Wadai Empire

At a glance

Where was Wadai?

Wadai lay in the Sahel belt of eastern Chad, between the Sahara to the north and the wooded savannah to the south, and between Lake Chad to the west and the mountains of Darfur to the east. Its heartland was the hilly country of the Maba around Ouara and Abéché. Around this core lay a ring of tributary lands: the desert peoples of Ennedi and Borkou to the north, Kanem and the Bahr el-Ghazal towards Lake Chad, the kingdom of Bagirmi on the Chari River to the south-west, and to the south-east Dār Runga and Dār al-Kūti, the slave-raiding frontier towards today's Central African Republic.

Its neighbours were also its rivals. Darfur, the larger sultanate to the east, claimed Wadai as a tributary for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Bornu Empire to the west competed with it for Kanem and for influence in Bagirmi. Wadai's own neighbours had different names for it. Gustav Nachtigal, the German doctor who lived in Abéché in 1873, recorded that it was called Burgū in Darfur, Wadai in Bornu and Bagirmi, and Dār Ṣāliḥ in written Arabic.

Who founded the Wadai Sultanate?

According to all the main traditions, a Muslim holy man named ʿAbd al-Karīm. Before him, the country was ruled by the Tunjur, a dynasty whose origins remain, in the words of the historian R. S. O'Fahey, "a mystery". Nachtigal heard that the Tunjur had ruled for scarcely a century, and the German explorer Heinrich Barth, who collected Wadai traditions in Bornu in the 1850s, was told ninety-nine lunar years. Their last king, Dāʾūd, resided at Kadama, south-west of the later Ouara.

The traditions agree on the outline of what followed. ʿAbd al-Karīm, son of Yāme, had studied at Bidderi in Bagirmi, a centre of Islamic learning. He returned to preach among the Maba, allied himself by marriage with Arab clans such as the Mahāmīd and the Beni Halba, and defeated and killed Dāʾūd. Nachtigal tells that the decisive battle was won by a ruse: ʿAbd al-Karīm's men dragged branches behind their camels so that the dust cloud made their army look far larger than it was. He founded the realm, "which at the same time introduced Islam", and built a mosque at Ouara.

Several popular details are less secure. Nachtigal reports that ʿAbd al-Karīm had a love affair with Dāʾūd's daughter Meiram Aisa, but not that he married her, as many websites say. Nor do the nineteenth-century sources make him a Maba noble. Nachtigal said his family were immigrants from the Jaʿliyīn of Shendi on the Nile; Barth said they were Gimr from the same region and called their claimed Abbasid descent "altogether imaginary"; and the Tunisian scholar Muḥammad al-Tūnisī, who lived in Wadai in the early nineteenth century, traced the dynasty to the Fezāra Arabs. His power base among the Maba was political and religious, not a matter of birth.

When was Wadai founded: 1611 or 1635?

Nobody knows for certain, and the two dates in circulation come from two different travellers. Barth recorded that ʿAbd al-Karīm overthrew the Tunjur "according to tradition, in the year 1020 of the Hejra", that is 1611/12. Nachtigal gave his reign as "allegedly from 1635 to 1655". The French colonial administrator Henri Carbou set the two side by side in 1912: "The period at which the kingdom of Wadai was founded is somewhat uncertain: Barth gives the year 1611 (1020 of the hegira) and Nachtigal the year 1635." The ethnologist Marie-José Tubiana, who published two court chronicles of the sultans in 1960, dated ʿAbd al-Karīm "1635?", with the question mark.

The reason is that Wadai had no written chronicles from its early centuries. Al-Tūnisī stressed that all he heard was oral tradition: "God alone knows what the truth is." The historian Dennis Cordell counted "at least six divergent king lists" for Wadai and concluded that even the reigns between 1813 and 1835 cannot be dated precisely. The safest statement is that the sultanate was founded in the first third of the seventeenth century.

The border data behind this map draws Wadai from 1636, following the later date.

What did the title kolak mean?

Kolak was the title of the sultan of Wadai. Carbou wrote in 1912 that "the sultan (kolak) governs as a potentate" and took the title al-ʿAbbāsī, "the Abbasid", in his letters. Below him stood the kamkolak, great officials who governed provinces and judged cases, four of the first rank and four of the second according to al-Tūnisī and Nachtigal; the jerma, the highest official, ruled the Maba heartland and acted as regent when the throne was empty. The tributary lands were administered by *ʿaqīd*s, military governors of districts and Arab tribes.

