How Kano was made.
A thousand years before Nigeria existed, this was a walled city that made its living moving other people's goods. Everything valuable here is downstream of that.
Schematic, not to scale. The amber line is the trade route — north to the Sahara, south to the coast. It is drawn broken where the wall has gone.
The wall that took 250 years, and went in 50
Begun in the eleventh century, finished in the fourteenth. About a fifth of it is left.
The pyramids that everyone photographed and nobody kept
Nigeria's most valuable export crop, stacked in the open air. Then it fell by 71% in a decade.
Twenty camel-loads of silver
The man who built the pyramids bought at a price he did not set. His great-grandson sells at one anybody can look up.
Kurmi
The market inside the walls, and what it was built to handle.
The dye takes a month. The cloth it lost to is printed in a day.
Kofar Mata has been dyeing cloth since 1498. A hundred and forty-four pits; five still working.
Dawanau
Grain leaving for four countries a hundred trucks at a time. Nobody can show us the price mechanism.
The line south
The year the caravan route acquired a timetable.
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