The history of Kanem and Bornu, at first under a single government, is recorded in a chronicle collected by Barth.[381] It is, of course, not entirely trustworthy, but the salient facts are reasonably correct. The first king of Kanem, Sef, doubtfully referred to about A.D. 850, founded a dynasty and reigned over Berbers,[382] Tebu, and people of Kanem. This dynasty, called Duguwa, after the name of the grandson of Sef, continued until the end of the reign of Abd el Jelil or Selma I, who was succeeded in 1086 by Hume, the first king of the Beni Hume dynasty. Hume was reputed to be the son of Selma I, and the change of name in the ruling dynasty is attributed to the fact that the former was the first Moslem ruler,[383] whereas his predecessors were not. The chronology is confirmed by El Bekri’s statement,[384] written towards the end of the Beni Dugu dynasty, that Arki, the ante-penultimate king of the line in 1067, was a pagan. The dynastic change of name is even more important when the ethnic relation of the kings of the Beni Dugu and the Beni Hume are examined. During the period of the Beni Dugu, Bornu, according to Sultan Bello, was under the rule of the Tuareg. In the Chronicle two of the Duguwa kings are stated to have had mothers of the Temagheri tribe, while another was descended from a woman of the Beni Ghalgha bearing the Libyan name of Tumayu. The name Beni Ghalgha reminds one perhaps only fortuitously of the Kel Ghela,[385] while Temagheri may simply be a variant for Temajegh, which of course is the female form in the Air dialect of Imajegh, meaning a Tuareg noble, though I am told this etymology is unlikely. The importance of the women in the ancestry of these kings, as among all the Tuareg, is emphasised by the mention of their names. With the Beni Hume, on the other hand, the alliances seem to have been contracted, no longer with Tuareg women, but from Hume’s successor, Dunama I, till the reign of Abd el Jelil or Selma II, with Tebu women. In any event there are good reasons to believe that the change in the name of the dynasty at the end of Selma I’s reign in 1086 means more than a mere change in religion; it marks the passing of the power of the Tuareg in Bornu.[386]
The year 1086 may therefore also mark approximately the first wave of the Tuareg migration into Air. The immigration was probably gradual, since tradition records no single event or cataclysm to account for the changes which took place, which have, on the contrary, to be deduced from stories like that of Maket n’Ikelan and the change in the name of a dynasty. But 1086 is probably the latest date of the migration into Air and it may have been earlier. The invaders were the five tribes already mentioned, together with or including others which it would be difficult to trace by name, though one of them was probably the Itesan. All the tribes concerned can be traced among the People of the King, most of them in Air, though the Igdalen are on the south-eastern fringe of the plateau. The Itesan, whose dominant position in Air involved them in the vicissitudes of the Kel Geres, shared in their expulsion from the mountains. But the others belong to the Amenokal, and none of them to that later personage, the Añastafidet.
The Beni Hume dynasty in Bornu may be regarded as a Tebu dynasty or a negroid dynasty with Tebu alliances. The Chronicle makes this line continue until its expulsion from Kanem by the Bulala, a negroid people from east of Lake Chad, early in the fourteenth century, and its final extinction with the Bulala conquest of Bornu itself in the fifteenth century. The Beni Hume line seems in reality to have terminated in 1177, when Abdallah, or Dala, came to the throne. His half-brother, Selma II, is described as the first black king of Bornu, his predecessors having been fair-skinned like the Arabs. It is this reign which really seems to mark the advent to power of the negroid Kanuri, to which Bello makes allusion, even if it is not to be looked for earlier with the rise of the Beni Hume themselves. Bello describes the occurrence in the following terms:[387] “They came to Kanem and settled there as strangers under the government of the Tawarek . . . but they soon rebelled against them and usurped the country.” But I am nevertheless not disposed to consider the Beni Hume negroid Kanuri, so much as a Tebu or similar stock,[388] for, in the reign of Dunama II, the son of Selma II, we find, after a series of marriages with Tebu women, an apparently definite change of policy. No more Tebu women are recorded as the mothers of kings, and instead the great Dunama II, who ruled from 1221 to 1259, waged a war which lasted seven years, seven months and seven days against these people. As the result of this campaign he extended the jurisdiction of the empire of Kanem over the Fezzan, which remained within its borders for over a century.[389]
The fall of the Duguwa in Bornu at the end of the eleventh century was, then, the ultimate reason for the first Tuareg invasion of Air. We should thus have a fairly satisfactory date were it not probably to be regarded only as the latest limiting date, since the overthrow of the Tuareg dynasty probably only marked the culmination in Bornu of a steadily growing ethnic pressure from the east and north. An additional reason for assuming a late date for the invasion of Air is the detail recorded by Bello, that when the Kel Innek arrived they found some Sanhaja tribes already there. Now the true Sanhaja confederation was not brought into being until the beginning of the eleventh century, the most probable period for tribes of this division to have wandered as far afield as Air. It follows that the invasion of the Kel Innek should be placed later than that or towards the end of the century.
