Middle Africa (1252–1395 CE): Dynastic Turmoil, Bilala Incursions, and the Emergence of Borno

Between 1252 and 1395 CE, Middle Africa—encompassing modern Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Congo, and Angola including its Cabinda enclave—experiences intense dynastic turmoil, devastating external incursions, and significant political realignments focused primarily on the Kanem Empire.

Dynastic Instability and Internal Strife in Kanem

Following the zenith under Mai Dunama Dabbalemi (ca. 1221–1259), the Kanem Empire falls into prolonged instability and internal conflict. The previously established practice of granting military commanders governance over conquered peoples increasingly evolves from merit-based positions to hereditary titles. This shift weakens central authority and fosters deep internal divisions, exacerbating rivalries within the ruling Sayfawa Dynasty. Following Dabbalemi’s death, dynastic feuds escalate into widespread civil war, fracturing Kanem and severely diminishing its imperial cohesion.

Bilala Incursions and the Shift to Borno

Towards the latter half of the 14th century, Kanem faces intense pressure from external forces. The Bilala, originating east near Lake Fitri, conduct repeated raids and invasions. Between 1376 and 1400, they prove particularly devastating, killing five of the six reigning mais during this period. These relentless assaults and ongoing dynastic conflicts culminate around 1380, when Mai Umar Idrismi is compelled to abandon Njimi, Kanem’s capital.

In a dramatic geographic and political shift, Idrismi and the Kanembu people relocate westward to Borno, establishing themselves on the western fringes of Lake Chad. This migration significantly reshapes regional demographics, with the intermarriage between Kanembu settlers and local inhabitants giving rise to a new ethnic and linguistic group—the Kanuri.

Persistent Instability in Early Borno

The establishment of the Kanuri in Borno does not immediately resolve the dynasty’s instability. The Sayfawa Dynasty remains plagued by internal power struggles, demonstrated by rapid leadership turnovers throughout the remainder of the 14th century. The continuous internal feuds hamper any effective consolidation or administration, leaving the region politically fragmented and vulnerable.

Southern Shifts and Bantu Expansions

While northern political upheavals dominate this period, southern Middle Africa witnesses ongoing demographic shifts due to the continuing Bantu migrations. Indigenous Khoisan peoples, comprising the hunter-gatherer San and pastoral Khoi, are increasingly displaced into the less fertile and less accessible territories of present-day Angola and the broader southwestern region. These movements reshape the region’s cultural and ethnic landscapes profoundly, influencing interactions and sociopolitical developments for generations to come.

This era thus marks a critical transitional phase in Middle Africa’s history, characterized by shifting political centers, dynastic instability, external pressures, and transformative migrations that significantly shape the future cultural and political trajectory of the region.

The intermarriage of the Kanembu and Borno peoples creates a new people and language, the Kanuri, but even in Borno, the Sayfawa Dynasty’s troubles persist.

For example, fifteen mais occupy the throne during the first three-quarters of the fifteenth century.

Then, around 1472, Mai Ali Dunamami defeats his rivals and begins the consolidation of Borno.

He builds a fortified capital at Ngazargamu, to the west of Lake Chad (in present-day Niger), the first permanent home a Sayfawa mai has enjoyed in a century.

So successful is the Sayfawa rejuvenation that by the early sixteenth century the Bilala are defeated and Njimi retaken.

The empire’s leaders, however, remain at Ngazargamu because its lands are more productive agriculturally and better suited to the raising of cattle.

The Hausa states that had developed in the Sahel zone of Western Africa have become one of Africa's major powers.

Closely linked with the Kanuri people of Kanem-Bornu (Lake Chad) the the northeast, the Hausa aristocracy had adopted Islam in the eleventh century CE.

The architecture of the Hausa is perhaps one of the least known but most beautiful of the medieval age.

Many of their early mosques and palaces are bright and colorful and often include intricate engraving or elaborate symbols designed into the facade.

