Lost history · 13th/14th to 15th/16th century · Fact and tradition
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Between Katsina and Daura sit a handful of grassy mounds. Inside them were buried people wearing cowries, silver and a bowl that came from the far side of the Sahara.
About 32 kilometres east of Katsina, in Mani district, the land is flat and gently rolling, broken by granite hills. Scattered across it are eight or nine large mounds of earth. To a passer-by they could be anything. They are graves, and for around 200 years, from roughly the 1200s or 1300s to the 1400s or 1500s, they were where very important people were buried.
The name tells you who people thought they were. Durbi Takusheyi is usually translated as "tombs of the chief priest". Local tradition links the place to the Durbawa clan, whose chief priest held the title Durbi. That title still exists today as a senior rank in the Katsina Emirate. Near the mounds stood baobab trees that were shrines for ancestor figures, and the town heads of the area drew their authority from those ancestor cults. Over time, the story goes, that power moved elsewhere, to a nature shrine at a tamarind tree at Bawada, near Tilla.
Outsiders ignored the mounds until 1907. That year the British officer Herbert Richmond Palmer, working with the Emir of Katsina, Muhammadu Dikko, dug into the biggest mound and later two more, because nobody could give them a clear account of what was inside. They found pottery and metal. Then almost all of it vanished. Very little record of that first dig survives, and the objects themselves seem to be lost.
In 1959 Nigeria's antiquities department declared the site a national monument. The listing named three large mounds, two small ones, and the old baobab called Kuka Katsi, plus the spot where another tree, Kuka Kumayo, used to stand.
The proper dig came in 1991 and 1992, led by Dierk Lange of Bayreuth University with German research money. The team found three more mounds, numbered 4, 5 and 7, and each had one person buried in the middle.
What was buried with them is the reason this site matters. There were local things: pots, grinding stones, iron spearheads. And then there were things from very far away. One person in mound 4 wore a cap covered in cowry shells and a spiked leg guard lined with fur. Mound 5 had a belt sewn with cowries. Mound 7 had a beaded belt and a bowl from the Near East, dated to the late 1400s or early 1500s. Elsewhere there were cornelian beads, gold earrings, brass bars, and objects in copper, copper alloy and silver: bracelets, anklets, buckets, ingots, pins, even forks.
When scientists tested the metal, they found it had come from many places, from Africa as far as Iran. Some pieces arrived finished. Some came as raw metal and were worked locally. Some were imported and then changed by local smiths.
Put simply, these graves show that people in this corner of Katsina were plugged into trade routes that crossed the Sahara and reached the Islamic world centuries before most of us were taught to imagine it. That was exactly the period when the Hausa city-states were taking shape. The national museums commission calls the site a bridge between ancient Africa and the wider Islamic world. It also says a metal bowl from here carries the oldest archaeological evidence of Arabic writing found in northern Nigeria.
The finds then went on a journey of their own. They were stored first in Katsina, then moved to the Gidan Makama Museum in Kano, then to the Jos Museum. In 2007 they were shipped to the Romano-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, Germany, to be cleaned and conserved. In 2011 that museum put them on show alongside Nok pieces. They were supposed to come back in 2012. Some critics accused the Germans of exhibiting "looted" art.
The return was finally agreed in 2014. The collection reached Abuja that year and went on to the National Museum in Katsina, where it was first shown to the public on International Museum Day in 2015.
Katsina also has its own, much older story about how power changed hands here. Tradition says a Hausa man named Kumayo founded the Katsina kingdom with his capital at Durbi Takusheyi, and one of the baobab shrines was later dedicated to him. Later a man called Sanau ruled. Then came Korau, an outsider and a learned man from Yandoto who was not of royal blood. He befriended Sanau, then challenged him to a wrestling match at the Bawada tamarind tree. When Sanau hit the ground, Korau killed him with a short sword and became the first king of a new line. That sword, the tradition says, still appears among the town's royal insignia.
Nobody can prove the wrestling match. But the mounds are real, and they hold proof that whoever ruled here was rich and well connected.
