Bagirmi (1522-1897)
Located southeast of Lake Chad, Bagirmi has a history marked by constant warfare to acquire slaves from its southern neighbors, while struggling to maintain its independence or to ameliorate its status as a tributary of Kanem-Bornu and Wadai to the north. According to tradition, Bagirmi emerged from the welter of village polities in north-central Africa about 1522. During the sixteenth century the sun kings, or mbangs, forged a recognizable state. Islam became the court religion, but the rural people continued to worship their traditional gods. The mbang consolidated the heartland of the state, reduced vulnerable neighbors to tributaries, and became an important provider of slaves for trans-Saharan trade. During the reign of Burkumanda I (1635-1665), Bagirmi established its influence as far north as Lake Chad. Slaves procured in the south were the fundamental commodity of the economy, whether as chattel for transSaharan trade, agricultural laborers on local estates, retainers for the mbang and maladonoge, or eunuchs for the Ottoman Empire.
The military and commercial hegemony of Bagirmi did not go unchallenged. Between 1650 and 1675, Bornu claimed sovereignty over Bagirmi, but it did not inhibit the mbang from sending raiding parties into Bornu. More successful was the claim of suzerainty by the kolak (sultan) Sabun of Wadai who, taking advantage of the decline of Bagirmi’s power at the end of the eighteenth century, launched a brutal offensive in 1805, captured Massenya, the capital, slaughtered the mbang and his relatives, and decimated and enslaved the populace. Sabun’s invasion was the beginning of a century of decline and disintegration, during which the armies of Wadai plundered with impunity. This period ended only in the 1890s with the invasion of the kingdom by the forces of the Sudanese freebooter, Rabih Zubayr.
In desperation the last mbang, Gaugrang II, sought to ally himself with the advancing French, but when he signed a treaty of protection with Commandant Emil Gentil in 1897, he in fact consigned the Kingdom of Bagirmi to its place as a footnote of history.
Darfur (1650-1916)
The sultanate was established by the Fur, a non-Arab people who inhabit the western Nile River Basin surrounding the mountain massif of Jabal Marra. Their origins are obscure, but as cultivators they long interacted with the Fazara nomads, the non-Arab Toubou, and Arabs from Upper Egypt. The original state founded by the Tunjur may have appeared as early as the fifteenth century, but the first historically recorded Fur sultan was Sulayman Solongdungu (c. 1650-1680) who founded the Keira dynasty.
Although the royal house claimed an Arab heritage, it was probably more the result of intermarriage with Arabs from the Nile Valley whose holy men and merchants brought Islam to the court. Fur ritual and traditional beliefs, however, prevailed in the countryside. The successors of Sulayman are more obscure, but they seemed to have been preoccupied with unsuccessful attempts to extend their authority westward into Wadai and their unpopular enlistment of slave troops as an imperial guard from the equatorial south.
Frustrated in the west, the seventh sultan, Muhammad Tayrab (r. 1752-1786), turned east to conquer Kordofan from the Funj sultanate of Sennar, opening the Fur to Islamic legal and administrative practices and Muslim merchants. As early as 1633 the Darb al-Arba’in (the Forty Days Road) was an established trans-Saharan route from Kobbei to Asyut in Egypt. The reign of Abd al-Rahman was the apogee of the Keira sultanate, symbolized by his founding the permanent capital at El Fasher in 1792.
BAGIRMI, WADAI, AND DARFUR
In the nineteenth century, Darfur began a tempestuous passage through a period characterized by problems. In 1821 the forces of Muhammad ‘Ali conquered the Funj Kingdom of Sennar and the Kord-ofan province of the sultanate of Darfur. Thereafter, the Keira sultanate in El Fasher continued an uneasy coexistence with the riverine Arabs on the Nile and the Turco-Egyptian government at Khartoum whose traders established their control over the traditional slaving regions of Darfur to the south in the Bahr al-Ghazal. In 1874 the head of the largest corporate slaving empire, Zubayr Pasha Rahma Mansur, invaded Darfur with his well-armed slave army, defeated and killed the Sultan Ibrahim Qarad at the Battle of al-Manawashi, and occupied El Fasher as a province of the Turco-Egyptian empire in the Sudan. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad Al-Mahdi proclaimed his jihad against the Turco-Egyptian government. By 1885 his ansar had captured Darfur and destroyed Khartoum, ending their rule in the Sudan. Led by pretenders to the sultanate, the Fur resisted Mahdist rule in Darfur, the last of whom was Ali Dinar Zakariya. When the Anglo-Egyptian army defeated the forces of the Khalifa at the Battle of Karari in 1898 to end the Mahdists state, he restored his authority over the sultanate. For the next eighteen years Ali Dinar ruled at El Fasher, his independence tolerated by the British in Khartoum while the French advanced from the west, conquering Wadai in 1909. At the outbreak of World War I Ali Dinar allied himself with the Ottoman Empire, which precipitated the Anglo-Egyptian invasion of the sultanate. Ali Dinar was killed, and with him ended the kingdom of Darfur.
