Zabarima (emirate)

The Zabarima Emirate was a Zarma Islamic state that existed in what is today parts of Ghana and Burkina Faso from the 1860s until 1897.

The leaders of the Zabarima Emirate, who belonged to the Zarma ethnicity from which the Emirate is named, originated in an area now in the nation of Niger, in an area south-east of Niamey on the east side of the Niger River.

The key moving force behind the state was Babatu who hailed from Indungu in Niger, a place that had been Muslim far longer than most of the other areas the Zabarima leadership came from, most of which became Muslim only in the 1850s or so.