Kisra legend

Historical migration story shared in western Africa

The Kisra legend is a migration story shared by a number of political and ethnic groups in modern Nigeria, Benin, and Cameroon, primarily the Borgu kingdom and the people of the Benue River valley. The migration legend depicts the arrival of a large military force in what is currently Northern Nigeria around the 7th Century AD. The Borgu kingdom claimed direct descent from the leader of this migration and a number of other polities recognize the migration through ceremony and formal regalia. There are a number of different versions of the legend with Kisra sometimes being depicted as a religious and military rival to Muhammad near Mecca around the time that Islam was founded and sometimes as the remnant forces of a Persian king defeated in Egypt. The legend was a key piece of evidence in a number of Hamitic historical theories which argued that the political development of societies in sub-Saharan Africa was the result of contacts with societies from the Middle East. Whether the legend has a historical basis has been questioned by modern scholarship.

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