Niger

The desert and Sahel of Niger were crossed for a thousand years by the trans-Saharan trade, and Agadez grew rich as a caravan city and a centre of Islamic learning, its Grand Mosque topped by the tallest mud-brick minaret in the world. The southern lands fell within the reach of the Songhai Empire, the Hausa city-states, the Bornu Empire, and, in the nineteenth century, the Sokoto Caliphate. France conquered the territory around 1900 and ruled it as part of French West Africa; independence came in 1960.

The decades since have run on a loop of drought, coups, and brief democratic openings. Hamani Diori's founding government fell to a 1974 coup after the great Sahel drought; military rule gave way to elected governments in the 1990s; and Mahamadou Issoufou handed power to Mohamed Bazoum in 2021 — the first time one elected president in Niger had succeeded another.

In July 2023 the presidential guard, led by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, overthrew and detained Bazoum. The junta expelled French troops and the French ambassador, ended military cooperation with France and the United States, and turned toward Russia. With the juntas of Mali and Burkina Faso it left the West African bloc ECOWAS and formed the Alliance of Sahel States. Meanwhile Niger fights jihadist insurgencies on two fronts — Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliates in the west, and Boko Haram and its offshoots around Lake Chad in the southeast.

Niger is an overwhelmingly Muslim country whose peoples have kept distinct identities: Hausa traders and farmers in the densely settled south; Zarma-Songhai along the river; Tuareg of the Aïr and the deep desert, with their indigo veils, camel caravans, and silver cross pendants; Fula and Wodaabe herders, whose young men wear elaborate makeup and dance for hours at the Gerewol to be judged the most beautiful; and Kanuri near Lake Chad.

Griots keep genealogies and history in song, accompanied by the one-stringed goje and the calabash drum, and traditional wrestling (lutte traditionnelle) is the national sport, its yearly championship drawing enormous crowds.

Life is organised around the five daily prayers, the extended family and the walled compound, and rituals of hospitality — among the Tuareg, three glasses of sweet tea, each meant to taste different. The rhythm of the year is set by the single short rainy season and the movement of the herds to and from pasture.

Niger has one of the youngest and fastest-growing populations on Earth, with the world's highest birth rate, and it is among the poorest countries by almost every measure. Most people farm millet and sorghum or herd animals in the narrow Sahel band across the south, where the rains are brief and unreliable and the Sahara is advancing.

Niamey, on the river in the far southwest, is the one large city; Maradi and Zinder are the Hausa commercial centres. Uranium mined at Arlit in the northern desert is the signature export, alongside oil refined at Zinder and now piped toward Benin's coast, gold, onions — Niger is a major onion exporter — and livestock.

Agadez was for years the hub of the trans-Saharan migration route toward Libya, an economy that an EU-backed anti-smuggling law disrupted in 2015 and the junta restored in 2023. Drought, locusts, insecurity, and a population doubling every twenty years keep the pressure on relentless.

Millet and sorghum are the staples, pounded and cooked into a stiff porridge (tuwo) or a thinner gruel (fura, often stirred into milk), eaten with a sauce of baobab leaf, okra, sorrel, or groundnut. Rice with a meat or tomato sauce is the everyday town meal.

Grilled skewered meat (brochettes), roast mutton, and kilishi — spiced, paper-thin dried beef — are the meat treats, while masa (fermented rice cakes) and kosai (bean fritters) are common street food. Dates from the oases and rounds of sweet tea punctuate the day. Alcohol is little seen.

The security situation places most of the country off-limits, but its landmarks are extraordinary. The historic centre of Agadez, a World Heritage Site, has the bristling mud-brick Grand Mosque, the Sultan's palace, and a maze of earthen lanes, and it is the gateway to the Aïr Mountains — oases, rock art, and Tuareg villages — and to the dunes of the Ténéré, one of the emptiest deserts on Earth, where the "Tree of Ténéré" once stood as the loneliest tree in the world.

The far northeast holds the abandoned mud fortresses of the Djado plateau, and the Termit massif shelters rare addax antelope and Saharan cheetah. In the southwest, the "W" National Park, shared with Benin and Burkina Faso, is one of West Africa's best wildlife areas, with elephant and lion.

The region's last wild herd of West African giraffe roams the community reserve at Kouré, a short drive from Niamey, where they can be walked among on foot. Niamey itself has the National Museum, the Grand Marché, and the Niger River, crowded with pirogues at sunset.