Trois Hauts Dignitaires Bornoans du XVIeSiècle: Le Digma, Le Grand Jarma et Le Cikama

Abstract

Little attention has until now been directed to the rich information on title-holders contained in the two chronicles of the imām Aḥmad b. Furṭū written in 1576 and 1578 respectively. This neglect is partly due to the very confusing style of the imām's writing. In particular, he refers to the three highest ranking Bornoan officials by translating their Bornoan titles into Arabic: the Digma is called ‘al-wazīr al-kabīr’, the great Jarma ‘al-rā'id al-kabīr’, and the Cikama ‘al-ḥājib’. Once the meaning of these Arabic titles is decoded it appears that the political organisation of sixteenth century Borno owes very little to the Islamic model. Furthermore it becomes clear that the commander of the Bornoan corps of musketeers was the great Jarma, an official of Ngizim origin, and not a Turkish military instructor as one may have suspected.However, since Ibn Furṭū is mainly concerned with military activities, only a few functions of the three high-ranking court officials emerge from his account; others have to be inferred from the information provided by nineteenth-century European travellers and from more recent anthropological accounts. In Borno the political organisation of the Sayfuwa state fell to pieces in the first half of the nineteenth century, when al-Amīn al-Kānemī and his successors built up a new system of administration. This progressively supplanted the old system, which was based on a great number of court titles and attendant offices. Important elements of the political organisation of the Sayfuwa survive until the present day in some former vassal states of Borno which became independent in the course of the nineteenth century or earlier.