Kanem-Bornu Empire

The Kanem-Bornu Empire was a West African state centered on the Lake Chad basin that endured in one form or another for roughly a thousand years, beginning as the Kanem Empire founded under the Duguwa dynasty around the ninth century and later ruled from the ninth century by the Sayfawa dynasty, which converted to Islam under Mai Umme in the eleventh century. Pressure from rival groups drove the Sayfawa rulers to relocate their capital west of Lake Chad into the Bornu region in the late fourteenth century, and the state reached its greatest strength under Mai Idris Alooma in the late sixteenth century, who reformed the empire's army with firearms and expanded its control over regional trade in salt, textiles and enslaved people across the central Sudanic trade routes. The long-serving Sayfawa dynasty, among the longest-ruling dynasties in African history, eventually weakened, and effective power passed in the early nineteenth century to the Kanemi dynasty founded by the religious scholar Muhammad al-Kanemi. Bornu was conquered by the forces of Rabih az-Zubayr in 1893, and the region was subsequently divided among British, French and German colonial administrations.