Baggara
Culture | Active
1635 CE to 2215 CE
The Baggāra are a grouping of Arab ethnic groups inhabiting the portion of Africa's Sahel mainly between Lake Chad and southern Kordofan, numbering over one million.
They are known as Baggara in Sudan, and as Shuwa/Diffa Arabs in Chad and Africa.
Their name derives from the Arabic word literally meaning "cattle herder".
They have a common language, Shuwa Arabic, which is one of the regional varieties of Arabic.
They also have a common traditional mode of subsistence, nomadic cattle herding, although nowadays many lead a settled existence.
Nevertheless, collectively they do not all necessarily consider themselves one people, i.e., a single ethnic group.
The term "baggara culture" is introduced in 1994 by Braukämper.
The political use of term "baggara" in Sudan denoting a particular set of tribes is limited to Sudan.
It often means a coalition of majority Arabs and a few indigenous African tribes (mainly Fur, Nuba and Fallata) with other Arab tribes of western Sudan (mainly Guhayna), as opposed to Bedouin Abbala Arab tribes.
The bulk of "baggara Arabs" live in Chad, the rest live, or seasonally migrate to, southwest Sudan (specifically the southern portions of Darfur and Kordofan), and slivers of the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Niger.
Those who are still nomads migrate seasonally between grazing lands in the wet season and river areas in the dry season.
Their common language is known to academics by various names, such as Chadian Arabic, taken from the regions where the language is spoken.
For much of the twentieth century, this language is known to academics as "Shuwa Arabic", but "Shuwa" is a geographically and socially parochial term that has fallen into disuse among linguists specializing in the language, who instead refer to it as "Chadian Arabic" depending on the origin of the native speakers being consulted for a given academic project.
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His campaign eventually affects Kanem-Borno and inspires a trend toward Islamic orthodoxy, but Muhammad al Kanemi contests the Fulani advance.
Kanemi is a Muslim scholar and non-Sayfawa warlord who has put together an alliance of Shuwa Arabs, Kanembu, and other seminomadic peoples.
He eventually builds a capital at Kukawa (in present-day Nigeria).
Bagirmi and Wadai, in addition to Kanem-Borno, are prominent in the region of modern Chad.
The kingdom of Bagirmi had emerged to the southeast of Kanem-Borno in the sixteenth century.
Under the reign of Abdullah IV (1568-98), Islam was adopted, and the state became a sultanate, using Islamic judicial and administrative procedures.
Later, a palace and court were constructed in the capital city of Massenya.
Bagirmi 's political history is a function of its strength and unity in relation to its larger neighbors.
Absorbed into Kanem-Borno during the reign of Aluma, Bagirmi had broken free later in the 1600s, only to be returned to tributary status in the mid-1700s.
During periods of strength, the sultanate becomes imperialistic.
It establishes control over small feudal kingdoms on its peripheries and enters into alliances with nearby nomadic peoples.
Early in the nineteenth century, Bagirmi falls into decay and is threatened militarily by the nearby kingdom of Wadai.
Although Bagirmi resists, it accepts tributary status in order to obtain help from Wadai in putting down internal dissension.
When Rabih Fadlallah 's forces burn Massenya in 1893, the twenty-fifth sultan, Abd ar Rahman Gwaranga, will seek and receive protectorate status from the French.
The sultanate of Wadai had begun to expand its power in about 1800, during the reign of Sabun.
A new trade route north—via Ennedi, Al Kufrah, and Benghazi—had been discovered, and Sabun had outfitted royal caravans to take advantage of it.
He began minting his own coinage and imported chain mail, firearms, and military advisers from North Africa.
Sabun's successors are less able than he, and Darfur had taken took advantage of a disputed political succession in 1838 to put its own candidate in power in Ouara, the capital of Wadai.
This tactic backfires, however, when Darfur' s choice, Muhammad Sharif, rejects Darfur's meddling and asserts his own authority.
In doing so, he gains acceptance from Wadai's various factions and goes on to become Wadai's ablest ruler.
