Queen Amina of Zazzau

Amina was born around 1533 in the Hausa city-state of Zazzau — present-day Zaria in northern Nigeria — the eldest daughter of Sarauniya Bakwa Turunku, queen-regnant of Zazzau from 1536 to 1566, and her consort Mai Ankali. The Hausa chronicles and the early seventeenth-century Kano Chronicle preserve her training: at sixteen she was given the title magajiya — heir-presumptive — and received instruction in cavalry warfare and political administration alongside the male princes of the court.

She refused all marriage offers across the four decades that followed and acceded to the throne of Zazzau in 1576 at the death of her younger brother Karama. The thirty-four-year reign that followed is recorded in the chronicles as one continuous campaign. She extended the southern frontier of Zazzau to the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers, brought Nupe, Jukun and Kwararafa under tributary obligation, and reopened the trans-Saharan corridor that linked Zazzau north to the Hausa cities of Kano and Katsina.

She is the queen to whom the surviving fortified earthworks across northern Nigeria — collectively styled in the modern oral tradition the ganuwar Amina, the walls of Amina — are attributed. The walls served the dual purpose of defending tributary trading-cities and of housing the garrison cavalry that secured the trade-routes. The walls of Zaria itself, of substantial fragments at Katsina and Kano, and of the Kano-to-Bauchi corridor are preserved in archaeological survey to the present.

The Kano Chronicle records that she introduced the kola nut into Hausaland from the Yoruba south, that she had no consort but took a captured man each night and put him to death at dawn, and that she fell in battle near Atagara — present-day Idah in Kogi state — around 1610, at approximately seventy-seven years of age.

She is honored here as the warrior-sovereign of Zazzau.