The history of Niger

Niger, a vast landlocked country stretching from the Niger River and the farmlands of the Sahel into the heart of the Sahara, lies on the old caravan routes between West Africa and the Mediterranean. Its deserts preserve the traces of a green Sahara, when hunters, fishers and herders lived beside lakes now buried in sand. In the medieval and early modern centuries its lands were divided among the Songhai Empire in the west, the Tuareg sultanate of Aïr around Agadez, Kanem-Bornu around Lake Chad, the Hausa states of the south and, from the nineteenth century, the Sokoto Caliphate. France conquered the region between 1897 and the 1920s, and Niger became independent in 1960. Since then it has alternated between civilian and military rule, with five successful coups, while facing drought, poverty and, in recent years, jihadist insurgencies.

Stone tools found at Adrar Bous, Bilma and Djado in the north show that people lived in what is now the Sahara for hundreds of thousands of years. During the African humid period, which began after the last ice age, the region was a savanna of grasslands, lakes and rivers, home to elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses and crocodiles. At Gobero, in the Ténéré desert, archaeologists excavating in the early 2000s found hundreds of burials beside a vanished lake. The first community, of the Kiffian culture, lived there from about 7700 to 6200 BCE, hunting and fishing with bone harpoons; after a long dry spell, people of the Tenerian culture returned from about 5200 to 2500 BCE, herding cattle and burying their dead with care, in one grave a woman and two children with their hands clasped.

The Aïr Mountains, the Djado Plateau and the Termit Massif hold some of the finest rock art of the Sahara. Among the most famous works are the life-sized engravings of giraffes at Dabous, several thousand years old. Later carvings show cattle, horses and chariots, and warriors with spears and shields. Pottery appeared very early here, and stone burial mounds and monuments were built from the fifth millennium BCE. As the climate dried after about 2500 BCE, people moved south and to the oases, and millet and sorghum farming spread across the Sahel. Some archaeologists date iron smelting at Termit to as early as the middle of the second millennium BCE, though this early date is disputed. In the south-west, the Bura culture, known from cemeteries with pottery figures and iron goods, flourished from about the third to the thirteenth century CE.

From at least the first millennium BCE, the central Sahara was crossed by traders linking West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean, where Carthage and later Rome sought gold and ivory. The Garamantes of the Fezzan controlled some of these routes. The spread of the camel in the early centuries CE made regular crossings possible, and after the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, Muslim merchants made the trans-Saharan trade one of the great commercial systems of the medieval world, and spread Islam south along with it. One of the main routes ran from Tripoli through the Fezzan and the oases of Kawar to Lake Chad. The salt of Bilma and the Kawar oases, carried south by camel caravans, remained a staple of the trade into the twentieth century.

Berber-speaking Tuareg moved into the Aïr Mountains from the north from around the eleventh century, displacing or absorbing earlier peoples, and came to dominate the desert with their camels and their control of the caravans. Their society was divided into noble warrior clans, religious lineages, vassals and enslaved people, and Tuareg women enjoyed unusual independence and owned property.

The western part of Niger, along the Niger River, was the land of the Songhai and the closely related Zarma (Djerma). The Songhai state centred on Gao, in modern Mali, fell for a time under the Mali Empire in the fourteenth century, before rising under Sonni Ali in the late fifteenth century into the Songhai Empire, the largest state in West African history. Under Askia Muhammad I, who seized power in 1493, Songhai expanded east, and in the early sixteenth century it brought the Aïr under its rule.

The Sultanate of Aïr had been founded around 1449, when the Tuareg confederations accepted a sultan based at Agadez to arbitrate between them. Agadez grew into a walled caravan city of traders, scholars and craftsmen, dominated by a great mud-brick minaret. Its sultans arbitrated between the Tuareg confederations, which kept much of the real power, and in later centuries the Ottoman Empire claimed nominal authority over the region. When an army sent by Morocco defeated Songhai at Tondibi in 1591, the Songhai court retreated down the Niger into the Dendi region of south-western Niger, where small Songhai kingdoms survived, while the Zarma founded states around Dosso.

To the east, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, whose rulers had embraced Islam in the eleventh century, controlled the Lake Chad shore and the Kawar oases for centuries, and at its height in the late sixteenth century under Mai Idris Alooma dominated the trade routes to the Fezzan. In the eighteenth century Kanuri settlers founded the Sultanate of Damagaram around Zinder, which began as a vassal of Bornu but grew into an independent power in the nineteenth century, trading across the desert and raiding its neighbours for captives.

Southern Niger, home to most of its people today, forms the northern half of Hausaland, which straddles the border with Nigeria. Hausa kingdoms such as Gobir, Katsina and Daura grew from the tenth century onwards around walled towns, farming, cotton weaving, leatherwork and long-distance trade, while some Hausa communities, such as the Azna of the Dogondoutchi region, kept their traditional religion. Fulani herders moved into the region from the thirteenth century.

In 1804 the Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio, born in Gobir, declared a jihad against the Hausa kings, accusing them of injustice and impiety. His followers conquered most of Hausaland and founded the Sokoto Caliphate, whose capital lay just south of the modern border. Rulers from Gobir and Katsina who refused to submit withdrew north and refounded their states at Tsibiri and Maradi, in modern Niger, from where they fought the caliphate for most of the century. Niger's southern border thus emerged roughly along the line between the caliphate and the Hausa states that resisted it, together with Bornu's and Damagaram's lands to the east.

