Introduction
December 5, 2023 marked the ten-year anniversary in which 1000 people were brutally butchered in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). At first light, hundreds of attackers entered the city from different directions, mounting coordinated attacks on three of the poorest neighborhoods. Moving door to door, they specifically targeted Muslims, exacting an execution style massacre of men, women, and children (Fédération Internationale pour les Droits Humains 2014, 8). In the process, the districts of PK5Footnote 1 or Cinq Kilos became the only residential area harbouring Bangui’s Muslim community. Muslims who had fled similar attacks in Bossangoa and Bossembélé further north lived under a permanent state of siege (Weyns et al. Reference Weyns, Hoex, Filip and Spittaels2014). Places of worship were attacked, sometimes when Muslims sheltered there, and other times when uninhabited, and almost all mosques in the Bangui district were destroyed (International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic [ICICAR] 2014, 85). By late December, 99 percent of Bangui’s Muslims had fled, reducing the Muslim population in Bangui from 100,000 to 1,000 people. In 2014, 20 percent of those previously residing in the country remained (ICICAR 2014, 83). In the mass exodus, parts of the airport became an informal camp for people trying to flee violence, and convoys of internally displaced Muslims trying to leave the country came under sustained assault, even under the escort of humanitarian and international organizations (ICICAR 2014, 83).
The bloodshed in December was by no means the first, nor the last, intercommunal massacre, although it was one of the first observable manifestations of extreme religious polarization in the form of direct violence since formal independence. What appeared in the early days to distinguish it from others was not necessarily the scale of violence or even that it specifically targeted Muslims but, rather, that it appeared coordinated and planned. The assailants were heavily armed, the attack occurred on the eve of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution to provide protection for civilians, and as French special forces were deploying to Bangui under Operation Sangaris (UNSC 2013). For these reasons, it came to set a particular tone among scholars and practitioners for thinking about intercommunal sectarian violence. Because of the seeming level of organization, the violence of December 5 was interpreted in three broad ways.
First, the violence was understood within the context of an increasing security vacuum. Violence towards Muslims is attributed to retribution by informal self-defence units responding to violence perpetrated by a predominantly Muslim coalition who seized power through a coup d’état in 2013. After seizing power, the Seleka leadership was unable to reign in looting and killing of civilians by their foot soldiers, who operated with impunity throughout the West and South of the country (Käihkö and Utas Reference Käihkö and Utas2014, 70).Footnote 2 Given the increased insecurity across the country, the disbandment of Seleka and resignation of the coup president, Michel Am-Nondokro Djotodia, failed to stem this violence and prevent the emergent anti-Balaka self-defence groups from exacting retaliatory violence against predominantly Muslim civilians. Thus, in the context of a failed security system, the violent excesses of the Seleka in the post-coup period triggered deep resentment (Kane Reference Kane2014) and further spiralling insecurity across what had now become a religious divide. The violence of Seleka caused a “rupture in society” (Glawion and de Vries Reference Glawion and de Vries2018, 430) and this social rift was reinforced through the anti-Balaka response (Kilembe Reference Kilembe, Carayannis and Lombard2015).
A second interpretation is that violence is a means through which to acquire power (Vlavonou Reference Vlavonou2020) or to sustain it. Herewith, explanations for the violence center on political elite manipulation of ethnic and religious identity by a succession of leaders to hold onto power, regain it, or both. According to Maiangwa (Reference Maiangwa2017, 196), “successive leaders in CAR have played the ethnic, regional and religious cards in deciding who benefits from the spoils of their administrations.” The politicization of ethnic and religious identity by powerful leaders, in the context of patrimonial rule by “big men” or patrons, is a recurring theme in studies of African states since the 1970s (de Bruijne Reference de Bruijne2023; Driscoll Reference Driscoll2021). In the context of deep exclusion, patronage networks are embedded in communal identity (Cheeseman Reference Cheeseman2016). Given these claims, there are many accounts of the ways in which different CAR leaders from André-Dieudonné Kolingba to François Bozize have sought to insulate themselves through the politicization of ethnicity and distribution of rewards. Isaacs-Martin (Reference Isaacs-Martin, Varin and Abubkar2017), for example, argues that the burden of responsibility for violence lies with successive presidents whose manipulation of identity in the context of the construction of military alliances and poverty is intended to create an illusion of legitimacy. This, according to Siradag (Reference Siradag2016, 99), includes the leadership of Seleka and anti-Balaka, who also exploit the identities of communities to claim power and control natural resources. Further, as Vlavanou (Reference Vlavonou2023) claims, elites primarily mobilize non land-based “identity capital” in legitimacy-seeking processes to assert both legitimacy and dominance. Acquiring power is also reminiscent of the older greed and grievance thesis (Collier and Hoeffler Reference Collier and Hoeffler2004).
In many such accounts, the making of religious sectarian identity occurred in the contemporary period, with its foundations laid in the security vacuum produced by the coup, the lack of liberal democracy, the patronage systems of successive political elites–or a combination of all three. In explaining violence these ways, the CAR became a country for state legitimacy to be restored through a liberal and state-centric model of peacebuilding, ensuring the rule of law, good governance, security-sector and judicial reform, and civil-political rights.
