Central African culture: Sango is spoken and French is written

How a river jargon became everyone's language

The first Europeans to reach the headwaters of the Ubangi arrived in 1887, an expedition led by Alphonse Van Gele for the Congo Free State of King Leopold II, about 1,500 km upriver from Kinshasa. Van Gele spent a year among the riverine Ngbandi, buying ivory and staking the Free State's claims, and the newcomers soon had names for the people they met: Sangos, Yakomas, Dendis and Abiras. The French established themselves at Bangui in 1889 and pushed north and east from there.

The Ngbandi were fishers and ironworkers who traded along the river, and they owned canoes twenty metres long. An occupation that moved by river needed both the canoes and the men to paddle them, so the Ngbandi were drawn in from the start. Around them gathered the Europeans' African employees and militiamen, recruited in East and West Africa and among Bantu speakers from the equatorial Congo. In the account given by the APiCS survey of Sango, these men jargonized Ngbandi into a pidgin, reduced in grammar and vocabulary against its source. The earliest attestation of the jargon is from 1893. Kituba and Bangala-Lingala were coming into existence in the same years.

The survey records a second reading. Some scholars hold that a lingua franca based on Ngbandi already existed before Europeans arrived and changed after contact without becoming a pidgin. Both accounts agree on the source language, which was mainly Ngbandi and the related riverine Gbanziri, possibly with some Nzakara.

How the language then spread is also told two ways. The APiCS survey credits the French militia, many of whom spoke Ngbandi, and the foreign Africans working for the trading companies, and it gives the Catholic missions, the first two founded in 1894, a lesser part. Baptist Mid-Missions, which arrived in the 1920s with a Sango-only policy, produced the first written form and the scripture translations other Protestants went on to use; the Catholic standard, settled after the Second World War, differed from it. Britannica gives the churches the larger role, writing that Christian missionaries adopted, simplified and spread Sango among their followers across the country in the 1940s and 1950s.

The names the language has carried follow the people who used it. Linguists separate sango riverain, river Sango, from the lingua franca, which has been called sango commercial and sango véhiculaire. Until independence in 1960, popular speech called it sango ti turugu, soldier's Sango.

What Sango is made of

Most of Sango's small core vocabulary is Ngbandi. Among the country's other languages only Banda has added a substantial number of words, probably as the language moved north, and a layer of Bantu words, Swahili among them, came in early. French has supplied the bulk of the foreign words, and its pull on Sango's syntax, sound and vocabulary has grown since 1960. The verb kumase, to begin, is French commencer in Sango form.

The grammar builds a great deal from a few parts. A plural takes the prefix a-, so wali, woman, becomes a-wali, women. Compounds make new nouns: koli-kondo, literally man-fowl, is a rooster. The numbers from one to five are oko, use, ota, osyo and uku, and ten is bale oko, one unit of ten.

Sango keeps the three pitch levels of Ngbandi, though pitch separates only a few words and does almost no grammatical work. Religious publications marked tone on a handful of words. Wider tone marking arrived in the 1970s, mainly so readers could pronounce new coinages such as the word for an environmentalist, and in 1984 the government adopted the scheme recommended by the Institute of Applied Linguistics: a circumflex for high tone, a diaeresis for mid tone and a bare vowel for low. The country's own Sango name in the record, Ködörösêse tî Bêafrîka, is written with those marks. Outside religious publications spelling was still unstandardised when the survey was written, and each author kept his own conventions.

The language's centre of gravity is the capital. Sango is the dominant language of Bangui, a city the record puts at 889,231 people in 2020, and the first language of a growing number of young people there, whose contracted speech the survey singles out for its variation. It is also spoken over the borders in Cameroon and Chad, and by Central Africans in Brazzaville and France.

Why French still holds the written word

The state's moves toward Sango came as declarations and institutes, in this order.

The last step came in the final years of André Kolingba's presidency, and the APiCS survey notes that Kolingba was himself Ngbandi, from the people whose speech Sango grew out of.

What happens in the classroom

Education has always been in French. The government took up international projects to bring Sango into the first years of schooling and created an Institute of Applied Linguistics to carry them out, yet in the APiCS account Sango has never been on the curriculum of any government-approved school. Britannica describes the same position with a different emphasis: instruction is primarily in French, and the government has sought to promote Sango literacy and encourages its use in schools. It puts literacy at slightly more than one-third of the population. The University of Bangui, founded by Jean-Bédel Bokassa in 1969, opened in October 1970, and the students with the best results and connections still go to France.

