The history of Chad

Chad stretches from the sand seas and volcanic mountains of the central Sahara to the wooded savannas of the south, with Lake Chad on its western edge. Its fossil beds have produced one of the oldest known members of the human family, and its rock art records a time when the Sahara was green. For a thousand years the Sahel belt was ruled by Muslim kingdoms, above all Kanem–Bornu, which grew rich on trans-Saharan trade and on raiding the peoples to the south. France conquered the country between 1900 and the 1920s and governed it as a neglected outpost. Since independence in 1960, Chad has been shaped by the divide between a Muslim, largely Arabic-speaking north and a Christian and animist south, by long civil wars and by wars with Libya, and almost every change of government has come by force.

In 2001 a team led by the French palaeontologist Michel Brunet found in the Djurab desert a skull about seven million years old, named Sahelanthropus tchadensis and nicknamed Toumaï, one of the oldest known hominins. In the mid-1990s the same team had found the jaw of Australopithecus bahrelghazali, dated to about 3.5 million years ago, the first australopithecine found so far west of the Rift Valley.

Between about 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, a wetter climate turned the southern Sahara into grassland dotted with lakes, and Lake Chad swelled into a vast inland sea. Hunters, fishers and then cattle herders lived across what is now desert, and their paintings and engravings of elephants, giraffes, cattle and people survive in the Ennedi and Tibesti. Some of the earliest pottery in Africa was made in this region. As the climate dried after about 3000 BCE, people retreated towards the lake, the rivers and the south, part of the slow spread of farming and herding known as the Neolithic Revolution. Linguists have suggested that several of Africa's great language families have deep roots in the zone between Lake Chad and the Nile.

South of Lake Chad, along the Chari and Logone rivers, the Sao culture developed from earlier farming societies such as the Gajiganna culture. By the first millennium CE its people lived in walled towns built on mounds above the floodplain, and they made fine terracotta figures, bronze ornaments and large burial jars. The Sao city-states reached their height between about the ninth and fifteenth centuries, but were gradually absorbed by Kanem–Bornu and converted to Islam, ceasing to exist as a separate culture by the sixteenth century. The Kotoko people of the lower Chari, and in some traditions the Sara of the south, regard them as ancestors.

The Kanem–Bornu Empire was one of the longest-lived states in African history. Kanem arose in the ninth century north-east of Lake Chad, probably founded by pastoral peoples related to the Zaghawa of the Ennedi, whose union with farmers and ironworkers gave rise to the Kanembu people. Arab geographers wrote of it as a land of nomads and towns ruled by a sacred king. Its power rested on cavalry and on control of the trade route north through the Fezzan to Tripoli and the Mediterranean, along which it sent ivory, ostrich feathers and, above all, enslaved captives taken from the south, in exchange for horses, cloth, salt and metalwork.

In the eleventh century the rulers of Kanem adopted Islam, and in the second half of the century Mai Hummay founded the Sayfawa dynasty, whose kings made pilgrimages to Mecca and built mosques at their capital, Njimi. Kanem reached its height under Mai Dunama Dabbalemi in the thirteenth century, when its influence extended north into the Fezzan. Its scribes developed a distinctive style of Arabic script, and Kanem became a literate Muslim society. In the fourteenth century dynastic quarrels and attacks by the Bulala, a related people from the east, broke the kingdom apart, and around 1390 the Sayfawa abandoned Njimi and moved west of the lake to Bornu.

In Bornu, now mostly in north-eastern Nigeria, the Kanembu mixed with local peoples to form the Kanuri, and in the late fifteenth century Mai Ali Gaji founded a fortified capital at Ngazargamu. The revived empire reached its peak under Mai Idris Alooma, who ruled in the late sixteenth century. Facing the threat of the Songhai Empire, he acquired firearms and musketeers from the Ottoman world, sought an alliance with the Ottoman Empire, reconquered Kanem from the Bulala, and introduced Islamic law and administration. Bornu remained a major power for two more centuries, but in 1808 Fulani warriors inspired by the jihad that created the Sokoto Caliphate sacked Ngazargamu. A scholar and soldier from Kanem, Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi, rallied the defence and became the real ruler, and the Sayfawa line ended in 1846.

To the south-east, the kingdom of Baguirmi was founded around 1500 and adopted Islam later in the sixteenth century; it raided the southern peoples for captives and paid tribute in turn to Bornu and later to Wadai. In the east, the sultanate of Wadai was established in the 1630s by Abd al-Karim, who overthrew the Tunjur dynasty. Under Sultan Muhammad Sabun in the early nineteenth century Wadai opened a direct caravan route north to Benghazi, and in the middle of the century Muhammad Sharif fought off the Sultanate of Darfur and conquered Baguirmi. Through all these centuries the southern peoples, such as the Sara, lived in smaller, decentralised societies that were the main victims of slave raids from the north, a legacy that shaped relations between north and south long after.

In the 1890s the Sudanese warlord Rabih az-Zubayr, a former commander in the slaving armies of the Nile, swept westward with a large army of riflemen, defeated Baguirmi and in 1893 conquered Bornu itself, ending the old empire.

French columns converged on Lake Chad from Algeria, Niger and the Congo at the end of the Scramble for Africa. On 22 April 1900, at the Battle of Kousséri, they defeated Rabih's army; both Rabih and the French commander, Major Amédée-François Lamy, were killed, and the new French post on the Chari was named Fort-Lamy, today N'Djamena. Conquest of the rest of the country took decades. Wadai resisted until its capital Abéché fell in 1909 and its last sultan surrendered in 1911, and in 1917 French troops killed a large number of Muslim scholars and notables in Abéché after a rumoured plot. The Toubou of the Tibesti and Borkou, supported by the Sanusi Sufi order based in Libya, fought on into the 1920s.