In contrast, Lombard (Reference Lombard2016, 180–81) explains violence at the micro level as an emotional and collective practice of popular punishment to manage danger in times when social norms are in flux. Violence modalities also function during periods of nonwar and increased fragility. Popular punishment and vengeance are forms of social and political regulation that arise through diffuse modes of organization in wartime (Lombard and Batianga-Kinzi Reference Lombard and Batianga-Kinzi2015). In a recent issue of the African Studies Review, Lombard and Vlavonou (Reference Lombard and Vlavonou2023) explore perceptions among anti-Balaka, finding that a moral economy of interpersonal respect overlays claims to autochthony. In this way, violence is connected back to claims about grievances. This has resonance with studies elsewhere on the continent that discuss the importance of morality, rationality and agency (Chabal Reference Chabal2009, 66) or political etiquette and respect as a form of social and political regulation (Francis Reference Francis2011).
This paper argues that explanations of the violence that erupted in 2013 are incomplete. Whereas violence in the CAR may be broadly understood as a form of social and political regulation (Lombard and Batianga-Kinzi Reference Lombard and Batianga-Kinzi2015), expressed through claims to autochthony, attitudes towards Muslims in the CAR have deeper historical roots that are pervasive and widespread. Of course, other communities have faced structural violence in the form of marginalization. Indigenous Aka Pygmie groups had little influence during the first decades after independence, like hunter-gatherer communities elsewhere in Africa (Francis and Francis Reference Francis and Michael2024). Many examples exist tied to elite turnover, such as Yakoma riverine groups who fled CAR briefly as André-Dieudonné Kolingba left power. While violence is not a new phenomenon in the CAR, and othering has long been part of the modus operandi, theories of violence do not explain why it fragmented along these specific sectarian lines in 2013, why violence towards Muslims has repeatedly recurred, or why Muslim communities continue to be perceived as ‘other,’ foreign, and the cause of all insecurity within the country. Nor do they explain why patterns of negative othering towards Muslims are constant, rather than an ebb and flow dependent upon specific social and political circumstances.
The central claim of this paper is that attitudes towards Muslims have very specific foundations in the past, primarily in the colonial period of state-making, and specifically in the construction of colonial-subject relationships. It shows how ruptures of the present have deeply colonial origins and how the ways in which they are rooted in the longer past, including the ways in which the extreme brutality of the longer past impacts collective memories, shape the present. Whereas Muslim subjects suffered conquest, they escaped the diffusion of “Frenchness”; their mobility was not coterminous with the colonial project. Instead, Muslims lived a parallel existence outside of the postcolonial nationalist project which was founded on specific forms of past remembering that Muslim subjects were not able to share. Their “otherness” is a product of their escape, understood through an accumulated “pastness” of time and space in Central African historiography.
Methodology and Epistemology
This paper is based on multiple periods of ethnographic fieldwork in the CAR and archival documentary research. Ethnographic research was undertaken in the capital and the multiple peripheries of the CAR, comprising armed groups across the divides, former armed group members, women’s organizations, and peace-building communities.Footnote 3 Further, this paper draws upon archival research of primary documents on Equatorial Africa and Ubangui-Chari, primarily from the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM). Through purposive sampling of archival documents, patterns in the perceptions of French colonialists towards the communities they conquered were evaluated thematically for this paper and contextualized within the historical, social, and economic environment. Archival research is increasingly important for researchers, given the importance of contextualizing recent events within the wider and longer historical context of the African state (Bayart Reference Bayart1993) to illuminate the significance of those events in the present.
In this transdisciplinary approach and in understanding space, time, and meaning, the Francophone concept of “histoire” (rather than the English understanding of “history”) is a useful epistemic approach. Giles-Vernick found in her CAR fieldwork that Banda peoples understood history conceptually to simultaneously express, “a past space, as particular knowledge, practices and people associated with this past space, or as proper social relations” (Reference Giles-Vernick1996, 246). Taken together with lege (road or path) and ndo (space and hierarchical position), the spatial-temporal axis depicted both pastness and idealized order (Giles-Vernick Reference Giles-Vernick1996). This paper draws epistemologically on Giles-Vernick and, further, on Mbembe’s discussion of âge and durée as an entanglement (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001, 14) that contests time-bound considerations of postcolonial relationships. These accumulated memories—images, experiences, and meanings of past sociopolitical orders and profound sociopolitical transformations—can help to forge collective identities and ways of negotiating meaning that constitute present logic. Finally, this postcolonial approach posits that colony and colonial power are interdependent in the impact of the long historical past on the present. Thus, to consider the impact of the past on the present is a futile exercise without the consideration of the relationship between the metropole and colony.
The Extent of Muslim Precarity
A decade has passed since the forced displacements of 2013, yet the vast majority of Muslims have not returned home. Many remain situated beyond the country’s borders in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Sudan, and Cameroon. Inside the CAR, most Muslims displaced from the West of the country remain so. A few who were displaced, or sought sanctuary for their displacement in PK5, have been resettled in other areas.Footnote 4 Many spaces from which Muslims were forced to flee, including homes and small businesses, have been claimed by others. Paradoxically, despite professing peace, many communities simultaneously refused to allow Muslims to return, perpetuating further cycles of exclusion. Some local communities have even espoused the view that there is peace now because Muslims have gone (author field notes). Mbororo, or Muslim pastoralists, continue to face violent attacks, many of whom are now armed. For example, recently in Boyo, anti-Balaka executed male Muslim civilians, beheaded some, displayed heads and genitals as trophies, buried the wounded alive, raped women and children, and torched more than 500 houses (Agbetse Reference Agbetse2022, 8).
