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Until the late 19th century, the central Sahel was a trade corridor between West and North Africa, which, especially since the fall of Gao at the end of the 16th century, had become a fairly violent and chaotic place. Around 1900, the French added to the violence when they undertook to conquer it and set up a colony there. From that point, two competing but intertwined histories began to evolve: the history of the colony and that of the nation. The French tried to make the colony work for French commerce, albeit under the self-defeating premises that the place had no economic value and its people were more burden than asset. A cash crop—groundnuts—eventually started to make exploitation colonialism profitable in the 1930s, but after World War II, a new Zeitgeist saw the rise of the ideas of economic development and political independence. By then, colonialism had unwittingly fostered a Nigerien society, which turned nationalistic in this context. National development became the general theme of Niger’s history until the late 1980s. Colonialism was criticized for failing to achieve it; dissension arose between Niger’s leading politicians of the 1950 over the methods—radical or moderate—with which it should be pursued; a coup in 1974 was made in its name. The theme of national development grounded regimes that claimed to act through a “development administration” (1960–1974) or a “development society” (1974–1991). This seemingly bland concept was thus the source of the dramatic contests and upheavals and the driving force of the Nigerien project, until it became history some decades ago.

Nigerien women played important cultural, economic, and political leadership roles throughout history. Women across ethnicities contributed to the economic life in precolonial Nigerien societies and their public presence in indigenous markets have been recorded by both Arab chroniclers as well as European colonial explorers, authorities, and historians. Women also occupied important positions in the political sphere and played important roles within their indigenous religious traditions and pantheons. The advent of Islam in the region in the 11th century changed the nature of preexisting spaces. However, a syncretism between Islam and indigenous religions developed, and this created yet another space for women across Nigerien ethnic groups to continue the preservation of some practices tied to their indigenous culture. As predominantly Muslims, most Nigerien women and men have been exposed to Arabic and Qur’anic literacy, and women of clerical lineage and those married to Qur’anic teachers have played a major role in the propagation of Islamic literacy in Nigerien precolonial societies, and continue to do so in the postcolonial dispensation. Ethnic and regional diversity accounts for the degree of authority that women may enjoy within the family structure, and women from rural and urban areas experience patriarchal structures in distinct ways. In relation to contemporary participation in political leadership, the year 1991, with the historic women’s march, marked a turning point in the history of women’s political leadership. The democratization process opened the way for multiparty democracy and greater women’s participation; it also fostered a religious pluralism that has engendered manifestations with women playing distinctive roles in the religious moral economy, including in minority religions. However, democratic pluralism has inadvertently created the conditions for the growth of violent religious fundamentalist movements undermining the rights of girls and women. Unequal gendered and power relations continue to hinder Nigerien women’s emergence at high levels of public leadership, with consequences for economic development and women’s rights. While there has been a steady increase in women’s participation in parliament and high-level appointed positions in government owing to a quota law, which was revisited in 2019, Nigerien women still have some way to go to achieve representative parity not only in politics but also in other public and private sectors of employment and elective positions in society. In terms of human development, Niger continues to register poor development indicators, especially those relating to women’s and girls’ welfare and well-being in rural areas including high rates of child marriage as well as high infant mortality and maternal mortality rates. The status of women in Nigerien societies continues to experience major mutations as women consolidate their roles as a visible and vocal political force as well as one of the main drivers of economic development.

