Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In the twelfth century, Muslim kingdoms occupy the center and east of the African continent, and lie side by side with much older traditions until the two come into conflict. . . . In the center of Africa, just west of Lake Chad, a Muslim king named Dunama ruled over the state of Kanem. Kanem was, in the words of the tenth-century Arab geographer al-Muhallabi, a kingdom of “many nations”: a mix of peoples.* The nomadic Zaghawa, who had migrated south from an increasingly hostile Sahara Desert perhaps four hundred years before, had settled near Lake Chad and adopted some of the customs of the villagers there; in Kanem, farmers and seminomadic herdsmen seem to have existed side by side. Their wealth, al-Muhallabi notes, “consists of livestock such as sheep, cattle, camels, and horses. The greater part of the crops of their county is sorghum and cowpeas and then wheat. . . . Their means of subsistence is crops and the ownership of livestock." In the tenth century, Kanem still held to its native customs: “Their religion is the worship of their kings,” al-Muhallabi writes, “for they believe that they bring life and death, sickness and health.”