Chad's history: a southern state at independence, a northern one by force

What the Chad Basin held before the empires

The territory's record opens with bone. Michel Brunet found a hominid skull here dated to more than 7 million years and named it Sahelanthropus tchadensis; in 1996 he unearthed a jaw he called Australopithecus bahrelghazali, nicknamed Abel, dated by beryllium-based methods to about 3.6 million years ago.

The north was once much wetter than it is now. Rock paintings in the Tibesti and Borkou show large game animals, and UNESCO counts thousands of painted and carved images in the caves, canyons and shelters of the Ennedi Massif. Rock art in the "Round Head" style there has been dated to before the 7th millennium BC. Britannica describes an early Holocene lake, called Mega-Chad, that covered some 336,700 square kilometres until perhaps 7,000 years ago, stood as much as 170 metres deep, and spilled south and west into the Benue and on to the Atlantic.

Around the lake itself, legend gives the land to the Sao. They are known from artefacts and oral history, and the Kotoko fishing people on the Chari are thought to descend from them. Excavations along the Logone and Chari in the 1950s uncovered a medieval culture that worked in terracotta and bronze.

How Kanem built a state on the Saharan trade

States formed at the end of the first millennium in the Sahelian strip between desert and savanna, and for almost a thousand years their dealings with each other and with the peoples on their edges were the political history of the territory. The first of them was Kanem, north-east of Lake Chad, and its founding date is contested: about 700 in most modern accounts, with proposals running from 600 to 900, and the mid-9th century in Britannica.

The first written mention comes from the Arab geographer al-Ya'qubi in 872. Arab sources of the 9th to 11th centuries call it the "kingdom of the Zaghāwa", and the state was probably founded by Zaghawa pastoralists from the Ennedi Plateau. Its first capital, Njimi, has never been found with certainty, and later Arab writers suggest it began as a city of tents.

At the end of the 11th century a ruler named Hummay, Umme in Britannica's spelling, converted to Islam, and the Duguwa dynasty gave way to the Sayfawa. The state was literate by the 12th century, when its scribes developed a script style of their own called barnāwī. Dunama Dabbalemi, who reigned from about 1221 to 1259, commanded a cavalry recorded at 40,000 horsemen and pushed Kanem's reach north into the Fezzan. In 1257 he sent a giraffe as a gift to Muhammad I al-Mustansir of the Hafsid dynasty in Ifriqiya, and a hostel for pilgrims and students from Kanem was founded in Cairo.

The wealth came from the routes. Kanem sat at the southern end of the trans-Saharan road to Tripoli and exported salt, ivory, animal products and people. Around 1396 the Bulala drove Mai Umar Idrismi out of Njimi, and the dynasty moved west of the lake into Bornu, now in Nigeria, where intermarriage produced the Kanuri people and a new capital rose at Ngazargamu. Kanem-Bornu reached its height under Idris Aluma, who ruled from about 1571 to 1603. Fulani forces took Ngazargamu in 1808, the Sayfawa line died out in 1846, and the Sudanese warlord Rabih az-Zubayr conquered what was left in 1893.

Why the Sahel sultanates never ruled the south

Two more Muslim states grew up beside Kanem-Bornu. Bagirmi, south-east of it, adopted Islam under Abdullah IV, who reigned from 1568 to 1598, and paid tribute at different times to Kanem-Bornu and to Wadai. Wadai, in the east, became an Islamic sultanate when Abd al Karim took it over; Muhammad Sabun opened a new trade route north and struck his own currency between 1804 and 1815, and Muhammad Sharif conquered Bagirmi and held off the French in the middle of the 19th century.

Wikipedia dates Bagirmi to the late 15th or early 16th century and Wadai's Islamic sultanate to the 1630s; Britannica dates both to the early 17th century.

