A resource-rich basin state among the world’s poorest
The Central African Republic holds uranium, oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, timber and vast farmland, yet in 2017 it had the world's lowest income per head at purchasing power parity. This landlocked country of about 5.4 million people and some 80 ethnic groups was once the French colony of Ubangi-Shari.
It covers roughly 620,000 square kilometres, mostly savanna, with Sahelian country in the north and equatorial forest in the south. About two-thirds drains to the Ubangi, a Congo tributary, and the rest to the Chari and Lake Chad; the colonial name joined those two rivers. Sango is the national language. In 2023 the country ranked 191st of 193 on the Human Development Index.
People have lived here since at least 8000 BCE. The Bouar Megaliths in the west date to the late Neolithic, about 3500 to 2700 BCE, and ironworking began around 1000 BCE. Slave raiders pushed in along Saharan and Nile routes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. France seized Ubangi-Shari in 1894 and handed land to concession companies modelled on Leopold's Congo; its rule here is considered the harshest in the French Empire, and many Ubangians died building the Congo–Ocean Railway.
In 1940 Free French officers took over, and General Leclerc made Bangui his headquarters. Barthélemy Boganda, elected to the French National Assembly in 1946, chose the name Central African Republic because he hoped for a wider regional union, but he died in a plane crash in March 1959. His cousin David Dacko became the first president at independence on 13 August 1960 and soon banned opposition parties.
Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa overthrew Dacko on the last day of 1965, named himself president for life, and in December 1976 declared himself emperor of a Central African Empire. After his troops killed about 100 schoolchildren protesting compulsory uniforms in 1979, France removed him and reinstated Dacko, who was toppled again in 1981. A bush war broke out in 2004 and continued despite a 2007 peace treaty.
Source: Central African Republic
