Kanem, Bornu and the Hausa States

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   This is part of my own initiative to open up more topics on areas that are under-represented in the forum, in this case the history of Africa.
This topic's introduction, along with the other ones, is pulled from the webiste of one of our members, Berosus, who has this site below. I find his entries on Middle-Eastern history somewhat arguable (since he's writing from a Biblical viewpoint), but his articles on the history of the rest of the world are quite good.
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/
And now, the feature article:

Kanem, Bornu and the Hausa States
A different kind of kingdom arose in the eastern Sahel, one which depended on agriculture and warfare more than trade, though trade remained important. It was also the longest-lived of the Sahel states, lasting for a thousand years, despite a complete relocation from one side of Lake Chad to the other. 
We mentioned in Chapter 1 how Lake Chad was the only body of water that survived the drying out of the Sahara Desert. After that it served as a crossroads, being both the largest oasis and the best place to stop at on the way between the Nile valley and West Africa. In the ninth century A.D., one tribe in the area, the Zaghawa, prose to prominence over the others, and it was organized enough to found the kingdom of Kanem, north and east of Lake Chad, with its capital at the desert town of Manan. 
No records survive from Kanem's first two centuries. In the eleventh century, another tribe, the Kanuri, took charge; their ruling dynasty was called the Saifawa. The first Saifawa mai (king), Umme ibn 'Abdul-Jalil (1086-98), is credited with introducing Islam to the kingdom. He may have been Kanem's first Moslem king, but we don't know what sort of inroads Islam had made before his reign, so we have to take the Islamic claim with a bit of caution. 
Umme and his successors moved the capital to Nijmi, which was closer to Lake Chad. They attempted to dominate the Fezzan district of the Sahara, which meant controlling the caravan routes that passed through the Fezzan. For the trans-Saharan trade Kanem provided textiles, salt, and later on slaves, in return for copper, weapons and horses. However, the main interest of the mais seems to have been with the sedentary farmers on Lake Chad's shore. By marrying into agricultural families, and by making their crops the primary commodity sold to traders, they hoped to make the farmers rich enough to afford the upkeep of a standing army. This army was not a group of warriors on foot, armed only with spears and shields (the African norm), but men on horseback, covered with chainmail and wielding lances. Because these cavalrymen got their support from an agricultural base, much like the feudal system of Europe, it is appropriate to call them African knights. Originally the plan was to reward military commanders by putting them in charge of the people they conquered, but soon officers bequeathed their jobs to their sons, transforming the office from one based on achievement and loyalty to the mai, into one that automatically went to members of a hereditary nobility. 
Kanem saw its best years under Mai Dunama II Dubalemi (1221-59). The royal chronicle of Kanem portrayed Dubalemi as a pious Moslem, who restored pure Islam in the kingdom after a lax period under his predecessors; apparently, the mais of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had tolerated non-Moslem customs, which included giving political power to the queen mother and other women of the court. In addition, Dubalemi launched a series of jihads in all directions: north into the Fezzan, west as far as Hausaland, east to Darfur, and south as far as the Adamawa grasslands in Cameroon. Still, it is best to draw dotted lines on a map of Africa to show how influential Kanem really was; the farther one got from Nijmi, the more likely it was that the locals would give only minimal allegiance to the mai, and nomads were likely to escape paying tribute altogether. To the south, expansion had to stop where the grasslands of the Sahel gave way to the equatorial jungles, because forests of any kind cancel out much of the advantage of having cavalry. 
The people living south of Lake Chad were still unconverted, so they provided the largest source of slaves to sell to the Arabs; we'll be hearing a lot more about this disturbing practice in future chapters. Dubalemi also took credit for destroying the mune, a mysterious object held in reverence by pagans and believed to possess supernatural powers. Finally, Dubalemi founded a madrasa and hostel in Cairo for Kanuri citizens living in Egypt and/or traveling to Mecca, as well as an embassy in Tunis. 
