Hausa Speech, its Wit and Wisdow

Readers of the Arabian Nights, The Assemblies of El Hariri, and contemporaneous Oriental literature of a similar stamp, become familiar with a type of humanity characteristic of the locality and epoch in which those romances of Eastern life are laid. This characteristic type is a combination of merchant and divine, who is a great traveller and purveyor of news. He is always dignified, a gossip and a busybody in a gentlemanly way, and distinguished no less for his punctilious performance of all the external observances of the creed of Islam than for his assiduity in his commercial operations. To my mind residence in the country occupied by the Hausa people cannot fail to prompt the thought that between this typical personality and the average man of Hausaland there is a striking kinship in character, if not in race.