This post discusses the political history of central African Republic from the early history to the colonial period, independence and the politics.
The Central African Republic (CAR) is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the southeast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south, the Republic of the Congo to the southwest, and Cameroon to the west.
Read: POLITICAL HISTORY OF BURKINA FASO
The history of the Central African Republic is roughly composed of four distinct periods. The earliest period of settlement began around 10,000 years ago when nomadic people first began to settle, farm and fish in the region. The next period began around 10,000 years prior.
EARLY HISTORY
Approximately 10,000 years ago, desertification forced hunter-gatherer societies south into the Sahel regions of northern Central Africa, where some groups settled and began farming as part of the Neolithic Revolution. Initial farming of white yam progressed into millet and sorghum, and then later the domestication of African oil palm improved the groups’ nutrition and allowed for expansion of the local populations. Bananas arrived in the region and added an important source of carbohydrates to the diet; they were also used in the production of alcohol. This Agricultural Revolution, combined with a “Fish-stew Revolution”, in which fishing began to take place, and the use of boats, allowed for the transportation of goods. Products were often moved in ceramic pots, which are the first known examples of artistic expression from the region’s inhabitants.
The territory of modern Central African Republic is known to have been settled from at least the 7th century on by overlapping empires, including the Kanem-Bornu, Ouaddai, Baguirmi, and Dafour groups based on the Lake Chad region and along the Upper Nile.
EARLY MODERN HISTORY
During the 16th and 17th centuries Muslim slave traders began to raid the region and their captives were shipped to the Mediterranean coast, Europe, Arabia, the Western Hemisphere, or to the slave ports and factories along the West African coast. The Bobangi people became major slave traders[when?] and sold their captives to the Americas using the Ubangi River to reach the coast. During the 18th century Bandia-Nzakara peoples established the Bangassou Kingdom along the Ubangi River.
Population migration in the 18th and 19th centuries brought new migrants into the area, including the Zande, Banda, and Baya-Mandjia.
COLONIAL PERIOD
The European occupation of Central African territory began in the late 19th century during the Scramble for Africa. Count Savorgnan de Brazza established the French Congo and sent expeditions up the Ubangi River from Brazzaville in an effort to expand France’s claims to territory in Central Africa. Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom also competed to establish their claims to territory in the region. In 1875, the Sudanese sultan Rabih az-Zubayr governed Upper-Oubangui, which included present-day Central African Republic. Europeans, primarily the French, German, and Belgians, arrived in the area in 1885.
The French asserted their legal claim to the area through an 1887 convention with Congo Free State (privately owned by Leopold II of Belgium), which accepted France possession of the right bank of the Oubangui River. In 1889, the French established a post on the Ubangi River at Bangui. In 1890–91, de Brazza sent expeditions up the Sangha River, in what is now south-western CAR, up the center of the Ubangi basin toward Lake Chad, and eastward along the Ubangi River toward the Nile, with the intention of expanding the borders of the French Congo to link up the other French territories in Africa.
In 1894the French Congo’s borders with Leopold II of Belgium’s Congo Free State and German Cameroon were fixed by diplomatic agreements, and France declared Ubangi-Shari to be a French territory.
INDEPENDENCE
David Dacko began to consolidate his power soon after taking office in 1960. He amended the Constitution to transform his regime into a one-party state with a strong presidency elected for a term of seven years. On 5 January 1964, Dacko was elected in an election in which he ran alone.
During his first term as president, Dacko significantly increased diamond production in the Central African Republic by eliminating the monopoly on mining held by concessionary companies and decreeing that any Central African could dig for diamonds. He also succeeded in having a diamond-cutting factory built in Bangui. Dacko encouraged the rapid “Central Africanization” of the country’s administration, which was accompanied by growing corruption and inefficiency, and he expanded the number of civil servants, which greatly increased the portion of the national budget needed to pay salaries.
Dacko was torn between his need to retain the support of France and his need to show that he was not subservient to France. In order to cultivate alternative sources of support and display his independence in foreign policy, he cultivated closer relations with the People’s Republic of China. By 1965, Dacko had lost the support of most Central Africans and may have been planning to resign from the presidency when he was overthrown.
