Kano Emirate

The Kano Emirate is a Muslim state centered on the city of Kano in what is now northern Nigeria, formed in 1805 during the Fulani jihad led by Usman dan Fodio and established as an emirate by 1807, succeeding a much older Hausa kingdom that tradition traces to the year 999. As a vassal state of the Sokoto Caliphate it was governed by an Emir under the hierarchical Sarauta system, with the Kano Emirate Council acting as its legislature, and under an earlier ruler, Muhammad Rumfa, who reigned from 1463 to 1499, the city had already grown into a major center of Islamic learning and trade. Kano became the largest and most prosperous province of the Sokoto Caliphate, with the explorer Heinrich Barth estimating that enslaved people made up at least half its population in the 1850s, before British forces conquered the emirate in February 1903 and exiled its Emir, Aliyu Babba, bringing colonial administration.