Sara (people)

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Sara woman, 2000

The Sara are an ethnic group that lives in the extreme south of Chad - in the administrative regions of Moyen-Chari , Logone Oriental , Logone Occidental and Tandjilé - as well as in adjacent parts of the Central African Republic . According to one estimate, they numbered almost two million people around 1980, about three-quarters of whom lived in Chad and made up up to 30% of the population there. In the Central African Republic, an estimated 10% of the population are Sara. The Sara are divided into several subgroups, including the Ngambaye (also Gambaye), Mbai (also Mbaï, Mbaye, Mbaye) and Madjingaye as the largest groups and as smaller groups the Ngama , Kabalai , Deme , Daye and Rundjo as well as Sar, Kaba, Dindje , Nara and Gulay (also Gula, Goulaye) as well as Dijoko, Kumra, Nar, Noi, Mbun, Sara-Kaba, Bedjond, Gor, Mouroum and Dobra.

The Ngambaye in turn are divided into several groups, including Mbeur, Mbaoua, Kilang, Dogo and Laka.

history

Presumably the Sara immigrated to their present area from the northeast. It is unclear where they came from; maybe from other parts of Chad, maybe as Nilots from the Nile region in today's Sudan . The search for fertile land or the attempt to avoid attacks by slave hunters are cited as reasons for this migration.

The Sara traditionally did not form a unit. The name “Sara”, the origin of which is unclear, originally served as a collective name for ethnic groups in the south of today's Chad, from which slave hunters from the Muslim states of Bornu , Baguirmi and Wadai captured slaves. Since the majority of these prisoners were Madjingaye, the term “Sara” was initially used primarily for the Madjingaye. It was only recently, and especially during the French colonial period , that “Sara” became the general name for ethnic groups in the southern regions, regardless of the extent to which they were affected by the slave trade or Islamized. The respective groups finally adopted this name as a sign of their solidarity due to certain cultural similarities and in view of the contrast to the ethnic groups in the north of the country, the so-called Djellabah .

Under colonial rule the Sara were used for forced labor, recruited for the colonial army and finally forced to grow cotton. They were considered to be particularly suitable for this because they were physically strong on the one hand and, on the other hand, “docile and passive, and socially much less developed than the Muslim peoples”. So they often had to serve as porters. For the construction of the railway line between Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville - in which an estimated 10,000 Sara and other workers perished in 1921–1929 - 20,900 forced laborers were brought from the Moyen-Chari region alone in 1924–1934. From 1914, thousands of Sara served in the French army, including in the First and Second World Wars. The Régiment de Tirailleurs sénégalais du Tchad , formed in 1940, consisted exclusively of Sara.

Cotton cultivation, introduced in the late 1920s, brought lasting changes to Sara society. The farmers were obliged to produce certain quantities of cotton. The profits from this went primarily to local chiefs and middlemen, while the peasants became dependent farm laborers on modest wages. The cotton also displaced the cultivation of food, so that there was hunger in some areas. The peasants' displeasure resulted in several lynchings of chiefs, and their traditional authority was permanently damaged by this system. The requirement to produce certain quantities of cotton was abolished in 1955.

After World War II, hundreds of Sara moved from the countryside to cities like Fort-Lamy and Fort-Archambault , where they mostly formed an underclass, while the urban middle class consisted of Muslims. In this urban context in particular, the distinction emerged between Djellabah as the entirety of the Muslim ethnic groups from the north of Chad and Sara or originaires du Sud as the entirety of the southern ethnic groups. In 1946 there were ethnic conflicts between these two groups for the first time. In 1947 there were further violent clashes between the Parti progressiste tchadien (PPT), dominated by Sara and linked to the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain , and the Union démocratique tchadienne (UDT), which is dominated by Muslims from the north . The colonial power perceived both pan-Arabism , which was gaining in importance among Muslims, and allegedly class struggle and communist tendencies of Sara and the PPT as a threat. However, especially after the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, it tended to support the south of the country compared to the north. This contributed to the fact that the PPT grew significantly in the elections of 1956 and achieved a majority in the Territorial Assembly in 1957.

