Jos

Jos sits on the Jos Plateau at 1,217 meters elevation—high enough to escape the heat that blankets most of Nigeria and cool enough to grow temperate crops like strawberries and Irish potatoes. This geographic anomaly made it a colonial hill station and tin-mining center, then a postcolonial tourist destination, and finally ground zero for some of Nigeria's most devastating religious violence.

British colonial administrators chose the plateau for tin extraction in the early 1900s, importing labor from across Nigeria and creating the ethnically mixed population that defines Jos today. The mining attracted Hausa-Fulani Muslim traders from the north and Igbo Christian workers from the southeast, layering them atop the indigenous Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere communities who considered themselves the plateau's rightful owners. When tin mining collapsed in the 1980s, the economic competition for land, political representation, and government patronage intensified along ethno-religious lines.

The violence has been catastrophic. Riots in 2001 killed over 1,000 people. Attacks in 2010 killed hundreds more. Ongoing farmer-herder conflicts—pitting Berom crop farmers against Fulani pastoralists—continue to claim lives. Jos demonstrates how resource depletion can trigger identity-based violence: when the tin economy that justified ethnic mixing collapsed, the communities that mining had assembled competed for a shrinking economic pie along the identity lines that the colonial labor system had drawn.

Modern Jos has roughly 817,000 residents. The plateau's climate still supports agriculture (Jos supplies much of Nigeria's temperate produce), and the University of Jos provides intellectual infrastructure. Tourism—once marketed around the plateau's waterfalls, rock formations, and wildlife sanctuary—has been devastated by security concerns. Jos is a city where geographic advantage (cool climate, mineral wealth) attracted the diversity that, without economic growth to sustain it, became the fault line for conflict.