Rabih az-Zubayr

Rabih az-Zubayr was born around 1842 near Khartoum in Sudan, and began his military career serving in the irregular Egyptian cavalry before becoming the principal lieutenant of the Sudanese warlord al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur.

When al-Zubayr's rebellion against Egyptian administration in Sudan was defeated in the late 1870s, Rabih refused to surrender as most of his fellow rebels did, instead fleeing south into Central Africa with several hundred loyal followers to build a power base of his own.

Over the following decades Rabih built a formidable military force through conquest, eventually commanding some 5,000 men equipped with dozens of pieces of field artillery, and by the early 1890s he had conquered the powerful Kanem–Bornu Empire, displacing its ruling dynasty and establishing control over territory spanning present-day Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon.

As French colonial forces pushed to consolidate control over the Chad basin in the late 1890s, Rabih's empire became the principal obstacle to French expansion in Central Africa, and his forces won an early victory over a French-Baguirmian force at the Battle of Togbao in 1898.

Rabih was ultimately defeated and killed at the Battle of Kousséri on 22 April 1900, in one of the final major military confrontations of the French conquest of Chad; with his death, his empire rapidly disintegrated, and his territories were divided between French and British colonial control.