City of the indigo dye pits
Kano
An old Hausa trading city in northern Nigeria where cloth is still dyed in deep outdoor pits of indigo.
Why Kano is indigo
Kano is the largest city of northern Nigeria and for centuries stood at the southern end of trade routes across the Sahara. Near one of the old city gates are the Kofar Mata dye pits, which local tradition dates to 1498. Each pit is a deep well filled with water, indigo, ash and potash, left to ferment. Dyers sit at the rim and dip cloth again and again; more dips give a darker blue. The finest cloth is then beaten with wooden mallets until it shines almost like metal. Kano cloth was once traded across West Africa and the desert. Only some of the pits are in use today, as factory cloth has taken much of the market.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Kano
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Kano (city)" on Wikipedia. If you know Kano and we have it wrong, tell us.
More colour cities
All colour cities
🇳🇬 Capital of adireAbeokutaA Yoruba city in south-west Nigeria famous for adire, cotton patterned in white on deep indigo blue.
🇮🇳 The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.🇮🇳 Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.
🇮🇳 Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.
🇵🇰 City of saints and blue tilesMultanBrick shrines of Sufi saints are banded with blue, turquoise and white tiles, a craft still alive in the city.
🇰🇷 Busan's pastel hillsideGamcheonA steep neighbourhood of small box-like houses painted in pastels, turned into an art village in 2009.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Jodhpur In: Lavpatel2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Leh In: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, source
- Multan Pk: Yaarahmadd, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Gamcheon Kr: Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Abeokuta Ng: Melvin "Buddy" Baker, CC BY 2.0, source