The Economic History of Central African Republic (OLD)
A terrible autocrat and a civil war you've never heard of
The Central African Republic is a landlocked country that time forgot. Since independence in 1960, it has suffered six coups and a civil war raging since 2012 displacing 1M+ people and killing 13K. It’s so aid-dependent that foreign aid equals 224% of its government budget.
Sadly, CAR is one of the few African countries where people lived better in the 1960s than today, even after adjusting for inflation.
Compared to its neighbors, CAR is falling further behind.
75% of the population are subsistence farmers that grow cassava, corn, plantain, cotton, or tobacco.
Resources: CAR has uranium, copper, gold, and diamonds, but it doesn’t crack the top 10 list of mineral reserves in any of these. However, these resources are largely untapped or illegally smuggled due to CAR’s dysfunctional state capacity. As a result, Central African Republic legally exports $231M a year in gold, diamonds & wood, which is a paltry amount entering the central bank.
Informal economy
Most of CAR exists off the books. Many household or communal transactions are unrecorded by the government (i.e. home-brewing, housing construction, African medicine making, water collection, farming) bypassing GDP calculations entirely. Also, less than 20% of the population has access to the internet or electricity. Half own a mobile phone.
A Fragmented People
Among the ~5.5M Central Africans live many ethnic groups: Gbaya, Ngbaka, Baggara Arabs, and more. 73% are Christian, 14% are Muslim, and the rest follow traditional faiths.
Right now 71% of CAR lives under $1.90 a day. The UN ranks CAR as the 4th worst nation for human development. 11 IMF bailouts have failed to stabilize the country.
Pre-Colonial Era
The earliest inhabitants of this area were the dwarf, Pygmy peoples, who lived in the dense forests for millennia as hunter-gathers.
By 1400s, Bantu-speaking Africans arrived, forming loose “stateless societies” engaged in farming and ironworking.
Then came centuries of predation.
Trans-Saharan Slave Trade
This area was not impacted by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, but rather the Trans-Saharan slave trade.
Also, Muslim African statelets like Dar al-Kuti raided pagan African tribes and sell them to the Wadai Sultan. In the 1800s, Egyptian-Sudanese Arabs joined the hunt.
The most powerful slaver was Rabih az-Zubayr, a Sudanese warlord who made a slave-trading empire across Central Africa, terrorizing entire regions and selling thousands north.
The European Scramble for Africa
At the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, European powers established the concept of “effective occupation”: plant the flag, claim the land.
France moved more aggressively and won. In 1900, French forces killed the Warlord Rabih, eliminating their main obstacle of control and liberating Africans from Arab slavery.
France may have kicked out the Arab slave raiders, but the Africans were not free for long.
French Colonial Ubangi-Shari (1899-1960)
The Concessionary Companies Era (1899-1930)
In 1899, inspired by King Leopold’s Congo Free State model, France granted concessions to 40 private companies. It was high-risk colonial venture capital.
Most firms died, merged, or liquidated once investors realized their maps were wrong or they didn’t find enough rubber or ivory. By 1910, only a dozen firms remained, with the Compagnie forestière Sangha-Oubangui at the top, itself a merger of 11 struggling firms. In exchange, for monopoly rights, it paid rent to France.
By 1903, France named the area Ubangi-Shari after the Ubangi and Shari rivers. Alongside Gabon, Middle Congo, & Chad (and Cameroon post-WW1), it formed French Equatorial Africa.
Men and women gathered rubber, harvested ivory, grow cotton, and collect animal skins.
A Witness to Horror
In 1926-27, novelist André Gide traveled through Ubangi-Shari expecting civilizing missionaries and pristine jungles. Instead, his book Voyage au Congo (1927) documented systematic atrocities:
Why were Africans punished like this? Missing rubber quotas or refusing to work.
Resistance
Africans resisted continuously. The Kongo-Wara Rebellion (1928-1931), also called the “War of the Hoe Handle,” involved an estimated 350K Africans across multiple ethnic groups rising against French rule, company abuses, and forced labor. Using hoe handles and captured firearms, rebels attacked company posts and fought French colonial troops.
