Sara

The Sara are a cluster of Central Sudanic-speaking peoples with a society of patrilineal clans, who farm the savannas of the middle Chari and Logone rivers in southern Chad and the neighbouring north-west of the Central African Republic. Muslim states to their north called them Kirdi, meaning unbelievers, and counted them among their chief sources of slaves.

From its foundation about 1522 the Sultanate of Bagirmi built its wealth on raiding the peoples south of the Chari for the trans-Saharan slave trade; its court adopted Islam under Mbang Abdullah around 1600, while the Sara kept their ancestral religion.

Bagirmi shook off Bornu overlordship in the eighteenth century but was conquered by Wadai in 1805, when twenty thousand captives were taken at Massenya, and the raiding of Sara villages continued through the 1830s.