Bilala

The Bilala were a people of the Lake Chad region who lived within the Kanem empire under the Sayfawa dynasty. Their leaders may have belonged to a junior branch of that dynasty.

Around 1380 the Bilala captured Njimi and drove the Sayfawa rulers to Bornu. In the early 1500s Bornu’s Idris III reconquered Kanem and sealed peace by marriage, allowing Bilala rulers to govern as vassals. By the seventeenth century they had established a small independent sultanate at Yao near Lake Fitri.