Sarh

Sarh began as a French military post on the Chari, founded in 1897 during the conquest of the region and named Fort-Archambault. The site lay in the country of the Sar, one of the Sara peoples, who farmed the plains between the Chari and its tributaries in villages organised by lineage and initiation society rather than under kings, and who had suffered heavily from the slave raids launched out of the Muslim sultanates to the north.

Under French Equatorial Africa the post became an administrative and garrison town with wide avenues, a hospital, missions and schools. From the late 1920s the colonial administration forced southern farmers to grow cotton, and Fort-Archambault became one of the collecting and ginning centres of the crop that paid for the colony; a sugar complex was later built at Banda, some 25 kilometres from the town. Missions spread Christianity and produced much of the educated class that staffed the state at independence in 1960, including Chad's first president, François Tombalbaye, who came from this part of the south.

Tombalbaye's campaign of cultural authenticity in the early 1970s renamed French-era towns, and Fort-Archambault became Sarh in 1972, three years before he was killed in a coup. The town was drawn into the violence that followed the northern capture of N'Djamena in 1979 and 1980, when the south became the base of resistance and fighting in the early 1980s left lasting scars. Since then Sarh has remained the administrative and trading centre of Moyen-Chari, living on cotton, sugar, fishing and government.

This is Sara country: the city is named after the Sara, who make up roughly a third of Chad's population and form its largest ethnic group, and Sar is spoken alongside French; Sara communities extend across Moyen-Chari, the Logone regions and part of Tandjilé. Chadian Arabic is heard among traders but counts for less here than in the north, and the city's identity is southern, agricultural and Christian.

Churches shape the week. Catholic and Protestant congregations fill on Sundays, choirs are practised and competitive, and the diocese runs schools and clinics across the region, while ancestral practices continue quietly alongside church life. The yondo, the Sara initiation in which young men spend a period in the bush learning from their elders, remains a cornerstone of identity in the villages around and is not explained to outsiders; traditional chiefs still arbitrate disputes over land.

Music and dance belong to funerals, weddings and harvests, with drums, balafons and massed singing, and the dry season brings wrestling matches that draw villages against each other. Football is followed closely, and the university gives the town a student population. Manners are those of the south: greetings that run through family and health before anything else, the right hand for eating and giving, and a calabash of millet beer offered to guests. Southerners speak frankly about the long imbalance of power with the north.

Sarh is the third-largest city in Chad, after N'Djamena and Moundou, and the administrative centre of Moyen-Chari, though it remains a provincial town where most households have a foot in farming. Sorghum, millet, cassava, groundnuts and sesame are grown for the family and cotton for cash, and fishing on the Chari supports a trade in smoked and dried fish that reaches markets across the country. The sugar complex at Banda, some 25 kilometres away, cotton ginning, government offices and the university are the main sources of wages.

The centre keeps the shape the French gave it — wide avenues, old trees, low public buildings — while newer quarters spread outwards in compounds of mud brick and concrete. Electricity and piped water are limited and interruptions routine; cooking is on wood or charcoal, and water is often drawn from wells and boreholes.

The day begins early, pauses through the worst heat and resumes in the evening, when the market empties and the riverbank and terraces fill. The pressures people name are the price of food and fuel, the state of the roads, flooding when the Chari rises, the recurring crises of the cotton sector, and the insecurity to the south, which has brought refugees from the Central African Republic into camps in the region.

Sarh eats the food of the Sara south, with the river giving it a particular character. Boule, the stiff porridge of millet, sorghum or cassava, is taken by hand with a sauce of okra, called gombo, sorrel and other leaves, sesame, groundnut paste, or fish. Shea butter, pressed from the nuts of wild trees, is the usual cooking fat, and dried fish flavours much of what is cooked.

Fish from the Chari is the town's speciality: perch and catfish grilled fresh over charcoal, or smoked and dried on racks along the bank for sale in markets far away. Goat, mutton and chicken are grilled in the evening and eaten with bread, raw onion and chilli, while rice with sauce and groundnut stew are the usual midday meals in the street kitchens near the market. Mangoes, guavas and citrus grow around the town and are sold by the basket in season; roasted groundnuts and sesame bars are the standard snacks.

To drink, bili-bili, the cloudy home-brewed millet beer, is sold by women brewers from their compounds and shared from calabashes, and bottled Gala lager from Moundou is found in the bars. Sweet tea is drunk throughout the day, along with karkanji, a red infusion of dried hibiscus flowers spiced with ginger, clove and cinnamon, sweetened with sugar from the complex nearby.