After Chad gained independence from France in 1960, Sara (Madjingaye) François Tombalbaye became its first president. His efforts to Africanize or to promote Tchaditude from 1973 onwards sometimes resulted in imposing the “traditional values” of Sara on the whole country. In particular, the rule that all candidates for civil service, government offices or higher ranks in the army had to go through the initiation ritual yondo of the Madjingaye became known. This provoked opposition from non-Sara as well as from modern-minded Sara elites. Tombalbaye was killed in a military coup in 1975 and replaced by Félix Malloum , also Sara.

In 1979 rebels from the north took over the capital and ended the independence of the southern Chadians, which had existed since independence. Since then it is again the Sara who feel marginalized in the whole of Chad. They complain, for example, of the intrusion of Muslim ranchers from the north into their area. As a result, some Sara advocate independence for the South as the “Republic of Logone ” or a federal system with extensive autonomy. Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué held talks with Ange-Félix Patassé , who is also Sara and was President of the Central African Republic from 1993 to 2003.

language

The Sara languages are a subgroup of the Central Sudan languages , which in turn are part of the Nilo-Saharan language family . These include Ngambay - which was estimated to be spoken by 896,000 people in Chad and others in Cameroon in 2006 -, Sar or Madjingaye, Bedjond, Dagba, Gor, Gulay, Horo, Kaba, Laka (partly regarded as a dialect of Ngambay), Mango, Mbay, Ngam and the subgroup Sara Kaba, which comprises five individual languages.

Culture and religion

The Sara are traditionally arable farmers and live in villages under the authority of a head ( mbang , French chef ).

Sara women used to enlarge their lips by stretching them by inserting lip plates . Some researchers believe that this custom originally served to make them unattractive to slave hunters. There are followers of traditional religions, Christians and Muslims among the Sara.

swell

  • René Lemarchand: The Politics of Sara Ethnicity: A Note on the Origins of the Civil War in Chad , in: Cahiers d'Études Africaines , Vol. 20, Cahier 80 (1980)
  • René Lemarchand: Chad: The Misadventures of the North-South Dialectic , in: African Studies Review , Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sept. 1986)
  • Mario Azevedo: The Human Price of Development: The Brazzaville Railroad and the Sara of Chad , in: African Studies Review , Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1981)
  • Mario Azevedo: Power and Slavery in Central Africa: Chad (1890-1925) , in: The Journal of Negro History , Vol. 67, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ nationsencyclopedia.com/Central African Republic / Ethnic Groups
  2. ↑ a b c d e René Lemarchand: The Politics of Sara Ethnicity: A Note on the Origins of the Civil War in Chad , in: Cahiers d'Études Africaines , Vol. 20, Cahier 80 (1980)
  3. ^ Facts On File: Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East , Verlag Infobase Publishing, 2009, ISBN 143812676X [1]
  4. ↑ James Stuart Olson : The Peoples of Africa: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, ISBN 0313279187 , page 510 [2]
  5. ↑ James Stuart Olson: The Peoples of Africa: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, ISBN 0313279187 , [3]
  6. ^ Countrystudies.us/Chad/Nilo-Saharan Languages ​​# Sara-Bongo-Baguirmi Languages
  7. ↑ Samuel Decalo: Chad: The Roots of Center-Periphery Strife , in: African Affairs , Vol 79, No.. 317 (Oct. 1980)
  8. ^ René Lemarchand: Chad: The Misadventures of the North-South Dialectic , in: African Studies Review , Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sept. 1986)
  9. ^ Regionalism and République du Logone , in: Samuel Decalo: Historical Dictionary of Chad , Scarecrow Press 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3253-4
  10. ^ Ethnologue.com: Ngambay
  11. ↑ ethnologue.com: Sara languages

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