Patterns of Migrations and Population Mobility in Sudanic West Africa: Evidence from Ancient Kano, 800-1800 AD

Chukwuemeka P. Odoemene, Imo State University

In the last three decades historians of migration in Europe and the Americas have increasingly criticised the idea of a ‘mobility transition’, which assumed that pre-modern societies were geographically fairly immobile, and that people only started to move in unprecedented ways from the nineteenth century onwards. This paper takes this perspective as a point of departure, and further presents evidence of remarkable population mobility from ancient Kano, taking a longue durée perspective. It reconstructs the nature and transformative roles of constant and consistent migrations and population mobility in Kano, which ensured enormous social interactions within and between culturally distinct communities and led to socio-cultural changes. This earned Kano a reputation as an important, formidable and largest medieval urban metropolis in Sudanic West Africa. Thus, ancient Kano, like elsewhere in Sudanic Africa, had a rich history of massive and systematic migrations and population mobility since the 7th century AD.