In official circles, there remains a pervasive and conspicuous silence about attacks on Muslims, and oftentimes these attacks are not investigated. For those in official peacebuilding capacities, it has been difficult to raise and discuss these concerns (field notes). This underscores the uphill struggle in terms of restitutive justice to reclaim rights and spaces for Muslim communities. This struggle itself is underscored by a failure to acknowledge the precarity facing Central African Muslims.
The precarity of Muslims is extreme and widespread, but not officially recognized. In government circles, Muslim civil servants are isolated and lay low in times of extreme violence, hiding from public view (field notes).Footnote 5 At a socioeconomic level, there continues to be severe discrimination against internally displaced persons and refugees. Ten years have passed, during which a peace process has become established, yet severe fragmentation remains. There has been no process of restitution. For example, as a displaced person described:
As Muslim communities we are isolated and marginalised. We cannot get our homes and shops back. Others, non-Muslims have taken them. Very few Muslims can return to where they came from. The government doesn’t take the decision to facilitate the return of people and ensure they get their property back.
The negative othering of Muslims has a long history in the CAR and beyond, in other Francophone colonial possessions. In the CAR, interviewees expressed their historical experience of being Muslim over many decades. As one elder interviewee living in N’dele in the northeast stated:
When growing up, my generation learned to cope by avoiding conflict and hiding that we were Muslim through fake identity documents. This gave us access to schools and hospitals. The young don’t want to hide it anymore but the anti-Balaka see everyone east of Bria as Muslim and foreign. This is extreme. It is a large part of public opinion. We are not citizens to them.
Like other parts of Central and East Africa, Hamitic mythologies permeate relations between communities in which Muslims are frequently racialized as objects and constructed as outsiders, foreigners, and an unnatural part of the authentic ordering of what it means to be Central African. This is also central to claiming control of intellectual and elite spaces. For example, in discussing his life prior to 2013, a member of an armed group said:
I was a student at the University of Bangui before I joined [an armed group]. In lectures one day a Professor stood before us and said that Muslims came to the Central African Republic just to do business and when we Central Africans are ready we will tell them all to leave. He asked us all “are you Central African or Muslim?” There were 500 people in that room and I knew that just 7 of us were Muslim. I left that day and went home. I did not eat the whole day because I felt so hurt. These were my compatriots. I never went back to the university because it wasn’t safe to do so.
Not all undercurrents of insecurity and precarity connected to being and belonging as a Muslim have been understated and implied. Despite the creation of a strong legal arsenal and the existence of a civic space in the country, overt threats remain. In Bangui, for example, the few Muslims who have moved back to the area remain noticeably close to PK5 (field notes) so they can cross the road to the only Muslim enclave and reach safety quickly.
In Bangui, there are overt discussions about the elimination of Muslims. For example, one peacekeeper discussed the perceptions of a variety of office-holders in religious organizations about Muslims. He said:
No-one is speaking up about the targeting of Muslims. When we arrived, people within the Catholic Church, Jesuits, Fransiscan Nuns asked, “you were sent here with guns so why don’t you use them?” My reply was “who are you suggesting we should kill?” They were suggesting Muslims should be killed and that we the peacekeepers, those who came to bring peace, should be the ones to do it.
In social circles, both elite and nonelite, governmental and nongovernmental, the anti-Balaka are frequently considered as patriots, defending an idealized ordering of society and restoring proper social relations among communities. In conveying sentiments that they do not belong, there have been many vivid displays of pretending to eat the flesh of Muslims in a form of masquerade, portraying disgust, dismemberment, and possession. Human rights abuses, including detentions, particularly against Muslim pastoralist communities, have increased (UN interview).
The extreme precarity of Muslim communities is encompassed by direct, structural, and cultural violence which has not abated over the last decade. In this paper, I consider the specific roots of this precarity as divided into four broad themes, to which I shall now turn.
Making Christians as “Frenchmen” in Colonial Ubangui-Chari
The negative othering of Muslims occurred long before the massacres of 2013. Colonial France, in dealing with its African possessions, developed an inimical relationship with Islam, impacting intellectual debates in France that simultaneously came to define and redefine colonial practice in Central Africa.
During the Second Republic, policies directed towards the Islamic Maghreb, such as the Nativist Policies of the 1860s and Arab Kingdom Policy of 1863 to create a Franco-Muslim Algeria, entrenched the tacit acceptance of Islam and the dual administration of two colonial subject populations. Cardinal Lavigerie, who established the White Fathers,Footnote 6 implemented a nonproselytizing presence among Muslim subjects in Algeria. Across Central Africa, the largest group of Roman Catholic missionaries were French (Pawlikova-Vilhanova Reference Pawlikova-Vilhanova2007) who criticized these policies as anti-Christian in a language reminiscent of the Crusades. Missionaries saw themselves as both priests and soldiers in a Catholic army dedicated to a moralist conquest of the Maghreb. The White Fathers focused on conversion, not civilization, as Lavigerie’s philosophy was to facilitate the development of African churches,Footnote 7 not create French subjects. Lavigerie’s expansionist ambitions of a “Christian Kingdom” at the heart of Equatorial Africa were mandated by Pope Leo XIII. Lavigerie’s project was defined as a greater moral crusade against slavery (Pawlikova-Vilhanova Reference Pawlikova-Vilhanova2007, 252), unifying the anti-slavery campaigns in Central Africa and beyond. Christianity was now central to the anti-slavery crusade against Muslim Sultanates and broader ideas of civilization held in France, as well as French expansion in Central Africa.
