2 - Patterns of Migration and Population Mobility in Sudanic West Africa: Evidence from Ancient Kano, c. 800–1800 AD

Abstract

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 viewpoint. It reconstructs the nature and transformative roles of constant and consistent migration 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 large medieval urban metropolis in Western Sudan. Thus, ancient Kano, like elsewhere in Sudanic Africa, had a rich history of massiv and systematic migration and population mobility since the ninth century AD.