The Chadic Language and It’s People
Chadic Languages and it’s people. Chad has had a lot of different ethnic groups for a long time, which makes it hard to separate their different stories. Because of its location and the fact that it has features like Lake Chad that make it a good place to live, people have been moving to and through Chad from all over Africa and beyond since at least 5000 BCE.
So, this area has been ruled by a lot of different empires, and each of them brought something of their culture, ethnicity, or language with them. During this time, the most powerful empires in the Lake Chad area were those of Kanem and, for a time, its neighbor Bornu. Their stories, though, became so intertwined that people often talk about Kanem-Bornu as a single thing. It was founded in the ninth century and lasted in a smaller form until the nineteenth century.
At first, it was home to a mix of nomadic tribes without cities. The kingdom was spread across a large part of the Sahara, which gave it access to trade routes that went across the Sahara. Over time, the tribes became more alike, especially as more and more Muslim Kanuri moved in starting in the eleventh century. This process was completed when their own language took the place of the different Teda-Daza languages that were already spoken in the area.
The Fula (Fulani, Fulbe) were originally pastoral nomads, but as their power and size grew, they became the largest group of pastoral nomads in the world and one of the largest Muslim groups in Africa. As some of the first to convert to Islam, they helped it spread across the continent while also increasing their own power.After a series of religious wars, the Fula were in charge of an empire that went from Lake Chad to the Niger Bend and back to their original home in Lower Senegal.
Soon after the start of the 1800s, the empire began to fall apart. The Bagirmi (Barma) lived in a state that their first king, Dala Birni, set up in the area southeast of Lake Chad in 1522. By the beginning of the 17th century, it had converted to Islam and served as a buffer between Bornu to the northwest and Wadai to the northeast. It had to pay tribute to both, and Bornu finally took it over at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It stayed a vassal of Bornu until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Over the years, the Bagirmi and other nearby tribes, especially the Fula, Kanemba, Sara, and Massa, have become more alike. Before the late 1300s, when city-states started to form, the first Hausa communities were set up in the 11th century. With the spread of Islam in the middle of the fourteenth century, which started in the well-off walled cities of the area, like Kano and Katsina, their numbers grew dramatically, and they moved into more of the Kanem-Bornu empire and, in the sixteenth century, the Songhai empire.
The last attempt led to the creation of the Fula empire and the coming together of the two groups, which was led spiritually at first by Usman dan Folio. The Kanemba (also called Kanembu, Kanuri, Borno, and Bornu) started building the kingdom of Kanem in the ninth century. The royal family was originally Arabic, but at the end of the eleventh century, they converted to Islam. At the same time, they spread their power from Kano to Western Sudan. In the middle of the 13th century, they moved out of Chad and into Bornu, which became their capital in the 14th century.
At the end of the fifteenth century, when it became the Kanem-Bornu empire, the kingdom’s power grew even more. It was at its highest point by the end of the 17th century, then stayed the same for another hundred years before starting to go down in the 18th century. Tradition says that Kotoko people are related to the Sao, a race of giants who used to live south of Lake Chad, between the northern parts of Nigeria and Cameroon. Around the year 800 CE, the Sao people, whose history goes back to 3000 BCE, arrived in the Lake Chad area.
In the 15th century, the Kotoko rose to power when they left their home country and moved down the Rivers Logone and Chari to rule a large part of northern Nigeria and Cameroon. Their conversion to Islam happened pretty late, and they kept a lot of what they believed before they became Muslims.
The Maba, who speak the Nilo-Saharan language of Bora Mabang, are another ethnic group that is almost entirely Muslim and used to be the most powerful group in the Wadai kingdom.
Maybe because of this past glory, the Maba never did manual labor because they thought of themselves as a noble class. Their social structure was similar to that of the Fula, and they were closely related to the Moussei (Moussey) people from the north and center of the country.
The Sara (Kirdi), who live mostly in the south of the country, are Nilotic people who are thought to have come in the 1600s. From the beginning, their northern neighbors, especially the Fula, attacked them violently to take slaves. As a result, they moved further and further south. Even though the slavers lost a lot of people, they were still the largest group of people in Chad.
The Teda (Tebu, Tibbou, Toubbou) are made up of about 40 clans and have always lived a nomadic or seminomadic life. The Teda were some of the first people to convert to Islam. Over the years, they were known as livestock raiders when they weren’t making money by charging travelers who came across the long desert tracks they patrolled for protection. When Ottoman authorities moved into the area, they cut back on their activities. This forced them to grow dates on a small scale in the Tibesti region.
The Bilala (Bulala), whose culture is Arabic and who say they all come from the same ancestor, Bilal, are the last group to be mentioned (Balal). Even after they became Muslim, they still held on to some of their old beliefs and did some farming along with it.
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