The phrase "Kolak dynasty", found online, is a modern label; the dynasty itself claimed Abbasid descent. No source consulted for this entry explains the origin of the word kolak.

The court had strict rules of birth. Al-Tūnisī recorded that a sultan's son whose mother did not come from one of the four noble Maba groups could not succeed. These rules came to matter in the succession crises of the nineteenth century and again in 1901, when the French backed a prince of "pure Maba descent" against two rivals with non-Maba mothers.

What was Ouara, the old capital?

Ouara (Wāra) was the capital of Wadai for more than two centuries, a walled royal town in a valley ringed by hills north of Abéché. Nachtigal heard that ʿAbd al-Karīm founded it where his calves had strayed into a well-watered thicket, and derived the name from an Arabic word for a place "difficult to pass". Barth credited the foundation to ʿAbd al-Karīm's son Kharūt.

Nachtigal rode to Ouara in May 1873, twenty years after the court had left. He found only "a poor little village of about 100 huts" beside the royal cemetery. Of the palace only the oval enclosure walls survived, partly of fired brick, but ʿAbd al-Karīm's great mosque, built "entirely of red bricks", still had a regular polygonal minaret about 10 metres high.

The ruins survive. In 2005 Chad placed "the ruins of Ouara" on its tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage, describing a palace enclosure about 325 metres across, with a two-storey residence, a watchtower and an audience hall, and a mosque of fired brick outside the walls. That text also says that the palace was built in the sixteenth century by an Egyptian architect and abandoned because of drought. Both claims are the Chadian government's own: the first conflicts with every founding date, and the nineteenth-century sources give political reasons for leaving Ouara.

How did Wadai win its independence from Darfur?

Slowly, and the sources disagree on when. Nachtigal recorded that ʿAbd al-Karīm paid tribute to Darfur, chiefly by sending a princess every three years, and also sent gifts to Bornu so that it would not intervene for the Tunjur.

The break came under Yaʿqūb ʿArūs, who according to Nachtigal reigned from 1681 to 1707. In Nachtigal's account a ragged man named Kirdi stopped the tribute princess from leaving, and ʿArūs told the Darfur sultan to "come and fetch it himself". He invaded Darfur, fought there and made a peace "solemnly buried on the border"; later he captured a Darfur prince, ʿUmar Lele, who lived out his days in Wadai reading the Qurʾān. Barth was told the opposite: that ʿArūs invaded Darfur but "was beaten, and obliged to make a speedy retreat".

The French reference work Encyclopædia Universalis places full independence later, under Jōda (Jawda), who reigned from 1747 to 1795 according to Nachtigal. Jōda defeated a Darfur army sent to avenge ʿUmar Lele, and Wadai remembered him as one of its greatest kings. His general Gerfa took much of Kanem and Mondo, the old Tunjur centre, from Bornu, which Barth called "the commencement of the hostilities … between Bórnu and Wadáy".

The dates before 1813 are traditional reckonings and should be read as approximate.

Why was Sabun Wadai's most remembered king?

ʿAbd al-Karīm Ṣābūn, who came to power around 1804 after seizing Ouara from his father Ṣāliḥ Derret, turned Wadai from a regional power into a dominant one. Nachtigal heard that no Wadaian hesitated to call him, alongside Jōda, "the wisest, most brilliant prince"; Barth was told that all agreed his reign was "one of the wisest ever known in this part of the world".

The conquest of Bagirmi. In the second year of his reign Ṣābūn attacked the kingdom of Bagirmi on the Chari River, "conquered and destroyed the capital Massenya" and had its sultan killed. Carbou dates the capture of Massenya to 1806. Barth heard that Ṣābūn carried off "five camel-loads" of silver, and that Bagirmi "became for ever a tributary province of Waday". The tribute, Nachtigal recorded, was 500 slaves, 30 young slave girls, 30 horses and 1,000 cotton robes every third year. The figure of 20,000 people enslaved, which appears on many websites, is not found in Nachtigal, Barth or Carbou.

The road to the Mediterranean. Ṣābūn's most lasting achievement was a new caravan route. Until then Wadai's trade with North Africa had to pass through Darfur or Bornu. Around 1809 or 1810, according to the French consul Fulgence Fresnel, a trader of the Majābra from the oasis of Jalo, who had lost his way, was brought to Ṣābūn's court. Ṣābūn sent a caravan north under his guidance, through the desert of the Bideyat and the oases of Kufra and Jalo to Benghazi in Cyrenaica. The first expeditions suffered heavy losses, but the route held. Cordell calls the Benghazi–Wadai route "probably the most important avenue of long-distance trade between the Mediterranean and the eastern Sudan in the late nineteenth century".

