Sao

The Sao religion was the traditional belief of the walled city-states that stood around Lake Chad and along the Chari River. Each city was headed by a divine ruler who made few public appearances and then stayed hidden behind a screen, and oral tradition says the Sao clans were united by a single language and a single religion.

The Sao buried their dead in funerary urns and made bronze and terracotta figures of people and animals. After the Bornu empire expanded in the 1500s the Sao ceased to exist as a separate culture, and conversion to Islam changed their identity; the Kotoko inherited their city-states, and the Sara and other peoples trace their descent to them.