Chad

• 1. Dead Heart of Africa

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  Chad is a landlocked country in Central Africa, and its capital, N'Djamena, lies 1060 km from the nearest seaport, Douala in Cameroon. That distance, together with a largely desert climate, gave the country a bleak nickname: the "Dead Heart of Africa". The nickname hides a great deal. Chad is the fifth-largest country in Africa. It is home to 19 million people and more than 200 ethnic and linguistic groups, and its official languages are French and Arabic. How did a vast basin, a run of Sahelian empires and a French cotton colony shape this country? Why has it known so much war since independence? And what does everyday life look like for most of its people?

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• 2. Lake and Desert

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  Seven thousand years ago, an immense lake covered 330,000 square kilometres of the Chad Basin. Today Lake Chad is what remains of it, covering only 17,806 square kilometres, and its surface area swings heavily with the seasons. It is still the second-largest wetland in Africa. The country takes its name from the lake, and the lake's own name comes from the Kanuri word for "lake".

  Chad covers about 1,284,000 square kilometres, making it slightly smaller than Peru and slightly larger than South Africa. The land is dominated by a wide basin, bounded on the north and east by the Ennedi Plateau and the Tibesti Mountains. Among the Tibesti peaks stands Emi Koussi, a dormant volcano that reaches 3414 m above sea level.

  Every year, a tropical weather system called the intertropical front crosses Chad from south to north. It brings a wet season that lasts from May to October in the south, and from June to September in the Sahel. Rainfall then divides the country into three zones. In the northern third lies the Sahara, where yearly rainfall stays under 50 mm and only occasional palm groves survive, all of them south of the Tropic of Cancer. The centre is a Sahelian belt with 300 to 600 mm of rain a year and a steppe of thorny bushes, mostly acacias. In the south, the East Sudanian savanna receives over 900 mm.

  Wildlife follows those three zones. Counts list at least 134 species of mammals, 509 species of birds and over 1,600 species of plants. Of the birds, 354 species are residents and 155 are migrants. Elephants, lions, buffalo, hippopotamuses, giraffes, leopards, cheetahs and hyenas all live here, though most large carnivore populations have dropped sharply since the early 20th century. On the Ennedi Plateau, a small group of West African crocodiles survives as one of the last known colonies in the Sahara.

  In Zakouma National Park in the south, organised poachers kill elephants in herds for the ivory trade. The parks are understaffed, and a number of wardens have been murdered. Forest now covers around 3% of the land, or 4,313,000 hectares in 2020, down from 6,730,000 hectares in 1990. Against that loss, more than 1.2 million trees have been replanted to hold back the advancing desert, and the acacias among them yield gum arabic that brings local people an income.

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• 3. Empires of the Sahel

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  In the 7th millennium BC, ecological conditions in the northern half of what is now Chad favoured human settlement, and the population grew considerably. Some of the most important archaeological sites in Africa are found here, mainly in the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti Region. Some date to earlier than 2000 BC.

  For more than 2,000 years, farming communities have lived settled lives in the Chadian Basin, and the region became a crossroads of civilisations. The earliest of these was the legendary Sao, known only from artefacts and oral histories. The Sao fell to the Kanem Empire. Kanem was the first and longest-lasting of the empires that rose in the Sahelian strip by the end of the 1st millennium AD.

  Two more states followed in the 16th and 17th centuries: the Sultanate of Bagirmi and the Wadai Empire. All of them drew their strength from one source, control of the trans-Saharan trade routes that crossed the region. These states were at least tacitly Muslim. They never extended their rule over the southern grasslands, except to raid for slaves. Inside Kanem itself, about a third of the population were slaves.

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• 4. The Cotton Colony

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  In 1900, France created the Territoire Militaire des Pays et Protectorats du Tchad. By 1920 it had secured full control and folded the colony into French Equatorial Africa. French rule had no policy to unify the territory, and modernisation crawled along more slowly than in other French colonies.

  Paris saw Chad mostly as an unimportant supplier of untrained labour and raw cotton, and large-scale cotton production began in 1929. The colonial administration was critically understaffed and relied on the weakest officials in the French civil service. Only the Sara of the south were governed effectively. French presence in the Islamic north and east was nominal, and the school system suffered from the same neglect.

