Slave traders had begun to raid the…

Slave traders had begun to raid the region of the present Central African Republic as part of the expansion of the Saharan and Nile River slave routes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Their captives had been enslaved and shipped to the Mediterranean coast, Europe, Arabia, the Western Hemisphere, or to the slave ports and factories along the West and North Africa or South along the Ubanqui and Congo rivers.

In the mid nineteenth century, the Bobangi people (speakers of Bangi, a Bantu language) had become major slave traders, selling their captives to the Americas using the Ubangi river to reach the coast.

As the Bobangi people come to dominate the slave trade along the upper Congo River in the late nineteenth century, the Bangi language is used to facilitate trade between different ethnic groups in the region.