SINCE INDEPENDENCE (1960–PRESENT)
In the Ubangi-Shari Territorial Assembly election in 1957, MESAN captured 347,000 out of the total 356,000 votes and won every legislative seat, which led to Boganda being elected president of the Grand Council of French Equatorial Africa and vice-president of the Ubangi-Shari Government Council.[41] Within a year, he declared the establishment of the Central African Republic and served as the country’s first prime minister. MESAN continued to exist, but its role was limited. The Central Africa Republic was granted autonomy within the French Community on 1 December 1958, a status which meant it was still counted as part of the French Empire in Africa.
After Boganda’s death in a plane crash on 29 March 1959, his cousin, David Dacko, took control of MESAN. Dacko became the country’s first president when the Central African Republic formally received independence from France at midnight on 13 August 1960, a date celebrated by the country’s Independence Day holiday. Dacko threw out his political rivals, including Abel Goumba, former Prime Minister and leader of Mouvement d’évolution démocratique de l’Afrique centrale (MEDAC), whom he forced into exile in France. With all opposition parties suppressed by November 1962, Dacko declared MESAN as the official party of the state.
BOKASSA AND THE CENTRAL AFRICAN EMPIRE (1965–1979)
On 31 December 1965, Dacko was overthrown in the Saint-Sylvestre coup d’état by Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who suspended the constitution and dissolved the National Assembly. President Bokassa declared himself President for Life in 1972 and named himself Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire (as the country was renamed) on 4 December 1976. A year later, Emperor Bokassa crowned himself in a lavish and expensive ceremony that was ridiculed by much of the world.
In April 1979, young students protested against Bokassa’s decree that all school pupils were required to buy uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives. The government violently suppressed the protests, killing 100 children and teenagers. Bokassa might have been personally involved in some of the killings. In September 1979, France overthrew Bokassa and restored Dacko to power (subsequently restoring the official name of the country and the original government to the Central African Republic). Dacko, in turn, was again overthrown in a coup by General André Kolingba on 1 September 1981.
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC UNDER KOLINGBA
Kolingba suspended the constitution and ruled with a military junta until 1985. He introduced a new constitution in 1986 which was adopted by a nationwide referendum. Membership in his new party, the Rassemblement Démocratique Centrafricain (RDC), was voluntary. In 1987 and 1988, semi-free elections to parliament were held, but Kolingba’s two major political opponents, Abel Goumba and Ange-Félix Patassé, were not allowed to participate.
By 1990, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, a pro-democracy movement arose. Pressure from the United States, France, and from a group of locally represented countries and agencies called GIBAFOR (France, the US, Germany, Japan, the EU, the World Bank, and the UN) finally led Kolingba to agree, in principle, to hold free elections in October 1992 with help from the UN Office of Electoral Affairs. After using the excuse of alleged irregularities to suspend the results of the elections as a pretext for holding on to power, President Kolingba came under intense pressure from GIBAFOR to establish a “Conseil National Politique Provisoire de la République” (Provisional National Political Council, CNPPR) and to set up a “Mixed Electoral Commission”, which included representatives from all political parties.
PATASSÉ GOVERNMENT (1993–2003)
Patassé purged many of the Kolingba elements from the government and Kolingba supporters accused Patassé’s government of conducting a “witch hunt” against the Yakoma. A new constitution was approved on 28 December 1994 but had little impact on the country’s politics. In 1996–1997, reflecting steadily decreasing public confidence in the government’s erratic behavior, three mutinies against Patassé’s administration were accompanied by widespread destruction of property and heightened ethnic tension. During this time (1996), the Peace Corps evacuated all its volunteers to neighboring Cameroon. To date, the Peace Corps has not returned to the Central African Republic. The Bangui Agreements, signed in January 1997, provided for the deployment of an inter-African military mission, to the Central African Republic and re-entry of ex-mutineers into the government on 7 April 1997. The inter-African military mission was later replaced by a U.N. peacekeeping force (MINURCA). Since 1997, the country has hosted almost a dozen peacekeeping interventions, earning it the title of “world champion of peacekeeping”. In 1998, parliamentary elections resulted in Kolingba’s RDC winning 20 out of 109 seats. The next year, however, in spite of widespread public anger in urban centers over his corrupt rule, Patassé won a second term in the presidential election. On 28 May 2001, rebels stormed strategic buildings in Bangui in an unsuccessful coup attempt. The army chief of staff, Abel Abrou, and General François N’Djadder Bedaya were killed, but Patassé regained the upper hand by bringing in at least 300 troops of the Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba and Libyan soldiers.
