Ubangi-Shari
former French colony in central Africa
Ubangi-Shari (French: Oubangui-Chari) was a French colony in central Africa, a part of French Equatorial Africa. It was named after the Ubangi and Chari rivers along which it was colonised.
Established on 29 December 1903 from the Upper Ubangi (Haut-Oubangui) and Upper Shari (Haut-Chari) territories of the French Congo, it was renamed the Central African Republic (CAR) on 1 December 1958, and gained independence on 13 August 1960.
History
French activity in the area began in 1889 with the establishment of the outpost Bangi at the head of navigation on the Ubangi.
The Upper Ubangi was established as part of the French Congo on 9 December 1891. Despite a France-Congo Free State convention establishing a border around the 4th parallel, the area was 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 was a separate colony from 13 July 1894 until 10 December 1899, at which time it was folded back into the French Congo. The Upper Shari region was established as part of the French Congo on 5 September 1900. That same year the Company of the Upper Ubangi Sultanates took over 140,000 km2 of Upper Ubangi as a concession.
The territories were united as the separate colony of Ubangi-Shari on 29 December 1903, following the French defeat of Abbas II of Egypt, who had claimed the area.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1421888. VIAF identifies the subject as 147165513. The Library of Congress control number is n78060053. Authority coordinates are 7.000, 20.000. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1903, 1958, 1960 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ubangi-Shari” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.