Methodology and Epistemology

This paper is based on multiple periods of ethnographic fieldwork in the CAR and archival documentary research. Ethnographic research was undertaken in the capital and the multiple peripheries of the CAR, comprising armed groups across the divides, former armed group members, women’s organizations, and peace-building communities.Footnote ³ Further, this paper draws upon archival research of primary documents on Equatorial Africa and Ubangui-Chari, primarily from the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM). Through purposive sampling of archival documents, patterns in the perceptions of French colonialists towards the communities they conquered were evaluated thematically for this paper and contextualized within the historical, social, and economic environment. Archival research is increasingly important for researchers, given the importance of contextualizing recent events within the wider and longer historical context of the African state (Bayart Reference Bayart1993) to illuminate the significance of those events in the present.

In this transdisciplinary approach and in understanding space, time, and meaning, the Francophone concept of “histoire” (rather than the English understanding of “history”) is a useful epistemic approach. Giles-Vernick found in her CAR fieldwork that Banda peoples understood history conceptually to simultaneously express, “a past space, as particular knowledge, practices and people associated with this past space, or as proper social relations” (Reference Giles-Vernick1996, 246). Taken together with lege (road or path) and ndo (space and hierarchical position), the spatial-temporal axis depicted both pastness and idealized order (Giles-Vernick Reference Giles-Vernick1996). This paper draws epistemologically on Giles-Vernick and, further, on Mbembe’s discussion of âge and durée as an entanglement (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001, 14) that contests time-bound considerations of postcolonial relationships. These accumulated memories—images, experiences, and meanings of past sociopolitical orders and profound sociopolitical transformations—can help to forge collective identities and ways of negotiating meaning that constitute present logic. Finally, this postcolonial approach posits that colony and colonial power are interdependent in the impact of the long historical past on the present. Thus, to consider the impact of the past on the present is a futile exercise without the consideration of the relationship between the metropole and colony.

The Extent of Muslim Precarity

A decade has passed since the forced displacements of 2013, yet the vast majority of Muslims have not returned home. Many remain situated beyond the country’s borders in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Sudan, and Cameroon. Inside the CAR, most Muslims displaced from the West of the country remain so. A few who were displaced, or sought sanctuary for their displacement in PK5, have been resettled in other areas.Footnote ⁴ Many spaces from which Muslims were forced to flee, including homes and small businesses, have been claimed by others. Paradoxically, despite professing peace, many communities simultaneously refused to allow Muslims to return, perpetuating further cycles of exclusion. Some local communities have even espoused the view that there is peace now because Muslims have gone (author field notes). Mbororo, or Muslim pastoralists, continue to face violent attacks, many of whom are now armed. For example, recently in Boyo, anti-Balaka executed male Muslim civilians, beheaded some, displayed heads and genitals as trophies, buried the wounded alive, raped women and children, and torched more than 500 houses (Agbetse Reference Agbetse2022, 8).

In official circles, there remains a pervasive and conspicuous silence about attacks on Muslims, and oftentimes these attacks are not investigated. For those in official peacebuilding capacities, it has been difficult to raise and discuss these concerns (field notes). This underscores the uphill struggle in terms of restitutive justice to reclaim rights and spaces for Muslim communities. This struggle itself is underscored by a failure to acknowledge the precarity facing Central African Muslims.

The precarity of Muslims is extreme and widespread, but not officially recognized. In government circles, Muslim civil servants are isolated and lay low in times of extreme violence, hiding from public view (field notes).Footnote ⁵ At a socioeconomic level, there continues to be severe discrimination against internally displaced persons and refugees. Ten years have passed, during which a peace process has become established, yet severe fragmentation remains. There has been no process of restitution. For example, as a displaced person described:

The negative othering of Muslims has a long history in the CAR and beyond, in other Francophone colonial possessions. In the CAR, interviewees expressed their historical experience of being Muslim over many decades. As one elder interviewee living in N’dele in the northeast stated:

Like other parts of Central and East Africa, Hamitic mythologies permeate relations between communities in which Muslims are frequently racialized as objects and constructed as outsiders, foreigners, and an unnatural part of the authentic ordering of what it means to be Central African. This is also central to claiming control of intellectual and elite spaces. For example, in discussing his life prior to 2013, a member of an armed group said:

Not all undercurrents of insecurity and precarity connected to being and belonging as a Muslim have been understated and implied. Despite the creation of a strong legal arsenal and the existence of a civic space in the country, overt threats remain. In Bangui, for example, the few Muslims who have moved back to the area remain noticeably close to PK5 (field notes) so they can cross the road to the only Muslim enclave and reach safety quickly.

