Idris Alooma

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.

Borno reaches its apogee under mai Idris Alooma (ca. 1569-1600), during whose reign Kanem is reconquered.

As a result of his campaigns, several Hausa cities, including Kano and Katsina, become tributaries.

The destruction of Songhai leaves Borno uncontested as an imperial force, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Borno continues to dominate the political history of northern Nigeria.

Now Borno becomes the center of Islamic learning and trade.

Its capital at Birni Gazargamu, on the Komadugu Yobe River that flows eastward into Lake Chad, is well situated in the midst of a prosperous agricultural district.

Textile production is a mainstay of its economy.

Borno also controls extensive salt deposits, which supply its most important export to the west and south.

These reserves are located at Bilma and Fachi in the Sahara, in the districts of Mangari and Muniyo adjacent to Birni Gazargamu, and on the northeastern shores of Lake Chad.

Despite Borno's hegemony, the Hausa states wrestle for ascendancy among themselves for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Gobir, Katsina, Zamfara, Kano, Kebbi, and Zaria form various alliances, but only Zamfara ceases to exist as an autonomous state, falling to Gobir in the eighteenth century.

Borno collects tribute from Kano and Katsina, and its merchants dominate the trade routes that pass through Hausaland.

Gradually, however, Borno's position begins to weaken.

Its inability to check the political rivalries of the competing Hausa cities is one example of this decline.

Another factor is the military threat of the Tuareg, whose warriors, centered at Agades in the center of present-day Nigeria, penetrate the northern districts of Borno.

They even divert the salt trade of Bilma and Fachi from Birni Gazargamu.

Tuareg military superiority depends upon camels, which also are used to transport salt and dates to the savanna.

The major cause of Borno's decline is a severe drought and famine that strikes the whole Sahel and savanna from Senegal to Ethiopia in the middle of the eighteenth century.

There had been periodic droughts before—two serious droughts, one of seven years' duration, had hit Borno in the seventeenth century—but the great drought of the 1740s and 1750s probably causes the most severe famine that the Sahel has known over the past several hundred years, including that of the 1970s.

As a consequence of the mid-eighteenth century drought, Borno loses control of much of its northern territories to the Tuareg, whose mobility allows them the flexibility to deal with famine conditions through war and plunder.

Borno regains some of its former might in the succeeding decades, but another drought occurs in the 1790s, again weakening the state.