Middle Africa (1396–1539 CE): Equatorial Forests, River Corridors, and Atlantic Horizons

Geographic & Environmental Context

The subregion of Middle Africa includes Chad, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola.Anchors include the Congo River basin and its tributaries (Ubangi, Kasai), the Gulf of Guinea islands (São Tomé, Príncipe), the Atlantic mangrove–estuary belt, the Cameroon Highlands, and the northern savanna–Sahel fringetoward Lake Chad. This is a world where dense evergreen forests yield to mosaics of woodland, floodplain, and savanna, threaded by some of Earth’s most voluminous rivers.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

The Little Ice Age introduced modest cooling and shifts in rainfall seasonality. Equatorial belts retained high annual precipitation, but interannual variability—longer dry seasons in some decades, intensified rains in others—reshaped farming calendars and fish runs. Along the Atlantic coast, estuaries and mangroves buffered storm surges; inland, floodplains rose and fell with the Congo’s pulse, redistributing soils and fisheries.

Subsistence & Settlement

Households combined shifting cultivation (sorghum, pearl millet on northern fringes; plantain, yam, taro, and bananas in forest belts) with cassava’s gradual spread (accelerating later, but present in pockets by this era), plus oil palm, legumes, gourds, and leafy greens. Riverine and lacustrine fisheries furnished key protein; forest hunting and gathering (duiker, bushpig, wild fruits, kola, honey) remained integral. Settlement patterns ranged from riverside towns and hill-foot villages to dispersed hamlets along canoe routes and forest paths. In the far north, Lake Chad basincommunities practiced flood-recession farming and herding.

Technology & Material Culture

Ironworking thrived: hoes, axes, knives, and spearheads supplied farms and hunting; blacksmiths held ritual esteem. Canoe carpentry produced long dugouts for river trade; basketry and pottery stored grain and palm oil. In forest polities, raffia textiles, barkcloth, and beadwork marked status. Copper and salt circulated from regional sources; carved ivories and wood sculpture expressed courtly and ritual aesthetics. Early coastal contacts brought small quantities of European cloth and metal goods by the early 16th century, but inland systems remained largely endogenous.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

The Congo–Kasai–Ubangi waterways were the great arteries, moving palm oil, salt, fish, smoked meat, raffia cloth, and ironware among river towns. Overland paths crossed the Mayombe and Plateaux Batéké, linking forest and savanna markets. To the north, caravan paths brushed the Sahel–Lake Chad edge, exchanging salt, kola, and textiles. From the late 15th century, Atlantic corridors opened: Portuguese ships probed the Kongo–Angola littoral, touching São Tomé and Príncipe (colonized as sugar and way-stations) and forging ties with coastal polities near the Congo estuary and Angola.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

Political authority ranged from acephalous village federations to centralized courts. Along the lower Congo, the Kingdom of Kongo—a regional power by the late 15th century—projected influence through provincial lineages, tribute, and ritual kingship. Across forest belts, initiation societies structured life stages; masked dances, ancestor shrines, and sacred groves anchored moral order. Praise poetry and drum speech memorialized rulers and genealogies; sculptural arts (ivory, wood) encoded sovereignty and cosmology. Northward, Sahel–savanna Islam brushed Middle Africa’s margins via traders and scholars, without displacing local ritual life.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Farming systems hedged risk through multicropping, staggered planting, and field rotation; fallow cycles regenerated soils. Floodplain agriculture followed river pulses; smoked fish and dried grains bridged hungry seasons. Forest households balanced gardens with foraging and hunting, guided by ritual taboos that conserved keystone species. In drier zones, mobile herding and dry-season wells buffered drought. Trade networks redistributed surpluses after crop failure, while kinship and initiation societies mobilized labor for clearing, house-building, and canal/landing-site upkeep.

Transition

By 1539 CE, Middle Africa was interlaced by river trade and forest pathways, with Kongo ascendant on the lower river and Atlantic contact growing at coastal nodes and on São Tomé and Príncipe. Inland subsistence systems remained resilient and diverse; courtly and village religions flourished; blacksmiths, canoe builders, and ritual specialists sustained everyday life. The next age would tighten the Atlantic hinge—sugar, Christianity at Kongo’s court, and an accelerating slave trade—reshaping corridors that had long run with the current of the Congo.

Borno's history is closely associated with Kanem, which had achieved imperial status in the Lake Chad basin by the thirteenth century.

Kanem expanded westward to include the area that became Borno.

Its dynasty, the Sayfawa, was descended from pastoralists who had settled in the Lake Chad region in the seventh century.

The mai (king) of Kanem ruled in conjunction with a council of peers as a constitutional monarch.

