Central African Republic
Capital: Bangui · Central Africa
Savanna-forest crossroads of the Gbaya, Banda and Zande worlds, where the Aka people's polyphonic song is a UNESCO masterpiece.
Ethnic communities
- GbayaLargest group; blacksmithing and oral epic traditions
- BandaSavanna society famed for slit-drum communication
- ZandeKingdom traditions shared with DRC and South Sudan
- Aka (BaAka)Forest people; complex vocal polyphony (UNESCO)
More communities of Central African Republic
- Mandjia · Plateau farmers between Gbaya and Banda
- Sara · Southern kin of Chad's great farming people
- Nzakara · Bandia-dynasty neighbors of Zande courts
- Yakoma & Sango · River traders whose tongue became national
- Mboum · Western plateau's old chiefly lineages
- Banziri & Buraka · Ubangi river fisher communities
- Ngbaka · Forest-edge harp-music culture
- Kare & Runga · Northern Muslim-belt communities
- Goula & Kaba · North-central farming peoples
- Dagba & Langbasi · Smaller Ubangian farming communities
Languages
Major languages: Sango, French, Gbaya, Banda
Language families: Niger-Congo (Ubangian); Ngbandi-based creole (Sango)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Zande (Bandia) kingdoms
- • Dar al-Kuti sultanate
Heritage sites
- • Manovo-Gounda St Floris
- • Sangha Trinational forest
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Central African Republic
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1910–1959
Barthélemy Boganda
Independence
Founding father of the Central African Republic who designed its flag and argued for a united states of Latin Africa. Died in a plane crash months before independence.
- Music & the arts1935–2015
Pierre Sammy-Mackfoy
Literature
Teacher and novelist of L'Odyssée de Mongou, the best known work of Central African fiction.
- Sportb. 1981
Romain Sato
Basketball
EuroLeague champion and finals MVP with Panathinaikos, and the most decorated player the Central African Republic has produced.
Deep-dive community profiles
Aka (BaAka)
The forest hunters of the Sangha basin — whose yodelled polyphony, sung by everyone at once in overlapping parts, is inscribed by UNESCO, and whose elephant-hunting and net-hunting knowledge is disappearing with the forest.
Open deep profile →Ali (Ali-Gbaya)
A small Gbaya-group community of the Ombella-M'Poko and Lobaye, farmers and hunters on the savannah-forest margin north of Bangui, whose language is one of a cluster the wider Gbaya identity has been absorbing for a century.
Open deep profile →Azande
The 'great eaters of the forest edge' — a conquering Avongara-led nation spanning three borders, whose oracle-governed courts, throwing knives and Ture trickster cycles made them the classic study of an African philosophy of causation.
Open deep profile →Baka
Forest hunter-gatherers of the western Congo basin — whose yelli and water-drumming polyphonies are among the world's most admired music, whose Jengi forest spirit governs the hunt, and whose land rights are among Africa's most contested.
Open deep profile →Banda
The savanna people of the Central African Republic's east — driven west by nineteenth-century slave raiders from the Nile, makers of the towering linga horns and the ngakola initiation, and the largest group in a country whose politics they helped shape.
Open deep profile →Bofi
Farmers and forest people of the Lobaye in the south-western Central African Republic, whose villages sit alongside BaAka camps in one of the most studied hunter-gatherer and farmer relationships in Africa, and whose forest is now a diamond and logging frontier.
Open deep profile →Gbaya
The savanna-forest farmers of the CAR's west — whose Karnu prophet led the great Kongo-Wara rebellion against French rule, and whose hunting societies, initiation dances and sanza thumb-pianos hold the country's largest people together.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Mandjia
Farmers of the central savanna who rose against French cotton and rubber requisitions in the Kongo-Wara war of 1928, one of the largest anti-colonial revolts in French Africa, which France concealed and then took four years to crush.
Open deep profile →Mbororo of the Central African Republic
The cattle nomads of the savanna — Fulani herders who moved into the Central African Republic in the twentieth century, whose herds were the country's largest export, and who were driven out or killed in tens of thousands after 2013.
Open deep profile →Mbum
Farmers and ironworkers of the Adamawa plateau's eastern edge, whose chiefdoms were broken by the nineteenth-century Fulani jihad and whose territory spans three countries at the point where the Chari and the Sanaga rise.
Open deep profile →Ngbaka
Farmers of the Ubangi hinterland whose gaza initiation took boys into the forest for months, whose harp-zithers and slit drums furnished a distinctive music, and whose villages sit across a border that Central African conflict repeatedly pushes people over.
Open deep profile →Ngbandi
River people of the Ubangi whose speech is the base of Lingala's northern cousin Sango, the national language of the Central African Republic, and whose community produced Mobutu Sese Seko and was rewarded and then ruined by that fact.
Open deep profile →Nzakara
A small kingdom of the Ubangi savanna whose court harpists composed a repertoire of astonishing complexity, sung in a language now spoken by very few, and recorded in the 1960s by an ethnomusicologist who realised she was hearing the last of it.
Open deep profile →Sara-Kaba
The people of the Chad-Central African borderland — a Sara group whose women wore the lip plates that colonial photographers made into a symbol of Africa, a practice they adopted, by their own account, to make themselves unsellable.
Open deep profile →Yakoma
The river people of the Ubangi — canoe traders and fishers whose language became the basis of Sango, the Central African Republic's national tongue, spoken by nearly everyone in the country.
Open deep profile →