Chad

Overview

Chad is a landlocked country in north-central Africa, the fifth-largest on the continent at roughly 1.3 million km², with its capital at N'Djamena. It takes its name from Lake Chad (from the Kanuri word for "lake") and has been called the "Dead Heart of Africa" because of its distance from the sea and its largely desert climate.

History

Humans settled the Chadian basin from the 7th millennium BC, and by the end of the 1st millennium AD a series of Sahelian states had risen to control the trans-Saharan trade routes: the Kanem Empire (later Kanem–Bornu), the Sultanate of Bagirmi, and the Wadai Sultanate, which remained significant regional powers into the 19th century. France created a military territory in 1900, secured full control by 1920, and incorporated Chad into French Equatorial Africa. Colonial rule was thin and extractive, focused on cotton in the Sara-populated south while the Islamic north was only nominally governed.

Independence came on 11 August 1960 under François Tombalbaye, a southern Sara, whose one-party rule and anti-northern policies provoked a Muslim northern rebellion (FROLINAT) in 1965 and a long civil war. Rebels took the capital in 1979; Libya intervened in the ensuing factional war, until Hissène Habré, with French backing, expelled Libyan forces by 1987. Habré's brutal dictatorship — later judged responsible for the killing of some 40,000 people — ended in 1990 when his general Idriss Déby seized power. Déby ruled until April 2021, when he was killed fighting FACT rebels; his son Mahamat Déby took over through a Transitional Military Council and won a disputed election in May 2024.

Later history and present status

The economy is among the world's least developed: most Chadians are subsistence herders and farmers, with crude oil (exported since 2003) the main source of export earnings. The population of about 20 million spans over 200 ethnic groups; French and Arabic are official languages, and religion divides between Islam (~55%) and Christianity (~41%). Chad hosts around 1.5 million refugees, mostly Sudanese from Darfur, and remains plagued by political violence, coups, and jihadist spillover, though its army is a key regional counterterrorism partner.