Dosso Kingdom

The Dosso Kingdom is a precolonial state in what is now southwest Niger which has survived in a ceremonial role to the modern day.

The Djerma people of Niger are believed to have migrated from what is now the Fula region around Lac Debo, Mali during the Songhai Empire, and settled first in Anzourou and Zarmaganda in the 16th century. In the 18th century, many Djerma resettled south to the Niger River valley, the Fakara plateau and Zigui in what is now Southwest Niger near Niamey. Forming a number of small communities, each led by a Djermakoy, these polities soon found themselves pressured from the north by the Tuareg and the Fula from the southeast, as well as other ethnic groups in the area. While Djermakoy Aboubacar founded the Dosso state from his own Taguru clan around 1750, it remained a small collection of villages in the Dallol Bosso valley until the 1820s, when it led much of the resistance to the Sokoto Caliphate. While Dosso fell under the control of the Amir of Gando (a sub division of Sokoto) between 1849 and 1856, they retained their Djermakoy and the nominal rule of a much larger Djerma territory, and were converted to Islam. Under Djermakoy Kossom (r. 1856-65), Dosso united all of the eastern Djerma, and left a small state stretching from Tibbo and Beri in the north, to Gafiadey in the south, and to Bankadey and Tombokware in the east.

French colonial forces first entered the area in the 1890s and found Dosso allied with local Fula communities and small states like Kebbi against other Djerma states, the Dendi, the Gourounsi (in modern Burkina Faso) the Hausa states to the east (in what is now southern Niger), and still struggling to retake the territory it held in 1865.

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