In Bangui, there are overt discussions about the elimination of Muslims. For example, one peacekeeper discussed the perceptions of a variety of office-holders in religious organizations about Muslims. He said:

In social circles, both elite and nonelite, governmental and nongovernmental, the anti-Balaka are frequently considered as patriots, defending an idealized ordering of society and restoring proper social relations among communities. In conveying sentiments that they do not belong, there have been many vivid displays of pretending to eat the flesh of Muslims in a form of masquerade, portraying disgust, dismemberment, and possession. Human rights abuses, including detentions, particularly against Muslim pastoralist communities, have increased (UN interview).

The extreme precarity of Muslim communities is encompassed by direct, structural, and cultural violence which has not abated over the last decade. In this paper, I consider the specific roots of this precarity as divided into four broad themes, to which I shall now turn.

Making Christians as “Frenchmen” in Colonial Ubangui-Chari

The negative othering of Muslims occurred long before the massacres of 2013. Colonial France, in dealing with its African possessions, developed an inimical relationship with Islam, impacting intellectual debates in France that simultaneously came to define and redefine colonial practice in Central Africa.

During the Second Republic, policies directed towards the Islamic Maghreb, such as the Nativist Policies of the 1860s and Arab Kingdom Policy of 1863 to create a Franco-Muslim Algeria, entrenched the tacit acceptance of Islam and the dual administration of two colonial subject populations. Cardinal Lavigerie, who established the White Fathers,Footnote ⁶ implemented a nonproselytizing presence among Muslim subjects in Algeria. Across Central Africa, the largest group of Roman Catholic missionaries were French (Pawlikova-Vilhanova Reference Pawlikova-Vilhanova2007) who criticized these policies as anti-Christian in a language reminiscent of the Crusades. Missionaries saw themselves as both priests and soldiers in a Catholic army dedicated to a moralist conquest of the Maghreb. The White Fathers focused on conversion, not civilization, as Lavigerie’s philosophy was to facilitate the development of African churches,Footnote ⁷ not create French subjects. Lavigerie’s expansionist ambitions of a “Christian Kingdom” at the heart of Equatorial Africa were mandated by Pope Leo XIII. Lavigerie’s project was defined as a greater moral crusade against slavery (Pawlikova-Vilhanova Reference Pawlikova-Vilhanova2007, 252), unifying the anti-slavery campaigns in Central Africa and beyond. Christianity was now central to the anti-slavery crusade against Muslim Sultanates and broader ideas of civilization held in France, as well as French expansion in Central Africa.

The expansion of trans-Saharan slave-raiding among Muslim states occurred in the context of the expansion of the European world economy and their military power (Cordell Reference Cordell and Diouf2004). The Sultanates of Borno, Baguirmi,Footnote ⁸ Wadai, and Dar Fur raided the South, as did the colonial Khartoumers, with Wadai and Baguirmi slaving both Sara and Banda peoples. During its brief existence at N’dele from 1896 to 1911, Dar el-KoutiFootnote ⁹—a Muslim tributary to the Sultanate of Wadai—became a major hub for slave-raiding and trading. Cordell (Reference Cordell1985) sets out the extent of this destruction in meticulous detail—violent decimation of the population, extensive social dislocation, and severe impact on food production. Many of the populations raided included refugees from slaving further north. Slaves tended the plantations at N’dele, which also traded ivory, cloth, aromatic foodstuffs, and coffee.

Between 1896 and 1911 Muhammad al-Senoussi, Sultan of Dar el-Kouti, arranged an agreement with Rabih az-Zubayr, a notorious slaver, to end attacks on Dar el-Kouti in return for passage across the territory to attack and enslave Banda. From 1898 onwards, with the expanding presence of the French, “N’dele never had a pre-colonial history whose dynamics were totally independent of the French” (Cordell Reference Cordell1985, 94). French pressures on Dar el-Kouti were driven by a desire to connect French Congo with Lake Chad, securing a route from Algiers to Congo and curtailing British influence in the interior. The ill-fated Crampel expedition of 1891Footnote ¹⁰ undermined the extension of French paper annexations over the interior,Footnote ¹¹ thereafter supported by military expeditions. French colonialists first tried to annex the Sultanates through paper treaties and then destroy them through direct military conquest (archival analysis). The colonial archives contain thousands of colonial reports demonstrating permanent confrontation with, and direct action against, the Sultanates—including Dar el-Kouti in Ubangi-Chari, Ouaddai, and the Sultanates beyond.