France crushed the rebellion with machine guns and aerial bombardment. Thousands of Africans died in combat or were executed.
Spreading Catholicism & Engineering Tribalism
French Catholic missionaries spread Christianity aggressively among the animist Southern populations, establishing mission schools where a tiny elite (2-3% of the population) learned French and received basic education.
The Muslim North, already Islamic for generations, resisted conversion. This created a deep religious and educational divide.
France systematically favored Southern ethnic groups, particularly the Ngbaka and Yakoma, recruiting them into the colonial administration as clerks, interpreters, and auxiliary troops. These became the évolués (”Evolved Africans”), , a privileged class exempt from forced labor who wore European clothes and wielded power over other Africans.
WWII: Free France’s Base
In 1940, after Nazi Germany conquered France, Ubangi-Shari became crucial to the Free France. Pro-Gaulist French officer Félix Éboué, the Black governor of Chad, rallied French Equatorial Africa to Charles de Gaulle.
Ubangi-Shari became a base for Free French Operations. 1000s more Central Africans were conscripted to fight in North Africa and Europe.
Post-War Transformation
After WW2, grateful for French Africa’s loyalty and facing international pressure to allow self-determination, France dramatically improved colonial rule. By 1946, France included Ubangi-Shari and other parts of French Africa into the “French Communities”.
As a part of the French community, France gave way more investments into its colonies (schools, health clinics, roads). A Black Catholic Priest, Barthelemy Boganda, a Southern Ngbaka elite, became the first representative for Ubangi-Shari.
Barthelemy Boganda (1946-1959)
As the representative, Barthelemy ended forced labor, the system that killed his parents during rubber collection.
In 1958, France offered its colonies a choice: immediate independence or remain in the French Community with autonomy.
He persuaded his people to say yes, and 99% voted to stay. Staying meant more aid, military protection, a currency anchored to the French franc (CFA franc), and preferential access to French markets.
The Only French African state that left the French orbit was Guinea.
A Grander Vision, Interrupted
Boganda’s ambitions extended beyond Ubangi-Shari. He proposed uniting French Equatorial Africa (Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, and Ubangi-Shari) into one large Central African Republic.
The initiative failed. Tribal and ethnic divisions ran too deep.
On March 29, 1959, Boganda died when his plane exploded mid-flight. Officially ruled an accident, many suspected sabotage.
His nephew, David Dacko, another member of the Christian Ngbaka elite, assumed power. By August 13, 1960, the Central African Republic gained formal independence.
Independent Central African Republic
David Dacko (1960-1965)
David Dacko became CAR’s first-independent president.
French-Afrique
Like most French African leaders, Dacko embraced Françafrique. French businesses invested the economy (logging, uranium, electric power). French personnel ran hospitals, schools, and ministries. French troops provided security. French aid kept the government solvent.
In exchange, France maintained military bases in CAR and tried to act out in France’s interest in UN votes.
“State Building”
Development focused almost exclusively on Bangui. The vast hinterland, where most people lived, was abandoned to traditional chiefs. No roads connected regions. No electricity outside the capital. Few rural schools or hospitals.
Many rural people didn’t even know they lived in a country called the Central African Republic. Northeastern CAR shared languages, clans, and trade networks with Darfur (western Sudan) and Chad. People routinely crossed borders for trade and migration, as they had for centuries. Village & tribal identity was stronger than nationalism.
Patronage
By 1962, Dacko banned all opposition parties, establishing a one-party state and played favoritism to his ethnic group.
He packed the government with fellow Ngbaka tribesmen. A staggering 58% of the national budget went to civil service salaries, pensions, and amenities for government workers in Bangui.
Economic Issues
Being landlocked, CAR depended on exporting through Congo-Brazzaville’s ports via rail. Sometimes CAR’s exports were mislabeled.
Artisanal mining was (and is!) a big issue for CAR. It was more profitable for CAR’s 40K artisanal miners to cross into the Democratic Republic of Congo and sell diamonds there to avoid CAR’s export taxes. This illicit trade killed foreign investment in mining, as legitimate companies couldn’t compete with smugglers.
