Dar al Kuti

Dar al-Kuti was an Islamic state in the savanna of what is now the Central African Republic, on the southern frontier of the sultanates of Wadai and Baguirmi. Its name means "abode of the forest". It began around 1830, when Djougoultoum, a prince of Baguirmi who had fled to Wadai, settled in the region south of the Aouk River and made Chá his capital. The state was nominally tributary first to Dar Runga and then to Wadai, but its rulers enjoyed considerable independence and grew wealthy from ivory and slaves. In the 1870s and 1880s the slave raider Rabih az-Zubayr repeatedly intervened; in 1890 he installed Muhammad al-Sanusi as ruler. After Wadai forces destroyed Chá in 1894, al-Sanusi founded a new fortified capital at N'Délé. French expeditions and the advance of colonial troops ended the state's independence, and on 17 December 1912 it was absorbed into French Ubangi-Shari. Its history illustrates the slave-trading frontier states of the central African savanna and their destruction by larger predators and colonial conquest.