The Sayfawa or Saifawa mai (kings) trace their dynasty to Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, a semi-legendary Yemeni prince. The empire of Kanem rose east of Lake Chad in the 8th–9th centuries CE around the capital Njimi, controlling the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan route from Tripoli through Fezzan. Mai Hummay (r. c.1075–1086) converted to Islam, making Kanem one of the first sub-Saharan polities to adopt the religion, and by the 13th century Kanem maintained a madrasa in Cairo for its students at al-Azhar.
A succession of wars with the Bulala forced the abandonment of Njimi in the late 14th century; Mai Umar Idrismi refounded the empire on the western shore of Lake Chad as Borno, with a new capital at Birni Ngazargamu (founded c.1472, in present-day Yobe State). Under Mai Idris Alooma (r. c.1564–1596) — known to history through his chronicler Ahmad ibn Furtu — Borno reached its zenith: it imported Turkish musketeers from Tripoli, built a corps of mounted heavy cavalry in chain mail, codified Maliki Islamic law, and projected power from the Aïr massif in the north-west to the Mandara mountains in the south.
For three centuries thereafter Borno was the dominant Muslim state of the central Sudan, a counterweight to the Hausa city-states and, after 1804, to the Sokoto Caliphate. When Usman dan Fodio's jihad swept eastward in 1808 it captured Birni Ngazargamu and burnt it, but the empire was rescued by the Kanembu scholar-warrior Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi, who repelled the Fulani, established a new capital at Kukawa (1814), and effectively governed Borno as Shehu while permitting the Sayfawa mai to retain ceremonial authority. In 1846 the last Sayfawa mai was killed and al-Kanemi's son Umar formally assumed the throne — ending the Sayfawa line after some 1,100 years.
Borno was destroyed in 1893 by Rabih Fadlallah (Rabih az-Zubayr), a Sudanese warlord and former lieutenant of al-Zubayr Pasha, who sacked Kukawa, killed Shehu Hashimi, and ruled Borno from Dikwa until himself killed by French forces at the Battle of Kousseri on 22 April 1900. The British, French and Germans then partitioned the empire: the rump western Borno became part of Northern Nigeria under indirect rule (1902); the Shehu was restored at Yerwa (modern Maiduguri) in 1907. The Shehu of Borno remains the senior traditional ruler of the North-East to this day.