BOZIZÉ
On 28 May 2001, rebels stormed strategic buildings in Bangui in an unsuccessful coup attempt. The army chief of staff, Abel Abrou, and General François N’Djadder Bedaya were killed, but Patasse retained power with the assistance of troops from Libya and rebel FLC soldiers from the DRC led by Jean-Pierre Bemba.
In the aftermath of the failed coup, militias loyal to Patassé sought revenge against rebels in many neighborhoods of the capital, Bangui. They incited unrest which resulted in the destruction of homes as well as the torture and murder of opponents.
Patassé came to suspect that General François Bozizé was involved in another coup attempt against him, which led Bozizé to flee with loyal troops to Chad. In March 2003, Bozizé launched a surprise attack against Patassé, who was out of the country. This time, Libyan troops and some 1,000 soldiers of Bemba’s Congolese rebel organization failed to stop the rebels, who took control of the country and thus succeeded in overthrowing Patassé. On 15 March 2003, rebels moved into Bangui and installed their Bozizé, as president.
2003–2007: BUSH WAR
After Bozizé seized power in 2003, the Central African Republic Bush War began with the rebellion by the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR), led by Michel Djotodia.[30] This quickly escalated into major fighting during 2004.
In early 2006, Bozizé’s government appeared stable.
On 13 April 2007, a peace agreement between the government and the UFDR was signed in Birao. The agreement provided for an amnesty for the UFDR, its recognition as a political party, and the integration of its fighters into the army. Further negotiations resulted in an agreement in 2008 for reconciliation, a unity government, and local elections in 2009 and parliamentary and presidential elections in 2010. The new unity government that resulted was formed in January 2009.
2012–2014: CIVIL WAR
In late 2012, a coalition of old rebel groups under new name of Séléka renewed fighting. On 27 December 2012, CAR President Francois Bozizé requested international assistance to help with the rebellion, in particular from France and the United States. French President François Hollande rejected the plea, saying that the 250 French troops stationed at Bangui M’Poko International Airport are there “in no way to intervene in the internal affairs”.
On 24 March 2013, rebel forces heavily attacked the capital Bangui and took control of major structures, including the presidential palace. Bozizé’s family fled across the river to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then to Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon where he was granted temporary refuge.
2015–PRESENT: CIVIL WAR
By 2015, there was little government control outside of the capital, Bangui. The dissolution of Séléka led to ex-Séléka fighters forming new militias that often fought each other.
In February 2016, after a peaceful election, the former Prime Minister Faustin-Archange Touadéra was elected president. In October 2016, France announced that Operation Sangaris, its peacekeeping mission in the country, was a success and largely withdrew its troops.
2020s
In December 2020, President Faustin Archange Touadéra was reelected in the first round of the presidential election. The opposition did not accept the result because of allegations of fraud and irregularities. Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have supported President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in the fight against rebels. Russia’s Wagner group has been accused of harassing and intimidating civilians.
POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
Politics in the Central African Republic formally take place in a framework of a presidential republic. In this system, the President is the head of state, with a Prime Minister as head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and parliament.
Changes in government have occurred in recent years by three methods: violence, negotiations, and elections. A new constitution was approved by voters in a referendum held on 5 December 2004. The government was rated ‘Partly Free’ from 1991 to 2001 and from 2004 to 2013.