Enugu
Nigeria's 'Coal City' lost its coal to oil, its capital status to civil war, and now ranks 4th in startup ecosystems — fern-stage succession from mine to tech.
A British mining engineer named Albert Kitson came to the Udi Ridge in 1909 looking for silver and found coal instead. That accident created a city. Enugu — Igbo for 'top of the hill' — grew from a mining camp to the administrative capital of Eastern Nigeria, then briefly became the first capital of Biafra during the 1967-70 civil war, then watched its primary industry die when crude oil was discovered in the neighbouring Niger Delta. Today it is a city of roughly one million people trying to become a tech hub.
Wikipedia covers the colonial coal history and the Biafran war. What it undersells is the completeness of the economic succession. Coal mining defined Enugu for six decades — the Nigerian Coal Corporation employed thousands, and the city's population swelled from a handful of colonial administrators to 300,000 by mid-century. Oil killed coal gradually from the 1960s. The Corporation staggered on until 2002, then shut down entirely. The mines are now abandoned.
The current pivot is to technology. Enugu ranks fourth in Nigeria's startup ecosystem, behind Lagos, Abuja, and Ibadan. Its advantages are structural: lower living costs than Lagos, over 30 tertiary institutions including Nigeria's first indigenous university, a young population (significant percentage under 35), and an Igbo entrepreneurial culture that has produced diasporic business networks across Africa. The state government is building bus rapid transit, an intrastate rail network, and modern terminals. But the challenges are equally structural: capital is scarce, support networks are thin, and Lagos's gravitational pull on talent remains strong.
The biological parallel is the fern. After a catastrophic event strips a landscape bare — volcanic eruption, mine abandonment, forest fire — ferns are among the first colonisers, establishing themselves in hostile soil with minimal resources and creating the conditions for more complex species to follow. Enugu is in its fern stage: the coal economy is dead, the new ecosystem is establishing itself, and whether it develops into a mature forest or remains thin undergrowth depends on whether the early colonisers — startups, universities, infrastructure — can accumulate enough biomass before the next disruption.