Early nineteenth-century records document the relationship between the concession companies and the colonial government, reserving vast swathes of territory for the concession’s private extraction, which Sultan Senoussi refused to recognize.Footnote ¹² Increasingly hostile colonial reports document Senoussi’s intransigence towards French colonialism, specifically regarding the unfulfilled terms of the 1909 Treaty signed under duress,Footnote ¹³ concerns over Senoussi’s relationships with other Muslim sultanates in the region and beyond,Footnote ¹⁴ and culminating in the assassination of Senussi, his son, and the “pacification” of N’dele by colonial military conquest.Footnote ¹⁵ These processes mark a sustained and permanent action against the Sultanates and their tributaries. The treaties signed under duress stripped all sovereignty from Dar el-Kouti, annexing it into the French possession of Ubangi-Chari.

For older Banda peoples, the communal oral histories of slaving by Muslim Sultanates features in the contemporary perceptions of their own identity, as “a past space … that shape[s] present social relations” and “a past space that posed dangers even in the present” (Giles-Vernick Reference Giles-Vernick1996, 259) with implications for the proper social ordering. Oral histories of fear and distrust from fleeing slaving by Muslim Sultanates exist among older Banda and similarly, French regroupement policiesFootnote ¹⁶ implemented following the destruction of Dar el-Kouti feature in these memories. In contrast, perceptions among Muslim communities in the northeast differ. As one person who traced his lineage directly to the Sultanate of Dar el-Kouti stated:

Although precolonial relations were not as copacetic as may be suggested—and many groups identifying as Muslim today, such as Goula communities, were also raided—oral mythologies imprint the present. Thus, for members of this community, the present social ordering is one in which colonial relations of the past, also deeply fraught with danger, became that of a deeper alienation.

Despite the vociferous Republican anticlerical debates about whose France and which France taking place in Parisian intellectual circles at the turn of the century, French Catholic missionaries refashioned themselves as a critical component of La Mission Civilisatrice during the Third Republic, now on a crusade for both God and country. Whose France and which France were firmly on the agenda following the Dreyfus Affair in 1894 (Daughton Reference Daughton2008). The false espionage accusations against Dreyfus emboldened republicanism, which blamed the “older ways” and demanded separation of church and state. Open hostility to republicanism by French missionaries was firmly in the spotlight with the invention of anticlericalism in metropolitan France. Sustained measures targeting Islamic institutions and Muslim societies were “a direct extension of French confrontation with the Catholicism that dominated on the near side of the Mediterranean” (Triand Reference Triand, Levtzion and Pouwels2000, 170). This included the deliberate exclusion of Muslim societies from the redefined notion of God and country on the continent.

Simultaneously, the Parisian intellectual left idealized and “fetishized Africa and its so-called primitive cultures as an imaginary antidote to their alienation from bourgeoise metropolitan life” (Clark Reference Clark1997, 56). Shaped by exoticized desires and representations of the African subject as a noble savage (Gide Reference Gide1902), French intellectuals, in keeping with the colonial lexicon of Islam Noir, recast Muslim Africans as marabouts. The civilizing and colonizing goals of France were subject to intense debate and Catholic missionaries in Central Africa reframed their moral goals to align with the expansion of republican colonialism, aiming to overcome political, cultural, and social divisions in France. Thus, they appropriated the rhetoric of republican colonialism, placing Catholicism firmly within the civilizing mission and asserting that there could be no civilizing mission without Catholicism (Daughton Reference Daughton2008, 262). Missionaries now actively advanced French colonial republican objectives, eliding Catholicism with patriotism and religious salvation with secularist projects of Empire. Reversing Lavigerie, French language and education became a central part of missionary endeavors.

Intense debates within French intellectual circles, reinforced through French military campaigns in Africa and supported by evangelizing missions confronting Islam Noir, characterized African Muslims as diametrically opposed to the progressive and modern ideals of the French state, neither modern nor part of the “noble savage” trope. The administration of Muslim subjects had come to define France in multiple ways (Murray-Miller Reference Murray-Miller2017). Islam was extricated from the colonial spheres of progress and modernity, necessitating a corresponding isolation of Muslims from these domains. In order to advance republican Christianity, French colonialism denigrated Islam. As one interviewee stated:

Muslims in Central Africa were excluded from the civilizing mission of republican colonialism, or the making of Frenchmen through Christianity. Civilizational goals now firmly aligned republicanism and Catholicism in French colonies, while Muslims were relegated to a parallel existence from those who were both conquered and acculturated under the French republican and Christian orbit, in what one interviewee called, “two compartments of a single state.”

