Present for more than 1000 years in the Lake Chad basin, the Kanem‐Bornu (or Kanem‐Borno) Empire was the longest‐lasting empire in the history of Africa. It was created around the 8th century in Kanem on the eastern shores of Lake Chad before shifting to Borno (Bornu) on the western side of the lake during the 13th and 14th centuries. Kanem‐Bornu was a trans‐Saharan empire with possessions in the Fezzan as well as in Bilma; it reached its largest territorial extent in the 16th and 17th centuries before being invaded by a Sudanese warlord in 1893 and colonized by the Europeans at the beginning of the 20th century. Kanem‐Bornu presents four distinguishing features: an enduring state structure, the wealth of its written and oral sources, the early presence of Islam and the importance of the trans‐Saharan trade.
This chapter offers a summary of the main academic debates surrounding state formation in precolonial Nigeria. It provides a multidisciplinary discussion on the evolution of the scholarship on statehood’s origins in different polities now part of modern-day Nigeria (Benin, Borgu, Borno, Hausa cities, Oyo). Not surprisingly, the quest for origins always tends to be teleological, as one needs to understand the golden age of one polity by examining the seeds of what would become one day a kingdom or an empire. This chapter aims to show that it is impossible to understand the myths surrounding the creation of Nigerian kingdoms and empires without analyzing the political regimes and scholarly paradigms since the nineteenth century. In other terms, the myths of creation have their own history and are constantly changing in Nigeria.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.