Girgam

The Girgam or Diwan is the actual chronicle of the Kingdom of Kanem, written in Arabic. It is one of the main sources on this kingdom and its neighbors, including Daura, Fika and Mandara. The Girgam was discovered in 1851 by the German traveler Heinrich Barth in Kukawa, the capital of Bornu in the 19th century. It provides the names of 69 rulers of Kanem-Bornu and supplementary information on the length of their reigns, their ancestry (Ibn Sa'īd, al-Maqrīzī and al-Qalqashandī), confirms the validity of data provided by the Girgam. to draw a chronology of the rulers of Kanem-Bornu from the 10th to the 19th centuries. After the fall of the Sefuwa dynasty in 1846, the followers of the new dynasty Kānemī tried to erase the memory of their predecessors. For that reason the majority of the copies were destroyed, being the two copies found by Barth the only known ones. Bibliography

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