Central Africa: An Introduction

Since the mid-1800s, perceptions about the identity and location of the central part of the African continent have changed repeatedly. For David Livingstone (1857), the center lay near the Zambezi River; for Georg Schweinfurth (1875), it occupied Mangbetu country, in the northeast of what in the late 1900s was the Republic of Zaire. In I960, Ubangi-Shari, one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, proclaimed independence under the name "Central African Republic"; in 1966, it became an empire; and in 1979, after a coup d'etat, it became a republic again.