The family record
السجلTen generations of one family, from Abdelkhadir the caravan guide to the children born this century. Every person here carries the evidence behind them: what the printed chart records, what the family remembers, and what the documents prove.
What the chart established
- Al-Khabir may be a name, not a title. The printed chart writes the earliest man as one line, Abdelkhadir Alkhabir Batate. The scroll does not: it gives الخبير an oval of its own directly above عبد القادر, which reads as Abdelkhadir son of Alkhabir son of Batate, three men rather than one with a title. الخبير is also an ordinary word, the guide who leads a caravan across the desert and knows the route and the wells, which is why it was read as a title here at first. Both readings are still open.
- The name carries four generations. Moustapha, son of Abderahim, son of Mahamat-Saleh, son of Djalal.
- The genetics confirm the cousin marriage independently. FROH 0.057, with 144 Mb in segments over 8 megabases, just under the 0.0625 expected for first cousins.
- Because the two grandfathers were brothers, the Y chromosome reaches you by two paths. Any first cousin carries the identical chromosome, so testing one proves nothing about the paternal line.
The chart and the scroll are the same record, made twice
| On the scroll | On the chart |
|---|---|
| جلال | Djalal Khalil Massobane, the central medallion |
| عبد الرحيم | Abderahim Djalal |
| محمد صالح | Mahamat-Saleh Djalal |
| محمد أحمد | Mahamat-Ahmat Djalal |
| عربي | Arabi Djalal |
| حبابة | Hababa, m. Ibrahim Kabir |
| صفية | Safia, m. Djibrine Khérallah |
| خديجة الكبرى | Khadidjé-Koubra, m. Ali Fadil |
The scroll’s crown is Djalal’s household; the chart expands it downward. Neither was made with the other in view, and they agree. The trunk above the medallion has now been read, and it does say what the chart says: خليل, then مسبعان, then عبد القادر — Khalil, Massobane, Abdelkhadir. It then keeps going, sixteen further ovals down to هاشم, a line the chart never carried and this archive does not yet hold. Those ovals need a sharper photograph before any of them can be written down as a name.
Where the research stands
Identified in the family photograph, left to right. The same four sons of Djalal appear on both documents.
The Khérallah marriage explains the politics
- Djalal’s daughter Safia married Djibrine Khérallah.
- Khérallah was president of GIRT, born at Ati in Batha, Foreign Minister of Chad 1961 to 1963, arrested after the September 1963 riots and held eight years.
- The published record says Abderahim Djalal was elected for Batha in March 1957 and joined GIRT shortly after, and never says why. The chart says the party’s president was his brother-in-law.
Two names that must be kept apart
- Acheikh Ibn-Oumar is on the chart, as a great-grandson of Djalal through his daughter Hababa. Leader of the CDR and Foreign Minister of Chad 1988 to 1990. His sister married a son of Mahamat Saleh, so the branches married back into each other.
- Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh is a different man: born 1949 in Biltine, Maba rather than Arab, a mathematician who founded the PLD and was taken from his home on 3 February 2008 and never found. He does not appear on the chart and no source attaches the Djalal name to him. The two are routinely confused in the Chadian press.
Timeline
Family events and the surrounding history on one line, so the two can be read against each other.
The claims register
Every family claim with what supports and what contradicts it. This is the spine of the archive: as evidence arrives, entries move up.
What “sultan” means in Chad
Read this before assessing either royal claim; it changes what the claim even means.
- Chadian law brackets sultan and chef de canton at the same administrative rank. Loi organique 013/PR/2010 makes traditional chiefs collaborators of the administration, appointed by presidential decree. The difference between a sultan and a canton chief is prestige and history, not statutory power.
- The state still creates sultans. In 2024 three southern rulers were raised to the rank by decree; in 2019 a wholly new sultanate, Dar Bilia at Amdjarass, was created for the presidential family.
- So “daughter of a sultan” in Chad can point at anything from an Abbasid kolak of Ouaddaï, ruling from Abéché since 1635, to a canton chief styled sultan over a few thousand people. Both are correct usage.
There is no sultanate at Am Timan
- Arabic sources describe the region as governed for generations by a مشيخة سلامات, a Salamat shaykhdom subordinate to Ouaddaï. A chieftaincy, not a sultanate. The population is Baggara Arab: Salamat, Mahamid and Rashid.
- There is no sultanate of Batha or of Ati either. Batha contains the Bilala kingdom of Fitri at Yao, and otherwise canton chiefs for each group.
- The nearest real sultanate is Dar Rounga, tributary to Ouaddaï, seated at Kouga, Haraze and Mangueigne, conquered by Rabah in 1890. The Rounga kept their own sultan until 1983.
- A sociolinguistic survey of Salamat also records a “Chef de Canton et Sultan des Daggal” at Mouray and a sultan resident at Ardo I in Kibet country. Several small sultans coexisted in Salamat at canton level.
Where this leaves the royal claims
- Structurally plausible, individually unverified. Marriages between merchant notables and chiefly families were the ordinary way Sahelian commercial houses secured standing and safe passage. The claim describes normal practice, not an extraordinary one.
- The testable hypothesis is specific: a Rounga sultan of Dar Rounga, or a canton-level sultan among the Daggal, Kibet or Salamat Arabs. Not a kolak of Ouaddaï.
- The French rapports politiques and rapports de tournée for the Salamat circonscription name sultans, canton chiefs and their genealogies, year by year. That is where this gets answered.
Documents and sources
What is held, what is published, and what is still to be obtained, ranked so the highest-value targets read first.
A clear photograph of the whole scroll, straight on and in overlapping sections, is the cheapest and highest-value thing outstanding. ANOM is the highest-value archive: it addresses the sultan claim, the tea claim and Abderahim’s colonial file at once.
What happened under Habré
Family account: after the civil war the men of the family were jailed, and none came out. The record does not name them, but it describes with precision the two patterns they fall into.
- Arab Chadians were targeted from 1982, treated as presumed allies of Libya, persecuted continuously rather than in a single wave.
- Merchant and business families were targeted with a documented financial motive, and assets were typically seized at the moment of detention.
- An Arab merchant and political family in Chad in the 1980s sat at the intersection of both.
The records exist and are not searchable by a family
- In 2001 Human Rights Watch found roughly 49,000 DDS files on the floor of the abandoned headquarters. They name 12,321 individuals, with 1,208 recorded as dead in detention.
- The database built from them was to be published through a public portal. That portal was never launched. There is no searchable victim database anywhere.
- The former headquarters was demolished in 2024 despite a court order preserving it as a museum, and the lawyer who found the archive was expelled that October. The access climate is closing.
The route is through people
Prepare the file first: every spelling variant of each name in French and Arabic, dates and places of arrest, names of co-detainees or witnesses, occupation and whether a business was seized, and proof of relationship including an acte d’hérédité.
Add to the archive
For anyone in the family. Add a person and they appear in the tree; add testimony, a document or an answer and it is kept with the record it belongs to. Nothing is overwritten. Corrections are recorded alongside what they correct.
Everything added through this page, newest first.
How the record is structured
- People carry a father and mother, so the tree is computed rather than drawn. Adding a person with a parent places them automatically, however many generations deep.
- Events, claims, sources and questions all reference people and each other by id, so opening any record shows everything attached to it.
- Evidence is a field, not a footnote. Every record says whether it rests on a document, the chart, the genetics, or family testimony, and the whole archive can be filtered by it.
- Nothing is deleted. Corrections are added as new records against the old ones, which is how an archive stays trustworthy over decades.