The Niger

Where it is

The Niger rises in the Guinea highlands only a couple of hundred kilometres from the Atlantic, and then does the opposite of what that suggests: it runs inland, north-east, into the southern Sahara, before turning south-east and finally reaching the Gulf of Guinea through a large delta in Nigeria. That arc is roughly 4,200 kilometres long to cover a straight-line distance a fraction of that. Along the way it spreads into the Inner Niger Delta in Mali — a seasonal floodplain the size of a small country — and passes within a few kilometres of Timbuktu at the top of its bend.

The land and water around it

• Inner Niger Deltadelta

  A vast inland floodplain in Mali where the river spreads out and slows before reforming into a single channel. It floods seasonally, and three livelihoods are timed to that flood in sequence: recession farming as the water drops, grazing on the exposed pasture, and fishing in the remaining channels. Change the flood and you change all three at once.

• The Sahara's southern margindesert

  The river's northern bend brings permanent water within reach of the desert. Everything about Timbuktu's position follows from that single fact of geography.

• The Niger Deltadelta

  The river's true mouth, on the Nigerian coast — a large network of distributaries and mangrove, and the centre of Nigeria's oil industry. It shares a name with the inland delta upstream and is a completely different place.

Its history, in short

The river's shape puzzled European geographers for centuries, because a river running toward a desert reads as a mistake. It is not: the arc is the inherited course of two once-separate river systems that joined, and it is the reason West Africa had a navigable highway reaching the desert's edge. Towns at the transfer points between water and camel — Djenné upstream, Timbuktu at the bend — grew on that geography. In the modern period the same water became an engineering question: dams for power and irrigation upstream, a floodplain whose flood the delta's farmers, herders and fishers all depend on, and a dispute about who the water is for.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• Timbuktu12th century onward

  A few kilometres north of the river at the top of its bend, where boats and camels exchange cargo. The town's scholarly reputation is downstream of that commercial position, not separate from it.

• DjennéFirst millennium onward

  The river end of the same system, in the inland delta. Its Great Mosque is re-plastered communally each year, which makes the building's continuity a social practice rather than a conservation programme.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereThe Niger is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• Why is the Niger's course surprising?

  It rises near the Atlantic but first runs inland toward the Sahara

  It rises in the Guinea highlands close to the Atlantic, arcs north-east toward the desert, then turns south to the Gulf of Guinea.

• Why does changing the Inner Niger Delta's flood affect so many people?

  Because three livelihoods — recession farming, grazing and fishing — are timed to it in sequence

  Farming, herding and fishing each depend on a different stage of the same annual flood, so a change upstream reaches all three.

Worth arguing about

• Upstream dams give power and irrigation; the flood they moderate supports a floodplain economy downstream. How would you decide between them?
• The Niger Delta and the Inner Niger Delta share a name and nothing else. What other place names have you seen cause that kind of confusion?

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