I think there is no other country in Africa which comes more mysterious and with a darker image than the Central African Republic. Of course, my uneasiness had to do with reminisce ces of Werner Herzig‘s movie „Echoes from a Sombre Empire“ and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the former self-proclaimed emperor of the CAR. The film follows journalist Michael Goldsmith as he revisits the Central African Republic, where he was imprisoned and tortured, obviously even by Bokassa himself. I found the film unique since Goldsmith was victim and actor at once.

Goldsmith could even consider himself lucky since Bokassa was notorious for throwing enemies to his hungry lions. Which obviously did not hinder him from being a favorite hunting companion of then French President Valéry Giscard d‘Estaing. When my wife and me visited the CAR from our home in Nairobi in November 2021 Bokassa was long gone. Surprisingly there now seemed to be another hero – shown with his signature freezing-cold smile on multiple billboards: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Another surprise: We liked Bangui, the war-torn CAR capital, quite a bit: its setting by the Bangui, an immense tributary to the great Congo River, its pécheurs, and above all, the food at „Le Releais des Chasses“ (think fish carpaccio, grenoouiles with French fries, crème brûlée).  Our taxi driver drives us from one bush meat market to another. A sheer endless number of monkeys and antelopes of all size are on sale. A cruel reminder how teeming with wildlife the equatorial jungle once must have been. On our way he points repeatedly to sites where battles between government and rebel forces had taken place. In a continent full of coups I cannot think of any other country with as many coup d’etats as the CAR.

Our taxi driver, as many other inhabitants of Bangui I had the opportunity to chat with, was quite clear: The troops of MINUSCA, the UN stabilization force and successor of a African Union force, here since more than 10 years to “build peace and development while also providing humanitarian assistance to those most in need”, had not done their job. Every second or so year, the driver explained, the rebels had come out of the bushes to Bangui, killed scores of people and loot everything they could get away with. The UN troops had just done nothing, he remarked, and had just stayed ohnmächtig in their camp. Now, there were Patrouillen of white UN Panzerfahrzeugen painted with huge “UN” letters and convoys of unnamed Wagner trucks with vermummten soldiers in Wüstenkleidung, sometimes bumper to bumper. A peculiar sight! Since Wagner had been in town, looting rebels never again made it into Bangui, my driver argued. Wagner troops had fought the rebels off, just here, pointing again to a former battle site. Did they not commit human rights abuses and deplete his country’s natural resources? I understood why I harvested Unverständnis. Later we encountered a blond Wagner mercenary buying a box of dried of butterflies of all colors and pattern as a souvenir. A small aircraft, which sometimes doubled as presidential jet, took us from the dry savannas around Bangui to the evergreen forests of the Congo Basin which still cover the southwest of the CAR. Against all odds, the great South African couple Ron and Tamar Cassidy managed to maintain one of the most exciting wildlife camps all over Africa. We went with Pygmies to the jungle, entered huge hollow trees WELCHE? full of bats, followed pangolins in the Baumwipfel, took a dip in a cascade of verwunschen waterfalls, watched two hundred forest elephants meeting on a Bai (humans would call it marketplace) to have fun, communicate and lick salt from it’s nutritious soil. I have not yet spoken about the family of lowland gorillas we could watch for an hour (after walking four hours through the woods) frolicking in the woods and hilariously climbing trees.

We slept in a rustic camp on a bend of the Sangha river, enjoyed delicious river fish and watched the endless circle of river life. In the evening, scientists from the nearby WWF station, guardians of this last Eden of wildlife, came over for dinner, talks and drinks. Most of them were Spanish and German and some had even brought  their little kids to this forgotten corner of the CAR – a country for which most Western countries issue travel warnings. I wish more people who draft travel advice could travel. Travel kills prejudice.