ABSTRACT
This chapter compares two African twin cities emerging in northeastern Nigeria. African cities have a long and rich history dating back at least a thousand years, especially in the historic empire of Kanem–Borno: the first state system in West and Central Africa. The cities are Kukawa and Maiduguri, Borno's political and administrative capitals in the nineteenth and twentieth century’s, respectively. Kukawa was founded in 1814 by a nineteenth-century scholar-warrior known as Sheikh Muhammed El-Amin El-Kanemi, flourishing as the capital of Kanem–Borno Empire until 1893. Kukawa's political and administrative functions were sustained by resources derived from pre-colonial Borno's larger economy. Nineteenth-century Borno, unlike Maiduguri, was a feudal society, and this shaped Kukawa's social structure. Maiduguri's emergence as a twin city directly resulted from British colonization in 1902. For at least a decade beforehand, Borno was thrown into political crisis, paralysing its social, economic and political affairs.
