Central African Republic

The area between the Ubangi and Chari rivers was a crossroads for savanna and forest peoples and, from the sixteenth century, a hunting ground for slave raiders working the Saharan and Nile slave routes. France took control in the 1890s and ran it as the colony of Ubangi-Shari, notorious for the abuses of the rubber and cotton concession companies.

Independence came on 13 August 1960. The early leader Barthélemy Boganda died in a plane crash in March 1959, before it, and his cousin David Dacko became the first president, only to be overthrown at the end of 1965 by his own cousin Jean-Bédel Bokassa. Bokassa declared himself Emperor of the Central African Empire in 1976 and crowned himself in a ruinously expensive ceremony a year later; France overthrew him in September 1979, months after schoolchildren arrested during protests were killed, and restored Dacko. Coups and short-lived governments followed.

In 2013 a mainly Muslim rebel coalition, Séléka, seized Bangui; a mostly Christian militia movement, the anti-balaka, formed in response, and the country collapsed into civil war along sectarian lines. A 2016 election and a 2019 peace deal did not end the fighting. Faustin-Archange Touadéra has been president since March 2016, backed from about 2017 by Russian support; government forces, Russian-linked paramilitaries and Rwandan troops have pushed the rebels back since 2021, and in July 2025 the two largest remaining rebel groups disarmed and dissolved under a peace agreement, though other armed groups remain active. A referendum in 2023 removed presidential term limits, and after the election of 28 December 2025 the Constitutional Court declared Touadéra the winner of a third term with 77.9 per cent of the vote, a result his main rivals disputed.

The population is a patchwork of some eighty peoples — the Gbaya and Banda, who between them are slightly over half the country, with the Mandja, Sara, Ngbandi, Yakoma and Zande among the rest, and the Aka and Baka of the southwestern rainforest, forest hunter-gatherers; the oral traditions of the Aka, famed for their polyphonic singing, were proclaimed by UNESCO a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.

Most Central Africans are Christian, with a Muslim minority concentrated in the north and among traders, and traditional beliefs widely held alongside. The 2013–14 conflict deliberately pitted these communities against each other, and rebuilding trust between them is a central challenge.

Music, dance, and oral storytelling are strong, and the sanza thumb piano and water-drumming of the forest peoples are distinctive. Everyday social life, where it can function normally, runs on the extended family, the village, the church or mosque, and the market.

The Central African Republic consistently ranks near the bottom of global measures of income, health, and education. Most people live by subsistence farming — cassava, plantain, groundnuts, maize — supplemented by fishing on the rivers, hunting, and gathering forest products, with cotton, coffee, and above all diamonds and gold as the cash economy.

Years of conflict have displaced a large share of the population, inside the country and into neighbouring countries, and have left much of the interior without functioning schools, clinics, or administration. Aid agencies provide many basic services. Bangui, on the Ubangi River facing the DR Congo, is the one substantial city and the centre of what economy there is.

Central African cooking is simple and starch-based. The staple is a stiff cassava or sometimes maize porridge — gozo, made from cassava flour, with fufu of pounded cassava and foutou of pounded plantain alongside it — eaten by hand with a sauce of greens, okra, or groundnut, and, when available, fish, bushmeat, or chicken. Wild leaves and tubers are widely used, and the wild koko leaf, sold in Bangui's markets with caterpillars and other forest foods, is another.

Fish from the Ubangi and other rivers goes into many dishes, and grilled meat is part of the everyday diet in Bangui. Palm oil, chilli, onion and garlic season many dishes.

Palm wine and banana wine are the traditional drinks; tea and coffee, taken sweet and with canned evaporated milk, and, in Bangui, imported soft drinks and beer are common.

In a country at peace, the Central African Republic's draw would be its wildlife. The Dzanga-Sangha reserve, in the southwestern rainforest where the country meets Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo, protects the Dzanga Bai — a large forest clearing where large numbers of forest elephants, along with bongo and forest buffalo, gather to feed on the mineral-rich soils. Habituated western lowland gorillas can be tracked from the Bai Hokou site, where the programme works with the local Aka, and the reserve forms part of the Sangha Trinational, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012 together with neighbouring parks in Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo.

In the north, the Manovo-Gounda St. Floris National Park was once one of the richest savanna reserves in Central Africa, with elephant, lion, and vast antelope herds, but poaching by heavily armed hunters, said to have taken as much as 80 per cent of its wildlife, has devastated it; the western black rhinoceros that lived there was declared extinct in 2011. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1988, the park has since been placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

Elsewhere, the Chutes de Boali, about 250 metres wide and 50 metres high on the Mbali river some 100 kilometres northwest of Bangui, and the Ubangi River itself are the sights closest to the capital. For now, access to nearly all of this is limited by the security situation.