The history of the Central African Republic

The Central African Republic sits in the middle of the continent, a landlocked country of savanna and rainforest drained northward to Lake Chad and southward to the Ubangi and the Congo. For thousands of years it was a land of farmers, fishers and forest foragers, and later a borderland raided for captives by the sultanates of the Sahel and the Nile. France conquered it in the 1890s, named it Ubangi-Shari and handed most of it to concession companies that ran it through forced labour. Since independence in 1960 it has known one self-crowned emperor, repeated coups and, from 2013, a civil war that has left much of the country under the control of armed groups.

People have lived in the region since the Stone Age. As the Sahara dried after about 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers moved south into the savanna belt, where some began to cultivate yams and later millet and sorghum, part of the wider spread of farming known as the Neolithic Revolution. Fishing along the rivers, pottery for storing and carrying food, and later oil palms and bananas allowed populations to grow. In the southern rainforest, the ancestors of the Aka and other forest peoples lived by hunting and gathering, trading forest products with farming villages.

Near Bouar in the far west stand hundreds of groups of standing stones, the tazunu, some several metres tall. They have been dated by some archaeologists to the late Neolithic, possibly from the fourth millennium BCE, though their age and purpose remain debated. Ironworking reached the region early: furnaces and a smithy at Gbabiri have been dated to roughly 900 to 200 BCE, and claims for even earlier iron at Oboui are disputed.

Over the first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE, three great language families came to share the land. Ubangian-speaking peoples spread eastward from what is now Cameroon towards the Nile, Bantu speakers settled the south-western forests as part of the Bantu expansion, and Central Sudanic speakers lived along the middle Ubangi. Trade moved copper, salt, iron, dried fish and cloth along the rivers.

The northern savannas lay on the edge of powerful Sahelian states. The Kanem–Bornu Empire around Lake Chad, the sultanates of Baguirmi and Wadai in what is now Chad, and the Sultanate of Darfur to the east all looked south for captives. From the sixteenth century slave raiding drew people from the region into trans-Saharan and Nile trade routes, and later into Atlantic networks via the rivers. In the eighteenth century the Bandia, a Ngbandi-speaking ruling clan, founded the Nzakara kingdom of Bangassou on the Ubangi, while Zande kingdoms took shape further east. The Banda, Gbaya and Mandja peoples, today the largest groups in the country, moved into their present lands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in part to escape the raids.

The nineteenth century was a catastrophe for the north and east. Traders from the Nile valley armed with firearms pushed into the region, and the Bobangi of the Ubangi river sold captives downstream. The Sudanese warlord Rabih az-Zubayr, who had served in the slaving armies of the Nile, dominated the upper Ubangi from the 1870s before moving on to conquer Bornu. In the north-east, his former ally Muhammad al-Sanusi made Dar al-Kuti, with its capital at Ndélé, into a slave-raiding sultanate that emptied large parts of the eastern savanna. These raids, which continued into the first years of colonial rule, are the main reason the east of the country is still so thinly populated.

French expansion came up the Ubangi from Brazzaville during the Scramble for Africa. Agents of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza signed treaties with local rulers, an 1887 agreement with King Leopold II's Congo Free State gave France the right bank of the Ubangi, and in 1889 a post was founded at Bangui. Further treaties in 1894 fixed the borders with the Congo Free State and German Kamerun, and France named the territory Ubangi-Shari. Its army defeated and killed Rabih at the Battle of Kousséri in 1900, and civil administration was organised in 1903. In 1910 Ubangi-Shari became one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, governed from Brazzaville. In 1911 a large slice of the south-west was ceded to Germany in exchange for a free hand in Morocco; it was retaken during the First World War.

Inspired by Leopold's profits next door, France divided most of Ubangi-Shari among concession companies, which were granted monopolies over rubber, ivory and other produce in return for rent. Company agents and the colonial administration forced people to gather wild rubber, carry loads as porters and pay a head tax, enforcing quotas with hostage-taking, flogging and killing. Reports of abuses occasionally caused scandal in France, but almost no one was punished. In the 1920s thousands of men from Ubangi-Shari were conscripted to build the Congo-Ocean Railway across what is now the Republic of the Congo to the Atlantic coast, where very many died of exhaustion and disease. The novelist André Gide, who travelled through the territory in 1926 and 1927, publicised these conditions in his Voyage au Congo.

Resistance culminated in the Kongo-Wara rebellion, the "war of the hoe handle", which began in 1928 among the Gbaya of the west under a prophet named Karnou. It spread over a wide area and has been called the largest anti-colonial uprising in interwar Africa. Karnou was killed in December 1928, but fighting continued until 1931, and the French authorities kept its scale from the public. In the 1930s cotton, coffee and diamond mining became the basis of the colonial economy.