By 1965, the government was insolvent. Civil servants hadn’t been paid in months. Dacko tried raising taxes to improve finances, but a nationwide strike paralyzed the capital. Inflation adjusted, GDP declined since independence.
Jean Bedel-Bokassa (1966-1979)
On New Year’s Eve 1965, army commander Jean-Bédel Bokassa, yet another Christian Southern Ngbaka and Dacko’s cousin, seized power in a bloodless coup.
France not only allowed it but encouraged it. Dacko had been strengthening ties with Gaddafi’s Libya and flirting with the Soviet Union. France needed a more reliable puppet. Bokassa, a career military officer who had served in the French colonial army in Indochina, seemed perfect.
The Man
His cousin Dacko accused him of cannibalism, claiming Bokassa kept human remains in a freezer and served them at state dinners. Bokassa denied it, but rumors persisted.
A Kleptocracy
Bokassa looted the treasury with abandon. He purchased four chateaux in France, a 55-room mansion in Paris, properties in Nice and Toulouse, and a villa in Switzerland. Anyone loyal to him was permitted to steal as well. Corruption became government policy.
He would steal funds for a hydroelectric turbine so he could pay his people.
He named schools, hospitals, roads, and projects after himself, financed by World Bank concessionary loans.
He launched grandiose initiatives with fanfare, then abandoned them when his attention wandered. Government records disappeared. Civil servants went unpaid for months.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
In 1976, he proclaimed the Central African Empire and crowned himself Emperor Bokassa I. His coronation in December 1977 cost $22 million (about $110 million today), roughly 33% of CAR’s entire annual GDP and 6 years worth of CAR’s national development funds budget. France funded much of it.
Economy
Bokassa managed to raise cotton production above pre independence levels, by reducing the implicit cotton tax by the cotton monopoly. This encouraged farmers to produce more.
Strategic Madness
Bokassa was strategic in his madness. He gave French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing diamonds, ivory, gold, and ebony worth $250,000 ($1.1 million today) and voted with France at the UN. He did this to maintain French military and financial support.
But Bokassa also hedged his bets. In 1969, sensing France might abandon him, he tried to “Move to the East,” courting the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. When that failed, he dropped socialism.
France grew tired of his antics but tolerated him because the Bokassa allowed the French Atomic Energy Commission to have exclusive rights to explore for uranium deposits in the Bakouma region. After they found uranium in the late 1960s, France started mining. Because Bokassa gave France liberal tax cocncessions, this was basically a free deal for France.
The Massacre That Ended Everything
In January 1979, Bokassa decreed that all schoolchildren must purchase expensive uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives. Poor families couldn’t afford them. Students protested.
Bokassa ordered troops to suppress the demonstrations. Over 100 children were arrested, packed into overcrowded prison cells, beaten, and killed. Bokassa personally participated in the killings, bludgeoning children with his cane.
International outcry was immediate. France, already embarrassed by its support for the “cannibal emperor,” could no longer defend him.
Operation Barracuda
On September 1979, while Bokassa visited Libya to meet Qaddafi, France launched Operation Barracuda. French paratroopers seized Bangui, reinstalled David Dacko as president, and sent Bokassa into exile.
Dacko returns (1979-1981)
When French paratroopers reinstalled David Dacko in 1979, few Central Africans celebrated. Former Bokassa supporters, still numerous in the military and government, despised him.
Facing an empty treasury and economic crisis, Dacko turned to the IMF. The ~$12 million loan came with the usual strings: currency devaluation and removal of fuel subsidies. Prices spiked overnight. The poor, already barely surviving, were crushed. Riots erupted.
Dacko had learned nothing from his first presidency. After just two years, in 1981, he was overthrown in a military coup by General André Kolingba.
Andre Dieudonne Kolingba (1981-1993)
General André Kolingba seized power with help from French security officers acting unofficially, without direct orders from Paris.
Kolingba was the first non-Ngbaka ruler since independence, ending two decades of Ngbaka dominance. But he simply replaced one ethnic patronage system with another.
The Yakoma Takeover
Kolingba belonged to the Yakoma ethnic group, comprising just 5% of the population. He packed the government, military, and state institutions with fellow Yakoma. By the mid-1980s, an estimated 70% of army officers were Yakoma.
