Gula Erotic

The Gula are a small people from the far northeast of the Central African Republic, and for most of the country's modern history they barely registered in Bangui. They live in the savanna and seasonal floodplains along the Chad border, mostly in Vakaga prefecture. The region's markets have long looked north to Chad and east to Sudan more than south to the capital. Three things set the Gula apart inside the country: that distance, a language of their own, and Islam, which separates them from the largely Christian south.

Gula is a Central Sudanic language, related to Sara and Bagirmi across the border in Chad. Day to day it is used alongside Chadian Arabic, the trade language of northeastern markets, and Sango, the national lingua franca. One caution about the name: in southern Chad, communities around Lake Iro are also called Gula, but they speak Gula Iro. That is a Niger-Congo language of the small Bua group, from a different language family entirely. If you follow the name across the border, don't assume the two groups share an ancestry just because they share a label.

History has been hard on this corner of the continent. For much of the nineteenth century the northeast was a slave raiding frontier for Muslim states in the Chad basin and around Ndélé. That history is often cited to explain why so few people live in the region today. Colonial rule and then independence mostly left the northeast to itself.

In the 2000s the Gula were suddenly at the center of national politics. In 2006 the UFDR, a rebel movement based among the Gula of Vakaga, seized Birao and other northeastern towns. The movement's leader, Michel Djotodia, went on to head the Séléka coalition that took Bangui in March 2013. He became the country's first Muslim president and resigned under regional pressure in January 2014. The reprisals that followed hit Muslims across the country, wherever they came from. Since then the armed groups of the northeast have broken apart, sometimes along the line between the Gula and their Runga neighbors.

Through all of this, Gula life has stayed mostly rural. It happens in villages where the state barely reaches, and where the Gula name now carries a political weight that most people who bear it never asked for.