Sultanate of Darfur

The Sultanate of Darfur was the Fur sultanate of the eastern Sahara, ruling from El Fasher from the seventeenth century to 1916 with one long interruption. Founded by Sulayman Solon of the Kunjaara house, after the Tunjur Ahmad's sons split Kanjar-Darfur and Musa-Wadai with Mahamid spears, when last Tunjur Shaw, the master-over-us, yielded to half-brother Daali's usurpation, a eunuch of the Uri court, the two peoples claiming kinship, it grew around the Jebel Marra massif between the Sahel and the savanna, hot and dusty, pastoral north and fertile Fur south by tradition. At its late eighteenth-century height it ran from Darfur to Kordofan and the White Nile's west bank. In 1874 the warlord Zubayr took it for Egypt, and the land went twenty-four years without a sultan until Ali Dinar restored the throne in 1898. The British ended the second sultanate in 1916, closing three centuries of Fur kingship in the hills.