The expansion of trans-Saharan slave-raiding among Muslim states occurred in the context of the expansion of the European world economy and their military power (Cordell Reference Cordell and Diouf2004). The Sultanates of Borno, Baguirmi,Footnote 8 Wadai, and Dar Fur raided the South, as did the colonial Khartoumers, with Wadai and Baguirmi slaving both Sara and Banda peoples. During its brief existence at N’dele from 1896 to 1911, Dar el-KoutiFootnote 9—a Muslim tributary to the Sultanate of Wadai—became a major hub for slave-raiding and trading. Cordell (Reference Cordell1985) sets out the extent of this destruction in meticulous detail—violent decimation of the population, extensive social dislocation, and severe impact on food production. Many of the populations raided included refugees from slaving further north. Slaves tended the plantations at N’dele, which also traded ivory, cloth, aromatic foodstuffs, and coffee.
Between 1896 and 1911 Muhammad al-Senoussi, Sultan of Dar el-Kouti, arranged an agreement with Rabih az-Zubayr, a notorious slaver, to end attacks on Dar el-Kouti in return for passage across the territory to attack and enslave Banda. From 1898 onwards, with the expanding presence of the French, “N’dele never had a pre-colonial history whose dynamics were totally independent of the French” (Cordell Reference Cordell1985, 94). French pressures on Dar el-Kouti were driven by a desire to connect French Congo with Lake Chad, securing a route from Algiers to Congo and curtailing British influence in the interior. The ill-fated Crampel expedition of 1891Footnote 10 undermined the extension of French paper annexations over the interior,Footnote 11 thereafter supported by military expeditions. French colonialists first tried to annex the Sultanates through paper treaties and then destroy them through direct military conquest (archival analysis). The colonial archives contain thousands of colonial reports demonstrating permanent confrontation with, and direct action against, the Sultanates—including Dar el-Kouti in Ubangi-Chari, Ouaddai, and the Sultanates beyond.
Early nineteenth-century records document the relationship between the concession companies and the colonial government, reserving vast swathes of territory for the concession’s private extraction, which Sultan Senoussi refused to recognize.Footnote 12 Increasingly hostile colonial reports document Senoussi’s intransigence towards French colonialism, specifically regarding the unfulfilled terms of the 1909 Treaty signed under duress,Footnote 13 concerns over Senoussi’s relationships with other Muslim sultanates in the region and beyond,Footnote 14 and culminating in the assassination of Senussi, his son, and the “pacification” of N’dele by colonial military conquest.Footnote 15 These processes mark a sustained and permanent action against the Sultanates and their tributaries. The treaties signed under duress stripped all sovereignty from Dar el-Kouti, annexing it into the French possession of Ubangi-Chari.
For older Banda peoples, the communal oral histories of slaving by Muslim Sultanates features in the contemporary perceptions of their own identity, as “a past space … that shape[s] present social relations” and “a past space that posed dangers even in the present” (Giles-Vernick Reference Giles-Vernick1996, 259) with implications for the proper social ordering. Oral histories of fear and distrust from fleeing slaving by Muslim Sultanates exist among older Banda and similarly, French regroupement policiesFootnote 16 implemented following the destruction of Dar el-Kouti feature in these memories. In contrast, perceptions among Muslim communities in the northeast differ. As one person who traced his lineage directly to the Sultanate of Dar el-Kouti stated:
Until 1897 Dar el-Kouti was autonomous. It was later annexed and the Sultan was appointed as Mayor. This has been a long process of submission, exclusion and criminalisation of my people, and now direct abandonment and neglect.
Although precolonial relations were not as copacetic as may be suggested—and many groups identifying as Muslim today, such as Goula communities, were also raided—oral mythologies imprint the present. Thus, for members of this community, the present social ordering is one in which colonial relations of the past, also deeply fraught with danger, became that of a deeper alienation.
Despite the vociferous Republican anticlerical debates about whose France and which France taking place in Parisian intellectual circles at the turn of the century, French Catholic missionaries refashioned themselves as a critical component of La Mission Civilisatrice during the Third Republic, now on a crusade for both God and country. Whose France and which France were firmly on the agenda following the Dreyfus Affair in 1894 (Daughton Reference Daughton2008). The false espionage accusations against Dreyfus emboldened republicanism, which blamed the “older ways” and demanded separation of church and state. Open hostility to republicanism by French missionaries was firmly in the spotlight with the invention of anticlericalism in metropolitan France. Sustained measures targeting Islamic institutions and Muslim societies were “a direct extension of French confrontation with the Catholicism that dominated on the near side of the Mediterranean” (Triand Reference Triand, Levtzion and Pouwels2000, 170). This included the deliberate exclusion of Muslim societies from the redefined notion of God and country on the continent.
