What happened to the groundnut pyramids in Northern Nigeria?

Back in the day, if you passed through Kano, you’d see these massive golden mountains of groundnut sacks stacked so high they looked like they were competing with the sky. Those pyramids weren’t just sacks of crops; they were proof that Nigeria was a global boss in agriculture. 

Fast-forward to today, and you’ll struggle to find even a tiny hill of groundnuts in the same place. What happened to the pyramids, and why did they disappear?

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The Golden Era of the Pyramids

The story of the groundnut pyramids begins in the 1940s and 1950s, during Nigeria’s colonial and early post-independence years. Northern Nigeria was a major exporter of groundnuts, producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually. The region’s climate was perfect for the crop. Long dry seasons after planting made for excellent drying conditions.

British traders and local merchants built an export economy around them. Wealthy merchants such as Alhaji Alhassan Dantata consolidated harvests at collection depots and stacked thousands of groundnuts.

The pyramids themselves were not permanent structures. They were stacks of jute sacks filled with dried groundnuts, arranged in a triangular form outside warehouses. In Kano, they rose like man-made hills beside the railway lines, waiting to be loaded onto trains bound for Lagos ports, and from there to Europe and other markets.

The Marketing Board, set up by the colonial administration, managed the buying, storage, and export of the nuts. At its peak, Nigeria was among the top groundnut exporters in the world. In some years, the pyramids represented half a million tonnes of nuts, generating huge foreign exchange and sustaining countless farming communities.

The pyramids were so popular and symbolic that they made it onto postage stamps as a national emblem. They were featured in tourism brochures and even in Nigerian school textbooks. 

In the same way cocoa defined the West and palm oil defined the East, groundnuts defined the North. Farmers, traders, transporters, and labourers all depended on the crop. 

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How the Pyramids Disappeared

How did the pyramids vanish? There isn’t one single cause for the collapse of the groundnut-pyramid era; it was a combination of ecological, economic and political factors:

1. The oil boom of the 1970s

When crude oil was discovered in commercial quantities, Nigeria’s focus shifted dramatically from agriculture to petroleum. Government investment, which had supported groundnut farming through research, irrigation, and storage, was redirected to the oil sector. Farmers who once relied on steady prices and support from the Marketing Board found themselves abandoned.

2. Crop disease and falling yields

In the 1960s–70s, devastating groundnut pests and viruses, including rosette disease and other epidemics, wiped out large swathes of farmland, cutting harvests dramatically and making mass stacking pointless. Farmers abandoned peanut fields or moved to other crops.

3. Droughts and desertification

The Sahel droughts of the early 1970s severely affected Northern Nigeria. Rainfall dropped, desertification spread, and farmlands degraded. Groundnut yields fell sharply, and many farmers simply couldn’t recover.

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4. The collapse of the groundnut marketing board

Without strong government coordination, storage and export systems broke down. Groundnuts were no longer stockpiled in massive quantities in one location, so the iconic pyramids ceased to exist. Instead, smaller quantities were sold in open markets or consumed locally.

5. Shift to other crops and livelihoods

As profitability declined, many farmers switched to millet, sorghum, cowpea, and other drought-resistant crops. Others left farming entirely, moving to urban areas or joining the informal economy.

Today, Nigeria still grows groundnuts; in fact, it remains one of the top producers in Africa, but production is largely for domestic consumption, groundnut oil, and local snacks like kulikuli. The scale of coordinated export that once justified the pyramids no longer exists.

The pyramids may have disappeared physically, but in Northern Nigeria’s history, they remain a symbol of what once was, and what could be again if agriculture regains its rightful place in Nigeria’s economy.

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