Chad became part of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 and a separate colony in 1920. France invested little. The north and centre were left largely to military officers and local sultans, while in the south the administration imposed compulsory cotton growing from the late 1920s and conscripted labour for projects such as the Congo-Ocean Railway. Mission schools in the south produced a small educated elite, mostly Sara, who would inherit the state.

On 26 August 1940 Chad became the first French colony to rally to Charles de Gaulle's Free France, under its governor Félix Éboué, born in French Guiana and the first Black man to hold such a post. Fort-Lamy became a base for Allied operations in the Second World War, and in 1941 Colonel Philippe Leclerc led a column, many of its soldiers Chadian, north across the desert to capture the Italian oasis of Kufra in Libya.

After the war the Chadian Progressive Party (PPT), founded in 1947 by Gabriel Lisette and strongest in the south, competed with northern and Muslim parties for the new assemblies. François Tombalbaye, a Sara trade unionist and teacher, took over the PPT and became head of government in 1959. Chad became independent on 11 August 1960, as part of the decolonisation of Africa, with Tombalbaye as president.

Tombalbaye banned opposition parties in 1962 and filled the administration of the north and centre with southern officials whose high-handed rule caused deep resentment. A tax revolt at Mangalmé in the Guéra in 1965 was put down with hundreds of deaths, and in 1966 exiles in Sudan founded the National Liberation Front of Chad (FROLINAT), beginning a rebellion that spread across the north and east. French troops helped contain it. Tombalbaye grew increasingly erratic, forcing officials through southern initiation rites and turning on his own allies, and on 13 April 1975 he was killed in an army coup that brought General Félix Malloum to power.

The FROLINAT soon split into rival factions led by northern commanders, among them Goukouni Oueddei and Hissène Habré. In 1973 Libya under Muammar Gaddafi occupied the Aouzou Strip along the northern border and began arming Goukouni. Habré joined Malloum's government as prime minister in 1978, then turned his forces on the army in February 1979, and fighting in N'Djamena drove much of the southern population from the capital. The state collapsed into a contest of armed factions. A transitional government under Goukouni, formed after talks in Lagos, broke apart in 1980, and Libyan troops helped Goukouni drive Habré out.

In June 1982, with covert backing from the United States and France, who saw him as a bulwark against Gaddafi, Habré captured N'Djamena. When Goukouni's forces and the Libyan army counter-attacked, France sent troops in 1983 and again in 1986, and in 1987 Chadian forces in fast Toyota pick-up trucks routed the Libyan army at Fada and Ouadi Doum, in what became known as the "Toyota War". The International Court of Justice awarded the Aouzou Strip to Chad in 1994. This was a proxy front of the Cold War as well as an African war.

At home, Habré's political police, the DDS, ran a system of secret prisons, torture and mass killing, targeting southerners in 1984 and later the Hadjerai and Zaghawa peoples. A Chadian commission of inquiry later estimated that some 40,000 people died under his rule. After years of campaigning by survivors, an African Union-backed court in Senegal, the Extraordinary African Chambers, convicted him in May 2016 of crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and rape, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. It was the first time the courts of one African country had tried a former ruler of another. Habré died in prison in 2021.

In December 1990 Idriss Déby, a Zaghawa commander who had broken with Habré, invaded from Darfur and took N'Djamena with little resistance; France, which kept troops in Chad, did not intervene. Déby legalised political parties and won multiparty elections from 1996, though observers reported serious irregularities, and power remained concentrated in his family and clan. Rebellions continued in the south, the Tibesti and the east. Oil production began in the Doba basin in 2003, exported through a pipeline across Cameroon financed partly by the World Bank on condition that revenues go to health and education; within a few years Déby diverted them to the army and the scheme was abandoned.

From 2003 the war in Darfur in Sudan sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into eastern Chad, and Chad and Sudan backed rebels against each other. Sudanese-supported rebels reached N'Djamena in April 2006 and again in February 2008, when they surrounded the presidential palace before being driven back. After a 2010 agreement with Sudan, Déby turned the army into one of the strongest in the region, sending troops to fight jihadists in Mali in 2013 and against Boko Haram around Lake Chad in Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon. N'Djamena became the headquarters of France's anti-jihadist operation in the Sahel. Chadian troops also served in the Central African Republic, withdrawing in 2014 after accusations that they had sided with the Séléka rebels.

On 20 April 2021, a day after being declared the winner of a sixth presidential term, Idriss Déby died of wounds received while visiting troops fighting rebels of the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) in the north. A military council headed by his son, General Mahamat Idriss Déby, dissolved parliament and took power. In October 2022, when the transition was extended, security forces fired on protesters in N'Djamena and Moundou, killing between about 50 and 200 people. A new constitution was approved in December 2023, and in May 2024 Mahamat Déby was elected president with 61 per cent of the vote, a result disputed by his main rival, Prime Minister Succès Masra. Relations with France cooled, and the last French soldiers left in early 2025, ending a military presence that had lasted since the colonial era. The war that began in Sudan in 2023 has driven well over a million Sudanese refugees into eastern Chad, which by 2025 hosted more refugees for its size than any other African country.