Sani Maikatanga

Sani Mohammed Maikatanga was born in 1975 in Kano, the largest city of northern Nigeria, and began taking photographs as a secondary school student in the early 1990s. In 2000 he started work as a reporter and photographer for Fim, a popular magazine about Kannywood, the Hausa-language film industry based in Kano. He freelanced for the newspaper Leadership in 2005–06, joined Media Trust, publisher of the Daily Trust, in 2009, and left it in 2021 to open his own studio, Sani Maikatanga Photography.

His work documents the culture of northern Nigeria: festivals, horsemen and durbars, markets, crafts, landscapes and daily life. His best-known subject is the Argungu Fishing Festival in Kebbi State, where thousands of fishermen enter the river at once. The festival goes back to 1934, when it was founded as a gesture of peace between the Sokoto Caliphate and the Kebbi Kingdom, and it is held on the Matan Fada river. His photograph Fishers on the Run, taken at the festival, won the Global Landscapes Forum Africa photo competition in 2022 by public vote, and he was described as the first person from Kano to win it. One account dates the picture to the 2020 festival.

The festival has not been held every year. When the 61st edition returned in February 2026 after a long break caused by insecurity, the news agency AFP distributed Maikatanga's photographs of it through Getty Images, which brought his view of the river to an international audience.

How to look at his work: the subject is crowds and landscape at once, so look for the way the people fill the river or the road and for the light on the water or the dust, rather than for single portraits. A regional publication has included him among eight photographers changing how northern Nigeria is pictured.

See our lists of Nigerian photographers and African photographers.