Bangassou & the East

The river country of the south-east was shaped in the 19th century by the Zande and the Nzakara, whose ruling clans built sultanates along the Mbomou and its tributaries. The best known were those of Bangassou, Rafaï and Zémio, each named after its ruler and each still the name of a town. The sultans traded ivory and captives with Muslim merchants from the Nile valley and the north, and slave raids depopulated much of the savanna inland.

In the 1890s the Congo Free State and France competed for the region; an agreement in 1894 fixed the Mbomou as the frontier, leaving the north bank to France. The French mission of Jean-Baptiste Marchand passed up the Ubangi on its way to the Nile at Fashoda in 1898. Under colonial rule the east remained a remote outpost, with little investment beyond mission stations and a few administrative posts.

From around 2008 the Lord's Resistance Army, originally a Ugandan rebel group, moved into Haut-Mbomou, killing and abducting villagers, and Ugandan troops with American advisers pursued its leaders until 2017. After 2013, armed groups formed from the Séléka and rival militias spread across the east, competing for diamond areas, roads and towns, and violence has repeatedly forced people from Bangassou, Bria, Alindao, Zémio and other towns to shelter in churches, mission compounds and displacement camps.

The Ubangi valley in Basse-Kotto is home to the Yakoma and Sango peoples, whose Ngbandi language is the root of Sango, the lingua franca that spread downriver with traders and colonial boatmen and is now the national language. André Kolingba, president from 1981 to 1993, was a Yakoma. Upriver, the Nzakara and Zande of the Mbomou and Haut-Mbomou keep memories of their sultans, and Banda groups live in the savanna around Bria.

The Nzakara are known for harp music, and the Zande for carved drums and thumb pianos and a rich tradition of folk tales and oracles. Christianity is widespread, with Catholic missions long established in Bangassou and the river towns, and Muslim communities, often of traders, live in Bria and the larger towns. The years of violence have divided communities that once lived side by side.

The four prefectures are thinly populated; Bangassou, Bria, Alindao, Mobaye and Obo are the main towns, each with a few tens of thousands of people or fewer, and displacement camps outside several of them have at times held more people than the towns. Most families grow cassava, maize, groundnuts and plantains, fish in the rivers and gather forest foods, while diamond and gold digging around Bria, Nzako and other sites brings in cash and draws armed groups.

Basic services are thin. Few roads are paved, electricity is rare, and health care depends largely on mission hospitals and humanitarian agencies. Trade often looks across the rivers to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with goods ferried by canoe, and markets rise and fall with the security of the roads.

The staple is gozo, cassava paste, served with a sauce of cassava leaves, greens or groundnuts cooked with palm oil. Fish from the Ubangi and Mbomou is eaten fresh, grilled or smoked, and smoked fish is traded inland. Plantains, yams, maize and bananas grow well in the wetter south.

The forest supplies much of the rest: edible caterpillars and termites in season, mushrooms, wild honey and leaves, and bushmeat, though hunting protected species is illegal. Palm wine is the everyday village drink, and distilled spirits and maize or cassava beers are made at home.

Meals are usually eaten once or twice a day, shared from a common dish and taken by hand, with the starch pinched off and dipped into the sauce. In the Muslim quarters of Bria and the river towns, beef and goat grilled on skewers, rice and sweet tea are more common, and in lean seasons or after displacement, families rely on food aid of maize, beans and oil.

Bangassou stands on the north bank of the Mbomou, with the Congolese shore opposite, and its riverside, market and Catholic cathedral are the heart of the town. The Mbomou itself, wide and slow with rocky rapids in places, flows west past fishing villages to join the Uele and form the Ubangi, which continues past Mobaye. On the Kotto river in Basse-Kotto, the Kotto falls, a double waterfall, lie near Kembé.

Inland, Bria, on the Kotto in Haute-Kotto, is a diamond and gold mining town, surrounded by dry savanna and the digging sites of its hinterland. Far to the south-east, Obo lies in a remote corner of forest and savanna close to the South Sudanese and Congolese borders.

Between them stretch vast, largely uninhabited wilderness areas. The Chinko protected area, a vast tract of forest-savanna mosaic in the east, has been managed since 2014 by the conservation organisation African Parks, which has worked to protect remaining populations of elephants, chimpanzees, antelopes and large carnivores from poaching and armed herders.