European explorers reached the region in the nineteenth century, among them the German Heinrich Barth, who visited Agadez in 1850. After the Berlin conference and the Scramble for Africa, France and Britain agreed treaties dividing the region, and France set out to link its possessions in West and North Africa. In 1899 the Voulet-Chanoine mission marched east from the Niger River, burning villages and killing civilians across the south. At Birni-N'Konni it massacred the inhabitants in one of the worst atrocities of French colonial history, and it fought the Azna queen Sarraounia Mangou, who became a symbol of resistance. When an officer was sent to take command, Voulet had him killed, and the two leaders were then killed by their own African soldiers. Other French forces took Zinder in 1899 and defeated the warlord Rabih az-Zubayr near Lake Chad in 1900.

France created a Military Territory of Niger, with its headquarters first at Niamey and then Zinder, before settling on Niamey in the 1920s. Southern farmers were subdued relatively quickly, though risings such as the Kobkitanda revolt of 1905 and 1906 were crushed. The Tuareg resisted far longer. Agadez was only occupied in 1906, and in 1916 and 1917 the Tuareg leader Kaocen, backed by the Sanusi order in Libya, besieged the French at Agadez in a revolt that ended in fierce repression and the flight of much of the Aïr's population. In 1922 Niger became a colony of French West Africa, governed from Dakar. Colonial rule brought heavy taxes, forced labour, conscription and the spread of groundnut farming, but little investment; the famines of 1913 and 1931 killed many thousands. The French ruled through chiefs and favoured the Zarma of the west, who gained most of the places in colonial schools.

After World War II, in which French West Africa first backed Vichy and from 1942 the Free French under Charles de Gaulle, reforms gave Africans French citizenship rights and elected assemblies. Two parties came to dominate Nigerien politics: the Nigerien Progressive Party of Hamani Diori, a former teacher, and the more radical Sawaba of Djibo Bakary, which led the territorial government under the reforms of 1956. In the referendum of 1958 Bakary campaigned for a "no" to de Gaulle's French Community and immediate independence, but with the backing of chiefs and the French administration the "yes" won heavily. Niger became an autonomous republic on 18 December 1958, now celebrated as Republic Day, Sawaba was banned in 1959, and full independence followed on 3 August 1960, during the wider decolonisation of Africa.

Diori ruled a one-party state for fourteen years in close partnership with France. Sawaba guerrillas launched a failed armed rising in 1964. Uranium mining began at Arlit in the north in the early 1970s, making Niger one of the world's leading producers and binding it more tightly to French interests. The great Sahel drought of the late 1960s and early 1970s killed much of the livestock and caused famine, and accusations that ministers were hoarding food aid helped bring about a coup by Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché on 15 April 1974.

Kountché's military government restored food supplies and used the uranium boom to build roads, schools and clinics, but ruled through repression until his death in 1987. His successor, Colonel Ali Saibou, eased controls, but in 1990 the army killed students in Niamey and killed many Tuareg civilians at Tchintabaraden after an attack there, and strikes and protests forced the regime to accept multiparty politics.

A National Conference in 1991 drew up a democratic constitution, and Mahamane Ousmane was elected president in 1993. From 1990 Tuareg and later Toubou rebels in the north and east fought for development and autonomy, until a peace agreement in 1995. The elected government was paralysed by rivalry between president and prime minister, and on 27 January 1996 Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara seized power and won a flawed election. He was assassinated at Niamey airport in April 1999, and the new military rulers handed over to an elected president, Mamadou Tandja, at the end of that year.

Tandja was re-elected in 2004, but his rule was overshadowed by a severe food crisis in 2005 and a second Tuareg rebellion from 2007 to 2009. In 2009 he dissolved parliament and the constitutional court to hold a referendum allowing him to stay in power, and in February 2010 the army removed him. The junta kept its promise to hand over power, and Mahamadou Issoufou was elected president in 2011. His decade in office was dominated by insecurity spilling over from neighbouring states: the collapse of Libya, the war in Mali, the Boko Haram insurgency from Nigeria in the south-east, and attacks by groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the west, where massacres of soldiers and villagers killed hundreds in 2019 to 2021. France and the United States stationed troops in Niger, including a large American drone base at Agadez. In 2021 Issoufou handed power to the elected Mohamed Bazoum, the first peaceful transfer between elected presidents in Niger's history, though only after a coup attempt two days before the inauguration was foiled.

On 26 July 2023 the presidential guard detained Bazoum, and its commander, General Abdourahamane Tiani, proclaimed himself head of a ruling council. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) imposed sanctions and threatened military intervention, which did not take place. The junta expelled the French ambassador and troops, who left by the end of 2023, and in 2024 ordered the withdrawal of United States forces, while turning instead to Russia for military support. With the military governments of Mali and Burkina Faso, Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023, turned it into a confederation in July 2024 and formally left ECOWAS on 29 January 2025. In June 2024 the junta revoked the French company Orano's licence at the Imouraren uranium deposit.

In March 2025 a transitional charter made Tiani president for a five-year term and made Hausa the official language in place of French. Jihadist violence continued in the west and south-east. In August 2026 mutinous soldiers attempted a coup against Tiani in Niamey, which the government announced had failed. Niger remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with one of the fastest-growing populations, whose history is shaped as much by the desert, the river and the rains as by the states that have ruled it.