Zaria

Zaria was a Hausa city-state centuries before Nigeria existed. Founded around the 11th century, it became one of the seven 'true' Hausa kingdoms (Hausa Bakwai) and a major node in trans-Saharan trade networks carrying gold, leather, and enslaved people between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean world. The city walls—still partially standing—enclosed a sophisticated urban civilization that European explorers found bewildering in its complexity.

British colonization in 1901 reoriented Zaria's economy from trans-Saharan trade to groundnut (peanut) export. Northern Nigeria became a groundnut monoculture under colonial agricultural policy, and Zaria's cotton and leather trades withered as export crops replaced food crops. Ahmadu Bello University, established in 1962 and named after Nigeria's first premier, became West Africa's largest university and Zaria's most important institution—an attempt to build human capital in a region that colonial policy had deliberately kept undereducated.

Today Zaria's economy mixes agriculture, small-scale manufacturing, and the institutional economy generated by its universities and the Nigerian military's training facilities. The Nigerian Defence Academy and the National Research Institute for Chemical Technology are both headquartered here. Cotton textile manufacturing—once the city's pre-colonial strength—has largely collapsed under competition from Chinese imports, a pattern repeated across African manufacturing cities.

Zaria's millennium-long economic history illustrates how external forces repeatedly reshape a city's metabolism: trans-Saharan trade built it, colonial groundnut policy hollowed it, and post-independence institutions partially rebuilt it. Each transition imposed a new economic logic without fully erasing the previous one, creating the kind of layered identity that only cities with deep histories possess.