Who is Amina of Zaria

 Amina of Zaria (1533-1610?), commonly known as the warrior queen, expanded the territory of the Hausa people of north Africa to the largest borders in history. More than 400 years later, the legend of her persona became the model for a television series about a fictional warrior princess, called Xena.

Amina was the warrior queen of Zazzau (now Zaria). She is known also as Amina Sarauniya Zazzau. She lived approximately 200 years prior to the establishment of the Sokoto-Caliphate federation that governed Nigeria during the period of British colonial rule following the Islamic jahad (holy war) that overtook the region in the nineteenth century. According to most accounts, Queen Amina ruled for 34 years at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her domain of Zazzau, a city-state of Hausaland, was eventually renamed to Zaria and is the capital of the present-day emirate of Kaduna in Nigeria. Although many details of her life remain largely in dispute among historians, the fact that she existed is a matter of general acceptance, and she is presumed to have been a Moslem ruler. Much of what is known of Queen Amina is based on information related in the Kano Chronicles, a translation by Muhammed Bellow of pre-colonial African tradition based in part on anonymous Hausa writings. Other details were pulled from the oral traditions of Nigeria. As a result, the memory of Queen Amina assumed legendary proportions in her native Hausaland and beyond. The extent of her military prowess and her performance in battle was augmented by lore and remains unclear.

The reign of Amina occurred at a time when the city-state of Zazzau was situated at the crossroad of three major trade corridors of northern Africa, connecting the region of the Sahara with the remote markets of the southern forest lands and the western Sudan. It was the rise and fall of the powerful and more dominant Songhai (var. Songhay) people and the resulting competition for control of trade routes that incited continual warring among the Hausa people and the neighboring settlements during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was not until later that a ruling arrangement between the Hausa and the Fulani people ultimately brought a lasting peace to the region and survived into the colonial era of the nineteenth century.