Escape from the Socioeconomic and Cultural Diffusion of French Colonialism

Despite the conquest of Muslim sultanates in Central Africa by France, Islamic belief systems, institutions, and Muslim societies were never fully colonized. Conquest and dismantlement of the Sultanates in Central and East Africa did not result in the assimilation of Muslims into the Christian sphere and, as such, the colonial sphere and the Islamic sphere were never entirely coterminous in Africa.

At the moment of subjugation, Islamic identity in Ubangi-Chari, comprising transnational and trans-Saharan networks, provided an immense anti-colonial challenge to French republican colonialism. These “marabouts” as they became known in colonial lexicon were impervious to, and evaded, conversion through a greater mobility, setting them apart from other indigenous groups and hindering the prospect of incorporating other Africans into greater French “civilization.” Muhammad al-Senoussi, Sultan of Dar el-Kouti and born in Wadai, was a member of the Sanusiyya, a moderate Muslim politico-religious Sufi Order founded by an Algerian scholar in Mecca in 1837, headquartered in LibyaFootnote ¹⁷ and extending across the Sahara and most of the Sudan.Footnote ¹⁸ N’dele was not simply a slaving and trade hub. It was also a place through which pilgrims travelled and rested en route to the Hajj (Cordell Reference Cordell1985, 216), where they could meet Muslim religious advisors connected to other centers of faith, learning, and power.Footnote ¹⁹ The mythology of al-Senoussi in the region of the northeast encompasses the ideas of an anti-colonial nationalist in a political order in which Muslim communities did not have to hide (field notes). In western and southern Ubangui-Chari, syncretic affiliations between Christianity and animism became established among Gbaya and Banda. Muslim communities escaped from and remained peripheral to this trajectory throughout conquest, the colonial period, and in postcolonial state formation.

Sufism offered to CAR’s Muslims a transnational fraternity beyond the confines of the nation-state, spanning multiple schools of theology and philosophy broadly coalesced around the Sufi principles of repentance, remembrance, and sincerity. But importantly, this philosophical and theological mobility was never fully mediated by the state. The incorporation of traditional authorities into the colony of Ubangui-Chari and formalization of their roles during the Fifth Republic further entrenched the authority of spiritual leaders. For example, in the present, the Mayor-Sultan of the northeast is simultaneously a politico-administrative authority and a spiritual one (field notes), and the communities in this area have greater transnational spiritual mobility than Gbaya and Banda elsewhere. In N’dele, I observed the Mayor-Sultan practicing processes of conflict transformation within Muslim communities that speak to Islamic, African, and traditional value systems and practices. In discussions with communities, it was stated that, “Our Sultan is our spiritual guide, Iman, advisor, representative, leader. It is he that we go to restore the equilibrium.”

In the north, Muslim communities recognize a spiritual affinity beyond the border, particularly to the north and east (field notes). These idealized “sovereign” borders are frequently negated on a daily basis, as people cross for multiple reasons relating to broader cultural and spiritual affinities. One might concur with Wright’s findings in West Africa: “This was a pragmatic path of engagement with the political realities … [and Muslims] … held to long-standing knowledge practices and institutions” (Wright Reference Wright2013, 208). Muslims were also able to transcend the boundaries of the state through a sense of spiritual belonging that was both transnational and a refuge beyond nation. As state sovereignty became associated with autochthony in the CAR, and Muslims associated with foreignness, this mobility became a substantial symbol and marker of difference. This is to the degree, as one interviewee stated, that:

