Oubangui-Chari and Boganda
The land between the Oubangui and Chari rivers was colonised late and hard. As the French territory of Oubangui-Chari it was carved into concessions and worked for rubber, cotton and ivory under a brutal forced-labour regime that killed and displaced large numbers of people.
Its national hero is Barthélemy Boganda, a former priest turned politician who dreamed not of a small state but of a "United States of Latin Africa" uniting the French Central African colonies. He died in a plane crash in 1959, months before the independence he had done most to bring — a loss the country arguably never recovered from.
Dacko and the emperor
Independence came in 1960 under Boganda's relative David Dacko. In 1966 the army commander Jean-Bédel Bokassa seized power, and in 1976 he had himself proclaimed emperor, staging a Napoleonic coronation in 1977 — a diamond-encrusted throne, a gilded carriage — that is estimated to have swallowed something like a third of the national budget while his people went hungry.
Bokassa's rule ended in 1979 after his soldiers massacred schoolchildren who had protested against compulsory uniforms bought from a company he owned. France, his former patron, flew in troops and restored Dacko. It was a grim template: coup, extraction, external hand, repeat.
Séléka and anti-balaka
Decades of coups and mismanagement left almost no functioning state outside the capital. In 2013 a mostly Muslim rebel coalition, the Séléka, swept into Bangui and overthrew the government. Their abuses provoked the rise of the "anti-balaka", militias drawn largely from Christian and animist communities, and the country tipped into sectarian killing, with massacres on both sides and the near-total flight of Muslims from parts of the south-west.
A UN peacekeeping mission and a French intervention slowed the worst of it, but armed groups have controlled much of the interior ever since, financing themselves from diamonds, gold and cattle. The people paid in one of the world's worst humanitarian crises relative to population.
Touadéra and the Russians
Faustin-Archange Touadéra won the presidency in 2016 and, unable to rely on the national army, turned to Russia. From around 2018 fighters linked to the Wagner network arrived to prop up the government and secure mines, becoming one of the clearest examples of Russia's mercenary-and-minerals model in Africa. Rights groups have documented serious abuses by these forces.
A 2023 constitutional referendum removed presidential term limits, clearing the way for Touadéra to seek to extend his rule; he stood again in the election held at the end of 2025. As with much in the country, the details of the vote and its conduct are disputed and hard to verify independently. The mineral wealth, meanwhile, still flows out past a population that sees almost none of it.