French 1889 river outpost is CAR's crowded heart
Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, began as a French post founded 26 June 1889 by Michel Dolisie and Alfred Uzac under Albert Dolisie's order. By 2020 estimates near 889,000 people filled eight arrondissements. Iron Age metallurgy sites ring a city that still sets national politics.
The name comes from the Ubangi River, itself called after a Bobangi word for the rapids beside the town, which mark where boats heading north from Brazzaville can go no farther. Because those rapids cut the earlier upstream capitals off from river traffic, Bangui became French headquarters in 1906 and stayed a military and administrative hub through French Equatorial Africa and both Vichy and Free French rule. It is the only large city on the river, covering just 67 square kilometres opposite the Congolese town of Zongo.
Long before the French arrived, ironworkers were active here. At Pendere-Sengue, 800 metres from Independence Avenue, excavators found thousands of pottery shards, iron tools and a 9-kilogram iron spatula, possibly as old as the ninth century BC, and the Iron Age sites joined UNESCO's tentative list in 2006.
Bokassa founded Air Centrafrique in 1971 and ordered luxury hotels, and his spending soured ties with Paris. He returned voluntarily in 1986, was tried, and in 1988 received life imprisonment instead of death. General André Kolingba took over in September 1981, Ange-Félix Patassé won the 1993 election, and a May 1996 army mutiny over pay left more than 50 dead; that year the city was named among the world's most dangerous. François Bozizé ousted Patassé in 2003, and Séléka rebels captured Bangui on 23 March 2013, forcing him out. By early 2014 about 500,000 residents, nearly half the city, had fled their homes.
Bangui sits at the centre of the Bangui Magnetic Anomaly, a 700-by-1,000-kilometre ellipse that is Africa's largest crustal anomaly and still poorly understood. Many suburban families live in kodros, mud-brick houses with thatched roofs.
Source: Bangui