Coins that were never minted. Several reference works say that Ṣābūn minted his own coinage. Al-Tūnisī, who lived in Wadai in Ṣābūn's time, says the opposite: Ṣābūn "conceived the project of striking coins", but his counsellors reminded him that his grandfather Jōda had rejected the same idea, and "Ṣābūn yielded to these representations and gave up his plan". In 1873 Nachtigal found no coinage in Wadai at all; cotton cloth served as the main currency, and strips of cloth, paper and glass beads as small change.

Ṣābūn died between 1811 and 1815; al-Tūnisī, Nachtigal and Barth each give a different year. Nachtigal heard that he died of a spear wound while pursuing thieves, and that his killer "was never discovered".

What was the crisis of the 1830s?

The twenty years after Ṣābūn's death were the most unstable in Wadai's history. His son Muḥammad Busāta died of smallpox after two months; another son, Yūsuf Kharīfayn, came to the throne as a child and became, by Nachtigal's account, a tyrant who executed dozens of his wives after a poison plot and blinded his brothers, until he was killed around 1829 or 1830. Two short reigns followed, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz died of smallpox, and his young son Adam was left on the throne under a regent.

Darfur used the chaos. Its sultan Muḥammad al-Faḍl sent an army with a Wadai prince to install as a tributary ruler. Wadai's forces were destroyed at Ahbes, where according to Nachtigal only five of a thousand horsemen survived, and the Darfur army marched to the gates of Ouara. Barth recorded that the new sultan, Muḥammad al-Sharīf, took power "under promise of a considerable tribute to be paid yearly", in the month of Jumādā I 1250 H, which is late summer 1834. Carbou also gives 1834, Nachtigal 1835, and the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard 1838.

Nachtigal recorded a remarkable story about this ruler: that the real prince Muḥammad al-Sharīf had swapped identities with a cousin, ʿIzz al-Dīn, in Darfur, so that the man who reigned in Wadai from 1835 to 1858 was an impostor. Nachtigal himself admitted how improbable this sounded, but believed his informants. Barth and Carbou knew nothing of it.

How did Muhammad al-Sharif change Wadai?

He freed Wadai from Darfur, made war on Bornu, moved the capital and tied the state to the Sanūsiyya brotherhood.

The Sanūsiyya. According to Evans-Pritchard, Muḥammad al-Sharīf had met Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Sanūsī, the founder of the Sanūsiyya Sufi brotherhood, while both were in Mecca, and as sultan "furthered the interests of the Order" in Wadai. The brotherhood, based in Cyrenaica, came to control the lodges and wells along the Benghazi caravan route. For the next seventy years Wadai's trade and its politics were bound up with the Sanūsī leadership.

The Bornu war of 1846. In the spring of 1846 Muḥammad al-Sharīf marched on Bornu at the invitation of partisans of its old Sayfawa dynasty. Barth recorded that he defeated Bornu's army near Kousseri in March 1846, and that the Wadai army camped for about forty days while its raiders plundered the surrounding country, "and particularly Kukawa", Bornu's capital. Carbou wrote that he entered Kukawa and burned it. Nachtigal heard instead that he withdrew after being paid 8,000 Maria Theresa thalers. The common statement that he "sacked Kukawa" is therefore supported by Barth and Carbou, with Nachtigal's account as an alternative.

The move to Abéché. Around 1850 the sultan left Ouara. Barth wrote that "in the year 1850 he abandoned the old residence of all the former kings of Waday" for Abéché, then "a very inconsiderable place … almost entirely destitute of water", because it lay among his own partisans. Nachtigal and Carbou recorded the official explanation: the people were told that the palace at Ouara was haunted by evil spirits. The real reason, they agreed, was the sultan's fear of the powerful Kodoi, a Maba group who had risen against him.

The last years of Muḥammad al-Sharīf's reign were marked by blindness, revolts and hostility to foreigners. According to Carbou he molested foreign merchants so badly that caravans began to avoid Wadai.

What happened to the European travellers in Wadai?

Several were killed. Before Nachtigal's visit in 1873, a German biographical dictionary noted that Wadai had "until then cost every European who crossed its borders his life".

