Sokoto
— — a city the desert has not closed in on yet.
Not only on a wall.
“The old seat of the Sokoto Caliphate, founded in 1804 by Usman dan Fodio, sits where the Sokoto and Rima rivers meet at the edge of the Sahel. The city remains the spiritual centre of Nigerian Sunni Islam, the Sultan of Sokoto its acknowledged head. The dry season is long, the harmattan steady. From the studio, the place reads as ochre walls under a sky that has held that colour for a long time.
Sokoto, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sokoto is the capital of Sokoto State in the far northwest of Nigeria, near the borders with Niger to the north and Benin to the west. The city sits at about 300 metres elevation in the Sahel, just south of the Sahara's edge, near the confluence of the Sokoto and Rima rivers. Population estimates from recent national figures place the urban area above 600,000. It is one of the oldest continuously administered seats in West Africa, governed by the Sultan of Sokoto, the senior traditional ruler of Nigerian Muslims.
The Sokoto Caliphate was established in 1804 by the scholar and reformer Usman dan Fodio, whose tomb lies in the city. The annual rhythm follows the Islamic calendar: Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha bring the durbar, a horseback procession that gathers the emirate's nobility before the Sultan. The procession has been documented by photographers and ethnographers since the late nineteenth century. The city's older mosques, including the Shehu Mosque near dan Fodio's resting place, structure the religious year. The Sultan remains the spiritual head of about half of Nigeria's Muslims.
Sokoto sits in the Sudano-Sahelian zone, with two clear seasons rather than four. The dry months run roughly October to April, dominated by the harmattan, a dust-laden wind off the Sahara that drops visibility and cools the nights. The wet season brings most of the year's rainfall in a short, concentrated arc from June to September. Daytime temperatures in April routinely exceed forty degrees Celsius; nights in January can fall below fifteen. The light is hard, the shadows short, the horizon usually a thin band of haze.