Of the new African nations that we’ve decided to tell you about from time to time, the Central African Republic has one of the most resounding names and some of the gravest problems. Formerly a part of French Equatorial Africa, it covers two hundred and thirty-eight thousand square miles, nearly all of them empty, in the middle of the continent and has a population of a million two hundred thousand, whose average income is less than a hundred dollars a year… Boganda was a colored character. A Catholic priest when he entered the Assembly, he used to enjoy trying to shock his colleagues there by boasting that his father had been both a sorcerer and a cannibal; he really did give them a jolt when he married his French secretary, was defrocked, and returned home to found the Mouvement d’Evolution Sociale en Afrique Noire -a highly efficient political machine, known as MESAN for short, which is today in absolute control of the country… Boganda, some months before his death, persuaded the Territorial Assembly to pass two remarkable laws. One provides a prison sentence of from three to six months for all idlers and vagabonds eighteen years of age and over, and the other outlaws nudity. Since many equatorial tribes consider it dishonorable for any man over fifteen to do manual labor, and since it was estimated as late as 1949 that five-sixths of the population went about pretty thoroughly unclothed, these laws are proving a bit difficult to enforce… The first European to enter Ubangi-Shari country was an English Baptist missionary named Georges Grenfell, who discovered the Ubangi River in 1884 and explored it a year later in a small yacht call the Peace. French and Belgian explorers followed Grenfell, and in 1887 the French, having begun to think about putting together a vast empire centered on Lake Chad, signed a treaty with the Belgians establishing their claim to the territory… Source: C.A.R. by Louis P. Forster, Jane Boutwell, and Brendan Gill, April 1, 1961, The New Yorker, pages 24-26).
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 23:54:14 +0000
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