Assignment, Week 3

Write a short history of your city. Include screenshots of your main points highlighted with polygons, points, and lines. When was it founded, by whom, and under what circumstances? What does the name of your city mean? What is the broader significance of this history and name? What questions does this name raise? What if any earlier names were there?

The area around Bangui was historically inhabited by the Bobangi, a merchant people who lived along the Ubangi River. They participated, if indirectly, in the Atlantic trade, which brought them European products in exchange for commodities like ebony, ivory and slaves (Amaye 4).

Europeans, meanwhile, were just beginning to explore Central Africa. France and Belgium’s King Léopold II both had colonial ambitions in the Congo, and a rivalry arose around the competing expeditions of the French Pierre Sauvorgnan de Brazza and the Belgian-funded Henry Morton Stanley in the 1870s.¹ The Congress of Berlin made the Congo River the official border between the French Congo and Léopold’s Congo Free State in 1885, and a contemporaneous Franco-Belgian treaty made the Ubangi River (as yet largely unexplored) the northern boundary (Pounouwaka 2–3).

In the following years, a succession of expeditions explored and charted the Ubangi River. A Belgian post was founded at Zongo in 1885 on the east bank near the rapids of modern Bangui (Pounouwaka 9). To make up for lost time,² in July 1889, a French post was built at the rapids and christened Bangui, from the French interpretation of the local word for “rapids” (Fedangaï 13).³ It had rough beginnings due to local hostility, flooding, and shortages of personnel and medicine. In four years, the command of the post changed hands nine times and the installation itself had to be moved twice (Villien et al. 22).⁴

Sites of the three successive posts set up by the French. The settlement across the river is Zongo.

In 1903, when Bangui was made the capital of the newly formed colony of Ubangi-Shari, it began to expand into a city, instead of two conjoined clearings in the forest (Villien et al. 26). By 1912, it had administrative buildings, a hospital and a hotel, and over 1,000 residents. The European population of Bangui grew steadily, quadrupling between 1911 and 1934; the African population, however, grew from 2,000 to 20,000 in the same period (Fedangaï 26). As the European city expanded, African towns sprouted on its periphery (Villien et al. 40). In the 1920s, roads were built and automobiles introduced, easing communications with the interior (Fedangaï 27).

Bangui, as it existed in 1930; as the city expanded, indigenous villages sprang up on its outskirts, all of which were later engulfed by urban sprawl. (Villien, et al. 40, overlaid onto Google satellite imagery)

After World War II,⁵ all travel restrictions were lifted, prompting a huge influx of Africans to Bangui; by 1956, the city had a population of 72,000, of whom only about 1,000 were European. This “rural exodus” slowed by the late 1950s, as the region’s unpredictable political climate discouraged investment (Villien et al. 43–44).

It was around this time that thoughts of independence first became prominent. France gave citizenship to residents of its colonies, and allowed for representatives from the colonies to sit in the National Assembly. The first of these, Barthélemy Boganda, charismatically called for full independence with “voluntary interdependence.” In 1958, Ubangi-Shari gained autonomy with Boganda as its executive (Villien et al. 44–45). The next year, however, on the eve of full independence, he died in a plane crash.⁶ David Dacko succeeded him as the first president of the independent Central African Republic. Dacko’s authoritarian rule ended in 1965 with a coup by Jean-Bédél Bokassa. Bokassa brutally ruled for 14 years, at one point crowning himself emperor of the new “Central African Empire” before being ousted in 1979.⁷ Dacko was reinstated, then promptly ousted by André Kolingba. An election in 1993 brought Ange-Felix Patassé to power, for the longest period of civilian rule in the C.A.R.’s history before he, too, was ousted in 2003 by the current president, François Bozizé (Woodfork 15–17).