Simultaneously, the Parisian intellectual left idealized and “fetishized Africa and its so-called primitive cultures as an imaginary antidote to their alienation from bourgeoise metropolitan life” (Clark Reference Clark1997, 56). Shaped by exoticized desires and representations of the African subject as a noble savage (Gide Reference Gide1902), French intellectuals, in keeping with the colonial lexicon of Islam Noir, recast Muslim Africans as marabouts. The civilizing and colonizing goals of France were subject to intense debate and Catholic missionaries in Central Africa reframed their moral goals to align with the expansion of republican colonialism, aiming to overcome political, cultural, and social divisions in France. Thus, they appropriated the rhetoric of republican colonialism, placing Catholicism firmly within the civilizing mission and asserting that there could be no civilizing mission without Catholicism (Daughton Reference Daughton2008, 262). Missionaries now actively advanced French colonial republican objectives, eliding Catholicism with patriotism and religious salvation with secularist projects of Empire. Reversing Lavigerie, French language and education became a central part of missionary endeavors.
Intense debates within French intellectual circles, reinforced through French military campaigns in Africa and supported by evangelizing missions confronting Islam Noir, characterized African Muslims as diametrically opposed to the progressive and modern ideals of the French state, neither modern nor part of the “noble savage” trope. The administration of Muslim subjects had come to define France in multiple ways (Murray-Miller Reference Murray-Miller2017). Islam was extricated from the colonial spheres of progress and modernity, necessitating a corresponding isolation of Muslims from these domains. In order to advance republican Christianity, French colonialism denigrated Islam. As one interviewee stated:
We had a parallel existence before colonialism, but the coming of the church and the priests transformed the mindset of the people in the South to see us as enemies.
Muslims in Central Africa were excluded from the civilizing mission of republican colonialism, or the making of Frenchmen through Christianity. Civilizational goals now firmly aligned republicanism and Catholicism in French colonies, while Muslims were relegated to a parallel existence from those who were both conquered and acculturated under the French republican and Christian orbit, in what one interviewee called, “two compartments of a single state.”
Escape from the Socioeconomic and Cultural Diffusion of French Colonialism
Despite the conquest of Muslim sultanates in Central Africa by France, Islamic belief systems, institutions, and Muslim societies were never fully colonized. Conquest and dismantlement of the Sultanates in Central and East Africa did not result in the assimilation of Muslims into the Christian sphere and, as such, the colonial sphere and the Islamic sphere were never entirely coterminous in Africa.
At the moment of subjugation, Islamic identity in Ubangi-Chari, comprising transnational and trans-Saharan networks, provided an immense anti-colonial challenge to French republican colonialism. These “marabouts” as they became known in colonial lexicon were impervious to, and evaded, conversion through a greater mobility, setting them apart from other indigenous groups and hindering the prospect of incorporating other Africans into greater French “civilization.” Muhammad al-Senoussi, Sultan of Dar el-Kouti and born in Wadai, was a member of the Sanusiyya, a moderate Muslim politico-religious Sufi Order founded by an Algerian scholar in Mecca in 1837, headquartered in LibyaFootnote 17 and extending across the Sahara and most of the Sudan.Footnote 18 N’dele was not simply a slaving and trade hub. It was also a place through which pilgrims travelled and rested en route to the Hajj (Cordell Reference Cordell1985, 216), where they could meet Muslim religious advisors connected to other centers of faith, learning, and power.Footnote 19 The mythology of al-Senoussi in the region of the northeast encompasses the ideas of an anti-colonial nationalist in a political order in which Muslim communities did not have to hide (field notes). In western and southern Ubangui-Chari, syncretic affiliations between Christianity and animism became established among Gbaya and Banda. Muslim communities escaped from and remained peripheral to this trajectory throughout conquest, the colonial period, and in postcolonial state formation.
Sufism offered to CAR’s Muslims a transnational fraternity beyond the confines of the nation-state, spanning multiple schools of theology and philosophy broadly coalesced around the Sufi principles of repentance, remembrance, and sincerity. But importantly, this philosophical and theological mobility was never fully mediated by the state. The incorporation of traditional authorities into the colony of Ubangui-Chari and formalization of their roles during the Fifth Republic further entrenched the authority of spiritual leaders. For example, in the present, the Mayor-Sultan of the northeast is simultaneously a politico-administrative authority and a spiritual one (field notes), and the communities in this area have greater transnational spiritual mobility than Gbaya and Banda elsewhere. In N’dele, I observed the Mayor-Sultan practicing processes of conflict transformation within Muslim communities that speak to Islamic, African, and traditional value systems and practices. In discussions with communities, it was stated that, “Our Sultan is our spiritual guide, Iman, advisor, representative, leader. It is he that we go to restore the equilibrium.”
In the north, Muslim communities recognize a spiritual affinity beyond the border, particularly to the north and east (field notes). These idealized “sovereign” borders are frequently negated on a daily basis, as people cross for multiple reasons relating to broader cultural and spiritual affinities. One might concur with Wright’s findings in West Africa: “This was a pragmatic path of engagement with the political realities … [and Muslims] … held to long-standing knowledge practices and institutions” (Wright Reference Wright2013, 208). Muslims were also able to transcend the boundaries of the state through a sense of spiritual belonging that was both transnational and a refuge beyond nation. As state sovereignty became associated with autochthony in the CAR, and Muslims associated with foreignness, this mobility became a substantial symbol and marker of difference. This is to the degree, as one interviewee stated, that:
When Southerners visit the North and Northerners visit the South, they are in a foreign territory, a different country, another world.
