A list of the Sayfawa mais with reign lengths, parentage, mothers' names and burial places, and the odd event. Around 1200 it has Salmama (Abd al-Jalil), father of Dunama Dibalemi, with Dunama's long reign (about 1210 to 1248 in Lange's reckoning) following; the absolute dates depend on counting back from later fixed points and on Arab notices (Ibn Said, al-Maqrizi), so the year 1200 cannot be placed closer than a decade. It is the backbone of Kanem's chronology and the only internal text for the Sayfawa before the sixteenth century.
About this source
- Title
- Diwan salatin Barnu (the Girgam)
- Author
- Anonymous
- Author's dates
- court scribes of Kanem and Bornu
- Written
- kept and extended to the nineteenth century; Lange argues its core was first written down in the thirteenth century
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- the mais of Kanem and Bornu from the ninth or tenth century to the 1840s
- Kind
- Register
Lange's edition is the standard text and is under copyright. Palmer's translations are rough. A Halle (menadoc) scan of Blau's 1852 article is cited on the Wikipedia page but its link now redirects and could not be verified.
Where to read it
Editions
- D. Lange (ed. and tr.), Le Diwan des sultans du (Kanem-)Bornu: chronologie et histoire d'un royaume africain (Wiesbaden, 1977), Arabic text with French translation (not freely online)
Translations
- O. Blau (tr.), Chronik der Sultane von Bornu, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 6 (1852), German, from the abridgement Barth obtained at Kukawa in 1851 (not freely online)
- H. R. Palmer (tr.), The Bornu Girgam, Journal of the African Society 12 (1912), and Sudanese Memoirs, vol. 3 (Lagos, 1928), English (not freely online)