Dubalemi left an overextended kingdom, which came undone during the century and a half after his death. There were several reasons for this: rivalry among Dubalemi's sons, many of which had been appointed to high positions; rebellion from Kanem's non-Moslem subjects, avenging the destruction of their sacred symbol (the mune); and relative poverty whenever peace broke out or a battle was lost, because the military brought in much of the kingdom's wealth. The biggest threat, however, came from the Bulala, a clan that had split off from the Kanuri tribe and now contested with the Saifawas for leadership. At the end of the fourteenth century, internal struggles and external attacks tore Kanem apart. Between 1387 and 1400, six mais reigned, of which the Bulala killed five. 
One of the kings at this time, Umar I (1393-98), became a refugee; he abandoned Kanem to the Bulala, and moved to the lands southwest of Lake Chad (northeastern Nigeria), taking the Kanuri people with him. There he established a new kingdom named Bornu, but trouble followed him there. The Bulala continued to make raids from Kanem, and the So, a Chadic tribe already living in the area, resisted the newcomers, to avoid losing their ethnic identity to assimilation (the So had been the target of Kanuri raiders in the past, when they went looking for slaves). There also was more infighting within the Saifawa dynasty, to the point that one prince went into exile, living at Kano in the 1420s. The fifteenth century would be more than half over before this "time of troubles" ended for the Saifawas in Bornu. 
Kanem-Bornu usually got along well with its neighbor to the west, the Hausa of northwestern Nigeria. Traditionally the Hausa were divided between seven city-states: Kano, Rano, Katsina, Zazzau (Zaria), Gobir, Kebbi, and Auyo. Like the Swahili on Africa's east coast, the Hausa were never united, but because of their success as traders, they were influential over a wide area, in this case the lands between the Niger River and Lake Chad. 
Though we classify the Hausa as a Chadic tribe, their actual origin is unknown. Some scholars believe their ancestors migrated from the Sahara; others believe they came from Lake Chad; still others believe they were indigenous, always living where we see them now. Hausa legend asserts that their founder was an exiled Arab prince named Bayajidda. He married the queen of Daura and had a son named Bawo, who in turn had seven sons; each grandson is identified as the first ruler of a Hausa kingdom. Of these kingdoms, Kano was usually the most important, and probably the oldest; our chief source of Hausa history, a nineteenth-century work in Arabic called the Kano Chronicle, begins listing kings of Kano in 998 A.D. However, even if the Bayajidda story is true, it doesn't rule out the possibility that Kano existed as a village previously. Indeed, the Kano Chronicle describes a struggle that went on for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries between the kings, who wanted to build walled cities, and the native priests who had been the traditional rulers of the area. These priests got their power from sacred groves and shrines in rural locations, so they saw urbanization as a threat; the kings had to capture or destroy all the holy places before they could rule without opposition. 
However they got started, the seven city-states became strong trading centers between 1000 and 1350. Typically each one was surrounded by a wall and had a mixed economy of intensive farming, cattle raising, craft making, and later slave trading. The monarchs enjoyed less power than the kings of the Sahel super-states; many were probably elected, and most of the time they acted as a referee over a network of feudal lords. 
Islam must have been familiar to the Hausa from an early date, due to Moslem merchants and other visitors, but it took longer to convert the kings here than it did in Mali or Kanem-Bornu. The first king identified as a practicing Moslem was Yaji I of Kano (1349-85), and because he captured Santolo, the last of the traditional religious centers, the chronicler of Yaji's reign described the conflict between city and countryside as a jihad against paganism. However, Yaji and his successors remained willing, perhaps too willing, to accommodate traditional beliefs and their followers. They probably did this because political relationships were complex in Hausaland, and the king, unlike a Bornu mai, was powerless without the cooperation of his warriors and subjects, many of whom remained non-Moslem until the Fulani conquest of 1807. 