Bossangoa

Bossangoa grew up as a French administrative post in the savanna between the Ouham and its tributaries, in country long settled by Gbaya and Mandjia farming communities whose resistance to raiding from the north is part of their own history. Under colonial rule the north-west was turned into a cotton belt: villagers were required to grow the crop for export, and Bossangoa became the collecting point for the fields around it, with a ginning plant opened in 1928, warehouses and the road links that a cash crop demanded. The town and the country around it had been in rebellion against the French administration between 1901 and 1905.

Protestant missionaries made the town a centre of their work in the 1920s, and Catholic institutions followed: an apostolic prefecture was created at Bossangoa in 1959 and raised to a diocese in 1964, its mission running schools and a clinic. Through the decades after independence in 1960 the town remained what the colonial state had made it — a prefecture capital and a cotton market — while the industry that supported it declined, and politicians from the north-west came to dominate national politics.

The crisis that began in 2013 reached Bossangoa quickly. Fighting between armed groups and militias in the Ouham drove large numbers of people from villages in the prefecture; families sheltered at the Catholic mission and at sites on the edge of the town, and aid agencies established bases to supply them. The population of the town swelled with the displaced, and the pattern of life there has been shaped by that displacement ever since.

The prefecture is Gbaya and Mandjia country. The Mandjia, one of the largest peoples in the Central African Republic, are concentrated around Bossangoa, and the Gbaya, closely related to them, extend west towards Bozoum and Bouar. Both are farming peoples with a long tradition of initiation ceremonies, dance and storytelling that mark the passage from childhood, and with a historical memory of resisting invasion from the north — the Gbaya rising of 1928 to 1931 against forced labour is remembered in the west.

Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, is the dominant religion, and the mission compounds are as much social centres as religious ones: choirs, youth groups, schooling and medical care all run through them. A Muslim minority, many of them traders and cattle keepers, has long lived in the town's commercial quarters, and the violence since 2013 divided communities that had shared the same streets.

Sango is spoken by everyone, with French for official business and Gbaya and Mandjia at home. Music is made with drums, harps and the sanza thumb piano; football is played on cleared ground at the edge of the town; and the market, the church and the extended family set the shape of the week.

The 2003 census counted about 36,000 people in Bossangoa, and the number living in and around it since 2013 has risen and fallen with displacement from the countryside. Most households live in compounds of mud brick under thatch or corrugated iron, with a courtyard, a cooking fire and a plot of cassava nearby.

Farming is the basis of everything: cassava above all, with sorghum, millet, maize, groundnuts and sesame, and cattle kept by Fulani herders on the surrounding savanna. Cotton, once the town's cash crop and the reason for its ginnery, has largely collapsed as an industry, and what money circulates now comes from trade, transport, aid employment and remittances. Coffee is the other crop the area is known for.

Services are limited and largely provided by the mission and by international agencies: the hospital, the schools and the water points. Electricity comes from generators where it comes at all. The day begins at first light with the walk to the fields and the market, slows through the heat of the afternoon, and ends early; movement between villages depends on the state of the roads and on the security of the week.

Cooking in Bossangoa follows the northern pattern of a starch and a sauce. Gozo, the stiff cassava paste eaten across the country, is the staple, but here a thick porridge of millet or sorghum often stands beside it, reflecting the drier savanna and its grains. Both are eaten by hand, pinched off and dipped.

The sauces are made from pounded cassava leaves, sorrel leaves, okra, groundnut paste and sesame, cooked with palm oil and hot pepper. Cattle country means more beef than in the south: grilled skewers at the roadside, and stews for occasions, with goat as the meat of choice for celebrations. Dried and smoked fish from the Ouham is the everyday protein for most households, and chicken is kept for guests and feast days.

The savanna adds what it has in season — wild honey, shea nuts, mushrooms and edible caterpillars gathered when they swarm. Mangoes and papaya grow around the compounds. Local beers brewed from sorghum and millet are drunk in the villages, and in the Muslim quarters sweet tea is the social drink. In years of poor harvest or heavy displacement, families depend on distributions of maize, beans and oil.