In the eleventh century, the mai and his court accepted Islam, as the western empires also had done.

Islam is used to reinforce the political and social structures of the state, although many established customs are maintained.

Women, for example, continue to exercise considerable political influence.

The mai had employed his mounted bodyguard, composed of abid (slave-soldiers), and an inchoate army of nobles to extend Kanem's authority into Borno, on the western shore of Lake Chad.

By tradition the territory was conferred on the heir to the throne to govern during his apprenticeship.

In the fourteenth century, however, dynastic conflict forced the then-ruling group and its followers to relocate in Borno, where as a result the Kanuri emerged as an ethnic group in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The civil war that disrupted Kanem in the second half of the fourteenth century resulted in the independence of Borno.

Borno's prosperity depends on its stake in the trans-Sudanic slave trade and the desert trade in salt and livestock.

The need to protect its commercial interests compels Borno to intervene in Kanem, which continues to be a theater of war throughout the fifteenth and into the sixteenth centuries.

Despite its relative political weakness in this period, Borno's court and mosques under the patronage of a line of scholarly kings earn fame as centers of Islamic culture and learning.

Some of the Hausa states—such as those at Kano, Katsina, and Gobir—had developed by the eleventh century into walled towns that engaged in trade and serviced caravans as well as manufactured cloth and leather goods.

Millet, sorghum, sugarcane, and cotton were produced in the surrounding countryside, which also provides grazing land for cattle.

Until the fifteenth century, the small Hausa states were on the periphery of the major empires of the era.

According to tradition, the Hausa rulers descend  from a "founding hero" named Bayinjida, supposedly of Middle Eastern origin, who became sarki (king) of Daura after subduing a snake and marrying the queen of Daura.

Their children founded the other Hausa towns, which traditionally are referred to as the Hausa bakwai (Hausa seven).

Wedged in among the stronger Sudanic kingdoms, each of the Hausa states has acquired special military, economic, or religious functions.

No one state dominates the others, but at various times different states assume a leading role.

They are under constant pressure from Songhai to the west and Kanem-Borno to the east, to which they pay tribute.

Armed conflict usually is motivated by economic concerns, as coalitions of Hausa states mount wars against the Jukun and Nupe in the middle belt to collect slaves, or against one another for control of important trade routes.

Commerce is in the hands of commoners.

Within the cities, trades are organized through guilds, each of which is self-regulating and collects taxes from its members to be transmitted to the sarki as a pledge of loyalty.

In return, the king guarantees the security of the guild's trade.

The surrounding countryside produces grain for local consumption and cotton and hides for processing.

Islam was introduced to Hausaland along the caravan routes.

The famous Kano Chronicle records the conversion of Kano's ruling dynasty by clerics from Mali, demonstrating that the imperial influence of Mali extended far to the east.

Acceptance of Islam was gradual and was often nominal in the countryside, where folk religion continues to exert a strong influence.

Non-Islamic practices also are retained in the court ceremonies of the Hausa kings.

Nonetheless, Kano and Katsina, with their famous mosques and schools, come to participate fully in the cultural and intellectual life of the Islamic world.

Fulbe pastoralists, known in Nigeria as Fulani, begin to enter the Hausa country in the thirteenth century, and by the fifteenth century they are tending cattle, sheep, and goats in Borno as well.

The Fulani come from the Senegal River valley, where their ancestors had developed a method of livestock management and specialization based on transhumance.

The movement of cattle along north-south corridors in pursuit of grazing and water follows the climatic pattern of the rainy and dry seasons.

Gradually, the pastoralists move eastward, first into the centers of the Mali and Songhai empires and eventually into Hausaland and Borno.

Some Fulbe had converted to Islam in the Senegal region as early as the eleventh century, and one group of Muslim Fulani had settled in the cities and mingled freely with the Hausa, from whom they have become racially indistinguishable.

Here, they constitute a devoutly religious, educated elite who have made themselves indispensable to the Hausa kings as government advisers, Islamic judges, and teachers.

Other Fulani, the lighter-skinned pastoral nomads, remain aloof from the Hausa and in some measure from Islam as well, herding cattle outside the cities and seeking pastures for their herds.

Kanem-Borno peaks during the reign of the outstanding statesman Mai Idris Alooma (ca. 1571-1603).

