Bornu Empire

The Bornu Empire was the Lake Chad empire of the Sayfawa, heir of Kanem, ruling lands now split among Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Libya, Algeria, Sudan and Chad. When fourteenth-century troubles tore Kanem apart, the king and his men crossed to Bornu west of the lake and built anew at Ngazargamu. Fed by slave, salt and livestock roads across the Sahara, Bornu outlasted every neighbour and counts among the longest-lived states of African history. Mai Dunama Dabbalemi opened the pilgrimage roads; Idris Alooma, reigning 1571 to 1603, made the empire's noon: Ottoman musketeers drilled his guard, an Ottoman embassy of two hundred waited on his capital, sharia courts and mosques rose, and his horsemen raided from Fezzan to the Gongola. In 1851 Heinrich Barth copied the Arabic chronicles naming sixty-nine kings from the tenth century. The empire sank in the nineteenth century between Rabih's invasion and the European partition, ending in 1893 after half a millennium.