Transnational spirituality is one form of greater mobility. Muslims have also tended to be located in the socioeconomic modalities of pastoralism and private sector trade, as civil service and public sector occupations were closed off to them. In contrast, Gbaya and Banda communities are frequently found in sedentary agriculture and the public sector, with a more domestically focused orientation. Since the 1920s Mbororo communites, a subset of Peuhl pastoralists,Footnote ²⁰ have existed at the margins of Central Africa, “keeping a geographical and social distance from the rest of society … in CAR’s open territories’ (de Vries Reference de Vries2020, 2). Both Peuhl and MbororoFootnote ²¹ communities are predominantly Muslim and speak Arabic, but Mbororo also tend to speak Sango, a national language since independence. Mbororo communities were subject to taxation by the colonial authorities, but not regroupement. However, in the 1960s the government reorganized local authorities and established Rural Livestock Communities, formalizing claims to grazing land for cattle (de Vries Reference de Vries2020, 4) and merging traditional authorities within Mbororo clans with local government structures. This was extended in the 1980s in further reorganization as cattle routes were established across the CAR. Thus, claims that Mbororo could make on territory were directly connected to the contribution of pastoralism to the economy (de Vries Reference de Vries2020, 4), rather than wider claims to belonging and citizenship. Mbororo citizenship is thus secondary, borrowed, conditional, and subject to removal as the growing sovereignty of the postcolonial state meant the ability to control whose citizenship was “authentic” and whose was conditional. Conditionality is predicated on usefulness.

Mbororo communities also coalesce with traders and artisans (frequently Muslim), some of whom purchase cattle as an investment. Coffee and diamond tradersFootnote ²² in the country were historically Muslim and carried out cross-border trade in diamonds before being removed from the sector under Operation Closing Gate.Footnote ²³ Muslim diamond collectors who attempted to return to this sector in the west (Berberati/Sosso-Nakombo) were attacked (International Peace Information Service 2018, 86).

Despite the conquest of Muslim subjects, their lifestyle and mobility were never fully colonized. Their existence in the multiple peripheries of the state, and in non state-based employment and socioeconomic entreprises, as well as spiritual ties beyond the border, offered an alternative that the colonial authorities and postcolonial state could never fully mediate. Despite their precarity, they escaped, not from French conquest but from the socioeconomic and cultural diffusion of French colonialism. At the same time, this marker of difference—expressed through their mobility and nonconformity to the neoliberal concept of border sovereignty—has led to their further othering within the Central African landscape.

Resistance and the Creation of Nationalist Mythologies

Substantial documentary evidence exists cataloging the initial resistance of Gbaya and Banda communities against the oppressive and brutal conditions imposed by colonial rule.Footnote ²⁴ These communities, with limited prospects for socioeconomic mobility during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actively contested the oppressive circumstances imposed upon them. Initially viewed as a place to be crossed on the way to the more important Lake Tchad (Chad) and Fashoda (Sudan), the territory became a place to be pacified on behalf of the large concessionary companies in pursuit of rubber and ivory. Escalating cattle prices, Fulbe incursions, and attempts by the German authorities following the 1894 Franco-German protocol to rule Gbaya and Banda through indirect rule using the Fulbe in western Ubangui-Chari, resulted in widespread waves of retaliation and rebellion.Footnote ²⁵ Amid the overarching colonial administration facilitated by Fulbe intermediaries, the escalating pressures of concessionary exploitation, coerced labor, head taxes, and porterage converged to heighten the existing xenophobic sentiments directed specifically towards the Muslim population (Coquery-Vidrovitch Reference Coquery-Vidrovitch1972, 201–11).

From 1909, the colony was divided into four civilian and three military circonscriptions Footnote ²⁶ each subjected to intense pacification for the major concession companies, and the raising of taxation, using Muslim tirailleurs sénégalais from West Africa. In the hinterland, Banda communities fiercely resisted rubber collection and attacked trading posts (Weinstein Reference Weinstein1970, 110). With deteriorating French authority, imposed cooperation through outright war against the villages in the hinterland and the riverine ensued (Weinstein Reference Weinstein1970, 122) to exact rubber collection. Concession company reports acknowledge the extensive pressures placed on Africans to plant and collect rubber across the West of the country, with 82,750 kg collected in one year.Footnote ²⁷ In another concession, forced labour for rubber collection also drew on clerks and guards described as sénégalais and sierra-léonais. Footnote ²⁸