All three were cavalry states, and none of them pushed far into the south. Forests and the tsetse fly complicated the use of cavalry there, and Wikipedia's account of Bagirmi and Wadai is that they never controlled the southern grasslands except to raid them for slaves. Britannica puts raiding for captives among the animist peoples to the south at the centre of the prosperity of all three.

The trade had a logic that limited conversion. Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims, so the rulers of Kanem had no interest in converting their neighbours beyond a point. The early empire grew powerful by exporting slaves in exchange for horses, and captives taken in Dunama Dabbalemi's wars against the Sao were sold for further horses from North Africa. About a third of Kanem's population were slaves. Slaves from Bornu are first recorded in the Mediterranean in the 16th century, sold by Bornu's ambassadors for Ottoman horses and firearms, and the empire stayed in the trans-Saharan slave trade until the end of the 19th century.

The farming peoples of the south, the Sara among them, lived outside these states and were raided by them. That is the division the colonial state inherited and then turned upside down.

How France conquered Chad and governed only the south

French columns entered the territory in 1891, campaigning mainly against the Muslim kingdoms. Rabih az-Zubayr had overrun all three of them between 1883 and 1893, so the decisive fight was against him: at Kousséri on 22 April 1900 the forces of Major Amédée-François Lamy met Rabih's, and both commanders were killed. France created a military territory that year and restored the old Kanem-Bornu ruling house under its protection.

Conquest took another two decades. In 1905 the territory was placed under the governor-general at Brazzaville; Britannica dates its entry into French Equatorial Africa to 1910; Wadai fell only after a war from 1909 to 1912; and Chad gained a separate colonial status in 1920, with a lieutenant-governor at Fort-Lamy, now N'Djamena.

France ran Chad as a source of raw cotton and untrained labour for the richer colonies further south. Large-scale cotton growing began in 1929. The administration was short of staff and, in Wikipedia's phrase, had to rely on "the dregs of the French civil service". In the vast Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti prefecture a handful of military officers mostly left people alone; in central Chad French rule was only slightly more substantive. Only the Sara of the south were governed effectively. The French presence in the Islamic north and east was nominal, and schooling suffered from the same neglect.

Cotton also produced a poorly paid rural underclass, a fall in food production and, in some areas, famine. In April 1952 the colonial authorities carried out the Bébalem massacre of farmers protesting against the announced victory of the Chadian Democratic Union in local elections.

On 26 August 1940, under Félix Éboué, France's first black colonial governor, Chad became the first French colony to rejoin the Allies after the fall of France. A column under Colonel Philippe Leclerc that included two battalions of Sara troops drove north into Libya and took Kufra.

Who inherited the Chadian state at independence

Chad became an overseas territory of the French Republic in 1946, and its first parties formed along the line the sultanates and the colony had drawn. The Chadian Progressive Party (PPT), founded in February 1947 under the Panamanian-born Gabriel Lisette, spoke for the Christian and animist south. The Chadian Democratic Union, founded that November, represented French commercial interests and a bloc of traditional leaders drawn mostly from the Muslim and Ouaddaïan nobility of the north.

With a much wider franchise, the PPT won the elections of May 1957. Chad became an autonomous republic in the French Community on 28 November 1958, Lisette lost a confidence vote on 11 February 1959, and François Tombalbaye, a Sara trade union leader from the south, formed a government on 26 March 1959. France agreed to full independence on 12 July 1960, and on 11 August 1960 Chad became independent with Tombalbaye as president.

The state he took over had no paved roads and no railway. Outside a handful of towns there was no government presence in the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti or in much of the centre and east, and the budget rested on cotton exports and French subsidies. About half the population was Muslim, most of it in the north and east.

The army was southern. In 1964 it numbered 500 soldiers trained by 200 Frenchmen, and from independence until 1979 it was overwhelmingly Sara; at first only two officers came from the north. French officers commanded the army, the gendarmerie and the intelligence office, and a secret clause in the defence accords let Chad call in French troops to maintain internal order.

