Whenever I visit a country for the first time, I try to pay a visit to its national museum. It can tell you a lot about the place that set it up. Take the national museum in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), where I have recently been reporting. Situated in a dilapidated modernist villa built during the period of French colonial rule, it is named after Barthélemy Boganda, the country’s first nationalist leader who lived there before he died in a mysterious plane crash in 1959 (many suspect French involvement). When rebels overran Bangui in 2013—the start of what Central Africans call “La Crise”—the museum was looted. Pottery, canoes and musical instruments were sold on the streets or to traffickers. These days, despite a sign welcoming visitors from 9am to 3.30pm, the museum is almost always shut.
CAR, a Texas-sized nation surrounded by both Sudans and Congos, can feel similarly impenetrable to outsiders. ?Those who know anything about it will probably have heard of the self-proclaimed Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a flamboyant tyrant who was said to feed his opponents to crocodiles during his dictatorial rule in the 1960s and 1970s. (One important item still in the museum’s possession is his bejewelled throne.) The country has been dubbed by one French writer a “phantom”, a “country which doesn’t exist”. It was one of the very last patches on the colonial map to be claimed during the “scramble for Africa” in the late 19th century. Its name alone has been changed six times.
Academics often quibble with the journalistic cliché “failed state”. But in the case of CAR there is not much to dispute—except, perhaps, whether there has ever been a state in the first place. In 2011 CAR’s state budget was the same as that of the public hospital in Aix-en-Provence, a provincial French town. The government fails to provide even basic security, having controlled less than one-third of the countryside over the past decade. Despite multiple agreements it has signed with myriad armed opponents since 2013, most of the country still exists in an uneasy state between war and peace.
Beyond Bangui, the situation is particularly desperate. One Western ambassador warned me darkly not to get injured or sick—CAR’s sole anesthesiologist, they explained, had retired last year. In 2022, according to one jaw-dropping (albeit disputed) mortality survey, 5.6% of the population died. If accurate, that would mean a death rate twice as high as any other recorded anywhere in the world.
Because the state is so weak, it is at the mercy of outsiders. Since it won independence from France in 1960, CAR has suffered the indignity of no fewer than seven French military interventions. It has hosted so many different multilateral peace missions that it has been nicknamed “the world peacekeeping champion”. Experts describe CAR as a “concessionary” state, in which almost all basic functions of government are outsourced to aid agencies or foreign armies.
Which brings me to the main reason I was in Bangui last week: the Wagner Group. The notorious Russian mercenary outfit was invited by CAR’s government to help train the national army and crush the rebels in 2018. Since then, Wagner’s influence has spread far and wide, controlling the country’s most lucrative gold and diamond mines and providing President Faustin-Archange Touadéra with personal protection around the clock. Burly, balaclava-clad Wagner men can be spied in all the capital’s top restaurants and shopping malls.
To find out more about what the Russians are up to in CAR, keep an eye (and an ear) out for my coverage in The Economist in the coming weeks. For now, though, one final observation. For many outsiders, the presence of such unsavoury foreign troops on their own soil would be viewed as a national outrage. Among Central Africans, the typical reaction is more plus ça change.
