Njimi

Njimi was the capital of Kanem east of Lake Chad, the seat of the Duguwa and then the Sayfawa mais, and probably the first capital of the empire. Al-Idrisi mentioned it in the twelfth century as a smaller town south of Manan, and later writers described it as the home of the mai. It stood on the trans-Saharan routes that joined the Chad basin with North Africa.

The Bilala, who had been part of the empire, rebelled against the mais, and around 1380 they drove the Sayfawa from Kanem and took Njimi. Mai Umar I Idrismi moved the empire across the lake to Bornu. For about a century the court had no permanent capital, until Ali I Gaji founded Ngazargamu on the Yobe River around 1472. Ali's son Idris III Katagarmabe retook Kanem in the early sixteenth century, but the imperial centre stayed in Bornu. Njimi was still a prominent place in the sixteenth century, though its old medieval buildings had been abandoned.