Ayorou

Ayorou belongs to the Songhai country of the middle Niger. The river here was part of the Songhai Empire ruled from Gao, downstream in what is now Mali, and after the Moroccan invasion of 1591 broke that empire, Songhai princes withdrew along the river and founded small states in this stretch of the valley. Their descendants, and the closely related Zarma, are still the majority in the towns and villages around the town.

The settlement itself grew on an island in the Niger, a defensible site in a country crossed by raiding and by the herds. Fishing, river transport and farming on the flood-watered sandbanks supported it, and its position on the edge of the desert made it a natural meeting point between Songhai farmers and fishermen and the Tuareg, Bella and Fula herders of the country north and east. The weekly market grew out of that meeting and became one of the best known on this reach of the river.

French forces reached the valley at the end of the 19th century, and the town was administered from Tillabéri through the colonial period and after independence in 1960. Under Niger's republics it remained small — about 11,500 people in the town itself at the 2012 census, some 33,500 in the commune — and it drew a modest number of visitors for the market and the hippos. That ended as the war in the Sahel spread across the Mali and Burkina Faso borders from the late 2010s, drawing the Tillabéri region into the fighting and bringing displaced families and Malian refugees to the town.

The town's calendar turns on the market. On market day, herders bring cattle, goats, sheep and camels in from the bush, traders come up and down the river and the road, and the ground fills with animals, grain, salt, cloth and talk; transactions are made through brokers, and the day is as much a social gathering as a sale. It is one of the places where the two halves of Sahelian society — the settled farmers and fishermen of the river and the herders of the drylands — meet face to face.

Songhai and Zarma culture shapes the town. Islam is practised by almost everyone, with the long greetings, the five prayers and the fasting month that structure the year, and older river traditions survive beside it, above all the Songhai spirit-possession ceremonies, with their drumming and their dancers taken over by spirits. Griots keep genealogies and sing the deeds of the Songhai past at weddings and naming ceremonies.

Tuareg and Bella families bring their own dress, silverwork and leather to the market, and Fula herders their cattle and their milk. Craft here is practical: pirogues shaped from planks and sewn, nets, mats woven from river reeds, and calabashes. Hospitality is a duty — tea poured in three rounds for a guest, and a meal offered before questions are asked.

Ayorou is a small town — about 11,500 people at the 2012 census, in a rural commune of some 33,500 — built of banco and mud brick on the bank and on its island. Most households live from the river and the land: fishing with nets and traps, growing rice, millet and sorghum on the flood plain, market gardening on the sandbanks when the water drops, and keeping goats and cattle.

The market is the town's other economy, and it reaches well beyond the commune: animals bought here are driven or trucked towards Niamey and the coastal countries, and goods come back the other way. Cross-border trade with Mali, legal and informal, has always been part of that, as has seasonal migration by young men to Niamey or further afield.

The war has changed everything. Attacks on villages, on army posts and on roads in the Tillabéri region have pushed families off the land and into the town, which hosts displaced Nigeriens and refugees from Mali; markets and schools in the surrounding countryside have closed at times; and movement by road is dangerous. The visitor trade that once brought a little cash to boatmen, guides and lodgings has gone.

The river provides. Fish from the Niger — capitaine, the Nile perch, along with catfish and tilapia — is grilled fresh over charcoal, fried, or smoked and dried for trade inland, and it is the town's most distinctive food. Rice grown on the flood plain is eaten with a tomato and oil sauce, sometimes with fish, and is the meal of market days and celebrations.

Millet is the everyday staple, pounded and cooked into a stiff porridge eaten with a sauce of dried baobab leaves, okra, sorrel or groundnut, and rolled into fura, balls of millet flour crushed into soured milk to make fura da nono, which herding families sell and which is drunk through the hot months. Moringa leaves go into sauces and salads with groundnut paste and onion, and dambou, a steamed millet couscous with moringa, appears on better days.

Milk, butter and cheese come from the Fula and Tuareg herds, dates and salt from the desert trade, and dried meat — kilishi, spiced and cut paper-thin — from the market. Mangoes and melons are seasonal, sold beside the road. Drinks are sweet green tea boiled on charcoal and poured in three rounds, hibiscus bissap, ginger juice and kunu; alcohol has no public place in the town.