KAKRH and Early Kanem

al-Ya'qubi's description of Kanem translated in the Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (edited by Levtzion and Hopkins).

One thing we have been reconsidering is the claim by  Abdelkérim Souleyman Tério about the name of a Kanem ruler written down in the 9th century. In his Origine et évolution des Zaghawa: Du royaume du Kanem aux Etats modernes (VIIIe-XXIe siècle), the author suggests that the name of the Kanem ruler is actually a title. He then proposes the notion that it is etymologically linked to the modern Zaghawa word for king (kireh in Blench's Beria dictionary). If one reads the name recorded by al-Ya'qubi as a title and perhaps Kakira as the best fit, this does bear some resemblance with the Zaghawa word for king. Interestingly, Blench's dictionary suggests that the Zaghawa word for king is rooted in the word for elder, or old age. This is likely related to the Kanuri word for elder, kura. According to Cyffer's dictionary, this word can be used to mean "age" or "big" or related concepts with the use of Kanuri prefixes. Unlike the Beria or Zaghawa language, however, Kanuri does not use the word kura for a chief or king today. Indeed, decades ago Lavers expressed some skepticism about reading the name recorded by al-Ya'qubi as related to the word for elder or great. 

What is perhaps surprising about this is the Teda language using distinct words for the same concept. According to one Tudaga dictionary, the word for old is gibi. This seems to be related to the word for a chief or leader, bugidi (chief or old man). Carbou provided similar information in his work, too. According to Carbou, the word for grand/aged is bo, elder or chef is bougoudi. If Kanuri is more closely related to the Teda and Daza languages than it is to Zaghawa, it is intriguing that Kanuri uses words like kura instead of cognates of the Teda/Daza languages. Indeed, the word in Tudaga bears some resemblance to the Daju word for chief, a language from a distinct branch of the Nilo-Saharan family. Apparently, the Daju word for chief in more than one dialect is buge, so it would be interesting to note if it was based on a word for elder or seniority. In the Barma language of Bagirmi, from a different branch of the Nilo-Saharan family than the Saharan languages of Kanuri, the word for old is bon/o. An old man is gada and a chief is kadal (though the higher status bang or mbang for the ruler of Bagirmi is well-known). In addition, Barma and related Nilo-Saharan languages use ngare or similar words for chief or ruler.

It nonetheless seems likely that Kanuri and the Beria language inherited words of deep antiquity in Nilo-Saharan languages related to age, seniority and great, if one accepts Blench's theories on Nilo-Saharan linguistics. If, however, an early form of kura was used to name early rulers of pre-Islamic Kanem, one still has to explain the k- added to it. Instead, we could be looking at the Kanuri prefix ker- or kə̀r(kura) as in the modern word kermai? But, that seems to be prohibited by the rules of Kanuri grammar which would use nemkura to make the word a noun. Alternatively, it may be following the ki- prefix in Beria identified by Blench as a pronoun. But this may be contradicted by the use of the prefix nem- to form words like bigness in modern Kanuri. It does not seem common to add the k- prefix to the word kura in the Kanuri language (although an archaic form of the language might have done so, perhaps like the Beria kî? or the addition of the initial k- to anem to specify the Kanem region).

Ultimately, the theory that the KAKRH is derived from the Zaghawa word for king (or, alternatively, the Kanuri word kura) remains highly problematic. Perhaps something like kurabe would match older, more senior, as that form may have meant something akin to "the great." Since al-Ya'qubi was writing down what was a word in a language he didn't speak over 1000 years ago, this is necessarily speculative. And as total novices in the study of the Kanuri language, our speculations on this should be seen as purely exploratory.