Zinder

Zinder began as the Hausa village of Zengou. Its rise dates from 1736, when Kanuri aristocrats arrived, built a new fortified quarter called Birni to the south and made the town the capital of the Sultanate of Damagaram. The sultanate was at first a vassal of the Bornu Empire to the east, and it grew rich on the trans-Saharan caravan trade that came through the town — salt, leather, ostrich feathers, cloth and enslaved people — with Zengou, the Tuareg suburb beside the royal Birni, expanding on the back of that trade.

Under Sultan Tanimoune Dan Souleymane, in the middle and later 19th century, Damagaram declared its independence of Bornu and expanded vigorously, fortifying the Birni and building a standing military strength unusual in the region. French expeditions reached the area at the end of the century; the explorer Marius Gabriel Cazemajou was killed in Zinder in 1897, and in July 1899, after brief resistance, the town was occupied by a detachment under Lieutenant Pallier of the Voulet–Chanoine mission, a French column that had left a trail of destruction and killings across the Sahel and whose two commanders had by then been removed by force.

Zinder became the capital of the Niger Military Territory on its creation in 1911, and of the colony that grew from it, until 1926, when the French moved the seat of government to Niamey, citing the resistance of Zinder's Hausa population, the climate and Niamey's river position. The city stayed the commercial centre of the Hausa east, growing from about 50,000 people in 1977 to more than 200,000 by 2012, and gained Niger's first oil refinery, commissioned in 2011 some 50 kilometres north of the city. In September 2024 its historic great mosque collapsed in heavy rain.

Zinder is a Hausa city with a Kanuri ruling tradition, and the two are woven together in its life. The sultan of Damagaram still holds court in the palace in the Birni, judges disputes brought by families and quarters, and appears at the two great Islamic festivals with horsemen in embroidered robes and quilted armour, long trumpets, drums and praise-singers — the most striking public ceremony in the country.

Craft is the city's other inheritance. Zinder's tanners and leatherworkers have long worked dyed goatskin, and its embroiderers, blacksmiths, potters and builders keep trades that ran with the caravan trade. The most visible is the decoration of banco houses: fronts moulded in relief and painted in geometric and animal patterns, found throughout Birni and Zengou, a Hausa art shared with the cities of northern Nigeria.

Islam is near-universal, with strong Sufi brotherhoods and reformist currents alongside them, and the older Hausa spirit-possession practice, bori, survives at the margins. Hausa is spoken everywhere, and the language, music and trade of the city reach across the border to Kano and Katsina as much as they reach Niamey. Wrestling is followed with great enthusiasm, and the city's champions are national figures.

Zinder had about 236,000 people at the 2012 census, after quadrupling from some 50,000 in the late 1970s, and it has kept growing since. It is a low city of earthen and concrete compounds spread among granite boulders, with the old quarters at its core and new quarters running outward along the roads. Water supply has long been a problem; piped water was extended across much of the city in recent years, but population growth keeps pressure on it.

Trade is the economy. The Grand Marché and the transport yards handle grain, livestock, onions, groundnuts, cloth and manufactured goods, much of it moving to and from northern Nigeria, legally and informally, and currency swings in the naira are felt in every household. The oil refinery 50 kilometres north of the city is one of the four industries officially recognised here, with the Malam Yaro tannery among the others, alongside the administration, schools and hospitals.

Around the city, farmers grow millet, sorghum, cowpeas and groundnuts on rain-fed fields and vegetables in irrigated plots. Farms are divided between sons into ever smaller holdings, the rains are unreliable, and food crises have hit the region repeatedly, so many young men migrate seasonally to Nigeria or to the coastal countries and send money home. Days begin early, slow in the worst of the heat, and pick up again in the evening.

Zinder eats Hausa food. Tuwo, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum, is the staple, served with miyan kuka, a sauce of dried and pounded baobab leaves, or with okra, sorrel or groundnut sauces. Fura, balls of millet flour, are crushed into soured milk to make fura da nono, the drink-meal of the hot season, and dan wake, small dumplings of bean flour, are eaten with oil, pepper and onion.

Groundnuts run through the cooking — in sauces, roasted as a snack, and as kuli-kuli, crisp fried sticks of groundnut paste made from what remains after the oil is pressed. Galmi onions, the purple-red variety grown west of the city and exported across West Africa, flavour most dishes. Kosai, fried bean fritters, and masa, small fermented rice cakes, are sold in the mornings, and tsire, spiced meat grilled on skewers, in the evenings.

Milk, butter and cheese come from the herding families of the pastures north of the city, and mutton is the festive meat, above all at Tabaski, when families slaughter a ram and share it with neighbours and relatives. Drinks are kunu, a thin millet or groundnut drink, bissap from hibiscus, ginger juice and sweet green tea poured in small glasses; alcohol is very little seen.