Mser

Mser, also known as Kusseri, was one of the fortified Kotoko cities of the lower Chari and Logone basin. Its people lived in a country of rivers and floodplains, where farming, fishing and herding sustained a network of small states. The city was well enough known to be named by both the Bornu chronicler Ibn Furtu and the Italian geographer Lorenzo d'Anania in the sixteenth century.

As Bornu expanded into the region during that century, its armies captured Kusseri's ruler and made his chiefdom a dependency. The northern Kotoko cities subsequently fell under the influence of Makari and Bornu, while a southern group came together under Logone. By the time the traveller Dixon Denham visited in 1824, he described Kusseri as a walled city ruled by a sultan and largely independent of Bornu and Bagirmi.