Zaghawa

The Zaghawa, who call themselves the Beri, are Saharan-speaking pastoralists of the belt between Tibesti, Kanem and Darfur. By the ninth century, al-Ya'qubi placed them in Kanem and credited them with a loose hegemony from Lake Chad to Darfur, backed by their grip on trans-Saharan caravan routes.

The Kanem royal chronicle, the Girgam, names their early ruling line the Duguwa, and by the eleventh century Zaghawa kings were at least nominally Muslim. The rise of the Sayfawa dynasty broke their power: ibn Sa'id recorded in 1270 that the Sayfawa moved the capital from Manan to Njimi, and the Zaghawa were pushed east into the lands later called Dar Zaghawa.

After Darfur emerged as an independent state in the late fourteenth century, they kept only the desert fringes between Kanem-Bornu and the Nile, organized in stratified nomadic clans with endogamous artisan castes.