StapleChad
La Boule
also Aiysh
Millet or sorghum porridge shaped into a ball and served with sauce, the daily food of most of Chad. Eaten by hand from a shared bowl by the whole household.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes
Kim
Fishers and potters of the Chari's middle reaches around Bousso, whose women's pottery supplies markets across southern Chad and whose villages sit on a river that has been the region's road for a thousand years.
Identity
Population: Estimated 20,000 to 40,000
Location: Chari-Baguirmi and Mayo-Kebbi Est regions of Chad, on the Chari around Bousso and Kim
Language: Kim (Besme and related varieties)
Language family: Niger-Congo → Adamawa-Ubangi → Adamawa
Traditional governance: Village and lineage authority with land and river ritual offices; Chadian local administration.
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.
Kim of Bousso
The communities around the river town.
Kim of the Chari's left bank
Villages downstream toward the Bagirmi country.
Besme and Goundo
Small related communities of the same cluster.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary dress; women's beadwork and iron at festivals; the potter's and fisher's practical working dress.
Food: Fish from the Chari in quantity, fresh, smoked and dried; sorghum and millet porridge; groundnuts; rice from the flood plain; and the millet beer of the region.
Ceremonies: River and fishing rites; land rites before planting; funerals with dance and beer; harvest observances.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous; bridewealth in goods, iron and, in fishing households, in nets and canoes.
Initiation rites: Boys' initiation with instruction; girls learn pottery from their mothers and grandmothers, which is the community's principal transmitted skill.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Chad, at national rather than community level — 11 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.
StapleChad
Sauce Longue
also Okra sauce, Sauce gluante
Dried okra powder cooked into a deliberately viscous sauce with meat and sesame, ladled over boule. The stringiness is the point and the mark of a good one.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 20 minutes
National dishChad
Daraba
Okra, sweet potato, aubergine and greens stewed with groundnut paste into a thick vegetable sauce, served over la boule. Chad's national dish and almost always meatless.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishChad
Nachif
also Minced beef with spices
Beef minced or finely chopped and fried hard with onion, tomato and spice until dry and crisp at the edges, served with boule or bread across Chad.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Street foodChad
Kissar
Thin fermented sorghum flatbread spread on a hot plate, the same as Sudanese kisra and eaten across eastern Chad with stew.
Serves Makes 12 · 30 minutes, plus 2 days fermenting
Festival & feastChad
Mouton Grillé
Whole mutton grilled over embers for Eid and for guests, seasoned with nothing more than salt and cumin. The animal itself is the statement.
Serves 10 · 3 hours 30 minutes
Festival & feastChad
Karkanji
also Spiced hibiscus drink
Hibiscus steeped with ginger, cloves and mint, the Chadian festival and Ramadan drink, sweeter and more heavily spiced than the Sudanese karkade.
Serves Makes 2 litres · 30 minutes, plus 3 hours steeping
Regional specialityChad
Poisson Salanga
Fish from the Chari or Lake Chad, split, salted, sun-dried and then grilled, from the Sara country of the south. The smell of the drying racks carries for a long way.
Serves 4 · 40 minutes, plus 2 days drying
Regional specialityChad
Poisson Séché en Sauce
also Dried fish stew, Salanga en sauce
The Chari's sun-dried fish rehydrated and stewed with tomato, onion and dried okra, the everyday protein of the Chadian river country.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Drink & sweetChad
Bili Bili
Millet beer brewed and sold by women from courtyards in southern Chad, drunk warm and cloudy from a calabash. A marked pot outside means today's batch is ready.
Serves Makes about 5 litres · 4 days
Drink & sweetChad
Bouillie de Mil
also Millet porridge, Bouillie
Millet porridge soured overnight and thinned with milk or tamarind, drunk in the morning and at the breaking of the fast across the Chadian sahel.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes, plus overnight souring
Stories & Oral Literature
The Potters of the ChariCraft tradition
Kim women build pots by hand without a wheel, coiling and beating the clay, decorating with roulettes and combs, and firing in open bonfires. Their water jars, cooking pots and storage vessels supply markets well beyond the community, and the forms are distinctive enough to be identified at a distance in a Chadian market. It is a women's craft transmitted mother to daughter, and it is the household's most reliable income where the fishery fails.
A River as a RoadTrade history
The Chari has been the road between the Chad basin's sultanates and its southern hinterland for a thousand years, carrying fish, salt, grain, cloth, iron and, in the raiding centuries, captives. Bousso was a crossing and a market on it. The river's traffic is now pirogues and the occasional barge; the road bridge and the seasonal tracks have taken the rest, and the towns that were river ports have become road towns without quite noticing.
Between the KingdomsHistory of enslavement
Small non-Muslim communities on the middle Chari were within reach of Bagirmi's raids and, later, of Rabih's campaigns, and their settlement patterns, their defensive village siting and their historical demography all reflect it. The Kim's survival as a distinct community with its own language, in country dominated by much larger neighbours, is itself the achievement that their history records.
Proverbs
“The pot is made by the hand that will carry the water in it.”
On women's craft and its purpose.
“The river takes you where it is going, not where you are going.”
On the current, and on circumstance.
“A small village keeps its own words.”
On language survival among larger neighbours.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: A high god of the Adamawa tradition; land and river ritual offices; ancestral spirits; named pools and channels with prohibitions.
Beliefs: River and land rites; ancestral offerings with beer; Christianity and Islam both present and comparatively recent; the older practice continuing beneath.
Ancestors: Fishing rights and clay sources descend within lineages; the ancestors are addressed in those terms as much as at graves.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The high god
The remote creator
River powers
Presences of the Chari's named pools and channels, addressed before fishing
Ancestral spirits
Addressed at household and lineage sites
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Villages on the Chari's levees above the flood, with canoes and drying racks below and sorghum on the plain behind.
Building techniques: Mud and pole huts with conical grass thatch; mud granaries; hand-built pottery fired in open bonfires; dugout canoes and woven fish traps.
Village layout: Huts around a swept yard on the levee, granaries behind, canoes and racks at the water, and the potting and firing ground at the settlement's edge.
Artifacts
Hand-built pottery
Craft
Coiled and beaten vessels decorated with roulettes and combs, supplying markets across southern Chad.
Chari dugouts
Craft
Canoes worked on the river that links the southern plain to Lake Chad.
Woven fish traps
Craft
Basket traps set in the Chari's channels and on the falling flood.
Mud granaries
Craft
Stores raised above the flood with fitted lids.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1500
Adamawa-speaking communities settle the middle Chari as fishers, farmers and potters.
1500s–1800s
Bagirmi's raids reach the middle Chari; village siting and settlement patterns adapt.
1893–1900
Rabih az-Zubayr's campaigns devastate the Chari basin; French forces defeat him at Kousséri.
1900s–1960
French administration; cotton is introduced in the south; Bousso becomes a district centre.
1960s–present
Road transport displaces river traffic; pottery remains the community's most reliable trade.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: KimSIL International