Chad

The Lake Chad basin was the base of a series of Sahelian states that grew rich on trans-Saharan trade, above all the Kanem-Bornu empire, which lasted in some form for a thousand years, and later the sultanates of Baguirmi and Ouaddaï. These were Muslim, slave-raiding states whose raids reached deep into the non-Muslim south.

France conquered the region around 1900 and governed it as the least-developed part of French Equatorial Africa, investing little outside the cotton-growing south. Independence came in 1960. Almost immediately, resentment in the Muslim north at rule by southern elites fed a rebellion, and Chad spent much of the next thirty years in civil war, with repeated Libyan intervention in the north and a disputed border strip.

Hissène Habré's brutal 1980s rule — later punished in a landmark international trial — gave way in 1990 to Idriss Déby, who held power for three decades until he was killed fighting rebels in 2021. The army installed his son, Mahamat Déby, who consolidated control and won a contested election in 2024. Oil, pumped since 2003 through a pipeline to the Cameroonian coast, funds the state without lifting most Chadians out of poverty.

Chad's central divide is between a Muslim, Arabic-speaking, herding north and centre and a Christian and traditional-religion, farming south, with the Sara the largest single group. Overlaid on this are dozens of peoples — Toubou of the Tibesti, Zaghawa, Kanembu, Ouaddaïans, Fulani, Hadjarai, and others — each with distinct languages and customs.

Cattle and camels are wealth and status among the pastoralists, and the year is organised around the search for pasture and water. In the south, farming villages keep older masking and initiation traditions. Hospitality to travellers is a strong obligation, and tea — poured in rounds — is the ritual of welcome across the north.

The Sahara peoples have left a remarkable record on the rocks of the Ennedi and Tibesti: thousands of paintings and engravings of cattle, hunters, and a once-green Sahara, spanning several thousand years.

Most Chadians live by farming millet, sorghum, and groundnuts in the south and centre, or by herding across the Sahel, both increasingly squeezed by drought, desertification, and the shrinking of Lake Chad. Cotton is the traditional cash crop of the south; livestock is the north's.

N'Djamena, on the Chari River facing Cameroon, is the one large city and the centre of government and commerce. Elsewhere, towns are small and services thin — Chad has some of the world's worst indicators for maternal health, schooling, and electricity access.

The country also carries an enormous humanitarian burden, hosting well over a million refugees from Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Nigeria, many in camps in the east and around Lake Chad, straining already scarce water and land.

Chadian food is Sahelian and grain-based. The staple is a stiff millet or sorghum porridge — boule — eaten by hand with a sauce of okra, dried fish, meat, or daraba, a mix of vegetables and peanut. In the south, cassava and maize feature more; in the north, dates, milk, and grilled meat.

Rice dishes, maafé-style groundnut stews, and grilled river fish appear in N'Djamena. Bil-bil, a millet beer, is drunk in the non-Muslim south; strong sweet tea is universal in the Muslim areas.

Dates from the Saharan oases, and camel and goat milk among the herders, are staples of the desert diet.

Chad's great sight is the Ennedi Plateau in the northeast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of sandstone arches, towers, and slot canyons rising from the desert. At its heart the Guelta d'Archei is a permanent pool in a deep gorge where Toubou herders water their camels alongside a relict population of desert crocodiles, beneath walls stained by centuries of guano and ancient rock art.

The Lakes of Ounianga, further north, are a second World Heritage Site: a cluster of lakes of different colours in the middle of the Sahara, some fresh, some salt, fed entirely by underground water. Beyond them rise the volcanic Tibesti Mountains, home to the Sahara's highest peak — spectacular but effectively closed to visitors.

In the southeast, Zakouma National Park is a conservation success story: brought back from near-collapse by intensive anti-poaching work, it again holds large elephant herds, big buffalo and antelope populations, lions, and, in the dry season, huge gatherings of birds around the last waterholes.