Adamawa

Adamawa is the conventional name for a loose group of eighty to ninety languages scattered over the Adamawa Plateau and surrounding country in northern Cameroon, southern Chad, eastern Nigeria and the north-west of the Central African Republic. The largest member is Mumuye; many others are small tongues.

Joseph Greenberg assembled them into an Adamawa branch of the Niger–Congo family, though later linguists have treated them as more of a geographic grouping than a true family, some branches lying closer to Gur. For most of history their speakers lived in decentralised farming and pastoral communities between Hausaland and the Bornu and Mandara states.

In 1809 Modibo Adama, a follower of Usman dan Fodio, carried the Fulani jihad into these lands and founded the Adamawa Emirate within the Sokoto Caliphate, drawing the plateau's peoples into the world of Muslim cavalry states and long-distance slave raiding.