The city wall
Kano spent roughly two and a half centuries building a wall of earth around itself. Most of it has disappeared within living memory, and no one can tell you exactly how much is left.
Drawn by Sponge Media. The ring is the line of the wall; it is solid where the wall still stands and broken where it has gone, in the proportion the only published figure gives. We have no photograph at the top of this piece because we have not cleared rights to one we can name a source for.
You drive through it without seeing it.
There are in the old city, and traffic still goes through several of them. Most people passing under one are passing through an eleventh-century decision about who was allowed inside.
The wall those gates belong to is not stone. It is earth — laterite, dug out of the ground immediately beside it, which is why a ditch runs along much of its length. It stands .
That is not a fence. That is a piece of engineering the size of a motorway embankment, running right around a city.
It took about ten generations.
The wall was . Work began under Sarki Gijimasu, the third king of Kano, and was finished under a ruler who was not born when it started. It was extended again two centuries after that.
Nothing built in Nigeria since has been attempted on that timescale. The Third Mainland Bridge took fourteen years and we called eight of them a scandal. This took around two hundred and fifty, and everyone who laid the first baskets of earth died with the job unfinished.
It was built for one reason. A city that lives by moving other people's goods has to be a place those goods are safe.
The wall of Kano took roughly two hundred and fifty years to build — begun between 1095 and 1134, completed in the middle of the fourteenth century. It has lost about four-fifths of itself in under a hundred.
A city that lives by moving other people's goods has to be a place those goods are safe.
Roughly a fifth.
. The curator of the Gidan Makama Museum puts the destruction at almost 80 per cent.
The mechanism is almost poetic and entirely mundane. The wall is made of good building earth. It sits beside a growing city that needs building earth. So it is dug out, a barrow at a time, and once a section is opened the rain does the rest.
Nobody blew it up. It is being carried away.
“Major parts of the wall have disappeared, some have degraded, others have weakened. So what caused this? Research shows it is a combination of human activity and natural conditions. People broke the law by excavating soil from the wall.”
The 20 per cent figure is the only one anybody cites, and it was given in 2018. If a fifth was standing then, a fifth is not standing now.
We have asked the National Commission for Museums and Monuments for a current condition survey. If one exists we will publish the number. If one does not exist, then the country does not know how much of its oldest surviving structure it still has, and that is a harder story than the one we came for.
How long is it? The documents disagree.
This should be the easy part of the piece. It is not.
. Nigeria's own submission to UNESCO calls it a 14km radius earth structure. Taken literally that describes a wall about 88km around, which it plainly is not. Other accounts put it at roughly nine miles around at its greatest extent, which is about 14km — the same number, describing something entirely different.
We think the submission means circumference and is loosely worded. We are not printing that as a fact, because the whole point of this page is that we do not tidy up other people's documents.
It would be easy to treat this as pedantry. It is not.
The UNESCO submission is the document that is supposed to protect the wall. If it cannot state the wall's size unambiguously, then twenty years of heritage policy rests on a description nobody has checked — and no one can audit a loss of 80 per cent against a baseline that is ambiguous by a factor of six.
You cannot protect what you have not measured.
Whose job was this?
The walls have been , submitted together with Dala Hill, Kurmi Market and the Emir's Palace. A tentative listing says a country intends to nominate a site. Nineteen years later the nomination has not happened.
On the ground the responsibility is contested in public. An official of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments has named the Kano state government as the main culprit, for allocating land beside the wall. An official of the state's own history and culture bureau says the government has tried to maintain it. Both statements are on the record.
Nineteen years on a waiting list is not a queue. UNESCO does not inscribe sites that are not nominated, and a nomination is a document a country has to write.
So the honest version is not that the world has neglected Kano's walls. It is that the wall has been losing itself for decades while the paperwork that might have protected it sat unfinished, and while the people who could name a figure for what is left have not produced one since 2018.
It took ten generations to build and it has taken about three to lose most of it.
This looks like an ordinary mud wall. It is not.
Forty seconds. Hidden in Plain Sight, the first film from the Kano chapter.
Read the filmEvery word on screen, in order.
An ordinary mud wall?
It isn’t.
Ancient Kano city walls.
From settlement to defence. c.1095, under Sarki Gijimasu.
Defend the city and control entry.
Earth and laterite.
50 ft high.
40 ft thick.
Not just a wall.
Kano’s security system.
Hidden in Plain Sight — Kano City Walls.
Made and paid for by Sponge Media. No sponsor on this film or this page.
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Where all of this came from
Every claim in the piece, with its source and its status. Nothing hidden in a footnote, including the things we haven't nailed down yet.
Fifteen gates are recorded in the wall, controlling who and what entered the city. Most are now ruined or rebuilt. Sabuwar Kofa — literally 'new gate' — is among them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Kano_City_Walls ↗
Height is given as 9.1 to 15.2 metres (30 to 50 feet), with a base thickness of approximately 12 metres (40 feet). The wall is earth — laterite dug from immediately beside it, which is why a ditch runs alongside for most of its length.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Kano_City_Walls ↗
"The foundation for the construction of the wall was laid by Sakri Gijimasu from 1095 - 1134 and was completed in the middle of 14th Century during the reign of Zamnagawa." The walls were extended again in the sixteenth century.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5171/ ↗
Mustapha Bachaka, curator of the Gidan Makama Museum, is quoted saying almost 80 per cent of the wall has been destroyed, leaving roughly a fifth intact. Causes named include population growth, the digging out of laterite for building material, rain erosion once a section is weakened, and construction on the line of the wall itself. Aliya Abdu of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments names the Kano state government as "the main culprit" for allocating land beside the wall; Ibrahim Muazu of the state history and culture bureau says the government has tried to maintain it.
https://culturalpropertynews.org/nigeria-kanos-walls-will-disappear/ ↗
Nigeria's UNESCO submission describes "a 14km radius earth structure". A 14km radius would enclose a circumference of roughly 88km. Separate accounts describe the wall at its greatest sixteenth-century extent as about nine miles — 14.5km — around. The likeliest reading is that 14km is the circumference and the submission is loosely worded, but we are not going to quietly correct a government document on a guess.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5171/ ↗
The Ancient Kano City Walls and Associated Sites were submitted to UNESCO's tentative list on 8 October 2007, together with Dala Hill, Kurmi Market and the Emir's Palace. A tentative listing is a statement of intent to nominate. The site has not been inscribed.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5171/ ↗
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Dayo Elegbe
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Corrections and changes
- 16 Sep 2026 — First published.