Alooma (also spelled Aluma or Alwma) is remembered for his military skills, administrative reforms, and Islamic piety.

His main adversaries are the Hausa to the west, the Tuareg and Toubou to the north, and the Bilala to the east.
 
One epic poem extols his victories in three hundred and thirty wars and more than a thousand battles.

His innovations include the employment of fixed military camps (with walls); permanent sieges and “scorched earth” tactics, where soldiers burn everything in their path; armored horses and riders and the use of Berber camel cavalry, Kotoko boatmen, and iron-helmeted musketeers trained by Turkish military advisers.

His active diplomacy features relations with Tripoli, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire, which sends a two hundred-member ambassadorial party across the desert to Alooma’s court at Ngazargamu.  

Alooma also signs what is probably the first written treaty or cease-fire in Chadian history.  (Like many cease-fires that will be negotiated in the 1970s and 1980s, it is promptly broken.)

Alooma introduces a number of legal and administrative reforms based on his religious beliefs and Islamic law(sharia).

He sponsors the construction of numerous mosques and makes a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he arranges for the establishment of a hostel to be used by pilgrims from his empire.

As with other dynamic politicians, Aluooma's reformist goals lead him to seek loyal and competent advisers and allies, and he frequently relies on slaves who had been educated n noble homes.

Alma regularly seeks advice from a council composed of heads of the most important clans.

He requires major political figures to live at the court, and he reinforces political alliances through appropriate marriages (Alooma himself is the son of a Kanuri father and a Bilala mother).

Kanem-Borno under Alooma was strong and wealthy.

Government revenue comes from tribute (or booty, if the recalcitrant people have to be conquered), sales of slaves, and duties on and participation in trans-Saharan trade.

Unlike West Africa, the Chadian region does not have gold.

Still, it is central to one of the most convenient trans-Saharan routes.

Between Lake Chad and Fezzan lie a sequence of well-spaced wells and oases, and from Fezzan there are easy connections to North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea.

Many products are sent north, including natron (sodium carbonate), cotton, kola nuts, ivory, ostrich feathers, perfume, wax, and hides, but the most important of all were slaves.

Imports included salt, horses, silks, glass, muskets, and copper.

Alma takes a keen interest in trade and other economic matters.

He is credited with having the roads cleared, designing better boats for Lake Chad, introducing standard units of measure for grain, and moving farmers into new lands.

In addition, he improves the ease and security of transit through the empire with the goal of making it so safe that “a lone woman clad in gold might walk with none to fear but God."

The administrative reforms and military brilliance of Alooma sustains the empire until the mid-1600s, when its power begins to fade.

The political history of northern Nigeria attains a high point in the sixteenth century.

During this period, the Songhai Empire reaches its greatest limits, stretching from the Senegal and Gambia rivers in the far west and incorporating part of Hausaland in the east.

At the same time, the Sayfawa Dynasty of Borno asserts itself, conquering Kanem and extending its control westward to Hausa cities that are not under Songhai imperial rule.

For almost a century, much of northern Nigeria is part of one or the other of these empires, and after the 1590s Borno dominates the region for two hundred years.

The influence of Songhai collapses abruptly in 1591, when an army from Morocco crosses the Sahara and conquers the capital city of Gao and the commercial center of Timbuktu.

Morocco is not able to control the whole empire, and the various provinces, including the Hausa states, become independent.

The collapse undermines Songhai' s commercial and religious hegemony over the Hausa states and abruptly alters the course of history in the region.

Songhai's sway over western Hausaland includes the subordination of Kebbi, whose kanta (king) controls the territory along the Sokoto River.

Katsina and Gobir also pay tribute to Songhai, while Songhai merchants dominate the trade of the Hausa towns.

It is at this time that the overland trade in kola nuts from the Akan forests of modern Ghana is initiated.

Largely because of Songhai's influence, there is a remarkable blossoming of Islamic learning and culture.

The influence of Songhai collapses abruptly in 1591, when an army from Morocco crosses the Sahara and conquers the capital city of Gao and the commercial center of Timbuktu.

Morocco is not able to control the whole empire, and the various provinces, including the Hausa states, become independent.

The collapse undermines Songhai's commercial and religious hegemony over the Hausa states and abruptly alters the course of history in the region.