This instability, unsurprisingly, has led to an exceedingly poor investment climate, difficulty governing and inability to provide basic services. The population of Bangui has ballooned to over 600,000, in part because it is the only part of the country which the government can reliably control (Brinkhoff). Public services have collapsed, buildings and roads are maintained little if at all, and there are continual strikes and riots over lack of pay by civil servants. In addition, flooding in 2005 left 20,000 people homeless and outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever have claimed many lives in recent years (Woodfork xxi). Bangui, at the moment, is calm, but remains constantly on the edge.

Areas of Bangui that are prone to flooding (Villien, et al. 61, overlaid onto Google satellite imagery)

Footnotes

¹	At around this time, campaigns by the Bobangui threatened to displace the Bateke, their neighbors to the south. Makoko, the king of the Bateke, was concerned enough that when de Brazza wandered in and offered to make the kingdom a French protectorate in 1880, he eagerly accepted (Amaye 4). A French outpost was established on the west bank of the Congo River which would become Brazzaville; a Belgian city, Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), was promptly built directly across the river. Thus, the French gradually dominated the land west of the River, and Belgians the east.
²	The first French mission to be sent up the Ubangi was led by Albert Dolisie in 1887. At Mossaka, a major Bobangui city in modern Congo-Brazzaville, the fleet was routed and forced to retreat. Shortly after, a military expedition was sent to burn Mossaka and install a French garrison there. Through all this, despite their willingness to trade, the Bobangui were determined not to be displaced by Europeans, and mission after mission was met with hostility (Amaye 5).
³	There were two existing towns in the area of the rapids called “Bangui,” now distinguished as “Bangui I” and “Bangui II” (Amaye 4).
⁴	In one of the more dramatic incidents, post overseer M. Maurice Musy was ambushed, killed and eaten while trying to intervene in a local conflict (Amaye 6). Conditions were so poor that the authorities in Brazzaville considered abandoning Bangui entirely, though in the end its strategic position was deemed valuable enough to be maintained (Fedangaï 17–18).
⁵	Ubangi-Shari sided with the Free French during the war, thereby separating itself completely from France and forcing it to become self-sufficient—which, to the chagrin of those involved, meant the institution of mandatory collection of rubber and cotton so infamously destructive in the Congo Free State (Villien et al. 42).
⁶	Boganda was a larger-than-life figure to the citizens of Ubangi-Shari, to the point that he was nearly deified. On the day of his death, crowds gathered at the shores of the Ubangi River waiting to see him walk on water (Le Vine 238).
⁷	The French government supported Bokassa in coming to power, and continued to support his regime; this included paying for most of his coronation ceremony, whose total cost of $20 million was equivalent to the country’s entire annual G.D.P. It took a massacre of dozens of schoolchildren in which Bokassa personally took part before France withdrew its support, eventually sending troops to help with his ouster (Woodfork 15–16).

References

Amaye, Maurice. L’Identité des Populations Précoloniales de Bangui : Mythes et Réalités : Précisions Nouvelles d’Après les Sources Missionnaires. Bangui: 1991. Print.

Brinkhoff, Thomas. “Central African Republic: Prefectures and Cities.” CityPopulation. 15 May 2009. Web. <http://www.citypopulation.de/Centralafrica.html>.

Fedangaï, Jean. “Origines Diplomatiques et Politiques de la Création de Bangui.” WaMbesso 1.1 (1989): 6–28. Print.

Le Vine, Victor T. ”Experiments in Power, 1958–2003.“ Politics in Francophone Africa. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. 201-240. Print.

Pounouwaka, Martin. Les Explorateurs en Oubangui-Chari, 1884–1914. Bangui: Sanza Edition, 1996. Print.

Villien, François, et al. Bangui, Capitale d’un Pays Enclavé d’Afrique Centrale : Étude Historique et Géographique. 4 Vol. Talence: Centre de Recherches sur les Espaces Tropicaux, Institut de Géographie, Université de Bordeaux III, 1990. Print.

Woodfork, Jacqueline. Culture and Customs of the Central African Republic. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006. Print.