Central African Republic

The territory of the modern Central African Republic has been inhabited for thousands of years, with archaeological evidence of stone tool industries and megalithic sites near Bouar that point to organised human activity well before the common era. The region's earliest documented inhabitants were Pygmy peoples of the equatorial forests, later joined by successive waves of Bantu, Ubangian, and Sudanic speaking migrants who brought iron working, agriculture, and cattle. By the medieval period the savannas of the upper Ubangi were a borderland between the trans Saharan reach of states such as Kanem Bornu and the more localised polities along the Chari and Ubangi river systems, and they remained a recruiting ground for slave raiders dispatched by the sultanates of Wadai, Bagirmi, Dar al Kuti, and the Zande and Banda chieftaincies pressing in from the east.

Sustained European contact came late, only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when French and Belgian expeditions ascending the Ubangi from the Congo basin staked competing claims. France formalised its hold in 1894 with the creation of the colony of Ubangi Shari, which from 1910 was administered as one of the four units of French Equatorial Africa alongside Gabon, Middle Congo, and Chad. Colonial rule was exploitative even by the standards of the period, organised around concessionary companies that extracted rubber, ivory, cotton, and forced labour, and it provoked serious uprisings, notably the Kongo Wara rebellion of 1928 to 1931. A nationalist movement emerged after the Second World War around Barthelemy Boganda, whose Mouvement pour l'Evolution Sociale de l'Afrique Noire won the 1957 territorial elections and proclaimed the autonomous Central African Republic on 1 December 1958.

Boganda died in a plane crash in 1959, and his cousin David Dacko led the country to full independence on 13 August 1960. Dacko was overthrown on the night of 31 December 1965 by his army chief, Jean Bedel Bokassa, who ruled with growing brutality and in 1976 transformed the state into the Central African Empire, crowning himself emperor in an extravagant ceremony the following year. French paratroopers restored Dacko in 1979 in Operation Barracuda after Bokassa was implicated in the killing of schoolchildren, and Dacko was in turn deposed in 1981 by General Andre Kolingba. Multiparty politics returned under international pressure in the early 1990s, and Ange Felix Patasse won the first competitive presidential election in 1993.

The decades that followed were marked by army mutinies, coups, and regional spillover from conflicts in Chad, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Francois Bozize seized power in 2003 and was himself overthrown in March 2013 by the mainly Muslim Seleka coalition under Michel Djotodia, triggering a civil war between Seleka and the predominantly Christian anti balaka militias that drew in African Union, French (Operation Sangaris), and United Nations (MINUSCA) forces. A transitional government under Catherine Samba Panza prepared elections won in 2016 by Faustin Archange Touadera, who was reelected in 2020 amid renewed rebel offensives and the conspicuous deployment of Russian Wagner Group personnel. A 2023 referendum approved a new constitution removing presidential term limits.

The Central African Republic today is a unitary presidential republic with a multiparty legislature, governed from Bangui within the boundaries fixed at independence in 1960.