Where Sango is heard and French is read

French is the language of formal settings and of getting on in life, and above all of writing. State and private newspapers are in French; the state-run E Le Songo, the first daily, began in 1986. Sango is hardly ever seen on a poster or an advertisement.

Broadcasting is where Sango has a place. It reached radio at the end of the 1950s and since independence has carried news and educational and religious programmes, though French dominates radio and television as well. Radio is the medium that reaches the country: the national network broadcasts nationwide while national television is limited mainly to the Bangui district. Radio Ndeke Luka began in 1998 as Radio-MINURCA, the station of the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and took its present name in 2000 when the mission ended.

Literature runs on the same line. Few works from the country have been published. Makombo Bamboté wrote the novels Princesse Mandapu (1972) and Coup d'état Nègre (1987), and Britannica also names Faustin-Albert Ipeko-Etomane, Cyriaque Yavoucko, Pierre Sammy-Mackfoy and Gabriel Danzi. The larger body of narrative is oral: legends and tales, some dating to the nineteenth century, which storytellers deliver with call-and-response songs and chants and which collectors still gather from older villagers.

Which peoples speak the country's other languages

Sango sits over many mother tongues. Wikipedia counts over 80 ethnic groups, each with its own language, and Britannica's list of those spoken today includes Baya (Gbaya), Banda, Ngbaka, Sara, Mbum, Kare and Mandjia. The Gbaya and Banda made up slightly over half the population in 2003, at 28.8% and 22.9%. The record counts 5,152,421 people on 1 January 2023, against 1,232,000 in 1960.

Britannica handles those labels with care. Before Europeans arrived in the late nineteenth century, it writes, distinctions between groups were highly fluid and many people thought of themselves as members of a clan; the attempts of colonial administrators and ethnographers to sort Central Africans into fixed ethnic groups have never been viable. The French nonetheless promoted ethnic and regional distinctions, and from southern riverine peoples such as the Ngbaka (Mbaka), Yakoma and Ubangi they helped create an elite that has held most political positions since independence. The Yakoma were among the Ngbandi peoples Van Gele met in 1887, so the lingua franca and the colonial elite were drawn from the same stretch of river.

The range runs from the Aka, forest hunter-gatherers of the south-west and the probable descendants of the region's earliest inhabitants, to state-forming peoples such as the Zande and Nzakara; the Bandia-Nzakara Azande founded the Bangassou Kingdom on the Ubangi in the eighteenth century. Greek, Portuguese and Yemeni traders are scattered around the country, a small French population lives in Bangui, and diamond traders from western Africa and Chad work in the capital and the hinterland.

What the Aka sing in the southwestern forest

UNESCO's intangible heritage list carries a tradition from a people far from the river trade where Sango formed. UNESCO proclaimed the polyphonic singing of the Aka in 2003 and inscribed it on the Representative List in 2008. Its description is a contrapuntal polyphony in four voices, mastered by every member of the community, in which each singer may vary a part so that the music seems to keep changing.

The songs belong to ritual: the opening of a new encampment, the hunt, the funeral. A drum called the enzeko, a harp-like instrument called the geedale-bagongo and a single-string bow, the mbela, accompany them, each kept for its own occasion. The dances move to hand-clapping; some are for men only, some for couples, some for a solo dancer of either sex. Nothing is written down. Children are brought into the rituals early, and that is how the knowledge passes on.

Aka troupes have travelled to Europe to perform. UNESCO lists what is wearing the tradition down: game made scarce by deforestation, the movement of people to towns, and the folklorisation of the music for tourists. Britannica describes the forest houses the music comes from, small one-room shelters of flexible branches covered with broad leaves.

Part of that forest is protected. Sangha Trinational, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2012 across three countries, names the rights and livelihoods of indigenous peoples such as the BaAka as part of its management. Its UNESCO record also notes that in the Central African Republic indigenous hunting and gathering is not permitted inside the protected area.

What Bangui's musicians and artisans make

Bangui's popular music grew out of Congolese music. Bands in the capital and the regional towns, among them Musiki, Zokela, Makembe, Cool Stars, Cannon Stars and Super Stars, play their own version of electrified Congolese music, setting African rhythms and languages against rumba, cha-cha and merengue. Music in the Kinshasa style with Sango lyrics has been popular since the 1970s. Zokela, named after a band of the 1980s, has become a form of its own tied to the Lobaye region, mixing village ceremony with an urban sound.

