Bangi > Bangui Bangui Central African Republic
Related Events
Showing 3 events out of 3 total
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.
French activity in the area had begun in 1889 with the establishment of the outpost Bangi at the head of navigation on the Ubangi.
The Upper Ubangi had been established as part of the French Congo on December 9, 1891.
Despite a France-Congo Free State convention establishing a border around the 4th parallel, the area is contested from 1892 to 1895 with the Congo Free State, which claimed the region as its territory of Ubangi-Bomu (Oubangui-Bomou).
The Upper Ubangi is a separate colony from July 13, 1894, until December 10, 1899, at which time it is folded back into the French Congo.
The original site is six miles (9.7 kilometers) south of the Ubangi rapids.
Its territory is organized first into the territory of the Upper Ubangi (Haut-Oubangui) and later as the separate colony of Ubangi-Shari.