Central Africa is a label that moves with each institution
Central Africa has no single agreed map. The UN's Middle Africa counts nine countries from Chad to Angola, the African Development Bank lists seven, and the 1953–1963 Central African Federation joined lands now called Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, which most people today place in eastern or southern Africa.
The UN grouping covers Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, both Congos, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe, and its regional office also takes in Burundi and Rwanda. Church bodies use the label differently again: the Anglican Province of Central Africa spans dioceses in Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Whatever the boundaries, the Congo River basin has long shaped how people across the region live and connect.
Archaeological finds here reach back more than 100,000 years, and researchers have reported iron smelting in the Central African Republic possibly as early as 3000 to 2500 BCE. Bantu-speaking migrants reached the Great Lakes by about 2500 BCE and had moved as far south as Angola by the middle of the following millennium. The Sao, skilled in bronze, copper and iron, lived along the Chari River south of Lake Chad from around the sixth century BCE.
Kanem, known from the ninth century, later became Bornu and stayed independent until 1900, at its height stretching across Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon; its royal chronicle surfaced in 1851 through the traveller Heinrich Barth. On the White Nile, Nyikang founded the Shilluk kingdom in the mid-fifteenth century with its capital at Fashoda, and Wadai grew from a tributary into a regional aggressor by the eighteenth century.
Further south, a Luba prince married the Lunda queen Rweej in the 1450s, and their line produced emperors titled Mwata Yamvo. The Kingdom of Kongo, ruled by the manikongo from M'banza-Kongo, reached from the Atlantic to the Kwango River, and its Christian king Afonso I took the throne in 1506. After Europeans divided Africa at Berlin in 1884–85, the French occupied the Wadai capital Abéché in 1909, and the region's states won independence between 1956 and 1962.
Source: Central Africa
