The Central African Republic ranks among the most obscure and ignored nations on earth. Even the generic-seeming nature of its name testifies to the accidental manner by which the country was thrown together in 1960 out of the leftover bits from Europe’s African colonial holdings. Over the last five decades, CAR has gone from one coup to the next — with the world paying attention only when the violence descended to truly medieval levels of brutality (such as during the reign of Jean Bedél Bokassa, an alleged cannibal who styled himself an “emperor,” and squandered the state treasury on a bizarre “coronation” in which he dressed his entourage up as 19th-Century French gentry).
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