In the 1920s, the forced regroupement of villages along roads to enable taxation, porterage, rubber collection, and conscription for the construction of the Congo-Ocean Railroad after 1924 compounded existing societal strains among Gbaya communities. The impact of colonialism in French Equatorial Africa between 1910 and 1921 was the decimation of the population from 9 million to 2,830,000.Footnote ²⁹ Along the Congo-Ocean Railway, there were 120 deaths per kilometer.Footnote ³⁰ Concurrently, uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s across west and central Ubangui-Chari manifested as assaults on colonial intermediaries, agents, and merchants—many of whom were Muslim and Fulbe.Footnote ³¹ In Carnot, the European community enlisted Muslim Hausa guards as a defensive measure.Footnote ³² These rebellions and acts of resistance in the form of uprisings became known as the Kongo-Wara Uprisings, or the War of the Hoe-Handle, and took place across territory that had served as a refuge from the slave trade, creating substantial panic among colonsFootnote ³³ and concern by colonial authorities beyond French colonies.Footnote ³⁴ Although dispersed, an inter-village religious and politico-military elite were “interlocking … transcending village and lineage ties” (O’Toole Reference O’Toole1984, 332). French patterns of behavior supported Muslim merchants and Fulbe intermediaries, who came under direct assault. This included Fulbe cattle-keepers, pastoralists, guards of Muslim canton chiefs, and other Fulbe in Ouham Pende and elsewhere (O’Toole Reference O’Toole1984, 335–36; Coquery-Vidrovitch Reference Coquery-Vidrovitch1972, 210–12), and colonial posts throughout the west of the country.Footnote ³⁵ In these uprisings, Muslim traders were attacked, kidnapped, and killed along with collectors and plantation labourers from outside of the area, who were described as strangers and foreigners.Footnote ³⁶ These uprisings were eventually halted by substantial and extensive “pacification”Footnote ³⁷ located out of a Protestant mission station, through the scorched earth atrocities of the colonial administration.Footnote ³⁸ They were succeeded by the establishment of an unequivocal and direct form of colonial rule.

Notably, Gbaya village uprisings spanning Bossangoa, Carnot, Bouzom, Bocaranga, and Paoua specifically targeted Muslim Fulbe intermediaries and Muslim merchants, as opposed to targeting the French colonial administration directly responsible for their socioeconomic and political oppression. The narrative of resistance in the form of numerous uprisings by villages in western, central, and southern Ubangui-Chari against the intermediaries of indirect rule, including those linked with Kongo-Wara, and their subsequent suppression, stands as a profoundly symbolic collective memory in the context of nationalist mythologies of liberation struggle and postcolonial state formation.

This collective remembering was central to the movement of Barthélemy Boganda, the first African to become an ordained Catholic priest in the colony of Ubangui-Chari, who was a fierce critic of the conditions of colonialism but supportive of the ideals of French society. He was elected a member of parliament for the French National Assembly for Oubangui-Chari from 1946 onwards, Mayor of Bangui from 1956, President of the Grand Conseil in 1957Footnote ³⁹ and from 1958 until his death, Prime Minster of the CAR (van Walraven Reference van Walraven2017, 247). Orphaned and living in the forests of Lobaye, Boganda was picked up by a colonial patrol and deposited with an orphanage where he was drawn into mission life with the Spiritans.Footnote ⁴⁰ As an anti-colonial nationalist, his political goals had a strong religious dimension. He rejected the socioeconomic and repressive political dimensions of colonial rule, opposed the racism of settler society in Oubangui-Chari, yet still maintained a continued relationship with the French state. Devoutly Catholic, Boganda was committed to the improvement of rural society through evangelization, education, and civilization and served both the Church and France in keeping with the missionary ideals of the earlier century. Drawing on the mythology of Kongo-Wara and other rebellions, Boganda and other major nationalist movements, openly aligned with earlier peasant rebellions, syncretizing rural rebellion against perceived oppressors,Footnote ⁴¹ Christianity and anti-colonial nationalism, within popular movements, was a vehicle for liberation and postcolonial transformation.

The mission-educated évolués—who were groomed in the image of French “civilisation,” occupied administrative positions in the colonial period, and claimed political power in the postcolonial period—were primarily Roman Catholic (field notes). Muslims were not part of this mission-educated cadre, nor were they prepared for a life of colonial administration in this way. Instead, Muslims were subjected to additional restrictions and burdens beyond the indigenat (a two-tier law and punishment system during French colonialism) that imposed third-class citizenship, setting Muslims apart from other communities as unauthorized subjects set outside of the proper social ordering of the state. At independence, restrictions on movement and harassment when in contact with the public sector remained, with many forced to adopt an alternative name to try to exercise their rights as citizens by disguising their Muslim heritage. Embraced by the évolué, national liberation, and postindependence leadership, narratives of origin, communal perseverance, resistance, and rebellion hold significance as foundational narratives that are woven into the fabric of nationalist mythology, shape collective consciousness, and unify citizens. In this way, the long past haunts the present. For Muslims, these narratives emphasize a symbolic vulnerability. In discussions about the future, since the peace agreement of 2019, interviewees frequently talked about the unresolved past. As a senior member of an armed group inside the peace process stated:

The reference to “Arabou” marks a collective category based on religion, phenotypical features, relationship to nationalist struggle, language, and societal roles and is used in derogatory terminology to refer to all Muslims.