  The focus on cotton created a precarious underclass of poorly paid rural workers. Food production fell, and some areas suffered famine. Tensions between farmers and elites ended in the 1952 Bébalem massacre, carried out by colonial authorities.

  After World War II, France made Chad an overseas territory and gave its people the right to elect representatives to the National Assembly and to a Chadian assembly. The largest party was the Chadian Progressive Party, based in the south. Chad became independent on the 11th of August 1960, and the party's leader, François Tombalbaye, an ethnic Sara, became its first president.

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• 5. Revolt and Dictatorship

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  Only two years after independence, Tombalbaye banned opposition parties and built a one-party system. His autocratic rule and clumsy mismanagement sharpened tensions between ethnic groups. In 1965, Muslims in the north, led by the National Liberation Front of Chad, known as FRONILAT, began a civil war.

  Tombalbaye grew steadily more erratic. He alienated even his southern base by forcing public servants to undergo yondo, a ritual scarring. In 1973, an expatriate dissident named Outel Bono was assassinated in Paris. Tombalbaye was overthrown and killed in 1975, yet the insurgency went on. In 1979, rebel factions led by Hissène Habré took the capital, and all central authority collapsed. Armed factions, many of them from the northern rebellion, fought for power.

  France's position in the country collapsed along with the state. Libya moved to fill the vacuum, and the Chadian-Libyan conflict began with a Libyan invasion in 1978. Habré eventually defeated his rival commanders. Backed by France, he united Chadians in a way never seen before and forced the Libyan army off Chadian soil. That war ended in 1987, with a French military intervention called Operation Épervier.

  Habré then ruled as a dictator. His system relied on corruption and violence, and thousands of people are estimated to have died under it. He favoured his own Toubou group and discriminated against his former allies, the Zaghawa. In 1990, his general Idriss Déby overthrew him.

  Habré's reckoning came decades later. He was placed under house arrest in Senegal in 2005 and formally charged with war crimes in 2013. In May 2016, he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people. He was sentenced to life in prison.

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• 6. The Déby Years

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  After taking power, Déby tried to reconcile the rebel groups and brought back multiparty politics. A new constitution won approval by referendum, and in 1996 he won a competitive presidential election. Opposition parties had been legalised in 1992, ending the time when his Patriotic Salvation Movement was the only legal party. Since then, 78 political parties have registered. Even so, power stayed firmly with his movement, and his rule was described as authoritarian. He won a second term five years later.

  Oil production began in 2003, and with it came hopes that Chad would finally find peace and prosperity. A consortium led by ExxonMobil, with Chevron and Petronas, invested $3.7 billion to develop reserves estimated at one billion barrels in the south. A pipeline, financed in part by the World Bank, carried the oil to terminals on the Atlantic coast of Cameroon. The bank insisted that 80% of oil revenues go to development projects. In January 2006 it suspended its loans when Chad passed laws reducing that share. In July 2006 the two sides agreed that the government would commit 70% of its spending to priority poverty reduction programmes.

  The hopes for peace did not hold. Internal dissent worsened and a new civil war broke out. Meanwhile the Darfur crisis in neighbouring Sudan spilled across the border from 2003, and hundreds of thousands of refugees strained a nation that was already poor. Déby also changed the constitution by himself to remove the two-term limit, which caused an uproar among civil society and opposition parties. He won a third mandate in 2006 in elections that the opposition boycotted.

  Rebels stormed the capital on the 13th of April 2006 and were repelled. They tried again in 2008 and failed again. An agreement signed on the 15th of January 2010 ended a five-year war with Sudan and reopened a border that had been closed for seven years. In May 2013, security forces foiled a coup that had been in preparation for several months. Chad also became a leading partner in a West African coalition against Boko Haram and other Islamist militants.

  On the 20th of April 2021, the army announced that Déby had been killed on the front lines, during an incursion in the north by rebels of the FACT group. A Transitional Military Council led by his son, Mahamat Déby, took control and dissolved the National Assembly. The council replaced the constitution with a charter that gave Mahamat Déby the powers of the presidency. In October 2022 he extended his rule, which set off protests among the most violent in Chadian history. Authorities suppressed them and banned several opposition parties. After a disputed election on the 6th of May 2024, he was sworn in as president on the 23rd of May 2024.

