60

The Rulers of Kanem and Bornu or Borno

? third century-/? ninth century-

East-central Sudan

1. The ‘red’ (i.e. white) Sayfī (Sefuwa) or Yazanī rulers of Kanem

2. The ‘black’ Sultans of Kanem

3. The new line of Sultans in Bornu, the Mais or rulers, claiming Sayfī descent

4. The Kanembu line of Shaykhs or Shehus of Bornu and Dikwa

(a) The Shehus in Bornu, reinstated by the British

(b) The Shehus and Mais in Dikwa, reinstated by the French

During Islamic times, the histories of Kanem and Bornu have been intertwined, but together they have formed one of the oldest and certainly the most enduring of Muslim states in West Africa. Kanem lay to the east of Lake Chad, in what is now the Republic of Chad, while Bornu lay to the south-west of the lake, in what is now north-eastern Nigeria.

Already in Umayyad times, Arab raiders are reputed to have penetrated to Fezzan in southern Libya and to Tibesti and the region of the Tubu people in what is now northern Chad, but Kanem seems to have been founded by the Saharan nomadic people of the Zaghāwa. Islam was probably introduced into Kanem from the north by the Tubu during the eleventh century, when we find a dynasty ruling there which apparently claimed a spurious descent from the pre-Islamic Ḥimyarite prince of South Arabia, Sayf b. Dhī Yazan. There were connections across the Sahara with Egypt and North Africa, with a traffic in black slaves, and Dunama Dabalemi in 655/1257 sent a famed present of a giraffe to the Ḥafṣid ruler in Tunis (see above, no. 18).

By the end of the fourteenth century, these Sayfī rulers of Kanem had been forced to move to Bornu by the ascendancy in Kanem of a rival clan, the Bulālas (? Bilālīs). The Sayfīs, now in Bornu, were refounded as the Mais or rulers by ‘Alī Ghāzī, with their new capital at N’gazargamu (Qaṣr Gomo) to the west of Lake Chad, and this remained the capital until 1811. The rulers of Bornu subsequently regained Kanem, and extended their power westwards into Hausaland, north-westwards to the Aïr and north-eastwards against the Tubu. In the later sixteenth century they discovered the value in warfare of firearms, and imported Turkish musketeers, and they also began to make their state more consciously Islamic by introducing the prescriptions of the Sharī‘a in certain spheres. Over the next two centuries, however, Bornu remained either static or in a state of decline, under pressure from the Hausas and the Touaregs of the Sahara. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Fulani jihād (see below, no. 61) affected Bornu adversely, with the Mais being denounced as inadequate Muslims, so that in 1224/1809 Aḥmad b. ‘Alī had to appeal to Muḥammad Amīn al-Kānemī for help against the Fulbe. Al-Kānemī’s intervention marked the reduction of the Sayfīs of Bornu to the status of fainéants, and after 1262/1846 the line of the Kanembu Shaykhs or Shehus, religious scholars in origin, assumed legitimate power there. Bornu was occupied by the invader from Wadai, Rābiḥ, for several years, but soon after the restoration of the Kanembus in Bornu and the sister-sultanate of Dikwa after Rābiḥ’s death in 1318/1900, its territory was divided between the colonial powers of Britain, Germany and France. The Shehus of Bornu and the Mais of Dikwa still survive as local potentates within the North-eastern State of the present Nigerian Republic, which has its administrative centre at Maiduguru.

Complete harmonisation of the lists of Bornu kings, prepared by various Western scholars (German, French and British, starting with Barth in the 1850s) from the records of court scribes in Bornu, is not easy, although there is a remarkable degree of agreement as to names of rulers, if not of lengths of their rule. The list and dates given above follow such sources as those in the Bibliography below, with especial use of the work of Hogben and Kirk-Greene and of the concordance of dates and names prepared by Cohen.

EI¹ ‘Bornū’ (G. Yver); EI² ‘Bornū’ (C. E. J. Whitting), ‘Kanem’ (G. Yver*).

Y. Urvoy, Histoire de l’empire de Bornou, Paris 1949.

J. Spencer Trimingham, A History of Islam in West Africa, 104–26, 207–13.

S. J. Hogben and A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, The Emirates of Northern Nigeria: A Preliminary Survey of their Historical Traditions, London 1966, 307–42, with a list of rulers and a genealogical table for Bornu at pp. 341–2 and a genealogical table for Dikwa at p. 353.

Ronald Cohen, ‘The Bornu king lists’, in Boston University Papers on Africa. II. African history, ed. Jeffrey Butler, Boston 1966, 41–83, with a list of rulers at pp. 80–3.

J. F. A. Ajayi and M. Crowder, History of West Africa, 2nd edn, London 1976, I, chs 6 (J. O. Hunwick) and 13 (R. A. Adelẹyẹ), II, ch. 4 (R. Cohen and L. Brenner).

H. Montgomery-Massingberd (ed.), Burke’s Royal Families of the World. II. Africa and the Middle East, London 1980, 178–80.