Political Economy of Healing in Kano, Nigeria: Tracing Commodities of Trans-Saharan Exchange through West Africa’s Oldest Urban Market

The political economy of healing has rarely been studied in early urban Africa. This paper takes the longue duree perspective of the economy of materia medica (healing commodities) in the city of Kano,the largest metropolis in the Hausa-speaking region of Central Sudan and home to the one of the oldest and largest urban markets, Kurmi, believed to be founded around 1000 CE.  The paper will use data on Kurmi and other markets that linked Kano to trade in commodities such as salt, indigo, and kola that were used in medicinal and ritual healing well beyond Hausaland.  It will also combine new data on commodities in circulation in Sudanic Africa, such as civet cat musk, other perfumes, incense, and other commodities that grew more popular with Islamic medicine as well as sources related to new commodities introduced into Northern Nigeria in later times, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as contact with Europeans increased.  The paper suggests that historians can understand more about popular modes of healing through existing and new commodities and modes of marketing goods of healing that shaped and were shaped by changing settlement and practices of healers, patients, and traders in these goods. We can also understand how various political regimes in the Central Sudan, from city-state chiefship to militarized Caliphate to British colonial government, patronized, sought to control, tax, and deregulated healing through the markets.  The paper shows that health and healing in urban West Africa has long been cosmopolitan, shaped by economic exchange and production, and connected intimately to the culture of marketing which has been so unique to this region.