Wadai (c. Sixteenth Century-1909;
Also Waday, Ouadai, Oueddai)
The kingdom of Wadai was founded by the Tunjur as they moved westward from Darfur. They were eventually driven farther west into Kanem by the Maba under their historic leader Ibrahim Abd al-Karim (c.1611-1655). He built his capital at Wara, introduced Islam, and founded the Kolak dynasty, which ruled Wadai until 1915.
After his death the history of Wadai was characterized by desultory civil wars, hostile relations with Darfur and Bornu, and the development of a hierarchical aristocracy. Islam was the state religion, but its dissemination among the cultivators and herders was casual, the subjects of the kolak observing their traditional religious practices. The resources of the state came from the trade in slaves and the ability of its slave-raiding expeditions to supply the trans-Saharan caravans. The expanding economy was accompanied by more able sultans in the nineteenth century. ‘Abd al-Karim Sabun (r. 1805-1815) promoted Islam, controlled commerce, and equipped his army with chain mail and firearms to raid and plunder Baguirmi and Bornu. After his death, Wadai was plunged into internecine strife that enabled the Sultan of Darfur to intervene in 1838 and install the younger brother of Sabun, Muhammad al-Sharif (r.1838-1858), in return for loyalty and tribute. Muhammad al-Sharif did not remain a puppet. He formed a close alliance with Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Sanusi, whom he had met in Mecca, embraced the Sanusi order, and profited from their control of the new eastern trade route through the Sanusi strongholds of Jalu and Kufra. He founded a new capital at Abeche (Abeshr), from which he tightly controlled the Sanusi merchants and their commerce. His successors, protected and prospered by their connections with the Sanusiyya, imported firearms that enabled them to expand their influence in Bornu and continue their intervention in Baguirmi.
In 1846 the sultan defeated the army of the shehu of Bornu, sacked the capital Kukawa, and enforced the tributary status of Bagirmi. Relations with Darfur degenerated into inconclusive razzia (raid and counterraid). Muhammad al-Sharif was succeeded by his two sons, ‘Ali ibn Muhammad Sharif (r. 1858-1874) and Yusuf ibn Muhammad Sharif (r.1874-1898), both of whom enjoyed long, stable, and prosperous reigns that enabled them to increase trade and expand the state. The death of Yusuf in 1898 ironically coincided with the return of ‘Ali Dinar to El Fasher to rejuvenate the sultanate of Darfur and to intervene in the succession struggles in Wadai. His candidate, Ahmad al-Ghazali, was enthroned only to be assassinated and replaced by the Sanusi candidate, Muhammad Salih, the son of Yusuf, known as Dud Murra, “the lion of Murra.” Dud Murra repaid the Sanusiyya by allowing free trade for Sanusi merchants. In 1906 the French initiated an aggressive policy against the Wadai complete with a puppet sultan, Adam Asil, a grandson of Sultan Muhammad al-Sharif. On June 2, 1909, Abeche fell to a French military column. Dud Murra fled to the Sanusiyya, Asil was proclaimed sultan, and the French prepared to conquer and confirm French sovereignty over the tributary vassals of Wadai.
Robert O. Collins
See also: Central Africa, Northern: Slave Raiding.
Further Reading
Bj0rkel0, A. J. State and Society in Three Central Sudanic Kingdoms: Kanem-Bornu, Bagirmi, and Wadai. Bergen, Norway: University of Bergen Press, 1976.
Kapteijins, L., and J. Spaulding. After the Millennium: Diplomatic Correspondence from Wadai and Dar Fur on the Eve of
Colonial Conquest, 1885-1916. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1988.
Lampen, G. D. “The History of Darfur.” Sudan Notes and Records 31, no. 2 (1950): pp.177-209.
Lavers, J. E. “An Introduction to the History of Bagirmi c. 1500-1800.” Annals of Borno, no. 1 (1983): pp.29-44.
Reyna, S. P. Wars without End: The Political Economy of a Pre-Colonial African State. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990.
World History