Human population movements have throughout history balanced social obligations with vocational or entrepreneurial activities, with all practices heavily influenced by patterns of human and physical geography. West Africa’s particular shape and location on the Earth’s surface create special conditions for human mobility. West Africafeatures a complex system of human population movements ranging from temporary labor migration to herder mobility, apprenticeships, and other mostly urban-based work opportunities. Demographers, historians, geographers, and others have studied these movements and have worked to correlate them with underlying patterns of precipitation, food sufficiency, economic opportunity, and household dynamics. Understanding the complexities of human population movements in the region provides a window into not only diverse cultures but also the ways these communities have remained resilient in the face of periodic food-security crises. Often the ways outsiders view population movements in West Africa is biased toward the Western-style permanent move, where a job seeker cuts ties with her former home and sets up housekeeping someplace entirely new—a pattern only rarely encountered on the continent of Africa. The region known as the Sahel features a temperature and precipitation regime characterized by an extremely seasonal and unimodal distribution of rainfall that creates starkly delimited wet and dry seasons. Climate is a well-known feature of the Sahelian West African region, with influence on all aspects of life. In the Sahel, there is only one rainfed cropping season, leaving a “dead season” of six months or more when rainfed cropping is impracticable. Rainfed agricultural production is prey to the vicissitudes of the weather, and on-farm investments often reflect drought risk. Precipitation corresponds to the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), an area of contact between air masses north and south of the equator that follows the high-sun season throughout the year. The northernmost extent of the ITCZ brings needed precipitation to the Sahelian zone but is unreliable. Agricultural conditions are satisfactory in approximately four out of every five years, but there is a propensity toward drought (or in the other extreme case, flooding) on a regular though indeterminate basis. In response to this climate and environmental context, humans in the West African region have adapted in multiple ways to use rainfed agriculture when practicable and spread assets among livestock, cropping, and social network investments that often span considerable distances. In order to understand the complex interplay of place characteristics and human practices, typologies of movements are helpful. In anthropological fieldwork on mobility among the Hausa people of southern Niger and northern Nigeria, Harold Olofson identified twenty-five emic (or locally defined) categories of spatial movement, all but one of which were circular in nature. In a cosmological view of mobility, destinations are frequently indeterminate, and little qualitative distinction exists between yawon ganin gari (walk of seeing the town) and yawon ganin duniya (walk of seeing the world). In other words, there is not much difference between stepping a few yards from one’s door and traveling hundreds of miles away. Perhaps the differences between short- and long-term mobility are governed by cultural norms and economic logic, but particular decisions to move are difficult to quantify due to the flexibility of the practice. Of all the intriguingly interlocking explanations for West Africa’s complex patterns of human migration—environmental, sociopolitical, economic—perhaps the most compelling ones see a kind of pocketbook rationality in their sometimes erratic-appearing moves, from one rural farming setting to another, or living half the year in a nearby city, or traveling from market town to market town in a serpentine pattern reflecting the varied landscapes of the region, so heavily flavored by precipitation. Destinations for movements can be markets, through-points, or friends in a social grouping who could be a key link in a time of emergency, when any contact however indirect could come in handy during a drought. Westerners who view migration as a permanent move with cut ties to the home region, or who are blinded by their survey instruments, will miss the complexities of entire cultural systems organized across sometimes-great distances, with some of the movements over a millennium old. Some balanced place and network investments in transcontinental trade routes to the Maghreb or to the Guinea (gold, ivory, or slave) Coast. In the city of Maradi, a city of approximately three hundred thousand in southern Niger along the border with Nigeria, mobilities practiced by itinerant sellers became more attuned to market opportunities during the colonial period. Having a detailed understanding of all mobilities practiced by women, men, or children helps shed light on the social cohesion and resilience, expressed geographically through asset-spreading, complex social networks based on gifts and reciprocal sharing (such as would take place at a wedding or naming ceremony), and reliance on information—particularly meteorological and market information—to allow people to make informed household decisions.

Bori is a religious tradition with origins in West Africa dating to at least 1500 ce. Based on oral histories, ethnographies, archaeological analysis, and limited written sources, its origins lie in complex, syncretic blendings of pre-Islamic Arna (Maguzawa) religious traditions, Hausa aristocracies, and Islam throughout what became Northern Nigeria and south-central Niger over many centuries. Bori practitioners have special knowledge of the spirit world and thus are skilled at healing spirit-induced illnesses or interpreting communal problems with a spiritual basis. Individuals are frequently initiated into Bori as they seek healing but also sometimes through their heritage. Once initiated, Bori adepts learn to live with their spirits for the rest of their lives, inviting spirits to possess them during ceremonial rituals. Bori specialists are more prominent in areas heavily influenced by Arna traditions or Hausa aristocracies that maintained special leadership positions connected to Bori for the protection of the kingdom. Women have often found opportunities for power and prestige through Bori in a patriarchal society, although in some regions, men dominate religious leadership and healing practices in Bori. From the early 19th century, Bori was condemned and banned in the Sokoto caliphate and subsequently under British rule in Nigeria. Nevertheless, it persisted in these areas and especially flourished in regions of Hausaland outside of the caliphate, where historical practices of Hausa kingdoms and Arna religion were practiced more openly and centrally in society. Over the course of the 20th century, Bori has been studied by researchers not only in these regions of West Africa but also among diasporic communities and pilgrims with ties to West Africa.

The Kanem and Borno sultanates durably marked the history of central Sahel. From the 11th century to the end of the 19th century, the Islamic dynasties of the Sayfāwa, the Bulālah, and the Kanemi ruled over the shores of Lake Chad and actively participated in trans-Saharan and trans-Sahelian trade. There were also the site of a rich architectural and written Islamic culture. From the 11th to the 14th centuries, the Sayfāwa dynasty ruled over Kanem. They were the first rulers of this area to adopt Sunni Maliki Islam. In the 14th century, they migrated to Borno where they restored their authority, while the Bulālah dynasty replaced them in Kanem. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, the sultans of Borno developed intense diplomatic and commercial relations with the Mediterranean world, from Morocco to Mecca. In the 19th century, the Kanemi dynasty replaced the Sayfāwa in Borno after the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate in the west. The Kanemi ruled for a century, until 1897, at the eve of European colonization of the region.