Blackwell Reference Online

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The name “Niger” is derived from the name of the Niger River, “Eguerew n'eguerew” – “the river of rivers” – in Tamacheq, the language of the Tuareg people. As a modern territorial polity, Niger is a recent creation of French colonialism with a history that begins roughly in 1900. It unites under a single denomination those frontier areas of Hausaland that were left out of the Islamic Sokoto caliphate in 1804; the borderlands separating the Aïr Tuareg from their Kel Ahaggar counterparts in Algeria, and the western Iwillimidden (Kel Dinnik) Tuareg from the Mali-based eastern Iwillimidden or Kel Attaram; the Upper Volta region at the point where the westernmost extension of the medieval Songhay empire ended; and colonial borders separating the French colony of Niger from those of Dahomey to the south and Chad to the east. What distinguishes Niger from other regions of West Africa is that its nomadic and sedentary peoples have historically inhabited loosely federated, often isolated fringes of more articulated polities with centers that were located elsewhere. During the fourteenth century the Mande-speaking Wangarawa established a kingdom, Takedda, in the area west of the Aïr mountain massif, where copper was extracted for use as currency throughout the Sahel and Sudan. As the artisans of a vast interregional network of trade routes connecting Takedda to the Songhay empire and Hausaland, ... log in or subscribe to read full text