Sara people

The Sara social order is made up of several patrilineal clans formerly united into a single polity with a national language, national identity, and national religion. Many Sara people have retained their ethnic religion (animism), but some have converted to Christianity and Islam.

Overview

In Chad

The Sara (Kameeni) are the largest ethnic group in the Republic of Chad, concentrated in the Moyen-Chari, the Logone Oriental, the Logone Occidental, and parts of the Tandjile regions. After their arrival, they continued to be the target of violent raids by northern Fulani and Arab people.

The local Muslim groups of what is now Chad, referred to the Sara as "Kirdi", with the term "Kirdi" denoting a non-Muslim person. The Muslim raiders of what is now Chad were autonomously called "Bagirmi", and this geo-political conflict between the Kirdi and the Bagirmi continued through the nineteenth century.

The French colonial empire entered the ongoing hostilities in the early twentieth century, and the Sara people became a part of the French Equatorial Africa, more specifically as part of the "le Tchad utile". The Sara society was transformed by this development, both in terms of culture such as French-based education and training, but also socio-economically because of forced labor and conscription to serve the French military during the World Wars. The French colonial state particularly valued the Sara as workers. Thousands of Sara workers were forced to migrate thousands of kilometers to the south to work on the Congo-Ocean Railway in the 1920s and 30s, where they experienced abuse and high rates of mortality. At the time of independence from France in 1960, the southerners of Chad were more assimilated into French institutions than the northerners. This led to their political dominance of the country after 1960. They were also a part of the civil war with populations in north and central Chad, each population aligning with a different ideology.

In the Central African Republic

The Sara people make up ten percent of the population of the Central African Republic, making it the fourth largest ethnic group in the country. They live in the northwest part of CAR.