Transnational spirituality is one form of greater mobility. Muslims have also tended to be located in the socioeconomic modalities of pastoralism and private sector trade, as civil service and public sector occupations were closed off to them. In contrast, Gbaya and Banda communities are frequently found in sedentary agriculture and the public sector, with a more domestically focused orientation. Since the 1920s Mbororo communites, a subset of Peuhl pastoralists,Footnote 20 have existed at the margins of Central Africa, “keeping a geographical and social distance from the rest of society … in CAR’s open territories’ (de Vries Reference de Vries2020, 2). Both Peuhl and MbororoFootnote 21 communities are predominantly Muslim and speak Arabic, but Mbororo also tend to speak Sango, a national language since independence. Mbororo communities were subject to taxation by the colonial authorities, but not regroupement. However, in the 1960s the government reorganized local authorities and established Rural Livestock Communities, formalizing claims to grazing land for cattle (de Vries Reference de Vries2020, 4) and merging traditional authorities within Mbororo clans with local government structures. This was extended in the 1980s in further reorganization as cattle routes were established across the CAR. Thus, claims that Mbororo could make on territory were directly connected to the contribution of pastoralism to the economy (de Vries Reference de Vries2020, 4), rather than wider claims to belonging and citizenship. Mbororo citizenship is thus secondary, borrowed, conditional, and subject to removal as the growing sovereignty of the postcolonial state meant the ability to control whose citizenship was “authentic” and whose was conditional. Conditionality is predicated on usefulness.
Mbororo communities also coalesce with traders and artisans (frequently Muslim), some of whom purchase cattle as an investment. Coffee and diamond tradersFootnote 22 in the country were historically Muslim and carried out cross-border trade in diamonds before being removed from the sector under Operation Closing Gate.Footnote 23 Muslim diamond collectors who attempted to return to this sector in the west (Berberati/Sosso-Nakombo) were attacked (International Peace Information Service 2018, 86).
Despite the conquest of Muslim subjects, their lifestyle and mobility were never fully colonized. Their existence in the multiple peripheries of the state, and in non state-based employment and socioeconomic entreprises, as well as spiritual ties beyond the border, offered an alternative that the colonial authorities and postcolonial state could never fully mediate. Despite their precarity, they escaped, not from French conquest but from the socioeconomic and cultural diffusion of French colonialism. At the same time, this marker of difference—expressed through their mobility and nonconformity to the neoliberal concept of border sovereignty—has led to their further othering within the Central African landscape.
Resistance and the Creation of Nationalist Mythologies
Substantial documentary evidence exists cataloging the initial resistance of Gbaya and Banda communities against the oppressive and brutal conditions imposed by colonial rule.Footnote 24 These communities, with limited prospects for socioeconomic mobility during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actively contested the oppressive circumstances imposed upon them. Initially viewed as a place to be crossed on the way to the more important Lake Tchad (Chad) and Fashoda (Sudan), the territory became a place to be pacified on behalf of the large concessionary companies in pursuit of rubber and ivory. Escalating cattle prices, Fulbe incursions, and attempts by the German authorities following the 1894 Franco-German protocol to rule Gbaya and Banda through indirect rule using the Fulbe in western Ubangui-Chari, resulted in widespread waves of retaliation and rebellion.Footnote 25 Amid the overarching colonial administration facilitated by Fulbe intermediaries, the escalating pressures of concessionary exploitation, coerced labor, head taxes, and porterage converged to heighten the existing xenophobic sentiments directed specifically towards the Muslim population (Coquery-Vidrovitch Reference Coquery-Vidrovitch1972, 201–11).
From 1909, the colony was divided into four civilian and three military circonscriptions Footnote 26 each subjected to intense pacification for the major concession companies, and the raising of taxation, using Muslim tirailleurs sénégalais from West Africa. In the hinterland, Banda communities fiercely resisted rubber collection and attacked trading posts (Weinstein Reference Weinstein1970, 110). With deteriorating French authority, imposed cooperation through outright war against the villages in the hinterland and the riverine ensued (Weinstein Reference Weinstein1970, 122) to exact rubber collection. Concession company reports acknowledge the extensive pressures placed on Africans to plant and collect rubber across the West of the country, with 82,750 kg collected in one year.Footnote 27 In another concession, forced labour for rubber collection also drew on clerks and guards described as sénégalais and sierra-léonais. Footnote 28
In the 1920s, the forced regroupement of villages along roads to enable taxation, porterage, rubber collection, and conscription for the construction of the Congo-Ocean Railroad after 1924 compounded existing societal strains among Gbaya communities. The impact of colonialism in French Equatorial Africa between 1910 and 1921 was the decimation of the population from 9 million to 2,830,000.Footnote 29 Along the Congo-Ocean Railway, there were 120 deaths per kilometer.Footnote 30 Concurrently, uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s across west and central Ubangui-Chari manifested as assaults on colonial intermediaries, agents, and merchants—many of whom were Muslim and Fulbe.Footnote 31 In Carnot, the European community enlisted Muslim Hausa guards as a defensive measure.Footnote 32 These rebellions and acts of resistance in the form of uprisings became known as the Kongo-Wara Uprisings, or the War of the Hoe-Handle, and took place across territory that had served as a refuge from the slave trade, creating substantial panic among colonsFootnote 33 and concern by colonial authorities beyond French colonies.Footnote 34 Although dispersed, an inter-village religious and politico-military elite were “interlocking … transcending village and lineage ties” (O’Toole Reference O’Toole1984, 332). French patterns of behavior supported Muslim merchants and Fulbe intermediaries, who came under direct assault. This included Fulbe cattle-keepers, pastoralists, guards of Muslim canton chiefs, and other Fulbe in Ouham Pende and elsewhere (O’Toole Reference O’Toole1984, 335–36; Coquery-Vidrovitch Reference Coquery-Vidrovitch1972, 210–12), and colonial posts throughout the west of the country.Footnote 35 In these uprisings, Muslim traders were attacked, kidnapped, and killed along with collectors and plantation labourers from outside of the area, who were described as strangers and foreigners.Footnote 36 These uprisings were eventually halted by substantial and extensive “pacification”Footnote 37 located out of a Protestant mission station, through the scorched earth atrocities of the colonial administration.Footnote 38 They were succeeded by the establishment of an unequivocal and direct form of colonial rule.
