StapleCentral African Republic
Gozo
Cassava flour cooked into a stiff paste, the daily starch of the Central African Republic. Rolled in the palm and dipped in whatever sauce there is.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
Kare (Kari)
Savannah farmers of the Ouham and the Cameroonian border whose villages lay on the route of the nineteenth-century slave raids from Wadai and Bagirmi, and whose region became the French concession companies' cotton and rubber ground.
Identity
Population: Estimated 50,000 to 100,000 across the CAR and Cameroon
Location: Ouham and Ouham-Pendé prefectures of the north-western Central African Republic, and the adjacent East region of Cameroon
Language: Kare (Kari)
Language family: Niger-Congo → Adamawa-Ubangi → Ubangian (Gbaya group)
Traditional governance: Village and lineage authority; Central African and Cameroonian local administration; customary chiefs recognised alongside.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Kare of the Ouham
The main Central African concentration.
Kare of the Cameroonian border
Communities across the frontier in the East region.
Gbaya neighbours
The larger related group with which the Kare share language family and much history.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary dress; the older hide, bark and iron ornament in the ethnographic record; ceremonial dress at funerals and initiations.
Food: Cassava and sorghum, maize, groundnuts, sesame, forest and savannah game, river fish, honey, and the millet and cassava beers of the region.
Ceremonies: Labi initiation for boys, shared with the Gbaya; funerals with dance; harvest and hunting rites; ancestral offerings.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous; bridewealth in goods, iron and cash; labi initiation was historically a prerequisite for marriage.
Initiation rites: Labi, the boys' seclusion and instruction in a bush camp with ordeal and teaching, shared across the Gbaya-speaking peoples and reduced but not ended.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Central African Republic and Cameroon, at national rather than community level — 22 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Central African Republic
10 dishes
StapleCentral African Republic
Boule de Manioc
also Gozo ball, Cassava fufu
Cassava flour worked into a smooth dense ball, the Central African staple, torn off and used to lift sauce. Made in every household daily.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
National dishCentral African Republic
Kanda ti Nyma
Meatballs of beef and ground squash seeds cooked in a tomato and groundnut sauce, wrapped in leaves in the traditional version. A dish of the Ubangi river country.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
National dishCentral African Republic
Sauce Arachide
also Groundnut sauce, Kanda ti nyma
Groundnut paste cooked with meat, tomato and chilli into a thick red-brown sauce, the dish that turns up at every Central African table.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodCentral African Republic
Makara
Fried dough balls sold at markets and roadsides with sweet tea, eaten at breakfast or bought by the handful for a journey.
Serves Makes 20 · 2 hours 15 minutes
Street foodCentral African Republic
Kanya
also Peanut brittle bar, Kanyah
Roasted peanuts pounded with sugar and a little rice flour and pressed into bars, sold at markets and bus stops across the Central African Republic.
Serves Makes about 20 bars · 40 minutes
Festival & feastCentral African Republic
Poulet à la Moambé
Chicken cooked in palm nut pulp with chilli and garlic, made for guests and celebrations across the Congo basin. Orange, rich and served over cassava.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Regional specialityCentral African Republic
Koko
Forest vine leaves shredded very fine and cooked with palm oil, smoked fish and groundnut. The same plant as Cameroonian eru, gathered from the same forest.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Regional specialityCentral African Republic
Poisson Fumé aux Feuilles
also Smoked fish with greens
Smoked river fish cooked with cassava or gnetum leaves and palm oil, the standard meal along the Ubangi and its tributaries.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetCentral African Republic
Ngbako
Maize or cassava beer fermented in villages and drunk from a shared vessel at gatherings and funerals. Cloudy, sour and drunk young.
Serves Makes about 5 litres · 3 days
Cameroon
12 dishes
StapleCameroon
Fufu Corn
Maize flour beaten into a smooth stiff paste, eaten with njama njama or huckleberry greens in the north-west. The standard plate of the Anglophone highlands.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
StapleCameroon
Koki Beans
also Koki corn, Ekoki
Black-eyed beans ground to a paste with palm oil and spinach, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed into a savoury pudding. A Cameroonian street and household staple.
Serves 8 · 2 hours, plus overnight soaking
National dishCameroon
Ndolé
Bitterleaf boiled repeatedly to draw out the bitterness, then cooked with ground groundnuts, shrimp and meat. Cameroon's national dish, from the Douala coast.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
National dishCameroon
Mbongo Tchobi
also Black stew, Sauce noire
Fish or meat in a jet-black sauce made from burnt spices — mbongo seed, country onion and njangsa — from the Bassa country around Edéa. Smoky, bitter and unlike anything else in Africa.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Street foodCameroon
Soya
Beef skewers rubbed in a groundnut and chilli spice mix and grilled over charcoal, sold from evening braziers across the north and in every Yaoundé quarter.
Serves Makes 12 · 40 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating
Festival & feastCameroon
Eru
Wild forest vine leaves shredded fine and cooked with waterleaf, palm oil and smoked fish, from the south-west. Made for celebrations and eaten with water fufu.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Festival & feastCameroon
Achu Soup
also Yellow soup, Taro fufu and yellow soup
Pounded taro served with a bright yellow palm-oil soup coloured with limestone, the ceremonial dish of Cameroon's North West grassfields, eaten with the fingers from a shared bowl.
Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Regional specialityCameroon
Poulet DG
Chicken with fried ripe plantain and vegetables, whose name stands for Directeur Général because it was originally what you served a man of importance.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Regional specialityCameroon
Kondre
also Plantain and goat stew
Goat and unripe plantain stewed with country onion and njangsa until the plantain thickens the pot. A grassfields dish cooked for visitors and for the head of the household.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes
Regional specialityCameroon
Sanga
also Maize and cassava leaf
Fresh maize kernels cooked with cassava leaf and palm oil into a thick green-and-gold porridge. A Beti and southern Cameroonian dish of the maize harvest.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetCameroon
Foléré
Hibiscus juice with pineapple, ginger and mint, sold from freezers in the north and served cold at every celebration. Cameroon's name for what is bissap elsewhere.
Serves 8 · 30 minutes, plus chilling
Drink & sweetCameroon
Bil-Bil
also Millet beer, Bilibili
Sorghum beer of northern Cameroon, brewed by women in great clay pots and sold from the compound door. Sour, cloudy and drunk from a shared calabash.
Serves Makes about 8 litres · 1 hour active, plus 4 days germinating and 3 days fermenting
Stories & Oral Literature
The Raiding FrontierHistory of enslavement
The northern Central African savannah lay within reach of the slave-raiding sultanates of Wadai, Bagirmi and Dar al-Kuti, and Rabih az-Zubayr's campaigns in the 1880s and 1890s. Villages built for defence, dispersed into the bush, or attached themselves to a strong neighbour. Al-Sanusi of Dar al-Kuti raided the region with Ottoman-supplied rifles into the twentieth century, under French protection for part of that period. The Kare's demographic and settlement history is largely a record of that pressure.
The Concession CompaniesColonial history
French Equatorial Africa was carved into concessions granted to private companies with rights over rubber, ivory and labour, and the Ouham fell inside them. Forced rubber collection, portage and, from the 1920s, compulsory cotton cultivation produced conditions André Gide described after his 1926 journey through the region in Voyage au Congo, which caused a scandal in France. The Kongo-Wara rebellion of 1928 to 1931, led by the Gbaya prophet Karnu, rose against exactly this and was suppressed with several thousand deaths.
The Route NorthContemporary conflict
Ouham and Ouham-Pendé have been among the most violent prefectures of the Central African conflict since 2013: Séléka and anti-balaka forces, later the 3R group and Chadian and Sudanese armed elements, have fought over the roads, the cattle corridors and the towns of Bossangoa, Paoua and Bouca. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced into Chad and Cameroon and into bush sites within the country. The pattern of dispersal into the bush under pressure is the same one the nineteenth century established.
Proverbs
“The village that can be seen from the road is the village that is burned.”
A lesson learned in the raiding century and relearned since.
“Cotton is planted by order and eaten by nobody.”
On compulsory cultivation.
“The boy who comes back from labi answers to his name differently.”
On initiation.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: So as the creator in the Gbaya-related tradition; ancestral spirits; bush powers with prohibitions attached; the labi camp as a sacred space.
Beliefs: Labi initiation as the central transmitted institution; ancestral offerings; divination and healing; the Karnu movement of 1928 as a documented prophetic episode; Catholic and Protestant Christianity now dominant.
Ancestors: The dead are buried near the village and addressed at lineage sites; the disruptions of the raiding and concession periods broke many genealogies.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
So
The creator of the Gbaya-related peoples
Ancestral spirits
Addressed at lineage sites for health, hunting and harvest
Bush powers
Presences of the labi camps and of named hunting grounds
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Villages of round thatched houses with granaries along tracks in the savannah, historically sited for concealment; bush camps used in periods of insecurity.
Building techniques: Pole and mud with conical grass thatch; woven and mud-plastered granaries; iron working for hoes and spears; the labi camp built and abandoned for each cycle.
Village layout: Houses around a swept yard with granaries behind, fields around, and the initiation camp out of sight in the bush.
Artifacts
Labi initiation camp
Ritual structure
Bush camp of the boys' seclusion and instruction, shared with the Gbaya.
Woven granaries
Craft
Mud-plastered stores raised against damp and rodents.
Kongo-Wara rebellion sites
Memorial
Locations of the 1928–1931 rising against forced labour and cotton cultivation.
Iron hoes and spears
Metalwork
Forged tools and weapons of the savannah communities.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Gbaya-related communities settle the Ouham savannah as farmers, hunters and ironworkers.
1870s–1911
Slave raiding from Wadai, Bagirmi and Dar al-Kuti devastates the region.
1899–1930
Concession companies impose rubber, portage and cotton; Gide's 1926 account causes a scandal in France.
1928–1931
The Kongo-Wara rebellion under Karnu rises against forced labour and is suppressed with heavy loss of life.
2013–present
Central African conflict makes Ouham and Ouham-Pendé among the country's most violent prefectures.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: KareSIL International