THE FAT YEARS

On what kind of a world did the droughts of the early 1970s so rudely erupt? In the previous decade, the Northern Region of Nigeria (now the ‘northern states’ of the Federal Republic: figure 2.1), and also the adjacent areas of Niger Republic, reached levels of agricultural production probably unsurpassed before or since. Independence had come a decade previously, but it was an essentially unaltered colonial system of export agriculture that continued to sustain both economies. Although peasant producers, whose memories are long, were under no such illusion, delayed or inept bureaucratic responses to the drought crisis showed that stability had come to be taken for granted.

The crops and the animals

Any visitors to Kano in the 1960s could see with their own eyes that the fortunes of Northern Nigeria were built upon the groundnut. The famous storage pyramids portrayed the fruitfulness of the earth as vividly as the practical difficulties of evacuating the crop. Exports of the ‘blessed groundnut’ had grown from 50,000 tons in 1916 (six years after the arrival of the railhead at Kano) to 872,000 in 1962–63, when Nigeria was Africa's leading producer (Hogendorn, 1978: 123, 133). The groundnut-producing area lay mainly in the Dry Zone (figure 1.2) where more than half the population of the Northern Region lived, and where more than half the farmers produced groundnuts for the market.