For roughly a thousand years before the Atlantic trade reordered West Africa, the great trans-Saharan caravan routes carried gold from the Akan and Bambuk forests, salt from the Saharan salt-pans of Taghaza and Bilma, kola from the Yoruba forest belt, leather from Sokoto and Kano, slaves from the Middle Belt, and textiles from the Hausa city-states — northwards to Tripoli, Tunis, Cairo and Marrakesh, and southwards via Kano, Katsina, Birnin-Ngazargamu and Timbuktu.
Five main routes mattered for what would become Nigeria:
- The Bornu route — from Birnin-Ngazargamu (capital of Kanem-Borno) across the Bilma oases and the Fezzan to Tripoli. See Kanem-Borno Empire.
- The Hausa route — from Kano and Katsina via Agadez to Ghadames and Tripoli; the textile and leather export route. See The Hausa Bakwai.
- The Nupe route — from Bida north through Sokoto to the Hausa termini.
- The Yoruba kola route — from Ife and Oyo north through Ilorin to Hausa markets and onwards to the Sahara. See Kola Nut.
- The Igbo slave-and-iron route — Aro Chukwu through Nri and Awka, feeding the Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave markets via Nupe and the Benue corridor. See Aro Confederacy.
The trans-Saharan trade made Kano a city of 100,000 by 1500 — larger than London. Hausa-Fulani Islamic scholarship (the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya orders), the architecture of the Kano dye-pits, the *babban riga* gown, the Sokoto leather industry whose product Moroccan traders re-exported as "Moroccan leather", and the literacy in Ajami script all came up the same caravan routes.
## The collapse and what replaced it
The Atlantic trade after 1500 progressively gutted the trans-Saharan slave trade — buyers paid more on the coast — and the late-19th-century French conquest of the Sahel cut the political space the trade had relied on. The colonial railways (Lagos-Kano 1912, Port Harcourt-Maiduguri 1964) reoriented every northern commodity southwards to the coast.
## The contemporary echo — F.O.O.D and the lost continental market
The AfCFTA-era debate about why Nigeria barely trades with its own neighbours is, in part, a debate about a deliberately broken trans-Saharan and West African overland market. The 2019 Buhari land-border closure formally killed the cross-border trade in rice, palm oil, poultry and sugar — see The Reversal File · Act VII — but the cement, palm oil and sugar producers protected by the same tariff regime have never seriously pursued continental exports either, for the F.O.O.D reason: domestic margins under tariff protection are higher than any export margin a Nigerian producer could earn in Niamey, N'Djamena or Cotonou. See The King of F.O.O.D for the recurring pattern.