  France, Chad's greatest foreign influence, had long kept 1,000 soldiers in the country and given the army logistical and intelligence support. Relations had soured once, in 1999, when oil drilling rights went to the American company Exxon. In 2024 Chad ended its military cooperation agreement with France. In 2025 the French military handed its last base to the Chadian army, closing a presence that had lasted since 1960.

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• 7. Peoples and Faiths

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  Among the Sara of the south, the essential unit of social life is the lineage. The Sara are the nation's main ethnic group. In the Sahel, settled peoples live beside nomads such as the Arabs, the country's second major group, while the north belongs to nomads, mostly Toubous. Colonial and independent governments alike have tried to impose a national society. For most Chadians, local or regional society remains the strongest influence outside the immediate family.

  The population is unevenly spread. Density is 0.1 people per square kilometre in the Saharan Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti Region, but 52.4 in the Logone Occidental Region. About half the nation lives in the southern fifth of the territory. The country is young, with an estimated 47% of people under 15, and life expectancy is 52 years. Polygamy is common, and 39% of women live in such unions.

  Over a hundred regional languages are spoken. The Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic language family takes its name from Chad and is represented here by dozens of languages. Central Sudanic, Maban and several Niger-Congo languages are also spoken. French remains the lingua franca and the language of government and education.

  Islam, at 55.1%, and Christianity, at 41.1%, are the main religions. Estimates from Pew Research in 2010 put Muslims at 52-58% of the population and Christians at 39-44%, with 22% Catholic and 17% Protestant. Among Muslims, 55% belong to Sufi orders. The most common is the Tijaniyah, which incorporates some local African religious elements. A small minority of Muslims, 5-10%, hold more fundamentalist practices.

  Christianity arrived with French and American missionaries and, like Chadian Islam, blends in aspects of older beliefs. Some people still follow animist religions, which are tied to ancestors and to particular places. The Baháʼí faith and Jehovah's Witnesses came after independence in 1960, so they count as "new" religions. The constitution provides for a secular state and guarantees religious freedom, and the different communities generally co-exist without problems.

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• 8. Daily Life and Culture

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  More than 80% of Chadians live from subsistence farming and livestock raising. The southernmost 10% of the territory holds the most fertile cropland, with rich yields of sorghum and millet. In the Sahel only hardier millet grows, and yields are much lower, but the land suits large herds of cattle, goats, sheep, donkeys and horses. The Sahara's scattered oases support only some dates and legumes. Before oil, cotton accounted for roughly 80% of export earnings. Since 2003, crude oil has been the main source.

  Basic services are thin. Only 48% of urban residents have access to potable water and only 2% to basic sanitation. The state electricity company covers just 1.5% of the national population, and most Chadians burn wood and animal manure for power. In 1987 the country had only 30 km of paved roads, and by 2004 it had 550 km. Chad has no railways of its own and depends on Cameroon's rail system to reach the port of Douala. Attendance at primary school is compulsory, yet only 68 percent of boys attend, and the literacy rate of 33 percent is one of the lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa.

  Culture carries on regardless. Millet is the staple food, shaped into balls of paste and dipped in sauces. It is called alysh in the north and biya in the south. Fish is sold as salanga, sun-dried and lightly smoked, or as banda, which is smoked large fish. Carcaje is a sweet red tea made from hibiscus leaves. In the south, people drink millet beer such as billi-billi, made from red millet, and coshate, made from white millet.

  Music uses the kinde, a bow harp, the kakaki, a long tin horn, and the hu hu, a stringed instrument with calabash resonators. The group Chari Jazz formed in 1964 and started the modern music scene. Football is the most popular sport. Wrestling is widely practised too, with wrestlers wearing traditional animal hides and covering themselves in dust.

  Film has been harder to sustain. Only one cinema operates in the entire country. Yet the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun won the Grand Special Jury Prize at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival for Daratt. His 2010 feature A Screaming Man then won the Jury Prize at Cannes, making him the first Chadian director to enter and win an award in the main competition there.

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