Moundou

Moundou grew in the country of the Ngambaye, one of the Sara peoples of the southern plains, who lived in scattered farming villages organised by lineage rather than under a king. The region lay beyond the Saharan trade routes but within reach of the slave raids of the Muslim sultanates to the north, which depopulated districts of the south in the nineteenth century and left a distrust that still colours the way southerners speak about the north.

The French created the post of Moundou on 8 November 1923, in the middle of a zone that was still resisting colonial rule, and moved the chief town of the Middle Logone district there in 1927. A cotton ginning factory was installed in 1926, and from the late 1920s the colonial administration imposed compulsory cotton growing on southern farmers, with harsh penalties for those who resisted, and Moundou became the place where the crop was collected, ginned and shipped north. Missions and schools arrived with the administration, so that by independence in 1960 the south supplied much of the country's educated class. The Logone breweries grew into one of the country's main manufacturers, and their Gala lager became the best-known consumer product made in Chad.

Independence did not spare the city. The south was the base of resistance after northern forces took N'Djamena in 1979 and 1980, and fighting between government troops and southern rebels in the early 1980s reached the region, with lasting consequences for the city and its hinterland. Cotton has been through repeated crises since, and from 2003 the oil fields around Doba to the east brought a new industry, jobs and traffic to a city that remains, after the capital, the largest in Chad.

Moundou is the main city of the Ngambaye, and their language is what is spoken in the market, on building sites and at home, with French kept for offices, schools and paperwork; Chadian Arabic matters less here than almost anywhere else in the country. Southerners often define themselves against the north, and the city has a reputation for plain speaking and for political independence.

Christianity dominates. Catholic and Protestant churches are full on Sunday, choirs rehearse through the week, and the diocese runs schools, clinics and missions across the region, while ancestral practices continue alongside church membership in many families. Muslim traders have their own quarters and mosques, and the mix is generally peaceable. The yondo, the Sara initiation in which young men spend a period in the bush with their elders, remains important in the villages around and is not explained to outsiders.

Music and dance run through funerals, weddings and harvests — drums, balafons and massed singing — and the dry season brings wrestling, which draws crowds from the surrounding villages. Football is followed closely. Hospitality is straightforward and generous: guests are greeted at length, fed, and offered bili-bili, the home-brewed millet beer that is shared from a calabash, or a bottle of the beer the city itself makes.

Moundou's population is usually put at something close to 140,000, and the city keeps growing; it remains Chad's second-largest and the commercial capital of the south. Cotton is the old backbone — ginneries, an oil mill and the trade that the crop supports — and the brewery is the best-known employer, while the oil fields around Doba have added contractors, transport work and money that circulates in the city's shops and bars.

Most households combine a wage or a trade with farming: sorghum, millet, cassava, groundnuts and sesame on plots outside the city, and cotton for cash. Women dominate the market and the brewing of millet beer. Neighbourhoods are low compounds of mud brick or concrete behind walls, with schools, small churches and workshops between them, and services thin at the edges, where the city keeps spreading.

The day starts at first light, slows in the worst heat and picks up again in the evening, when the market empties and the terraces fill. Power cuts, the price of fuel and food, flooded streets in the rainy season, and the recurring troubles of the cotton sector are the practical concerns; so are the clashes between farmers and herders in the surrounding provinces, which are followed closely in the city.

Moundou eats the food of the Sara south. The staple is boule, a stiff porridge of millet, sorghum or cassava, taken by hand and dipped in a sauce built on okra, called gombo, sorrel and other leaves, groundnut paste, sesame, or dried fish. Shea butter, pressed from the nuts of wild trees, is a common cooking fat, and cassava appears more here than in the Sahel to the north.

Fish from the Mbéré and the Logone is grilled or fried fresh and sold smoked in the market; goat, mutton and chicken are grilled over charcoal in the evening and eaten with bread, raw onion and chilli. Rice with sauce and groundnut stew are the usual midday meals in the street kitchens around the market. Mangoes, guavas and citrus grow around the city and are sold by the basket in season, with roasted groundnuts and sesame bars as everyday snacks.

The city is known nationally for what it drinks. Gala, the lager brewed in Moundou, is found in bars across Chad, and bili-bili, the cloudy home-brewed millet beer, is sold by women brewers from their compounds and drunk from calabashes. Sweet tea is the everyday drink, and karkanji, a red infusion of dried hibiscus flowers spiced with ginger, clove and cinnamon, is taken cold.