Chronicle
Diwan of the Sultans of Bornu
ديوان سلاطين برنو
Anonymous · 1808
Synopsis
The chronicle opens with Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, presented as the son of the king of Baghdad, then devotes a short paragraph to each of the sultans of Kanem and Bornu, reign by reign. For each, it gives the name of his mother, often her origin, the length of the reign and sometimes the place where he died. It also notes a few facts: pilgrimages, a quarrel between the sons of a sultan, the arrival of two Fulani sheikhs from Mali. The Duguwa kings are followed by the Sefuwa, whose lineage it traces.
Context
The court chroniclers probably began to write it in the first half of the thirteenth century, first recording an oral tradition whose origin lies towards the end of the tenth; the work was then kept up to date until the extinction of the dynasty, in the nineteenth century, and yet runs to only five and a half pages. Heinrich Barth obtained an abridgement of it at Kukawa in 1851; Otto Blau published a German translation in 1852, Richmond Palmer an English translation in 1926, and Dierk Lange an annotated edition in French in 1977. The Arab geographers confirm its data for the most part, which underpin the chronology of the kingdom.
Who it is for
A brief, dry chronicle, in Arabic, to be read in Dierk Lange's annotated French edition in order to grasp its significance.
Prizes and reception
UNESCO makes it, in its General History of Africa, the main internal source on Kanem.