Other ethnic groups, particularly the Ngbaka and northern Muslims, were systematically excluded. The north-south divide deepened.
Mass Atrocities
In 1982, Kolingba’s chief of staff, Ange-Félix Patassé, a northerner from the Kaba-Sara ethnic group, attempted a coup. It failed. Patassé fled into exile.
Kolingba’s response was nearly genocidal. He ordered military expeditions into regions populated by the Kaba-Sara people, Patassé’s ethnic group. Soldiers massacred civilians, burned villages, and conducted mass arrests. Thousands died. It was collective punishment, pure and simple.
Democracy at Gunpoint
By the early 1990s, the Cold War had ended. France and Western donors demanded political reforms as conditions for continued aid. The new buzzword was “multiparty democracy.”
In CAR’s first democratic election, Ange-Félix Patassé, the man Kolingba had tried to destroy, won the presidency.
Ange-Felix Patasse (1993-2003): The North Strikes back
Patassé’s victory was historic: the first northerner to lead CAR, the first democratic transfer of power, the first president from the Sara ethnic group (also found in southern Chad).
It was also a disaster.
Revenge Politics
Patassé had not forgotten Kolingba’s massacres of his people. He wasted no time purging Yakoma from government and military.
He replaced them with his own Sara kinsmen. Government jobs, military positions, and business contracts flowed north. It was Kolingba’s ethnic favoritism in reverse, now targeting southerners. Opponents accused Patassé of conducting a “witch hunt” against the Yakoma.
The Worst of Times
Patassé inherited an economic catastrophe and made it worse. Global commodity prices continued falling. CAR’s export revenues collapsed.
The government couldn’t pay civil servants or soldiers for months at a time. Infrastructure crumbled. Schools closed. Hospitals ran out of medicine.
Coups, Mutinies, and Foreign Interventions
Between 1996 and 2003, CAR descended into chaos.
In 1996, unpaid soldiers mutinied in Bangui, looting the capital. France sent troops to restore order. The mutiny ended, but resentment simmered.
Another mutiny erupted in 1997. This time, France, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Chad, and Togo sent troops under an African-led peacekeeping mission to prop up Patassé. Without foreign soldiers, he would have fallen immediately.
In 2001, General François Bozizé, Patassé’s army chief of staff and a southerner, attempted a coup. Who saved Patassé? Muammar Gaddafi.
Gaddafi’s Gambit
By the 2000s, Gaddafi gave up Pan-Arabism and adopted Pan-Africanism. Gaddafi saw opportunity in CAR’s weakness. He provided Patassé with money, weapons, and Libyan troops, stationing hundreds of soldiers in Bangui by 2002 to defend the government.
But Gaddafi’s intervention alarmed everyone. French President Jacques Chirac worried Gaddafi intended to annex CAR, just as he’d tried annexing northern Chad in the 1970s and 1980s. Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, also grew nervous.
France, Chad, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, and the Democratic Republic of Congo jointly demanded Gaddafi withdraw his troops. Facing unified opposition, Gaddafi pulled out in late 2002. Patassé was now defenseless.
The Final Coup
In March 2003, while Patassé attended a conference in Niger, General François Bozizé launched a second coup attempt. This time, backed by Chadian President Idriss Déby’s military and with tacit French approval, Bozizé’s rebels marched on Bangui.
Patassé’s forces collapsed. Bozizé seized the capital after brief fighting.
Francois Bozize (2003-2013)
When General François Bozizé seized power in March 2003, the African Union immediately condemned the coup and imposed economic sanctions. Bozizé needed legitimacy fast.
In 2005, under international pressure, he held elections. He won, but through widespread fraud. The international community grumbled but accepted the result. Sanctions lifted. France resumed aid.
Bozizé was different from previous rulers in one respect: he was born in Gabon and belonged to the Gbaya ethnic group, not the dominant Yakoma or Ngbaka. This made him an outsider, which he believed would help him transcend ethnic divisions.
It didn’t.
