The Central African Republic is a landlocked country in western Central Africa. Its neighbors, going clockwise from the north, are Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, and Cameroon.
Its history since independence from France in 1960 has been a grim cycle of authoritarian leaders coming to power either through elections or coups d’état and staying there. The most colourful of these was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who declared himself emperor in 1976 but was overthrown in 1979.
The current president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, has been in office since 2015. However he controls only part of the country; a civil war between the government and regional factions has been running since 2012. As with several other countries in the neighbourhood, the government has developed a close security relationship with Russia.
The CAR has one of the lowest Human Development Index ratings of any country in the world.
I did not know this before researching this post: the main language of the CAR is Sango, which is generally classified as a creole of Congo-group languages with substantial injections from French. French and Sango are the two official languages. There are over 80 ethnic groups.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of the Central African Republic.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Co-Wives, Co-Widows | Adrienne Yabouza | 480 | 26 | 252 |
| Batouala | René Maran | 263 | 142 | 33 |
| The Good News Must Go Out: Stories of God at Work in the Central African Republic African Republic | Rebecca Davis | 246 | 188 | 20 |
| Foreign Words | Vassilis Alexakis | 179 | 49 | 10 |
| Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime | Anjan Sundaram | 111 | 15 | 20 |
| Song from the Forest: My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies | Louis Sarno | 85 | 96 | 3 |
| African Tales: Folklore of the Central African Republic | tr. Polly Strong, ill. Robert Wimer | 36 | 22 | 15 |
| State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic | Louisa Lombard | 48 | 11 | 10 |
The CAR’s leading contemporary writer is Adrienne Yabouza, and I’m glad to see her top this week’s list with Co-Wives, Co-Widows, about two women in a polygamous marriage whose husband dies. She writes in French; this is the only one of her novels which has been translated into English.
Batouala was written in 1921 by French-Guyanese writer René Maran; it’s about traditional life being disrupted by colonialism.
The Good News Must Go Out is a biography of mid-20th century American missionary Mrgaret Nicholl Laird. It is this week’s Goodreads winner (and would have been top overall without the StoryGraph ratings).
In Foreign Words, the Greek protagonist processes his grief at losing his father by going to the Central African Republic to learn Sango.
Breakup is about a Canadian war correspondent who discovers that the CAR conflict matters more too him than his family does.
Song from the Forest is an anthropological participant-observer account, where the researcher integrated into the tribe more than is usual.
African Tales is a collection of CAR folk tales in English translation.
State of Rebellion, published in 2016, covers the more recent war since it started in 2013.
I scratched my head about a couple of disqualifications. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul, is generally thought to be set in one of the Congos. Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer is set in the fictional Ubangida, which at first sight resembles Ubangi-Sgari, the old name for the CAR; but apparently the fictional Ubangida is a desert county, while the real CAR is mostly savannah.
There are a couple of books about the Lord’s Resistance Army, but none of them seemed to me to be more than half set in the CAR. Adrienne Yabouza’s book The Magic Doll: A Children’s Book Inspired by African Art is about Ghanaian sculptures rather than her own country.
Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, though they did change the winner as noted above.
I have no personal connection with the Central African Republic. The French photojournalist Camille Lepage, killed by militia in 2014 at the age of 26, was a friend of friends.
Next up are Palestine, Oman, Norway and Finland.
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