Sharif conducts military campaigns as far west as Borno and eventually establishes Wadai's hegemony over Bagirmi and kingdoms as far away as the Chari River.
In Mecca, Sharif had met the founder of the Senussi Islamic brotherhood, a movement that is strong among the inhabitants of Cyrenaica (in present-day Libya) and that will become a dominant political force and source of resistance to French colonization.
Indeed, the militaristic Wadai will oppose French domination until well into the twentieth century.
Wadai, located northeast of Bagirmi, is a non-Muslim kingdom that had emerged in the sixteenth century as an offshoot of the state of Darfur (in present-day western Sudan).
Early in the seventeenth century, the Maba and other small groups in the region had rallied to the Islamic banner of Abd al Karim, who led an invasion from the east and overthrew the ruling Tunjur group.
Abd al Karim had established a dynasty and sultanate that will last until the arrival of the French.
During much of the eighteenth century, Wadai had resisted reincorporation into Darfur.
Sayfawa mais remain titular monarchs of Kanem-Borno until 1846, when the last mai, in league with Wadai tribesmen, precipitate a civil war.
It is at this point that Muhammad al-Kânemî's son, Umar, becomes king, thus ending one of the longest dynastic reigns in regional history.
Although the dynasty ends, the kingdom of Kanem-Borno survives, but Umar, who eschews the title mai for the simpler designation shehu (from the Arabic "shaykh"), cannot match his father's vitality and gradually allows the kingdom to be ruled by advisers (wazirs).
Borno begins to decline, as a result of administrative disorganization, regional particularism, and attacks by the militant Wadai Empire to the east.
The decline will continue under Umar's sons, and in 1893 Rabih Fadlallah, leading an invading army from eastern Sudan, will conquer Borno.
Thereafter, authorities have sold licenses to private traders who compete with government slave raids.
In 1854 Cairo ends state participation in the slave trade and in 1860, in response to European pressure, prohibits the slave trade altogether.
However, the Egyptian army fails to enforce the prohibition against the private armies of the slave traders.
The introduction of steamboats and firearms enables slave traders to overwhelm local resistance and prompts the creation of southern "bush empires" by Baqqara Arabs.
In 1865 the Ottoman Empire cedes the Red Sea coast and its ports to Egypt; two years later, the Ottoman sultan grants Isma'il the title of khedive (sovereign prince).
Egypt organizes and garrisons the new provinces of Upper Nile, Bahr al-Ghazal, and Equatoria and, in 1874, conquers and annexes Darfur.
Isma'il names Europeans to provincial governorships and appoints Sudanese to more responsible government positions.
Responding to British pressure, Isma'il takes steps to eliminate the slave trade in Northern Sudan.
Attempts to build an army on the European model that will no longer depend on slaves for manpower, however, causes unrest.
Army units mutiny, and many Sudanese resent the quartering of troops among the civilian population and the use of Sudanese forced labor on public projects.
Efforts to suppress the slave trade also anger the urban merchant class and the Baqqara Arabs, who have grown prosperous by selling slaves.
In 1871 he named a notorious Arab slave trader, Rahina Mansur al-Zubayr, as governor of the newly created province of Bahr al-Ghazal.
Al-Zubayr had used his army to pacify the province and to eliminate his competition in the slave trade.
In 1874 he had invaded Darfur, then offered the region as a province to the khedive.
Later that year, al-Zubayr had defied Cairo when the khedive attempted to relieve him of his post and had defeated an Egyptian force sent to oust him.
Gordon, after he becomes Sudan's governor-general, ended al-Zubayr's slave trading, disbands his army, and sends him back to Cairo.
Gordon's successors lack direction from Cairo and fear the political turmoil that had engulfed Egypt; consequently, they fail to continue the policies he had put into place.
The illegal slave trade revives, although not sufficiently to satisfy the merchants whom Gordon had put out of business.
The Sudanese army suffers from a lack of resources, and unemployed soldiers from disbanded units trouble garrison towns.
Tax collectors arbitrarily increase taxation.