THE KEDE: A RIVERAIN STATE IN NORTHERN NIGERIA 173 with the position of immigrants who are dependent on the goodwill of their hosts, but claimed with the territory in which to settle also the political rule over it. If they are thus not 'colonists' in the strict sense of the word, not caring for settlement in new, virgin country, they are 'colonizers' in a more special, political sense, being settlers, immigrants, and representatives of a ruling race in one.
Here a final point remains to be cleared up: the exact relation between the elastic territorial expansion of the tribe and the necessarily more inert and rigid expansion of political domination. From the history of modern Kede settlement we learn that there is a certain time lag between the first occupation of a new place by Kede immigrants (the nucleus stage of the seasonal camp) and its eventual rise to the status of a political outpost. The Kede, as a rule, attribute the founding of their various colonies to particular chiefs. The initiative taken by the Kede chief in the colonial enterprise refers both to the early growth and the final political incorporation of the new colony. He might himself send out settlers from Muregi to a new place which looked a likely centre for Kede activities (Raba is an instance of this), or he might direct settlers from other places to a promising new settlement (as was the case in Katcha). But not until a settlement was firmly established and numbered several families would he delegate an official representative of his to take charge of it, thus proclaiming the political incorporation of the new Kede dominion.
We learn, further, that Kede territorial expansion did not proceed step by step, in continuous stages, but rather in a series of leaps, which may leave gaps between outpost and outpost, or mother-country and new settlement. Thus there are 'uncolonized* spaces on the Kaduna River between Gbara and Wuya or Gbara and Muregi—that is, stretches of country with native villages which (unlike the interspersed kintso^i villages in the 'old' Kede country) have not been absorbed politically by the Kede. We may assume that the early growth of the Kede community followed the same line of development. If this was so, the compact political unit in the 'old' Kede country proves that political rule was later brought up to the new outpost, and the territorial gaps eventually absorbed in the extending political unit. To-day the firmly fixed boundaries of provinces and districts forbid, of course, a similar sequel to the founding of new settlements. The new economic