Katsina

Katsina is the capital of Katsina State, Nigeria. Its population was just about 200 thousand in 2009.¹. Its most famous building is the Gobarau Minaret. It was the biggest city in today's Nigeria in 1700 with 60 thousand residents.² The majority speak Hausa and are Moslems.

Before the 20th century, the city name was rendered in Ajami script, perhaps like this³: كطصين

External References

photo of Gobarau Minaret, Kaduna

Historical Maps

Footnotes

(1) world-gazetteer.com, accessed 12/12/2009
(2) Cities of Africa tables in Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987). It is the largest city in the South Moslems table. Oyo, the largest city in the Guinea table, has ten thousand fewer residents.
(3) Possible errors. Vowels are mostly omitted here. Normally Arabic syllables that are consonant-vowel end in a long vowel, and long vowels are represented orthographically, and long i is normally one of them, so I represented the middle vowel with a yeh. But it is not clear how the Ajami script (adaption of Arabic script to non-Arabic) would handle the other vowels. Nor is it clear if the 'ts' in the middle would be two consonants, as I represented, or one. Further the choice of kaf rather than qaf, of tah rather than teh, and of sad rather than sin, is speculative.