Wadai Sultanate

Wadai was a Muslim sultanate in the Sahel east of Lake Chad, in what is now eastern Chad and part of the Central African Republic. Founded in 1635 by Abd al-Karim, it grew rich on long-distance trade and slaving, became one of the strongest states of the central Sudan in the nineteenth century, and fell to French conquest between 1906 and 1912. Our later maps label it the Wadai Empire.

Before the 1630s the region was ruled by the Tunjur, a dynasty also linked in tradition with Darfur. In 1635 Abd al-Karim, from a noble family of the Maba people, gathered the Maba and smaller groups under the banner of Islam and overthrew the Tunjur king Daud. He is said to have married Daud's daughter and sealed alliances with neighbouring peoples through further marriages, and he built a capital at Wara and founded the ruling Kolak dynasty. Islam became the religion of the state, although most ordinary people continued to follow traditional beliefs.

The decades after the founder's death brought civil wars and hostility with two powerful neighbours, the Sultanate of Darfur to the east and Bornu to the west. For much of the seventeenth century Wadai paid tribute to Darfur, until Ya'qub Arus stopped payments late in the century and beat back a Darfuri attack. His son Joda pushed the frontier south into the old Tunjur heartland.

Wadai's great expansion began under Muhammad Sabun, who ruled from 1804 to about 1815. In 1805 his armies conquered neighbouring Bagirmi, killed its ruler and, according to the sources, enslaved and sold some 20,000 people, leaving Bagirmi a tributary. Around 1809 or 1810 a direct caravan route was opened northward through Kufra to Benghazi on the Mediterranean, and Sabun sent royal caravans along it, freeing Wadai from dependence on the trade of Bornu and Darfur. He struck his own coins and imported chain mail and military advisers from North Africa.

After Sabun came years of disputed successions, and in 1838 Darfur placed its own candidate, Muhammad al-Sharif, on the throne. Al-Sharif soon threw off Darfuri control, sacked Kukawa, the capital of the Kanem-Bornu Empire, in 1846, and moved the capital to Abéché. He had met the founder of the Senussi brotherhood in Mecca, and under his son Ali the Senussi, who controlled the oases along the northern route, became close allies. When colonial expansion, the rise of the warlord al-Zubayr and the Mahdist War unsettled the region late in the century, the Benghazi road remained the one dependable route north. Wadai exported slaves, ivory and ostrich feathers and imported firearms; its musket stock reportedly rose from about 300 guns in the 1840s and 1850s to some 4,000 by the 1870s.

Succession quarrels returned after 1898, with Darfur and the Senussi backing rival claimants until the Senussi candidate, Muhammad Salih, known as Dud Murra, took power. France began hostilities in 1906, put forward Adam Asil as its own candidate and captured Abéché in 1909. Dud Murra fought on until his final defeat in 1910, and the sultanate's independent history is usually dated as ending in 1912.

France reportedly restored the sultanate as a dependent office in 1935, and when Chad became independent in 1960 it passed into the new republic. The Kolak of Wadai remains a traditional, non-sovereign ruler in Chad today.

Our maps from 1530 to 1800 draw an approximate Wadai, the earliest before its traditional founding in 1635, and our 1878 and 1880 maps show the Wadai Empire east of Lake Chad, bordering lands labelled Egypt to the east and the Ottoman Empire's Saharan territory to the north.