Kano Emirate

Hausa tradition and the Kano Chronicle place the beginnings of kingship at Kano around the tenth or eleventh century, associated with settlement at the base of Dala Hill. The dating in the chronicle is approximate and its early sections combine tradition with later reconstruction.

Islam was adopted at the court from about the fourteenth century, and the city was walled, with a large market and quarters for foreign merchants. In 1807 Kano was taken by forces of the movement led by Usman dan Fodio, and the Hausa dynasty was replaced by an emirate under the Sokoto Caliphate, with the Fulani Sullubawa house providing its emirs.

Kano's wealth came from manufacture and trade rather than territory. Its dyers, weavers, leather workers and smiths produced goods sold across the Sahara and the savannah, and Kano cloth and leather reached North Africa and beyond. The city stood at the meeting point of routes running north to Tripoli and Tunis, west to Timbuktu and south to the forest belt, and its market was among the largest in West Africa.

Under the caliphate the emirate administered a substantial territory through titled officials and Islamic courts, supported Qur'anic scholarship and sent tribute to Sokoto. The city's population, walls and market impressed nineteenth-century European travellers, whose accounts are among the fuller descriptions of a West African commercial city of the period.

A British force took Kano in February 1903, shortly before Sokoto fell. The emirate was not abolished: under indirect rule the emir was confirmed in office and the administration governed through him, with Islamic courts left in place for much civil and personal law. The railway reached Kano in 1911, tying its trade to the coast and to the groundnut export economy.

Kano remained a centre of commerce, learning and Islamic scholarship through the colonial period and after, and its emirate structure has shaped the organisation of traditional authority across the north-west. State-level arrangements governing the Kano emirate have been altered more than once in recent years, and have been the subject of legal proceedings.

The Emir of Kano presides over the palace in Kano city and holds customary and religious authority in chieftaincy, judicial-advisory and cultural matters within Kano State. The office is ceremonial in the constitutional sense and carries no political power, and the state framework in which it operates has recently been contested.