Queen Amina of Zaria

Amina was born to Bakwa Turunku, queen of the Hausa city-state of Zazzau — modern Zaria, in northern Nigeria — in approximately 1533. She succeeded her brother Karama as queen in 1576 and ruled for thirty-four years.

She was a military sovereign of the first rank. Within three months of taking power she launched the first of a series of expansionist campaigns that, over her reign, doubled the territorial extent of Zazzau through conquest. She brought the Hausa cities of Kano and Katsina under tribute; established trade routes from the Niger to the Mediterranean; and built the great earthen fortifications, the ganuwar Amina — Amina's walls — that survive at archaeological sites across the region. She is the only female sovereign in the Hausa record before whom the sarkis of subordinated cities are recorded to have personally rendered tribute.

She introduced metal armor to the cavalry of the Western Sudan and the kola trade — the bitter caffeine-bearing nut that became, through her trade routes, the central commodity of social ritual and Islamic communion across West Africa for the four centuries since.

The Kano Chronicle records that "every town paid tribute to her." She never married. The Bori tradition — the spirit-cult of Hausa women — preserves her memory in continuous ritual practice.

She is honored here as the warrior queen who doubled Zazzau and bound West Africa's trade routes for the centuries that followed.