The Sao towns

Who rules

Name

None known for 1 January 1200

Title

no single ruler: each town under its own ruler

Since

-

Family

Chadic-speaking townspeople, the forerunners of the Kotoko and of peoples absorbed into the Kanuri

Confidence

low

'Sao' (Saw) is the name the Kanuri tradition gives to the earlier peoples of Bornu and the Chari; no ruler, town or treaty of about 1200 is named in writing. The picture of divine town rulers hidden behind a screen, with powerful queen mothers and royal sisters, comes from the later Kotoko principalities and may or may not hold for 1200.

Overlord

None. Raided by Kanem; conquest by Kanem and Bornu came later (Dunama Dibalemi's campaigns after 1210; the last Sao wars under Idris Alooma in the sixteenth century).

What the realm holds

• The mound towns of the lower Logone and Chari (see Kotoko forerunners and the town records)
• The mound towns of the Bornu plains on the Ngadda and Yedseram (see Sao of Bornu)
• Fisheries, flood-retreat farmland and pastures of the clay plains (the firki)

How it was acquired

Long local development; the Gajiganna culture (from about 1800 BC) is often proposed as ancestral.

Allies and rivals

No alliance or war is recorded for 1199-1200. Rival and raider: Kanem, whose horsemen take captives here (see Kanem's southern raiding ground). Neighbours: the Kanembu herders of the north-west shore, the lake islanders, the Mandara hill peoples to the south, the Chari peoples upstream.

The realm that morning

On 1 January 1200 the Sao towns are independent of any recorded overlord, each under its own ruler, raided by Kanem. Kanem's systematic wars against them (Dunama Dibalemi's campaigns reaching Mafoni, now in Maiduguri) begin after 1210.

Wealth

Fish, sorghum, cattle, iron and bronze work, pottery; trade in fish and grain; their people as captives for Kanem's trade.

Military

Walled mounds with ramparts and ditches; town levies. No numbers recorded.

Threats

• Kanem's raids for captives
• The coming wars of Dunama Dibalemi (after 1210)

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

In 1200

1. 1200No dated event recorded; raiding from Kanem likely continues as in other years.Depends on: Kanem's demand for captives. Stopped by: -

Later, on the likely course

1. after about 1210Dunama Dibalemi's campaigns against the Sao, reaching as far as Mafoni (now in Maiduguri).Depends on: Dunama's accession. Stopped by: Sao resistance; Kanem's internal troubles.

Where the sources disagree

• Wikipedia's Sao article dates the culture from about 2000 BC to the 16th century AD, with a peak in the 9th-15th centuries; specific mounds have their own sequences, few of them published with dates near 1200.

Evidence: Archaeology (Daima, Mdaga, Houlouf and the Sao bronzes and terracottas studied by the Lebeufs and Holl) and later Kanuri and Kotoko tradition; no writing of the time.

On the map: The Sao were separate towns, not a state; the colour marks the country of the towns, not a kingdom.

Primary sources for this realm

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• The Diwan of the Sultans of Bornu (the Sayfawa king list) (kept and extended to the nineteenth century; Lange argues its core was first written down in the thirteenth century). A list of the Sayfawa mais with reign lengths, parentage, mothers' names and burial places, and the odd event.
• The Book of Geography, Ibn Said al-Maghribi (Ali ibn Musa ibn Said) (about 1250 to 1275). Written two generations after 1200 but drawing on the travels of Ibn Fatima, a merchant who had been in the Sudan, Ibn Said gives the first clear picture of Kanem as an empire: the mai Dunama Dibalemi (reigned about 1210 to 1248), his capital Njimi, his Muslim subjects and his reach to the Fezzan, Tajuwa and the Zaghawa, with the Sao and other peoples on his borders. Read online