Notably, Gbaya village uprisings spanning Bossangoa, Carnot, Bouzom, Bocaranga, and Paoua specifically targeted Muslim Fulbe intermediaries and Muslim merchants, as opposed to targeting the French colonial administration directly responsible for their socioeconomic and political oppression. The narrative of resistance in the form of numerous uprisings by villages in western, central, and southern Ubangui-Chari against the intermediaries of indirect rule, including those linked with Kongo-Wara, and their subsequent suppression, stands as a profoundly symbolic collective memory in the context of nationalist mythologies of liberation struggle and postcolonial state formation.
This collective remembering was central to the movement of Barthélemy Boganda, the first African to become an ordained Catholic priest in the colony of Ubangui-Chari, who was a fierce critic of the conditions of colonialism but supportive of the ideals of French society. He was elected a member of parliament for the French National Assembly for Oubangui-Chari from 1946 onwards, Mayor of Bangui from 1956, President of the Grand Conseil in 1957Footnote 39 and from 1958 until his death, Prime Minster of the CAR (van Walraven Reference van Walraven2017, 247). Orphaned and living in the forests of Lobaye, Boganda was picked up by a colonial patrol and deposited with an orphanage where he was drawn into mission life with the Spiritans.Footnote 40 As an anti-colonial nationalist, his political goals had a strong religious dimension. He rejected the socioeconomic and repressive political dimensions of colonial rule, opposed the racism of settler society in Oubangui-Chari, yet still maintained a continued relationship with the French state. Devoutly Catholic, Boganda was committed to the improvement of rural society through evangelization, education, and civilization and served both the Church and France in keeping with the missionary ideals of the earlier century. Drawing on the mythology of Kongo-Wara and other rebellions, Boganda and other major nationalist movements, openly aligned with earlier peasant rebellions, syncretizing rural rebellion against perceived oppressors,Footnote 41 Christianity and anti-colonial nationalism, within popular movements, was a vehicle for liberation and postcolonial transformation.
The mission-educated évolués—who were groomed in the image of French “civilisation,” occupied administrative positions in the colonial period, and claimed political power in the postcolonial period—were primarily Roman Catholic (field notes). Muslims were not part of this mission-educated cadre, nor were they prepared for a life of colonial administration in this way. Instead, Muslims were subjected to additional restrictions and burdens beyond the indigenat (a two-tier law and punishment system during French colonialism) that imposed third-class citizenship, setting Muslims apart from other communities as unauthorized subjects set outside of the proper social ordering of the state. At independence, restrictions on movement and harassment when in contact with the public sector remained, with many forced to adopt an alternative name to try to exercise their rights as citizens by disguising their Muslim heritage. Embraced by the évolué, national liberation, and postindependence leadership, narratives of origin, communal perseverance, resistance, and rebellion hold significance as foundational narratives that are woven into the fabric of nationalist mythology, shape collective consciousness, and unify citizens. In this way, the long past haunts the present. For Muslims, these narratives emphasize a symbolic vulnerability. In discussions about the future, since the peace agreement of 2019, interviewees frequently talked about the unresolved past. As a senior member of an armed group inside the peace process stated:
The national question is an issue that is historically unresolved. People see Muslims, see cattle, and think foreigner. We need a frank national dialogue where people are properly educated in their patriotic duty and citizenship. Everywhere you look, those in power studied in France, married in France, they have children with French citizenship, served in the French army, and the government often recall someone from France to be a Minister. They build their own myths and reality about the past and present … where everything is the foreigner’s fault, the Arabou. Muslims, including the Arabou, are foreigners.
The reference to “Arabou” marks a collective category based on religion, phenotypical features, relationship to nationalist struggle, language, and societal roles and is used in derogatory terminology to refer to all Muslims.
Fanon (Reference Fanon1986, 110) underscores the repercussions of colonial alienation in Africa, where estrangement from self, coupled with cultural imposition, robs Africans of their intrinsic value, stifling potential and diminishing self-worth. Consequently, “inferiority comes into being through the other” (Fanon Reference Fanon1986, 110) as, once alienated, Africans are taught to believe that they have “no culture, no civilisation, no long historical past” (Fanon Reference Fanon1986, 34). Echoing Cabral, indigenous colonial elites, “molded by colonization live materially and intellectually in the culture of the colonial foreigner” gradually seeking alignment with this externality (Cabral Reference Cabral2016, 164). The évolués became so through mission education, learning French, French military and university education, and adoption of Roman Catholicism, and they reproduced this format of internal colonialism in the CAR. To live in the culture of France was to be Central African. To remain outside was to be “foreign.”