Central African Republic Bush War (2004-2007)
By 2004, Bozizé faced armed rebellion in the north. The Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR), led by Michel Djotodia, a Muslim from the marginalized northeast, launched an insurgency.
Bozizé’s response was brutal. His forces swept through Patassé’s northwest stronghold, burning villages, massacring civilians, and destroying infrastructure. The northern town of Birao was burned to rubble in 2007. Thousands died. Over 100,000 people fled into Chad and Sudan as refugees.
The war officially ended in 2007 with a shaky peace agreement, but resentment festered.
A Decade of Instability
Bozizé won another rigged election in 2011, but governing proved impossible. He spent most of his political capital fighting rebels and spill over conflicts.
Central African Civil War (2012 — Present)
By late 2012, northern Muslim rebels regrouped under a new coalition called Séléka (”alliance” in Sango). Led by Michel Djotodia, now better armed with Libyan weapons, Séléka rapidly advanced south.
In March 2013, Séléka fighters stormed Bangui. Bozizé fled to Cameroon, then into exile in Uganda and Kenya.
Michel Djotodia (2013-2014): The 1st Muslim President
Michel Djotodia became CAR’s first Muslim president, with the help of his Seleka.
Séléka Fragments
Séléka was never a unified movement. It was a coalition of northern rebel factions, bandits, foreign mercenaries (Chadians, Sudanese), and opportunists united only by opposition to Bozizé.
After victory, the coalition splintered over spoils. Djotodia’s loyalists controlled Bangui. Other Séléka factions rampaged through the countryside, looting, raping, and killing.
Christian communities, comprising 80% of the population, bore the brunt. Séléka fighters saw them as complicit in decades of Muslim marginalization. Villages were burned. Churches destroyed. Civilians massacred.
Anti-Balaka: The Christian Militia Response
By mid-2013, Christian communities formed self-defense militias/death squads called Anti-Balaka (”anti-machete” in Sango).
Anti-Balaka conducted ethnic cleansing of Muslim neighborhoods. They burned mosques, massacred Muslim civilians, and drove entire communities from towns where Muslims had lived for generations. In Bangui, Muslim quarters were razed.
By late 2013, international pressure mounted on Djotodia. He’d lost control of his own rebels. CAR was disintegrating. In January 2014, Djotodia resigned.
Catherine Samba-Panza (2014-2016): A Businesswoman dropped into a war
Catherine Samba-Panza, a corporate lawyer and insurance broker who worked in Allianz and was a mayor of Bangui was chosen as transitional president by the National Transitional Council.
She became CAR’s first female president and faced an impossible task: restore order in a country consumed by tribal-religious war and organize elections in a country controlled by warlords.
Her government managed two goals: a constitutional referendum and elections.
Faustin-Archange Touadera (2016-Present)
In 2016 Faustin-Archange Touadera, a mathematics professor at the University of Bangui, was elected. During the civil war, France has completely left their troops from the country, and the UN was not doing enough. At the same time, a UN arms embargo prevented CAR from rearming. So Touadera went shopping for a new sponsor.
Enter Russia and Wagner
In 2017, Russia secured a UN exemption to ship weapons and “military instructors” to CAR despite the embargo. Soon after, reports began to surface of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group operating alongside those instructors, guarding Touadéra, training his presidential guard, and deploying to frontline towns.
In return, Wagner-linked firms, like Lobaye Invest, received mining concessions.
From 2018 onward, Russian mercenaries and Rwandan troops (brought in under a separate defense agreement) helped government forces push rebels away from Bangui and reclaim roads and towns.
The price has been high. UN experts and human-rights groups have documented widespread abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture, and looting by Wagner fighters and government forces as well as by rebels. But in Bangui, many people see one simple fact: these are the first foreign soldiers in years who actually helped the government regain territory. It is not surprising that you now see Central Africans now saying they love Russia.
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Jesus! I knew they had problems there but never knew it was THAT bad for basically all of their post-colonial history. Also I know one can't go in-depth with articles like this but the Russian love (I'm aware of the conflicts Wagner had with the locals due to getting into businesses like breweries, the killings and so forth) makes sense when you read about these horrific periods the people went through.
Truly informative.
Sounds horrible