Niger

From the green Sahara and the caravan sultanate of Aïr to a French colony forged in violence, an independent republic, and a Sahelian state of uranium, drought and coups.

Niger, a vast landlocked country straddling the Sahara and the Sahel, holds one of Africa's longest human records. During the early Holocene 'Green Sahara', lakeside peoples — the Kiffian and the later Tenerean — lived, fished and buried their dead at Gobero, in what is now the bone-dry Ténéré, while engraved and painted rock art recorded a world of cattle, giraffes and elephants long since vanished. As the desert returned, the great Sahelian trade and political networks reached into the region: the Tuareg founded the Sultanate of Aïr around the trading city of Agadez, a hub of the trans-Saharan caravan trade in salt, dates, hides and enslaved people; the Songhai Empire pushed eastward into Aïr around 1500; the Hausa states and, later, the Sultanate of Damagaram at Zinder grew rich on commerce; and the empire of Kanem-Bornu cast its influence over the east. In 1899 the brutal Voulet-Chanoine column carried French conquest across the land, and Niger was organised as a colony within French West Africa, with the desert Tuareg subdued only by the 1920s. Niger became independent on 3 August 1960 under Hamani Diori, but its modern history has been shaped by recurring Sahel droughts and famines, the uranium mines of Arlit, repeated Tuareg rebellions, and a long cycle of military coups, the most recent in July 2023.