but they stay on. He’s a very black little man, thin-faced and hooky-nosed. He wears a white robe and a pill-box hat. He led the way. A scrambly track slanting up the cliff. Quite a good road between the river and the town ditch, with the wall beyond it. Ditch full of fearsome thorn scrub. Islands in the river. Extraordinary tangles of wood between some of them and a fisherman scrambling around like a shiny black spider ’cos of the spray, getting at his fish-traps. Beyond the town what Ted calls New Kiti, another of his jokes ’cos it’s only a jumble of tin shacks and mud huts, higgledy-piggledy round the market. More about that in a mo.
    But first, something that happened inside me. While we were riding between the river and the wall I suddenly had the most extraordinary feeling. Here we were, in the middle of Africa, just the two of us, and I hardly count ’cos of being a woman. The nearest white man was probably Mr de Lancey at Birnin Soko, eighty miles away. If you look at a map you see all this enormous country coloured pink. Kiti mayn’t