Sultanate of Damagaram

Damagaram was a Muslim sultanate in what is now south-eastern Niger, ruled from the walled city of Zinder. Founded in 1731 by a group of aristocrats from Bornu, it began as one of many small vassals of that ageing empire and grew into the leading power between Bornu and the Hausa cities, rich on the caravan trade across the Sahara. French forces took its capital in 1899, but the sultans still hold a ceremonial office today.

The state began near Mirriah under a leader named Mallam, whose reign dates vary between sources, at a time when Kanem-Bornu was in decline. The capital moved to Zinder, then a small Hausa village, in 1736, and a large fortress, the Birini, was built soon afterwards. From this base Damagaram's rulers swallowed neighbouring vassal states of western Bornu one after another: in the 1830s they conquered the Myrria kingdom and the Sassebaki sultanates, and during the nineteenth century they absorbed eighteen such states in all.

Zinder sat on the main route between Tripoli on the Mediterranean and Kano in the south, and on an east–west route from the Niger river to Bornu. The sultanate also controlled salt workings and farms that raised ostriches, whose feathers sold well in Europe. Its relations with the Sokoto Caliphate were mixed: Damagaram helped the non-Muslim Hausa refugee states on its western side that had formed after Sokoto's conquests, yet stayed on good terms with Kano, since the trade between them supported both. Wealth came from caravan dues, from the capture and sale of slaves and from taxes on its own people.

European travellers in the mid-nineteenth century put the sultanate at about 70,000 square kilometres with over 400,000 people, most of them Hausa, with Kanuri, Tuareg, Fula, Toubou and Arab minorities. The sultan, known in Hausa as the Sarkin Damagaram, kept a large household; the traveller Heinrich Barth estimated in 1851 that he had some 300 wives. Power passed directly to a son or brother, and twenty-six rulers had reigned by 1906. Two leading officers stood beneath him: the Ciroma, commander and chief minister, and the Yakudima, the heir. By the late nineteenth century the state could raise around 5,000 horsemen and 30,000 foot soldiers, and even cast its own cannon, though the historian Robin Law judged these of little practical use.

As farming spread around Zinder, Sultan Tanimoun, who ruled for much of the later nineteenth century, made it an offence, punishable by death or mutilation, to cut or damage protected trees without permission, above all the gawo tree, prized for enriching the soil. He and his successors also planted gawo trees and spread their seed. This broke with older Sahelian custom, under which trees belonged to no person, and they came to be called the sultan's trees.

By the 1890s Zinder was the only town of more than 10,000 people in today's Niger, and Damagaram was squeezed between French expeditions from the west and the forces of Rabih az-Zubayr on its eastern and southern flanks. In 1898 the French officer Marius Gabriel Cazemajou, sent to seek an alliance with Rabih, was killed by a faction at the sultan's court. In 1899 the survivors of the Voulet–Chanoine Mission arrived, defeated the sultan's army at Tirmini, about 10 kilometres from Zinder, on 30 July, and took the city.

The French installed the sultan's brother, who had sided with them. In 1906, suspecting a planned Hausa rising, they replaced him with a puppet ruler, and the royal line was restored only in 1923. Zinder served as capital of the Niger Military Territory from 1911 until 1926, when the seat moved to Niamey. The sultanate lost lands, and its main trade partner Kano, to British Nigeria, but the title of sultan survives as a ceremonial office.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps show the Sultanate of Damagaram bordering Kanem-Bornu and the Sokoto Caliphate, in the last decades before French conquest.