Central African Republic

Overview

The Central African Republic (CAR) is a landlocked country of 622,984 km² at the geographic heart of Africa, bordered by Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, both Congos, and Cameroon, with its capital Bangui on the Ubangi River. Inhabited since at least 8000 BCE, the region hosted Neolithic farming cultures — the Bouar Megaliths date to around 3500–2700 BCE — and later kingdoms such as Bangassou, while slave raiding along the Saharan and Nile routes devastated its peoples from the 16th century onward.

History

France colonized the territory from 1894 as Ubangi-Shari, part of French Equatorial Africa from 1910/1920. Colonial rule was among the most brutal in the French Empire: concession companies forced unpaid rubber and cotton labor, over 17,000 workers died building the Congo–Ocean Railway, and the Kongo-Wara rebellion of 1928 — perhaps the largest interwar anti-colonial uprising in Africa — was concealed from the French public. In 1940 pro-Gaullist officers brought the territory to the Free French side. Barthélemy Boganda, elected to the French National Assembly in 1946, founded the MESAN movement and proclaimed the autonomous Central African Republic on 1 December 1958; after his death in a 1959 plane crash, his cousin David Dacko became the first president at full independence on 13 August 1960.

Dacko's one-party rule ended with Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa's Saint-Sylvestre coup of 31 December 1965. Bokassa declared himself president for life, then crowned himself Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire in a lavish 1977 ceremony; after the 1979 massacre of protesting schoolchildren, France overthrew him and restored Dacko. André Kolingba seized power in 1981, yielding to elected president Ange-Félix Patassé in 1993 amid mutinies and ethnic strife. François Bozizé ousted Patassé in 2003, but the Central African Bush War erupted in 2004, and in 2012–13 the Séléka rebel coalition toppled Bozizé, sparking civil war with anti-balaka militias and massive displacement. Faustin-Archange Touadéra, elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020 and 2025 after abolishing term limits, relies heavily on Russian Wagner/Africa Corps forces against rebels who still control much of the countryside.

Later history and present status

Despite diamonds, gold, uranium, timber, and rich biodiversity, the CAR ranks near the very bottom of the Human Development Index (191st of 193). Its roughly 5.5 million people span some 80 ethnic groups; about 73 percent are Christian and 14 percent Muslim. Sango and French are official languages.