Tombalbaye banned every party except his own in January 1962. Demonstrations on 16 September 1963 were put down with between 19 and 100 deaths, and in December 1963 only government candidates stood for the National Assembly.

Why the north rose against Tombalbaye

French officers ran the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti until January 1965, when southern administrators replaced them. In September 1965, after a soldier was killed in a fight following a dance at Bardaï in the Tibesti, the subprefect had the townspeople assembled and paraded naked, arrested nine people, among them the Toubou derde Oueddei Kichidemi and his son Goukouni Oueddei, and banned turbans, beards and gatherings. Bardaï rose. Riots against tax collection at Mangalmé in Guéra the same year killed more than 500 people, among them a member of the National Assembly, and they are usually taken as the start of the civil war.

On 22 June 1966, 24 delegates of opposition groups met at Nyala in Sudan and founded the National Liberation Front of Chad, FROLINAT. Its first leader was Ibrahim Abatcha, and it called for Arabic to become an official language of Chad. That December the derde fled to Libya with 1,000 followers.

How France fought the first rebellion

Abatcha was killed at Abéché on 11 February 1968, and the rebellion kept growing. France sent troops in 1968 and, from April 1969, ran Operation Limousin, which placed the whole Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti under French military administration. When Tombalbaye ordered the French commander, General Michel Arnaud, to kill 15,000 Arabs in communities he suspected of backing the rebels, Arnaud refused. By the end of the intervention in June 1971, combined French and Chadian operations had killed between 2,000 and 10,000 people, and 50 French soldiers died fighting the rebels between May 1969 and August 1972.

In 1972 Tombalbaye cut ties with Israel, accepted CFA 23 billion in aid from Libya, and ceded the disputed Aouzou Strip in the far north to Libya in return for a promise to stop arming FROLINAT. Britannica records that an Italian-French pact assigning the strip to Italian Libya had never been ratified by the French National Assembly, and that Libya used it as the pretext to seize the territory in 1973.

Why the army turned on Tombalbaye

The concessions did not hold his southern base together. In 1973 he renamed Fort-Lamy N'Djamena and required non-Muslim southern officials and officers to go through yondo, the initiation rite of a Sara subgroup; about 3,000 people went through it between mid-1973 and April 1974, and many saw the rite as anti-Christian. After a series of arrests of senior officers, gendarmerie units mutinied on 13 April 1975 and senior officers attacked the presidential palace and killed him. French forces in the capital did not intervene. Félix Malloum, another southerner, became chairman of the Supreme Military Council two days later.

How the civil war became a fight among northerners

FROLINAT broke apart in the early 1970s. The First Liberation Army under Ahmat Acyl was mostly Chadian Arab and fought in the east; the Second Liberation Army, mostly Toubou, fought in the north under Goukouni Oueddei and Hissène Habré, who then split over Goukouni's alliance with Libya. By late 1976 most of the northern third of the country was under combined Libyan and rebel control.

Malloum tried to co-opt the rebels and in August 1978 made Habré prime minister. In February 1979 Habré sent about 1,000 men against Malloum's forces in N'Djamena and took most of the city, and Sara, fearing the loss of their political position, were reported to have massacred thousands of Muslim civilians. Malloum resigned on 23 March 1979 and left for Nigeria. Wikipedia's summary is that the rebels "put an end to the south's hegemony".

Delegates of eleven factions signed the Lagos Accord on 21 August 1979, and the Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT) took office that November with Goukouni as president, the southern colonel Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué as vice-president and Habré at defence. Its ministries were split 11 to the south and 13 to the rest of the country. By then, in Britannica's reading, the war had become less a contest between the Muslim north and the south than a struggle among northern factions.

