Land owners, often acting as military chieftains, dominated the hinterland of a civilization.

Mungo Park when exploring the hinterland of this coast in 1795-1797, traveling incidentally with a slave coffle on part of his journey, estimated that in the Niger Valley generally the slaves outnumbered the free by three to one.

Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call sabkhàh, or sheets of gypsum.