Wadai Sultanate

The Wadai Sultanate, the Ouaddai Empire, was the Muslim sultanate east of Lake Chad in today's Chad and Central African Republic, ruling from Abéché from 1635 to 1909. Abd al-Karim, first sultan, rallied the Maba and small peoples to Islam's banner, overthrew the Tunjur kingdom of the fifteenth century, and made a branch of Darfur into a power between Darfur itself and Baguirmi. Its sultans took the title Kolak and governed the great wadi towns between desert and savanna, tributary of Darfur through the seventeenth century, rich in slave raids amid Bornu and Darfur wars, till Sabun expanded it after 1804. Tunjur storytellers say their Darfur founder's two sons divided the inheritance, Kanjar keeping Darfur and Musa taking Wadai with Mahamid spears, and the later Islamizing of old heroes for legitimacy sealed the dynasty's right. Wadai outlasted the caravan centuries into the colonial age, ending in 1909 after two hundred seventy-four years.