The coalition broke down by January 1980, when Goukouni's and Habré's forces were fighting again; Libyan troops came in at Goukouni's request in December 1980, and a statement in January 1981 that Chad and Libya would work towards full union drew heavy international pressure, after which Goukouni asked them to leave. Habré's Armed Forces of the North, which had retreated into Sudan, retook the eastern towns from there in November 1981 and entered N'Djamena in June 1982. Human Rights Watch has reported that "the United States helped Habré take power in the first clandestine operation" launched by the CIA director William Casey.

How Chad won the Aouzou Strip back from Libya

Goukouni set up a rival government at Bardaï with Libyan backing, and in 1983 its forces attacked in the north and east. French and Zairian troops pushed them back north of the 16th parallel. A Franco-Libyan agreement of September 1984 provided for both sides to withdraw; France left and Libya stayed, occupying the northern third of the country.

The war turned in 1987. With Goukouni himself moving towards him, Habré's forces drove the Libyans out of most of the north early that year and held Aouzou itself for a few weeks; when Libya retook the oasis, Habré raided Maaten es Sarra, well inside Libya. A truce followed in September 1987. Wikipedia describes the campaign as producing "a united response from Chadians of a kind never seen before".

The rest was settled in court. Under an agreement concluded at Algiers on 31 August 1989, the two states undertook to take the dispute to the International Court of Justice if no political settlement was reached, and Chad filed its application on 3 September 1990. Libya asked the Court to draw a boundary; Chad asked it to declare the one fixed by a Franco-Libyan treaty of 10 August 1955. On 3 February 1994 the Court found that the 1955 treaty had fixed a complete and permanent frontier, and the judgment ended the Libyan occupation of the strip.

Southern rebel commandos, the Codos, were broken up by government massacres in 1984, and thousands of people are estimated to have been killed under his rule. A special court in Dakar convicted him of crimes against humanity on 30 May 2016, and Wikipedia records that the findings included ordering the killing of 40,000 people.

Why Déby's rule ended on a battlefield

Habré was overthrown from the east. Rivalry between Hadjerai, Zaghawa and Gorane groups inside the government grew in the late 1980s, and in April 1989 Habré, a Gorane, moved against suspected plotters: the interior minister Brahim Mahamot Itno was arrested, the adviser Hassan Djamouss was killed, and Idriss Déby, a Zaghawa general, escaped to Darfur. He came back across the border in 1990, took Abéché, and entered N'Djamena in December as Habré fled. A national charter of 28 February 1991 confirmed him as president.

Parties were legalised in 1992, and a national conference in 1993 set up a transitional government with Déby as interim president. A new constitution was approved in 1996, and that year Déby won the first multiparty presidential election in Chad's history, a vote international observers found marked by serious irregularities. Chad became an oil producer in 2003, under a World Bank plan to spend 80% of oil export revenue on priority sectors such as education and health. When the war in the east escalated in 2006 the government added national security to the list, and of the 10 to 11 billion dollars Chad earned from oil after 2003, an estimated 4 billion went to the army.

The war came from Darfur. About 200,000 refugees had crossed by early 2005, and on 23 December 2005 Chad declared a state of war with Sudan, which it accused of backing Chadian rebels. Rebels reached N'Djamena in April 2006 and again in February 2008, and an agreement of 15 January 2010 committed both governments to stop hosting each other's rebels.

Rebels killed him in the end. Déby was declared the winner of the April 2021 presidential election as rebels attacked from the north, and on 20 April the army announced that he had died of injuries from the fighting. The constitution named the president of the National Assembly as interim head of state. The military instead dissolved the government and the Assembly and set up a council under Déby's son, Mahamat Idriss Déby, to govern for 18 months, which Britannica records was regarded as a coup. The transition was extended in October 2022, and protests on 20 October, the day the original mandate expired, were suppressed with between 50 and at least 300 deaths. A constitution approved on 17 December 2023 by almost 86% of voters on a turnout of almost 63% kept a unitary state that most opposition groups had opposed, and Mahamat Idriss Déby was sworn in as president on 23 May 2024 after an election that some international organisations said was neither free nor fair.