• Eduard Vogel, a German astronomer who had joined Barth's expedition, left Kukawa for Wadai at the start of 1856 and was killed there, probably in February 1856. Nachtigal heard in Abéché that he had been suspected of being a spy and clubbed to death on the sultan's orders.
• Moritz von Beurmann, who set out in 1862 to discover Vogel's fate, was killed in Kanem in February 1863. A German biography says it was on the orders of the sultan; Nachtigal reported that Sultan ʿAlī openly disapproved of the murder, which his officials in Kanem had committed.
• Gustav Nachtigal was the first European to return alive. He reached Abéché in April 1873, stayed until January 1874, and wrote the most detailed account of the kingdom in the third volume of his Sahara und Sudan (1889).

When was Wadai at its height?

Under ʿAlī, who ruled from 1858 to 1874. Carbou wrote that ʿAlī "brought the power of Dār Ṣāliḥ to its apogee". Nachtigal, who knew him personally, praised him as a ruler of "rare wisdom" who encouraged caravans to the Mediterranean, protected scholars, and gave offices to royal slaves rather than to the Maba nobility. He also called him a loyal adherent of the Sanūsiyya.

ʿAlī extended Wadai's reach in every direction: over the desert peoples of the north, Lake Fitri, much of Kanem and the Bahr el-Ghazal, and south to Dār Runga and Dār al-Kūti. By Nachtigal's reckoning this nearly doubled the area under Wadai's control. When Bagirmi rebelled, ʿAlī besieged Massenya, which fell at the end of February 1871 after two experts from Fezzan blew a breach in the wall with gunpowder. Carbou recorded that "Ali returned to Abéché with 20 or 30,000 slaves and prisoners of war", among them Bagirmi craftsmen whom he settled at Abéché.

Nachtigal was given figures for the army: some 4,000 flintlock muskets brought from Tripoli, about a dozen small cannon, 5,000 to 6,000 cavalry, over a third in quilted armour, and 56,000 to 60,000 infantry. His own observations were more modest. At a parade in 1873 he estimated the king's firearms throughout the realm at "scarcely 1,000", and the editor of his book warned that his informants had probably inflated the numbers.

What did Wadai trade?

Slaves above all. "Slaves still formed by far the largest part of the exports," Nachtigal wrote in 1873, and the Majābra merchants of Jalo took about 15,000 north, though he did not state over what period. Ivory and ostrich feathers were the other main exports. In return came firearms, cloth, paper, glass beads and other manufactures from the Mediterranean and Egypt.

The slaves came from raids. Nachtigal described the periodic ghazwa, slave raids that the sultans left to their generals, on the peoples to the south. Dār al-Kūti, which Cordell describes as "a slave-raiding and slave-trading state on the southern fringes of Wadai", became one of the main suppliers late in the century. The trade made the court rich and shaped Wadai's relations with its southern neighbours for generations; it is part of the sultanate's history that later accounts often pass over.

How did Wadai fall to France?

Under ʿAlī's successor Yūsuf (1874–1898), Wadai faced new threats. Rābiḥ az-Zubayr, a warlord from the Nile Sudan of the Egyptian slave-trading frontier, ravaged Wadai's southern tributaries Dār al-Kūti and Dār Runga in 1882 and conquered Bagirmi in 1893, according to Doutoum's chronology; in 1894 Yūsuf sent his own raiders to reimpose tribute on Dār al-Kūti. The Sanūsiyya moved its headquarters from Jaghbub in Ottoman Libya to Kufra in 1895 and on to Gouro in Tibesti in 1899, and its influence at the court of Abéché grew. The Chadian historian Mahamat Adoum Doutoum records that Yūsuf sent the Sanūsī leader slaves, ostrich feathers and ivory every year.

After Yūsuf's death in 1898 Wadai fell into a succession crisis. By the Anglo-French declaration of 21 March 1899 Britain recognised Wadai as part of the French sphere. Sultan Ibrāhīm was murdered in 1900, in the years after the fall of the Mahdist State in the Sudan; his successor Aḥmad al-Ghazālī was dethroned in December 1901, and Dūd Murra, a brother of Ibrāhīm, took the throne. Their cousin Muḥammad Aṣīl (Acyl), a grandson of Muḥammad al-Sharīf of "pure Maba descent", fled west to Lake Fitri and allied himself with the French.

