Maradi

Maradi is a young city with an old dynasty. When the jihad of Usman dan Fodio overturned the Hausa states after 1804, the ruling house of Katsina was driven north out of its city and settled in the valley of the Goulbi de Maradi, beyond the reach of the new Sokoto Caliphate. From the 1820s their kingdom at Maradi fought a long frontier war with Sokoto, raiding south and sheltering other Hausa exiles, and the chiefs of Maradi still trace their line to the kings of Katsina.

The French arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and drew the border a short distance to the south, cutting the Hausa country in two and leaving Maradi on the Nigerien side, separated from Katsina and Kano, the cities that had always been its markets. Under colonial rule the French pushed cash-crop farming, above all groundnuts, and the town became the collecting point for the crop, a trade that made it an important regional commercial centre.

The old town lay in the valley of the Goulbi N'Maradi until the seasonal river flooded it at the end of the rainy season of 1945, after which building spread onto higher ground. The groundnut economy collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s under drought, disease and falling prices, but by then Maradi's merchants had turned to cross-border commerce, and the city kept its position as Niger's trading capital. Droughts and food crises in 2005 and again in the following decade hit the region hard and brought large aid operations to the city.

Maradi is Hausa in language, faith and manner. Hausa is spoken by almost everyone, and Islam orders the week, with Friday prayer, the fast of Ramadan and the two Eids as the fixed points of the year. Sufi brotherhoods have long been strong in the region, and reformist currents from northern Nigeria are strong here too; the city has a reputation within Niger for religious seriousness.

Traditional authority survives alongside the state. The chief of Maradi holds court at his palace, arbitrates disputes and appears at Tabaski surrounded by horsemen in quilted armour and embroidered gowns, with long trumpets, praise-singers and drummers — the durbar of the Hausa courts. Griot families keep the genealogies of the ruling house and perform at weddings and namings.

Trade is the other half of the identity. Maradi's big merchants, the alhazai, built fortunes on commerce with Kano and Katsina and on transport, and their mosques, houses and charity are visible across the city. Hausa craft traditions continue in leatherwork, dyeing, embroidery and blacksmithing, and traditional wrestling draws large crowds, with the region's champions treated as national figures. Weddings and namings spill into the streets with drumming, and hospitality to a guest is close to obligatory.

Maradi has an estimated 270,000 people and is the country's second largest city after Niamey. Most households live in walled compounds of earth or concrete, grouped in wards under a ward head, with large families and many children — the region's birth rate is among the highest anywhere.

The economy is trade. Lorries, money changers and warehouses handle grain, livestock, fuel, cooking oil, cloth and manufactured goods moving between Niger and northern Nigeria, legally and informally, and the naira's exchange rate is followed closely because it sets the price of almost everything. Around the city, farmers grow millet, sorghum, cowpeas and groundnuts on rain-fed fields and vegetables in irrigated plots along the goulbi, and market gardening and small livestock fattening are common household sidelines.

The day starts before dawn with prayer and ends early; the hottest hours empty the streets, and business revives in the late afternoon and after dark. Water, electricity and waste collection struggle to keep up with the city's growth, and periodic food crises, flooding in the valley wards and the closure or disruption of the Nigerian border are the recurring pressures. Seasonal migration south for work is a normal part of many young men's year.

Maradi eats Hausa food, and eats it from the market. Tuwo, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum, is the base of most meals, served with miyan kuka, a sauce of dried baobab leaf, or with sauces of okra, sorrel or dried tomato, and a little meat or dried fish. Rice with a peppery tomato and meat sauce is the everyday town dish, and dan wake, small dumplings of bean flour tossed with oil, pepper and onion, is a cheap favourite.

Groundnuts run through the cooking, as they once ran through the economy: ground into sauces, roasted as a snack, and pressed for oil, after which the residue is fried into kuli-kuli, crunchy sticks eaten on their own or crumbled into salads. Galmi onions, the purple-red variety grown to the west and exported across West Africa, flavour nearly everything. Mornings bring kosai, bean fritters, and masa, small fermented rice cakes eaten with pepper or sugar; evenings bring tsire, skewers of mutton or beef rubbed with groundnut flour and chilli and grilled at roadside stands.

Drinks are non-alcoholic almost everywhere: fura da nono, millet balls mashed into soured milk, kunu, a thin millet or groundnut drink, hibiscus bissap, ginger juice, and sweet green tea brewed in small pots. Mutton is the festive meat, above all at Tabaski, when nearly every household that can afford one slaughters a ram.