Fanon (Reference Fanon1986, 110) underscores the repercussions of colonial alienation in Africa, where estrangement from self, coupled with cultural imposition, robs Africans of their intrinsic value, stifling potential and diminishing self-worth. Consequently, “inferiority comes into being through the other” (Fanon Reference Fanon1986, 110) as, once alienated, Africans are taught to believe that they have “no culture, no civilisation, no long historical past” (Fanon Reference Fanon1986, 34). Echoing Cabral, indigenous colonial elites, “molded by colonization live materially and intellectually in the culture of the colonial foreigner” gradually seeking alignment with this externality (Cabral Reference Cabral2016, 164). The évolués became so through mission education, learning French, French military and university education, and adoption of Roman Catholicism, and they reproduced this format of internal colonialism in the CAR. To live in the culture of France was to be Central African. To remain outside was to be “foreign.”

Set apart from the specific mythologies of the broader nationalist struggle, Muslim citizenship is simultaneously rendered precarious, foreign, and subject to ongoing contestation through the popularly accepted and propagated narratives of rebellion against colonialism, national struggle for independence, and postcolonial state formation.

Peasant Radicalism and Pentecostalism

Peasant radicalism, grown out of nationalist mythologies, is further reinforced through the rapid spread of Pentecostalism across the West, particularly communities experiencing socioeconomic alienation in the postcolonial period. Such communities in the context of economic catastrophe face little chance of socioeconomic mobility. The immediate postcolonial period, and period immediately preceding this, witnessed a substantial rise in the number of churches, many of which were apostolic.Footnote ⁴² Many professed a lateral Pentecostalism, particularly across the areas of Bouar, Bouca, Batafango, Paoua, Bossangoa, and Berberati, where contemporary anti-Balaka forcibly displaced Muslims (field notes).

In these regions, in the 1940s and 1950s, documentary evidence shows substantial growth in the number of evangelical missionary activity in the CAR by American nontraditional denominations.Footnote ⁴³ Archival documents indicate general concerns about “deviations” in doctrine from more traditional churches, and colonial authorities closely watched American evangelical and charismatic churches that expanded into the field of education through primary religious instruction.Footnote ⁴⁴

Christianity was mediated by the accelerated spread of Pentecostalism, a charismatic approach to spirituality cutting across all Christian denominations among the peasantry. Familial ties to the Francophonie do not confer évolué status upon the peasantry in CAR. Instead, Pentecostalism provides a lateral liberation philosophy of a desire for transformative justice in a Manichean world characterized by struggles between good and evil, salvation and damnation, determining who is damned or righteous. In this tangible and literal world, those born-again are able to craft their lives in their world of struggles according to a mediated domesticated theology of scripture and life, and in a broader quest for justice. Embedded within social institutions and contextualized practices, this localized and domesticated charismatic theology powerfully underpins locally constructed perceptions and understandings of the daily socioeconomic and political challenges endured by rural communities about their own historic situation in relation to others. When asked about this, one person said:

Many anti-Balaka leadership have built their own chapels, and foot soldiers draw on syncretic charismatic and animist belief systems through these “awakening churches.” Charismatic liberation theology, in a context in which social institutions are collective and many experience deep socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement, adds to powerful nationalist mythologies that already render Muslim belonging as precarious. This engenders a greater liberation ideology of “otherness” towards those who do not share these social institutions in the present, providing a fundamental lateral liberation theology among the peasantry who comprise the anti-Balaka foot soldiers. This was overtly expressed, despite claims for peace. For example, as one person claimed:

In many of the churches, worship is in Sango and French, a further divider for many Muslims who frequently speak Arabic, not Sango. Theologies of language mirror public sector positions of the past, where to be a member of the armed forces one had to read and write both in French and Sango.

In reinforcing and legitimizing a logic of negative othering in the public sphere as a form of patriotism and liberation, the structural violence of the past is reinforced as cultural and direct violence against Muslims in the present.