Onitsha
West Africa's largest market by commercial volume emerged where the Niger River becomes navigable—Onitsha's three million daily traders created a self-reinforcing commercial ecosystem that now chokes on its own congestion.
Onitsha Main Market is the largest market in West Africa by commercial volume, and possibly the largest in all of Africa. The numbers are staggering: an estimated three million people trade daily across a market complex that handles goods worth billions of naira. This is not an exaggeration for a guidebook—it is the central economic fact of a city that exists because the Niger River bends here.
The Igbo city sits on the eastern bank of the Niger in Anambra State, at the point where the river becomes navigable downstream to the Atlantic. Royal Niger Company established a trading post here in the 1850s precisely because of this geography. The Onitsha Market Literature tradition—cheap, locally printed pamphlets on love, morality, and business advice—emerged in the 1940s and became one of Africa's first mass-market publishing phenomena, demonstrating the city's appetite for commercial information exchange.
The Biafran War (1967–1970) devastated Onitsha. As a key Igbo city, it was fought over and occupied multiple times. Post-war reconstruction catalyzed the market's growth: returning Igbo traders, stripped of assets held in northern Nigeria, rebuilt through commerce. The market became a self-reinforcing attractor—more traders drew more suppliers, who drew more customers, who drew more traders. Classic positive feedback dynamics created a commercial density that no government planned.
Modern Onitsha faces the consequences of unplanned success. Traffic congestion makes the Niger Bridge—the city's lifeline to western Nigeria—one of the most congested corridors in the country. Pollution from the market and surrounding industries has made Onitsha's air quality among the worst globally. The city demonstrates how positive feedback loops that build commercial ecosystems can simultaneously degrade the physical infrastructure those ecosystems require.