While the Songhai were extending their influence to the northern bend of the Niger, the Mandingo peoples, from some unknown place of origin, were fighting their way westwards along the Upper Niger towards Senegambia. The Mandingos and the Songhai met somewhere about the junction of the Niger and the Bani, near the celebrated Jenné, which became a great Songhai city in the 8th century. The Mandingo negroids, who may have been connected with the ancient N.W. African Kingdom of Ghana, early attained wealth and power by opening up the salt and gold mines of the arid country bordering on or within the Western Sahara. They possibly carried on a trade thence with Romanized North Africa. Southwards they got into touch with the gold-bearing country of Ashanti; and it was perhaps through them that Roman and Byzantine beads first found their way to Ashanti and the Gold Coast. Sometimes the Mandingo empire prevailed over the Songhai; latterly the Songhai dominated the northern Mandingos, until both were swamped by the Moorish invasion of the sixteenth century. Both alike showed themselves very ready to receive Arab traders and the Muhammadan religion. The Hausa people are much more negro in their physical appearance than the Mandingos or Songhai. But their language, on the other hand, is imprinted with the white man’s influence. Not only is it sex-denoting, but in pronouns and in the peculiarity of indicating the feminine gender by the consonant _t_ it offers so many indications of ancient Hamitic influence that we are entitled to assume that it arose through an early invasion of Eastern Nigeria by people speaking a Hamitic language. If there is any veracity in Hausa legends, these Hamitic civilisers of the regions between the Niger and Lake Chad came from Egypt; apparently they likewise penetrated as far south as Baghirmi on the Shari and westward to the Logone, where they assisted to create the sex-denoting Musgu tongue. At one time it was thought that the evident “Libyan” element in Hausa came from the invasion of Central Nigeria by the Berbers or Tuaregs[6]; but it now seems much more probable that it was a Hamitic rather than a Berber influence, and more probably came from the regions of Nubia and Dongola where at one time a Hamitic language was spoken. The Hausa people were probably already in existence, and their “compromise” trading language had already been formed before the Tuaregs or desert Berbers of North Africa had found their way to the regions east of the Niger.