But the whole position was a false one so far as Great Britain was concerned. The British Government at the Berlin Conference on the affairs of Africa had pleaded everywhere the cause of Free Trade; yet here, in the British Nigerian sphere, a chartered company had secured the virtual monopoly of trade. Above Abo on the deltaic Niger it was practically impossible for anyone to carry on commerce except the natives and the Royal Niger Company. Yet the British Government was already called upon to protest against King Leopold’s monopoly of trade in the interior of the Congo State and the French exclusion of British merchants from French Congo. So the step was taken in 1899 of buying out the administrative rights of the Royal Niger Company; and on January 1, 1900, the British Government commenced the direct rule of “Northern Nigeria,” a territory of approximately 256,400 square miles (as delimited by the 1890-1898-1902 conventions with France and Germany—338,000 square miles with Southern Nigeria) which stretched from the confines of the Sahara Desert and Lake Chad to the Upper Benue, the Central Niger, Borgu, and the Cameroons frontier. In three and a half years’ time (1900-04) practically the whole of this enormous area had been brought under effective British control—thanks to the courage and indomitable energy of its first Governor, Sir Frederick Lugard (who had won Borgu and Illórin for the Niger Company in 1897-99). Colonel T. L. N. Morland commanded a force of 800 negro soldiers with British officers and non-commissioned officers, which with its light pieces of artillery and maxim guns defeated the large forces of cavalry brought against it by the Fula princes. In a campaign which lasted from the autumn of 1902 to the early summer of 1903 Colonel Thomas Morland marched from Nupe to Bornu, and Bornu to Sokoto, capturing the great Hausa city of Kano by the way. The inimical Fula Sultan of Sokoto was deposed, and a relative raised to the throne, who could be more depended on to work loyally with the British in suppressing the slave-trade and in discouraging those slave raids which were fast depopulating Northern Nigeria. It is pleasant to record that in the course of these operations the dynasty of the Kanemi Sheikhs of Bornu (the founder of which had been so good to the trans-Saharan expeditions sent out from England in the first half of the 19th century) was restored to the headship of that country. They had been driven out of Bornu in an extraordinary invasion of the Central Sudan by Rabah, a former slave of Zobeir Pasha in the Egyptian Sudan. Rabah, deserting the crumbling Dervish power of Omdurman, had marched to the west and entered Bornu in 1895 at the head of a large army. Rapidly he made himself master of the regions between Hausaland and the Congo basin.