The war that followed lasted a decade:

• 1903–1908. In November 1903 Wadai agreed to recognise French possession of Bagirmi and Kanem, but raids and battles continued along the western border, as French troops and Aṣīl's horsemen pushed east.
• 1 and 2 June 1909. A French column under Captain Fiegenschuh, with Aṣīl's forces, defeated the Wadai army west of Abéché and occupied the capital after five hours of fighting. Dūd Murra fled. In August 1909 Aṣīl was enthroned as sultan under French protection.
• 4 January 1910. Fiegenschuh's column was destroyed in an ambush by the Masalit, Dūd Murra's allies on the Darfur border; according to the Sciences Po Mass Violence encyclopedia, five French officers, more than a hundred African soldiers and 80 Wadai auxiliaries were killed.
• 9 November 1910. At Doroté in Dār Masalit, a surprise attack killed Lieutenant-Colonel Moll, the commander of the Chad territory, with five non-commissioned officers and 28 soldiers. The Masalit sultan Tāj al-Dīn was killed with 600 of his men.
• 27 October 1911. Driven out of the Masalit country and left with a few hundred followers, Dūd Murra surrendered at Abéché under a promise of safe conduct, and was sent into exile.

The French repression of the uprisings of 1909–1911 was brutal: the official figures count more than 1,320 people killed in 22 engagements and dozens of villages burned, and the Chadian historian Mahamat Adoum Doutoum estimated 1,500 to 2,000 dead.

Aṣīl did not last. The French found him "nervous and fanciful", in the words of a colonial report quoted by the historian Dorrit van Dalen, and suspected him of supporting a rebellion. A decision signed by Colonel Largeau on 19 June 1912 removed him to the south of the colony. The sultanate was abolished and Wadai was put under direct French rule as part of French Equatorial Africa.

What was the coupe-coupe massacre of 1917?

The worst atrocity of French rule in Wadai, remembered in Chad as the massacre des coupe-coupe or, in local Arabic, Kubkub, after the machetes used. On 21 October 1917, according to Doutoum's thesis, a drunken man stabbed a French sergeant, Guyader, to death in a public square in Abéché. The district commander, Major Gérard, suspected a plot by the Wadai dignitaries.

At dawn on 15 November 1917, on his orders, colonial soldiers surrounded the house of the ʿaqīd Dokom and beheaded him and 56 of his men. Muslim scholars of the Shiq al-Fukara quarter were taken from their homes or from the mosque at prayer and killed the same way; their heads were displayed in two rows at the eastern entrance of the administrative post. The depositions Doutoum cites show no evidence of any plot, and according to the archives Gérard was merely retired. The historian Dorrit van Dalen writes that estimates of the victims range between 80 and 150; Doutoum's thesis gives about 150 dead, and later popular accounts give much higher numbers. Many of the surviving scholars fled to Darfur, and the massacre is remembered in Wadai as the moment when its tradition of Islamic learning was broken.

The victims are commemorated at the Cemetery of the Martyrs in Abéché. In late 2024, after Chad ended its defence cooperation with France, the massacre was widely recalled again.

How was the sultanate restored?

In 1934, by a French decision. The colonial administration, which had governed Wadai directly for over twenty years, decided to restore the monarchy on the territory of the Abéché subdivision. Doutoum's research in the colonial archives shows that the chosen sultan, Muḥammad Ourada, a son of Sultan Ibrāhīm, came to Abéché in July 1934 and was appointed by a decree of 1 October 1934. Most published lists give 1935 as the date of the restoration.

Ourada died in 1945 and was followed by his cousin Ali Silek (1945–1977), then by Ourada's son Brahim Mahamat Ourada (1977–2004), and then by Brahim's son Mahamat Ourada II. In independent Chad the sultan has no state power, but he remained a respected figure in eastern Chad and claimed followers across the border in Darfur.

Why was the sultan suspended in 2022?

Because of a crisis between the sultanate, the national government and the people of Abéché. On 10 July 2019, President Idriss Déby removed Sultan Mahamat Ourada II by decree, without giving a reason. Security forces later tried to evict the Ourada family from the palace, and the government appointed a new sultan, Chérif Abdelhadi Mahdi.

In January 2022 the government planned to install a new chief for the Arab Bani Halba community in Abéché, which many residents saw as an affront to the sultanate. On 24 and 25 January 2022 security forces fired on protesters and then on mourners at a funeral. Human Rights Watch counted at least 13 people killed and more than 80 injured; Chad's national human rights commission reported five deaths. On 26 January the government suspended both Sultan Chérif Abdelhadi Mahdi and the new Bani Halba chief. The sultan was reinstated by an order of 8 April 2023.

Common myths about the Wadai Empire

Timeline of the Wadai Empire

What the map shows next

The border data draws Wadai from 1636 to 1910; at 1773 on the map it sits between Bornu and Darfur. Its eastern rival appears at Sultanate of Darfur, and its western one, at the time of the war of 1846, at Bornu Empire. After the French conquest the region belongs to French Africa, and since 1960 to the Republic of Chad.