Niamey

Niamey began as a small settlement, or a cluster of them, on the left bank of the Niger, where fishing and farming villages stood among the sandbanks. It was of no great importance in the region's politics: the powerful states were Songhai downstream, the Zarma chiefdoms inland and the Hausa cities to the east. French forces arrived in the 1890s and made it a military post, and its population rose and fell with their presence.

The decisive moment came in 1926, when the French moved the capital of the colony of Niger from Zinder back to Niamey, which had already held it between 1903 and 1911. Zinder's Hausa population had resisted colonial rule, Niamey's climate was considered more comfortable, and its position on the river, closer to the rest of French West Africa, suited the administration. The city was laid out in two parts — a European plateau of avenues and offices above the river, and African quarters below and around it — a division still legible in the street plan.

Growth followed independence in 1960, when the city had about 34,000 people, and then accelerated: the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s drove rural families in, and the population has multiplied many times over, spreading across the plateau and, after the Kennedy bridge opened in 1970, onto the right bank. As the capital, Niamey has also been the stage for the country's politics, including the coups of 1974, 1996, 1999, 2010 and July 2023, after which the military took power, expelled French troops and turned towards Russia.

Niamey is a Zarma-Songhai city with a large Hausa population, many of whom come seasonally from the countryside, and Tuareg, Fula, Kanuri and Beninese, Malian and Nigerian communities besides. Zarma and Hausa are the languages of the street, French the language of administration, and the mix is heard in the city's music, which runs from Zarma and Hausa song and griot praise-singing to Tuareg guitar and a lively hip hop scene.

Islam shapes public life, in Sufi brotherhoods of long standing and the newer reformist currents that have grown since the 1990s, with a small Christian minority. Older Zarma and Songhai practice survives alongside it, notably the Songhai and Zarma spirit-possession ceremonies, filmed in the region from the 1940s, in which drumming and dancing accompany possession by spirits.

The city is the centre of the country's cultural production. The ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch arrived in Niamey in 1941 and is considered the father of Nigerien cinema, and Niamey-born directors such as Oumarou Ganda carried a national cinema abroad in the 1960s and 1970s; the National Museum, the cultural centres and the university give the capital a concentration of artists, musicians and writers found nowhere else in Niger. Traditional wrestling is followed with passion, and its champions are national figures. Evenings are social: tea brewed on charcoal in front of compounds, conversation on mats, and crowds along the river when the heat drops.

About 1.4 million people live in Niamey at a 2022 estimate — more than ten times the figure of the early 1970s — spread over five communes on both banks. Growth has run far ahead of planning: many families live in informal quarters allocated semi-legally through customary chiefs, often without piped water, drainage or regular electricity, while the plateau keeps its avenues, walled villas and ministries.

Work is the state, aid agencies, trade and a very large informal sector: shared taxi and motorbike drivers, tailors, mechanics, market traders, street vendors and craftsmen. Households are big, young and often supported by several small incomes at once, with money sent home to villages or received from relatives abroad. Rural families displaced by the fighting in Tillabéri have added to the population.

The day starts before dawn, pauses in the hours of greatest heat, and revives after the afternoon prayer, with markets and streets busiest in the early morning and the evening. Water shortages, power cuts, flooding along the river in the rainy season, and the price of fuel and food are the running preoccupations, sharpened since 2023 by sanctions, the rupture with Western partners and the cost of the war in the west.

Millet is the foundation. It is pounded and cooked into a stiff porridge eaten with sauces of baobab leaf, okra, sorrel or groundnut, and rolled into fura, balls of millet flour that are crushed into soured milk to make fura da nono, the drink-meal of the hot season, sold from calabashes in every market. Rice with a tomato and meat sauce is the standard town lunch, and dambou, a steamed couscous of millet or rice mixed with moringa leaves, is a dish the capital is known for.

Moringa, called windi bundu locally and sold in bundles, is the favourite green, eaten as a salad with groundnut paste, onion and oil. Fish from the Niger — capitaine, catfish and tilapia — is grilled whole over charcoal at riverside stalls, and the gardens along the bank supply lettuce, tomatoes, onions and cabbage. Mangoes in season, from the river gardens and from Gaya in the south, are sold by the basket.

Street food is one of the pleasures of the city: brochettes of mutton and grilled guinea fowl, kosai bean fritters and masa rice cakes in the morning, kilishi, the spiced dried beef that Niger sends across West Africa, and groundnuts roasted or pressed into kuli-kuli. Drinks are sweet green tea poured in rounds, bissap from hibiscus, ginger juice and kunu; alcohol is served only in a few hotels and bars.