Kano

The Kano dye pits have operated continuously for over 500 years—indigo vats sunk into the earth where artisans still dip cloth using techniques unchanged since the Hausa city-states dominated trans-Saharan trade. This is path dependence made physical: the same pits, the same chemistry, the same guild structures that once supplied camel caravans now feed a domestic textile market worth billions of naira.

Kano is northern Nigeria's commercial anchor, with a metro population exceeding four million. Its location at the southern terminus of the oldest trans-Saharan trade route gave it founder effects that persist: groundnut pyramids once symbolised the city's agricultural export wealth, and today Kano's Sabon Gari market remains one of West Africa's largest trading complexes, handling goods from electronics to agricultural commodities. The city processes much of Nigeria's leather and hide exports, earning the moniker 'Centre of Commerce.'

The biological pattern is a trading organism whose metabolism adapted to each era's dominant commodity. When groundnuts declined, Kano shifted to manufactured goods distribution. When the naira weakened, cross-border trade with Niger and Chad intensified—a source-sink dynamic where Kano acts as the commercial attractor for the entire Sahel region. The Kano Free Trade Zone and industrial clusters in textiles, plastics, and food processing represent niche construction efforts to move beyond pure trading arbitrage.

Kano's tension is between its deep Islamic scholarly tradition—the city has produced centuries of Sufi and Tijani intellectual output—and the pressures of rapid urbanisation. Informal settlements grow faster than planned infrastructure, and the city's aquifer faces depletion from unregulated borehole drilling. Kano is an organism that has survived by commercial adaptation for half a millennium, but its resource base now faces metabolic limits that no amount of trading agility can circumvent.