For many centuries the Borno Empire, established west of Lake Chad in the 15th century, was the leading power of Central Sudan, today the Emirat shares a national border with Niger in the north an Cameroon in the east. As part of one of the main trans-Saharan trade routes the area provided a cross-road for many people and became the center of various networks of trade and social exchange. Assimilation and displacement strategies played a central role in the expansion of the Borno polity; processes which led to the so-called ‘Kanurization’ of societies living in the area before, e.g. of the Sao and the Badawai, Suwurti, Mower, Manga etc., today recognized as Kanuri sub-groups. Again others kept their individual identity (Margi) or came into existence as a distinctive ethnic group together with that of the Kanuri (Malgwa/Gamergu, and Mandara). Kanuri society is highly stratified, headed by a royal lineage, centered around the political and religious head, the Shehu. Although dominant in cities and administrative businesses many Kanuri identify themselves as farmers (millet, guinea-corn, beans). Most of the rural Kanuri are involved in multiple economic undertakings and do perform a handicraft (pottery, raffia plaiting, leather-work, calabash decoration, mud-brick-building) side by side with farming and animal husbandry. They share this multiple economic existence with other people living in formerly more powerful Emirates, e.g. that of Fika (Bole) and that of Bade (Bade, Ngizim). In addition, transhumant Shuwa Arabs live within the area of the Chad basin plains as “son of the soils” (i.e. “indigenous”). Being the most western part of the so-called Arabic-speaking “Bagara-belt”, they reached the area south of Lake Chad in the 18th century, where they adopted a mixed economy of cattle husbandry and agriculture and became involved in Borno politics defending the Muslim state against Fulani jihadists.
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