Preliminaires pour une histoire des Sao

Abstract

The identity of the Sao to the south of Lake Chad has remained obscure despite the efforts of archaeologists, ethnographers and historians. To solve the problem, it is necessary to look at the historical circumstances in which they passed into legend as the ancestors of the present occupants of the region, namely the creation of the empire of Borno to the west and south of the lake in place of Kanem to the north-east. The conflicts involved in this creation lasted from the beginning of the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and produced the main historical references to the Sao apart from oral tradition, always as enemies of the new rulers among the native population. The first applies to the fourteenth century, but all the others are from the contemporary record of the campaigns of Mai Idrīs Alauma by Ibn Furṭū in the sixteenth century, where we learn of the Sao-Gafata in the neighbourhood of the Bornoan capital Gazargamo, and of the Sao-Tatala on the flood-plain southwest of the lake. Elsewhere on the flood-plain, the various peoples are referred to by recognisably modern names: Ngama, Makari, Kotoko. It seems probable that in the work of Ibn Furṭū we find the last use of a term which the incoming Kanembu had originally used to describe all the inhabitants of their new Bornoan dominions, then employed as an adjective for each particular population, until with the suppression of the Sao-Gafata and Sao-Tatala it was abandoned except as the name of a legendary people ancestral to Kanuri and non-Kanuri groups alike. The most probable explanation of the term itself is that it meant ‘city’ or ‘city-dwellers’, describing the inhabitants of the walled villages or towns of the flood-plain as perceived by their conquerors the Sayfuwa rulers of Kanem-Borno at the outset of their imperial adventure.