Sultanate of Agadez

On the southern edge of the Sahara, in the Aïr Mountains of present-day Niger, Tuareg groups created a sultanate in the early fifteenth century to settle disputes among themselves. Ruled from the oasis city of Agadez, it controlled a key junction of the trans-Saharan caravan trade. It survived conquest by its neighbours, came under French rule in 1906 and still exists today as a traditional, non-sovereign monarchy.

Oral traditions differ in detail, but most describe a crisis among the Tuareg of Aïr in the fourteenth century, when the powerful Itesen could not get their leader accepted by other groups. The solution, dated by tradition to around 1405, was an office of sultan held by an outsider who could mediate between rival clans. The first sultan, Yunus, was said to be the son of a Tuareg from distant Targa and a local slave woman, which made him neutral between the founding factions. Afterwards every sultan was expected to marry a slave woman, so that no clan could claim him. Other accounts date the sultanate's founding to 1449.

The first seats of the sultans were at Tadaliza and then Tin Chaman, now archaeological sites in the mountains. Yunus's successor, his sister's son, is said to have moved to Agadez, a town founded around 1413 and inhabited by several Tuareg groups and by Hausa merchants from Katsina, who set up its first indigo dyeing works. Each Tuareg group had a quarter in the town, though the nomads themselves visited only to trade. Agadez became a crossroads of routes linking the Hausa Kingdoms, Kano and Timbuktu with Ghat, Ghadames and Tripoli in North Africa.

Around the start of the sixteenth century (accounts give dates from 1500 to 1517) the Songhai Empire brought Agadez under its control, in a campaign that involved the Hausa commander Muhammadu Kanta. The city's great mosque is dated to 1515. Kanta later broke with Songhai, and Agadez was occupied by his kingdom of Kebbi. After his death in the late sixteenth century, Agadez broke away from Kebbi, and after Songhai's defeat in 1591 the sultanate was fully independent again.

The sultan, also called amenukal, was the senior leader of the descent-based clans known as drum-groups. He was the highest judge and war leader, but his authority was limited and internal disputes were frequent. Female names among the earliest rulers in oral tradition suggest that descent was at first traced through the mother's line, as in other Berber societies. His subjects, the Kel Amenukal, included the Itesen, Kel Faday, Kel Ferwan and Kel Geres, mostly herders, some partly settled.

The sultanate's population and trade shrank sharply in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century Tuareg confederations moving south from the Sahara caused new conflict in Aïr, and by the end of the century the Kel Owey had pushed the Kel Geres southwards. When the German traveller Heinrich Barth visited in 1850, he described Agadez as a near-empty town.

France took control in 1906. During the Kaocen revolt of 1916, Sultan Tegama awaited the rebel leader's arrival and fled after the French defeated him. In 1917 the French recalled Tegama's predecessor to mediate between them and the population, and thereafter governed the region partly through the sultan. The sultan was involved in the Tuareg rebellion of 1990–1995. Today the amenukal, who spends much time in Niamey, helps with tax collection and school registration.

Our 1715, 1783 and 1800 maps show the sultanate as Air, covering the Aïr massif, with the Hausa Kingdoms to the south and the Kanem–Bornu Empire to the south-east.