There is scarcely any evidence regarding the earliest period at which it might have taken place. It may be possible to arrive at an estimate, when the results of further researches into the history of Bornu have been made public. It would be most interesting to learn, for instance, when the first Tuareg reached Bornu and Kanem. Is their presence there as a ruling caste to be ascribed to the very early days, or are they to be considered as having come in at a comparatively late epoch? It is difficult to reconcile their presence there in the earliest times with their failure to fuse to a greater extent with the local negroid population and their consequent retention of the individuality which they still possessed when they entered Air.
In the four centuries preceding A.D. 850, when the first Beni Dugu king ascended the throne, there are no recorded events in North Africa very likely to have caused extensive emigration of the Tuareg of the Fezzan to Equatoria, other than the Arab conquest; the only other invasion, that of Chosroes with the Persians in A.D. 616, does not seem to have had a far-reaching effect, or to have been accompanied by foreign immigration on a large scale. The first invasion of the Arabs in the seventh century was only small and at first did not cause widespread ethnic disturbances.[390] Okba invaded the Fezzan in A.H. 46 with only a small expeditionary force; the previous expedition of A.H. 26 was probably not larger. Arab pressure only began to become intense in the eighth century, when the conquest of Spain after Tariq’s exploits in A.D. 710 had become an accomplished fact. And then there followed another pause until the Hillalian invasion in the eleventh century took place.
On the other hand, the presence of Tuareg in the earliest days in the lands east of Lake Chad would find some justification in the position recorded of the Temahu in the southern part of the Libyan desert by Egyptian records. They might also explain the mysterious Blemmyes and the Men with Eyes in their Stomachs referred to by the classical authors.
On the whole I prefer not to speculate too much along these lines for fear of plunging into deep waters connected with the people of the upper Nile basin. I shall simply regard the Tuareg of Bornu as a part of the Lemta of the Fezzan, which we may assume from various sources they were. In consequence, however slender the evidence, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Tuareg reached Bornu from the north along the Bilma road in the course of the Arab invasions of the eighth century. They remained as rulers of the country until they were driven from there also, in consequence of increasing Arab pressure in the Fezzan and in Equatoria itself, for in the middle of the eleventh century the Hillal and Soleim Arabs are found extending their conquests as far as Central Africa. Their fighting under Abu Zeid el Hillali against the Alamt (Lemta) Tuareg in the Fezzan is still remembered in the traditions of the Equatorial Arab tribes.
All we can say with any degree of certainty is that somewhere between the eighth and eleventh centuries the Lemta Tuareg eventually emigrated from the Chad countries. In due course the first five tribes reached Air, with Elakkos and Damergu behind them already occupied. But in Air they only peopled the whole land later on. Some of the Tuareg of this emigration never entered Air at all or stayed in Damergu, but moved still further west to form with other groups from the north the Tademekkat and Kel el Suk, as well as some of the communities of Tuareg on the Niger. Subsequent historical events isolated the Air tribes, and when other waves of Tuareg joined them, their original relationship with the western Tuareg and the Aulimmiden had been forgotten. The origin of the latter is to be explained in this wise, and not by supposing that they arrived from Mauretania, as Barth would have it.[391] The further westward movement of the Tuareg from Lake Chad is borne out by a reference in Ibn Khaldun’s works to some Itesan[392] under the name of Beni Itisan among the Sanhaja.
Tradition represents that the oldest people in Air are those known to-day as the People of the King and the Itesan to whom the most evolved handiwork in the plateau, including the deep wells, is attributed. With the Itesan are associated all the older and more remarkable houses in Air. The form and construction of these buildings evidently had a great influence on the subsequent inhabitants, but as they are all found in an already evolved type, it is clear that the tradition and experience necessary for building them must have been brought from elsewhere. In accepting the view that these houses are the work of the Itesan and not of the later immigrants I can only follow the unanimous opinion of the natives to-day, who are, if anything, too prone to attribute anything remarkable to them. It may, of course, be discovered later that the Itesan had nothing to do with any of these works, and it is all the more curious that in their present habitat north of Sokoto they should have shown no similar architectural propensities. It is also strange that most of the “Kel names” among the Itesan are derived from places west of the Central massifs, while most of the large settlements containing the best so-called “Itesan” houses are on the east side. But the houses and wells in Air do not seem to be associated with the Kel Geres, with whom the Itesan now live, and there seems to be no doubt whatever in the minds of the natives that they are the works of the latter and not of other immigrants.