When El-Kanemi rose to power after the Fulani jihad, he did not reorganise the ancient kingdom of the Sayfawa dynasty territorially: he only tried to insert his men in the existing framework of the Sayfawa territorial fiefs, the chima chidibe.6 Indeed, according to Dierk Lange, it would be possible to call the
Sayfawa kingdom a centralised state as early as in the sixteenth century.7
4 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations Nègres Et Culture: De l’Antiquité Nègre Égyptienne aux Problèmes Culturels De l’Afrique Noire d’Aujourd’hui, 4th edn (Paris: Présence africaine, 1979).
5 Dierk Lange, ‘The Kingdoms and Peoples of Chad’, in General History of Africa, ed. by Djibril Tamsir Niane (London: Unesco, Heinemann, 1984), pp. 238-265. Since 1984, Dierk Lange has modified his theory for the origins of statehood in Kanem-Borno. According to him, Bornoan statehood was imported from Carthage. See Dierk Lange, ‘The Early Magistrates and Kings of Kanem as Descendants of Assyrian State Builders’, Anthropos, 104 (2009), 3. However, this more recent interpretation of historical facts does not seem as convincing.
6 Louis Brenner, The Shehus of Kukawa: a History of the al-Kanemi Dynasty of Bornu (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1973).
Ronald Cohen argued that the main political organisation of nineteenth- century Borno was based on personal relationship and that El-Kanemi initiated a more formal patron-client relationship.8 Indeed, Africanist scholarship frequently
focused on personal links between rulers and subjects rather than administrative or territorial organisation of kingdoms. Anthropologists and sociologists often referred to the role of lineages in African polities. Ethnologist Barrie Sharpe emphasised how this perception of African societies had a strong consequence on scholarly literature of northern Nigeria.9 This could be considered as an
anthropological bias.10 However, this chapter does not intend to contradict this
conception of nineteenth-century Borno. The associational fiefs, the chima jilibe were arguably the most important ones as Louis Brenner argued.
In 2000, Sara Berry published a book revealing that at a local scale chiefs knew the boundaries of their domains in Asante.11 Twenty-five years before, Ivor
Wilks had already suggested that this analysis could be applied to the whole kingdom in the nineteenth century.12 Could it be possible to argue the same at the
scale of the Bornoan State? Questionably, Borno was different from Asante. However, this section will try to demonstrate that a conceptual territorial framework also existed in nineteenth-century Borno.
Rather than contradictory, this vision of territoriality is complementary. Murray Last described the existing territorial framework as a system directly inherited from the Sayfawa dynasty reusing the quadrant system of the kings or mais of Borno.13 Thus, the territory of Borno was divided into four subdivisions
representing the four cardinal points. Each territory had at their head an officer. According to Herbert Palmer, the North was supposedly the territory of the
8 Ronald Cohen, The Kanuri of Bornu, Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology (New York: Holt,
1967).
9 Barrie Sharpe, ‘Ethnography and a Regional System’, Critique of Anthropology, 6 (1986), 33 -65. 10 Louis Brenner and Ronald Cohen, ‘Bornu in the Nineteenth Century’, in History of West Africa,
ed. by Michael Crowder (Harlow: Longman, 1984), pp. 93-128.
11 Sara Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896-1996 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).
12 IvorWilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
13 Murray Last, ‘Le Califat De Sokoto Et Borno’, in Histoire Générale De l’Afrique, Rev. ed. (Paris:
Yerima, the South being for the Kaigama, the East for the Mustrema and the West for the Galadima.14 These territories were considered as fiefs for the mais and the
Shehus of Borno after 1810. However, as Last mentioned, we still have little idea to what extent El-Kanemi was dominating the whole territory of Borno after the Fulani jihad. Was he only at the head of a personal principality as Last suggested, or did he totally overthrow the power of the mai?15 This process which may have
been longer than Brenner suggested is not very well documented.
Oral history and European explorers’ narratives only retain El-Kanemi’s irresistible rise to power. In this version of early nineteenth-century history, El- Kanemi assumed power in the 1810s without any competition from the Sayfawa mai Dunama before 1820.16 The Shehu was not a usurper but a saviour. However,
the competition between the ruling dynasty of the Sayfawa would not end before the middle of the nineteenth century. Brenner documented how El-Kanemi created a new dynasty but the transition between the Sayfawa and the Kanemi dynasty does not appear as clear-cut as thought previously.17
Thus, even if not in great number, nineteenth-century sources dealing with the spatial structure of Borno exist. Letters exchanged between the Sultan of Sokoto and the Shehu of Borno during the 1810s are an often-quoted example of diplomatic correspondence between African rulers before the colonisation.18
Secondly, a few letters exchanged between the Ottoman authorities in Fezzan, Tripoli, Istanbul and Borno are also available. Thirdly, Kanuri descriptions of Borno were recorded by a German linguist, Sigismund Koelle in Sierra Leone.19
Finally, the European explorers’ narratives also examine the question of the territory and borders of Borno.
14 Herbert Palmer, The Bornu Sahara and Sudan (London: John Murray, 1936). 15 Last, ‘Le Califat De Sokoto Et Borno’, 599-646.
16 At this date, mai Dunama and king Burgomanda of Bagirmi plotted to get rid of El-Kanemi. This
foreign intervention in Bornoan politics was a failure and mai Dunama was replaced by mai Ibrahim. See Brenner.
17 Brenner, The Shehus of Kukawa, p. 18.
18 Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 318-320.
19 For a precise description of Koelle’s linguistic work see Thomas Geider, ‘The Universe of
Kanuri Oral Literature and Documentary Texts’, in Advances in Kanuri Scholarship, ed. by Norbert Cyffer and Thomas Geider Ko ln: Ru diger Ko ppe, 1997), pp. 157-224.