A Sahel crossroads of two hundred languages between Sahara and savanna
Chad, Africa's fifth-largest country, is named after Lake Chad, from a Kanuri word for lake. Seven thousand years ago that lake spread over 330,000 square kilometres of the basin. Today about 20 million people from more than 200 ethnic and language groups live in this landlocked state, which lies 1,060 kilometres from the nearest seaport.
The country covers roughly 1,284,000 square kilometres between Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. A wide basin is rimmed by the Ennedi Plateau and the Tibesti Mountains, where the dormant volcano Emi Koussi reaches 3,414 metres. N'Djamena, the capital, holds about 1.6 million people. French and Arabic are official, and about 55 per cent of Chadians are Muslim and 41 per cent Christian.
People poured into the basin from the seventh millennium BC, and the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region holds major archaeological sites. The legendary Sao gave way to Kanem, the longest-lived of the Sahelian empires, whose wealth came from trans-Saharan trade. Kanem peaked under Mai Dunama Dabbalemi, around 1221 to 1259, and about 1396 Bulala invaders drove its court to Bornu. The sultanates of Bagirmi and Wadai rose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
France had secured the colony by 1920 as part of French Equatorial Africa but treated it chiefly as a supply of labour and cotton, imposed large-scale cotton growing in 1929 and governed only the southern Sara effectively. Independence came on 11 August 1960 under François Tombalbaye, who banned rival parties in 1962. A northern Muslim rebellion began in 1965, and Libya later waded into the civil war until Chadian forces under Hissène Habré expelled its army in 1987.
Habré's rule killed thousands before Idriss Déby, one of his own generals, ousted him in 1990; Habré was later charged with war crimes. Oil production began in 2003, but a fresh civil war followed, and rebels tried and failed to seize the capital in 2006 and 2008. Déby died after a clash with FACT rebels in April 2021, and a military council installed his son Mahamat Déby as interim leader.
Source: Chad
