Dispatch
The festival that depends on a river that keeps failing
Argungu is famous for one morning a year. The rest of the year is a town watching the water table.
North-West
Argungu
Kebbi State
12.7450° N, 4.5250° E
A river town on the Sokoto-Rima, known for one morning a year and misunderstood the rest of it.
About this place
Argungu is famous for a fishing festival that draws thousands of men into the river at a single signal. What the festival obscures is that this is a working fishing and farming town on a floodplain, and that the river it depends on has been an unreliable neighbour for two decades. The festival has been cancelled more often than it has been held.
Everything from Argungu
1 story, newest first.
People in Argungu
Dispatch
The festival that depends on a river that keeps failing
Argungu is famous for one morning a year. The rest of the year is a town watching the water table.
Field notes from Argungu
Rakiya Ibrahim
Rakiya Ibrahim's river notebook is a school exercise book, one line per week, going back to 2009. She keeps it in a drawer with the class registers. No institution has ever asked to see it and it is the longest continuous local record of the river's height that I have found.
Where to go next
Editorial adjacency rather than distance — somewhere it makes sense to go from here.
