TAXATION OF NATIVES IN NORTHERN NIGERIA. 
7 
which had been responsible for much of the oppression and 
extortion. In future the district headman would be in close 
touch with the chiefs of towns and villages, and with the 
peasantry under his rule, and in order that he might not become 
an independent autocrat, he was required to attend at the capital 
at least twice yearly on the occasion of the Mohammedan 
festivals, in order that the Emir might maintain his touch with 
the districts, and his control over the headmen. The Emir could 
also send his messengers into the district (who, however, were 
no longer to have any duties in connection with the collection 
of taxes), and could, if occasion arose, summon the district head 
man to the capital. In order to check any extortion or abuses 
every village headman is to be provided with a statement in 
Hausa and Arabic of the amount at which his village is assessed. 
The villagers, on the one hand, could demand to see this list 
if their headman collected more than the authorised tax, and on 
the other hand, the district headman could not claim from the 
village more than this sum. In the event of any excess demand, 
village headmen and peasantry alike had a right of appeal to 
the Assistant Resident of the division. These safeguards have 
been welcomed by the people, and it is reported that little or 
no extortion now exists. As the scheme becomes more and more 
effective and recognised, I trust that extortion will disappear, 
and the maximum of administrative control, which is com 
patible with the machinery at the disposal of a Protectorate 
Government, will have been attained. The system here out 
lined is now in process of creation. In some provinces it is 
already in effective operation, in others it is still being com 
pleted. 
Consolidation of Districts. 
G. The headmen thus appointed are, it will be seen, territorial 
magnates, appointed to the charge of a specified area of terri 
tory, in which they would exercise control up to the limit of the 
executive powers conferred upon them,—judicial powers being 
vested in the Native Courts. But in practice it was found that 
in every district there were a considerable number of towns 
which had been founded by immigrants from some distant 
parent city, or which consisted of a portion of a clan, the parent 
stock of which was located outside the district, or which con 
sisted of a settlement of people of a race alien to the bulk of the 
population of the district. In all these cases the town in 
question would decline to acknowledge the authority of the local 
headman, and would claim to pay their tax to the clan from 
which they had emanated. The unit, in fact, through a great 
part of the Protectorate, was not territorial, e.g., a specified 
district or area, but a group of individuals—a tribe or a clan— 
however scattered. This was not unnatural in a country where 
the population had been devastated by decades of slave-raiding 
and inter-tribal war, so that fugitive remnants of tribes were 
scattered in various directions and vast areas of land remained