Britannica writes that the slave trade and the early colonial years broke the region's crafts and that most of them disappeared. Woven mats and baskets, wooden utensils, carved stools, pottery and instruments remain, among them a balafon built from animal horns, skins and wood. Newer work includes pictures made from butterfly wings glued to paper and carvings in ebony and other tropical hardwoods, sold in the larger towns and at Bangui's artisans' market. The murals and canvases of Jerome Ramedane show animal life, hunting parties and village days, and paintings like them hang in restaurants and bars across Bangui. Joseph Akouissonne directed the films Zo kwe zo, "A Human Being Is a Person", and Les Dieux noirs du stade. The Boganda Museum in Bangui holds musical instruments, weapons, village architecture, hunting tools, pottery and religious objects.

How old the Bouar stones are

The megaliths near Bouar in the west are stones weighing several tons each. Their date is disputed. Britannica says local farmers raised them about 2,500 years ago; Wikipedia places them in the late Neolithic, about 3500 to 2700 BCE. The country put the megaliths on its World Heritage tentative list in 2006.

Which houses count as traditional

In Bangui and the other large towns people often live in whitewashed houses of fired mud brick with wooden shutters and aluminium roofs. In the south there are wattle-and-daub houses under woven palm fronds, near the lumber companies houses built from discarded sawmill planks, and farther north the Pana build round one-room houses of mud brick with grass thatch. Britannica adds a caution: some of these forms arrived under French rule, and some people say they once built in bark or in wattle and daub and learned mud brick from colonial officials. By the majority account Sango has the same history, a colonial-era arrival that is now the ordinary local form.

What Central Africans eat and drink

The staples are cassava, rice, squash, pumpkins and plantains, usually served with a sauce and grilled meat. Okra, called gombo, goes into almost every meal, and peanuts and peanut butter appear in many dishes. Game is popular, and maboké and soussou are dishes built on fish. Beer, palm wine and banana wine are made locally, and ginger beer is the common soft drink.

Food is mostly women's work from field to pot. Women grow and cook most of the food and are the main producers for the household, while hunting, trapping and fishing are men's work; in some regions women fish in the dry season. Coffee, cotton and tobacco, the crops grown for sale, are mainly men's. Many women in town and country also turn food crops into sorghum beer or spirits and sell them, income that largely stays off the books.

Little of this food is exported. In 2019 the country produced 730 thousand tons of cassava, 511 thousand tons of yams and 143 thousand tons of peanuts. Two of the ingredients are old in the region: farmers had domesticated the oil palm before 3000 BCE, and bananas arrived in the first millennium BCE, eaten and also brewed into drink.

How churches and holidays shape the year

The 2003 census counted 80.3% of the population as Christian, 51.4% Protestant and 28.9% Roman Catholic, with 10% Muslim, 4.5% other groups and 5.5% with no religion. The Pew Research Center's estimate for 2010 put Christians at 89.8% and Muslims at 8.9%. Britannica puts about one-tenth of the population in traditional religions, and indigenous belief runs through Christian and Muslim practice as well.

Churches are social centres as much as places of worship, with schools and fellowship groups for women, men, adolescents and children. After a service members often hold a ndoye, Sango for gift: a celebration with singing and dancing in honour of a notable member, who receives food, soap and kerosene from the congregation and serves coffee, tea and a light meal in return. The custom has a Sango name and a church setting, which is where the two halves of the country's language meet most often.

Many missionary groups work in the country, among them Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, Grace Brethren and Jehovah's Witnesses, mostly from the United States, France, Italy and Spain and many also from Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many left when fighting broke out in 2002 and many came back. After Seleka rebels took the capital in 2013, violence between Christians and Muslims followed, and through the crisis that began in 2012 religious leaders mediated between communities and armed groups and sheltered people who fled.

The calendar keeps Christmas and New Year as the large celebrations. Beside them sit 1 December, called National Day, Proclamation Day or Republic Day, for the proclamation of the republic in 1958; 1 May, Labour Day; and 29 March, the anniversary of the death of Barthélemy Boganda in 1959.

Where football and basketball are played

Even the smallest village usually has a football field, and villages, churches and schools field teams for boys and girls. Men's and women's teams have played in international competition, and the national side, run by the Central African Football Federation, plays at the Barthélemy Boganda Stadium in Bangui.

Basketball and rugby are played mostly in the capital. The national basketball team has won the African Championship twice and qualified for the Basketball World Cup in 1974. Central African athletes have competed at the Olympic Games since 1968.

Boganda's name is on the stadium, the museum and a public holiday. He was a Roman Catholic priest who left the priesthood for politics, and he favoured the name Central African Republic over Ubangi-Shari, reportedly because he hoped for a wider union of the territories of the region. That name is French. In Sango, the language most of the country speaks, it is Ködörösêse tî Bêafrîka.