Set apart from the specific mythologies of the broader nationalist struggle, Muslim citizenship is simultaneously rendered precarious, foreign, and subject to ongoing contestation through the popularly accepted and propagated narratives of rebellion against colonialism, national struggle for independence, and postcolonial state formation.
Peasant Radicalism and Pentecostalism
Peasant radicalism, grown out of nationalist mythologies, is further reinforced through the rapid spread of Pentecostalism across the West, particularly communities experiencing socioeconomic alienation in the postcolonial period. Such communities in the context of economic catastrophe face little chance of socioeconomic mobility. The immediate postcolonial period, and period immediately preceding this, witnessed a substantial rise in the number of churches, many of which were apostolic.Footnote 42 Many professed a lateral Pentecostalism, particularly across the areas of Bouar, Bouca, Batafango, Paoua, Bossangoa, and Berberati, where contemporary anti-Balaka forcibly displaced Muslims (field notes).
In these regions, in the 1940s and 1950s, documentary evidence shows substantial growth in the number of evangelical missionary activity in the CAR by American nontraditional denominations.Footnote 43 Archival documents indicate general concerns about “deviations” in doctrine from more traditional churches, and colonial authorities closely watched American evangelical and charismatic churches that expanded into the field of education through primary religious instruction.Footnote 44
Christianity was mediated by the accelerated spread of Pentecostalism, a charismatic approach to spirituality cutting across all Christian denominations among the peasantry. Familial ties to the Francophonie do not confer évolué status upon the peasantry in CAR. Instead, Pentecostalism provides a lateral liberation philosophy of a desire for transformative justice in a Manichean world characterized by struggles between good and evil, salvation and damnation, determining who is damned or righteous. In this tangible and literal world, those born-again are able to craft their lives in their world of struggles according to a mediated domesticated theology of scripture and life, and in a broader quest for justice. Embedded within social institutions and contextualized practices, this localized and domesticated charismatic theology powerfully underpins locally constructed perceptions and understandings of the daily socioeconomic and political challenges endured by rural communities about their own historic situation in relation to others. When asked about this, one person said:
We live our challenges every day. It is simply part of the culture, to overcome them. But there is peace now, the Muslims have gone.
Many anti-Balaka leadership have built their own chapels, and foot soldiers draw on syncretic charismatic and animist belief systems through these “awakening churches.” Charismatic liberation theology, in a context in which social institutions are collective and many experience deep socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement, adds to powerful nationalist mythologies that already render Muslim belonging as precarious. This engenders a greater liberation ideology of “otherness” towards those who do not share these social institutions in the present, providing a fundamental lateral liberation theology among the peasantry who comprise the anti-Balaka foot soldiers. This was overtly expressed, despite claims for peace. For example, as one person claimed:
The priests and the cardinal … this evangelism … they said “the Muslims” are killing us, they said this in the churches.
In many of the churches, worship is in Sango and French, a further divider for many Muslims who frequently speak Arabic, not Sango. Theologies of language mirror public sector positions of the past, where to be a member of the armed forces one had to read and write both in French and Sango.
In reinforcing and legitimizing a logic of negative othering in the public sphere as a form of patriotism and liberation, the structural violence of the past is reinforced as cultural and direct violence against Muslims in the present.
Conclusion
The massacres of December 5, 2013 can only be fully understood through the long past and broader processes that situate metropole and colony. Although there is a security vacuum in the CAR, and many claims to autochthony, violence specifically targeted and targets Muslims. The construction of colonial subject relationships in the past is associated with destruction, brutality, and violence enacted by outsiders, fought against by fleeing and fighting in spaces of controlled mobility. The ruptures of the present have distinctly colonial foundations, not least in the ways in which the longer past impacts collective memories and actions.
Excluded from the “civilizing” mission and the acculturation of French colonial subjects, Muslims were more able to escape the double burden of diffusion of Frenchness and colonial subjectivity; they were conquered but not fully colonized. Colonialism was never fully mapped onto Islamic mobility, and this mobility came to be perceived as foreign. Instead, Muslims in the CAR are subjected to the internal colonialism of the South, which itself is reinforced through the historicity of resistance to colonialism, nationalist mythologies of origin, and a liberation ideology of otherness. The construction of the state in the present is built on past remembering that Muslims are not able to share, their identity and belonging rendered precarious through it.
This accumulated “pastness” situates Muslims as foreign. As people draw on older social and cultural capital to make meanings of their socioeconomic and political situation in relation to others, “otherness” is given a contextual value in the present because the patterns located in the past explain and legitimate the present social order. Their spiritual ties and mobility could never be fully mediated by the colonial or postcolonial state, but marks them as different and foreign. The “otherness” of Muslims is thus also a product of their escape.
The growing movement of Pentecostalism or “awakening” churches across the Central African landscape adds a further layer of patriotic liberation theology to the already precarious position of Muslims, reinforcing the structural violence of the past as cultural and direct violence in the present. The violence against Muslims a decade ago is thus an accumulated “pastness” of time and space in Central African historiography.
A question remains. How might this new knowledge of the reasons for violence against Muslims, through an understanding of the impact of this longer historical past in constructing whose lives matter, now stimulate effective practices to acknowledge this past and build social cohesion for the future? Answering this question is critical for all citizens in the CAR and has resonance for other violent conflicts across the continent.
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