Dori

Dori belongs to the Sahel rather than to the Mossi plateau, and its story is one of herders, traders and Islamic scholarship. The country around it, known as Liptako, lay on the routes between the Niger bend and the savanna to the south, and was inhabited by Fulani pastoralists, Tuareg and their former dependants the Bella, Songhai cultivators and Gurmanche communities.

In the early nineteenth century, in the wave of Islamic reform movements that reshaped the western Sahel, the Fulani of Liptako founded an emirate with its capital at Dori. The town became a seat of Muslim learning, a centre of authority over surrounding herding grounds and a market where livestock, salt, grain and craftwork were exchanged. Its leatherworkers and its stock trade date from that period.

French forces reached the area at the end of the nineteenth century, and Liptako was absorbed first into the colonies of the Niger and then into Upper Volta, with the emirate's titles retained in a reduced form. Under the republic Dori became the administrative capital of the Sahel region and of Séno province. The great droughts of the 1970s and 1980s destroyed herds and drove families into the town permanently. Since around 2015 the insurgency that began in this region has cut Dori off from much of its hinterland, closed rural markets, schools and clinics, and turned the town into a refuge for tens of thousands of displaced people from the surrounding Sahel.

Dori is a Fulani town above all, and Fulfulde is the language of the market and the street, alongside Songhai, Tamasheq, Mooré and the French of the offices. Islam is practised almost universally and has deep roots here: the emirate made the town a centre of Quranic teaching, and the rhythm of the day still follows the calls to prayer.

Pastoral values shape manners. Wealth is counted in animals, hospitality is offered before business, and a guest is given water, milk or green tea poured from a height in several small rounds. Reserve, restraint and careful greetings are admired, and questions about family, herds and the rains come before anything else. Tuareg and Bella families contribute their own crafts — silverwork, leather-covered boxes, mats and rope — and Songhai and Gurmanche communities farm alongside the herders.

Craft is the town's visible culture. Tanning and leatherwork have been made here for generations, in bags, sandals, cushions, sheaths and harness worked with geometric patterns, sold at the market and once carried south by traders. Music and praise-singing accompany naming ceremonies and weddings, and the Muslim festivals, above all Tabaski, are the great occasions of the year. The long conflict has thinned much of this public life, and the arrival of displaced families from many different communities has reshaped the town's social mix.

The 2019 census recorded about 46,500 people in Dori, though the number actually living in and around the town has risen far above that with the arrival of families displaced from the countryside. It is a low, sandy town of walled compounds, corrugated roofs and wide open trading grounds, the administrative centre of the Sahel region and the base for its schools, hospital and government offices.

Livestock is the economy. Cattle, sheep, goats and camels come in from the grazing lands to be sold to traders from the south and from Niger, Benin and Ghana; hides feed the tanners, milk is sold daily in calabashes, and millet, cowpeas and sorghum are grown where the rains allow. Gold mining, both industrial and artisanal, grew across the region in the 2010s. Small trade, transport and public employment account for most of the rest.

The conflict dominates everything. Roads out of town are dangerous or closed, some supplies have arrived by convoy or by air, herders have lost access to pasture and wells, and many rural schools and clinics have shut, concentrating their populations in the town. Aid agencies are a large presence. Where life continues it is organised around the market, the mosque, the water points and the movement of animals, with the year turning on the single short rainy season.

Sahel food is built on millet and milk. Tô, a stiff millet porridge, is the daily dish, eaten with sauces of okra, baobab leaf, sorrel or dried fish and seasoned with soumbala, the pungent condiment made from fermented néré seeds. Dégué mixes cooked millet grains with sour milk or yoghurt and sugar, and is sold cold in the market; zoom-koom, a millet-flour drink flavoured with tamarind or ginger, is the common refreshment in the heat.

Milk is central in a herding town. It is drunk fresh or curdled, churned into butter, and sold in calabashes by Fulani women at the market. Meat is more important here than in the south of the country: mutton and goat are grilled over charcoal, and kilishi, thin strips of meat dried and spiced so that they keep in the heat, is a Hausa speciality from northern Nigeria and southern Niger, traded across the Sahel. At Tabaski a sheep is slaughtered in every household able to afford one.

Rice with sauce and riz gras, rice cooked in a tomato and meat sauce, are the standard cooked meals bought away from home, with beans and fried dough beignets at the stalls. Dates, baobab fruit and groundnuts fill out the market. In this Muslim town the drinks are green tea poured in several rounds, milk, and strong sweet coffee at roadside stands rather than the millet beer of the Mossi south.