In August 1940, after the fall of France in the Second World War, French Equatorial Africa rallied to Charles de Gaulle's Free France, and Ubangi-Shari's soldiers and produce supported the Allied war effort. After the war, colonial subjects became French citizens and gained elected assemblies. Barthélemy Boganda, a Catholic priest and the first Ubangian elected to the French National Assembly in 1946, founded the Movement for the Social Evolution of Black Africa (MESAN), which came to dominate local politics. Boganda dreamed of a united central African state. When French Equatorial Africa was dissolved after the 1958 referendum, he proclaimed the autonomous Central African Republic on 1 December 1958, but he died in a plane crash on 29 March 1959. His relative David Dacko led the country to full independence on 13 August 1960, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa.

Dacko quickly made MESAN the sole legal party and was re-elected unopposed in 1964. Facing bankruptcy and a threatened general strike, he was overthrown on the night of 31 December 1965 by the army commander, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a veteran of the French army. Bokassa abolished the constitution, made himself president for life in 1972, and on 4 December 1976 proclaimed the Central African Empire. His coronation as Emperor Bokassa I a year later, modelled on Napoleon's, cost a large share of the national budget in one of the world's poorest states, with France paying much of the bill.

Bokassa's rule was marked by arbitrary arrests, torture and killings. In April 1979, after schoolchildren protested against an order to buy uniforms from a company linked to his family, around a hundred children and teenagers were killed in detention in Bangui, and an African commission of inquiry found that Bokassa had probably taken part in the killings himself. In September 1979, while he was abroad, French troops flew Dacko back to Bangui and restored the republic. Bokassa later returned from exile, was tried for murder and embezzlement and sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to imprisonment; he was released in 1993 and died in 1996.

Dacko was overthrown again in 1981 by General André Kolingba, who ruled through a military committee and then a single-party system, filling the army and administration with members of his own Yakoma group. After the end of the Cold War, pressure from donors forced multiparty elections, and in 1993 Ange-Félix Patassé won the presidency, the first time power changed hands through a competitive vote. His government was soon shaken by three army mutinies in 1996 and 1997 over unpaid wages and ethnic favouritism, which brought in African and then UN peacekeepers. After a failed coup in 2001, Patassé relied on Libyan troops and on fighters of the Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, whose men committed widespread killings, rapes and looting in Bangui in 2002 and 2003; Bemba was convicted by the International Criminal Court in 2016, though the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2018.

In March 2003 Patassé's former army chief François Bozizé, backed by Chad, captured Bangui while the president was abroad. Bozizé won elections in 2005 and 2011, but from 2004 rebel groups in the neglected north-east, many of them drawing on Muslim communities with ties to Chad and Sudan, fought the Central African Bush War. Peace agreements from 2007 onwards integrated some rebels into government, while the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army raided the south-east and spillover from the war in Darfur destabilised the north.

In December 2012 a coalition of northern rebel groups called Séléka, mostly Muslim and including fighters from Chad and Sudan, swept south, and on 24 March 2013 took Bangui. Its leader, Michel Djotodia, became the country's first Muslim head of state. Séléka fighters looted and killed across the country, and in response mainly Christian and animist self-defence militias known as anti-balaka rose up and attacked Muslim civilians. By early 2014 the violence had taken on a sectarian character: thousands were killed, hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled to Chad and Cameroon or into the north-east, and a UN commission found evidence of ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the west. France sent troops in December 2013, Djotodia resigned in January 2014, and Catherine Samba-Panza led a transitional government. In September 2014 the UN mission MINUSCA took over from African Union peacekeepers.

Faustin-Archange Touadéra, a mathematics professor and former prime minister, won the presidency in 2016, but the state controlled little beyond the capital. Ex-Séléka factions and anti-balaka groups divided the country into fiefdoms financed by taxing roads and trading gold, diamonds, coffee and cattle. A peace agreement signed in February 2019 with fourteen armed groups, after talks in Khartoum, was the eighth since 2012. From 2018 Touadéra turned to Russia, and fighters of the Wagner Group, later joined by Rwandan troops, became his main protection in return for access to the country's resources; they were accused of serious abuses against civilians.

Touadéra was re-elected in December 2020 in a vote that could not be held in many areas. Rebel groups had formed the Coalition of Patriots for Change, coordinated by Bozizé, and in January 2021 attacked Bangui before being driven back by government forces, UN peacekeepers, Rwandan troops and Russian contractors. A referendum in July 2023, boycotted by the main opposition, lengthened the presidential term to seven years and removed the limit on re-election. In July 2025 two of the largest remaining rebel groups, 3R and the UPC, signed disarmament agreements with the government, and in December 2025 Touadéra was elected to a third term. Russian forces, now increasingly under the state-run Africa Corps, remain closely tied to his government. Despite deposits of diamonds, gold, uranium and timber, the country ranks among the poorest in the world.