Bangassou

Bangassou takes its name from the sultan who ruled here in the late nineteenth century, the strongest of a line of Bandia rulers who had governed the Nzakara along the Mbomou since about 1780, when the sultanate was established. Theirs was one of several such states along the river and its tributaries. The sultans held a strategic reach of river, traded ivory and captives with merchants from the north and the Nile valley, and governed a hierarchy of chiefs across the surrounding country. Rafaï and Zémio, the other sultanates of the Mbomou, likewise left their rulers' names on towns that still exist.

An agreement in 1894 fixed the Mbomou as the frontier between French territory and the Congo Free State, leaving the north bank to France and dividing Zande and Nzakara country in two. The French worked through the sultans before displacing them, and Bangassou became a district headquarters. Catholic missionaries established themselves here early, and their schools, hospital and eventual diocese made the mission the town's dominant institution, as it has remained.

After independence in 1960 Bangassou stayed the capital of Mbomou, remote from Bangui and dependent on a road that failed for much of each year. From around 2008 the Lord's Resistance Army raided villages in this part of the country. The crisis that began in 2013 brought armed groups and militias into the prefecture; violence repeatedly drove people from the town and the villages around it to shelter in churches and mission compounds, and a United Nations peacekeeping base was established here. Fighting reached the town itself in May 2017 and again in January 2021.

This is Zande and Nzakara country. Both peoples were organised under ruling clans whose sultanates shaped the region in the nineteenth century, and both keep a strong body of oral tradition: Zande folk tales, riddles and the practice of oracles were recorded in detail by anthropologists, and the Nzakara are known for court harp music, sung poetry accompanied by a five-stringed harp. Carved drums and thumb pianos belong to the same tradition.

Christianity is deeply established, with the Catholic diocese at its centre and Protestant congregations alongside; church choirs, schools and youth groups carry much of the organised social life of the town. A Muslim minority, mostly traders, has long lived in Bangassou, and the violence since 2013 strained relations between communities that had been neighbours.

Sango, which grew up as a trade language among the river people of the Ubangi before French rule, is the shared language, with French in offices and Zande or Nzakara at home. The river ties the town to the Congolese bank as much as the road ties it to Bangui: families, trade and languages cross the water, and Congolese music is as familiar here as anything from the capital.

The 2003 census counted about 24,000 people in Bangassou, and numbers since have moved with displacement in the prefecture. Households live in compounds of mud brick under thatch or corrugated iron, set among mango trees and cassava plots, with the forest edge never far away.

Almost everyone farms. Cassava is the staple crop, with plantain, maize, groundnuts and vegetables, and fishing in the Mbomou supplements it. Trade across the river with the Democratic Republic of the Congo has always been part of the town's economy, carried by canoe. Diamond and gold digging goes on in the wider east, and coffee was once grown commercially in this corner of the country. Salaried work is limited to the administration, the mission and the aid agencies.

Services are thin and mission-based: the diocesan hospital and schools do much of what the state cannot. Electricity comes from generators, water from wells and the river. The day begins early with the walk to the fields and the first canoes on the water, and ends soon after dark. Prices and the availability of goods follow the state of the road west, which is impassable for months at a time.

The kitchen here is that of the river and the forest edge. Gozo, cassava paste, is the staple, eaten by hand with a sauce of pounded cassava leaves cooked in palm oil, or of okra, greens or groundnut paste. Plantains, boiled, pounded or fried, and maize and yams round out the starch.

Fish from the Mbomou is the everyday protein: fresh and grilled on the bank, or smoked over slow fires so that it keeps and can be traded inland, a trade that runs both ways across the river. Goat and chicken are cooked for guests and feast days, and skewers of grilled meat are sold near the market.

The forest provides in season: edible caterpillars, gathered and fried or dried, mushrooms after the rains, wild honey, forest leaves and fruit. Koko, the sliced leaves of a forest vine, is cooked with palm oil and groundnut. Palm wine is tapped in the villages and drunk fresh, home-distilled spirits and maize or cassava beers are made locally, and sweet tea is the drink of the Muslim quarters. Meals are usually taken once or twice a day from a shared dish.