Runga Erotic

The Runga are a Muslim people of the borderland where eastern Chad meets the northeastern corner of the Central African Republic, and that frontier shaped who they are. In the nineteenth century Dar Runga, the Runga country, lay along the southern edge of the Wadai sultanate. It was a tributary province: it sent payments north to Wadai while its own men raided south into the lands of non-Muslim farmers for captives. That push south produced Dar al-Kuti, a sultanate founded by Muslims from Dar Runga and ruled from Ndélé. Dar al-Kuti became one of the last major slave-raiding states supplying the trans-Saharan trade, until French forces broke its power in 1911 and took over the territory.

The Runga language belongs to the small Maban family. Its close relatives include Maba, the language at the core of the old Wadai state, and Masalit, spoken along the Sudan border. So the Runga were linguistic kin to the people who ruled them, not outsiders pulled into their orbit. Most Runga speak more than one language. Chadian Arabic is used for trade, religion and dealing with neighbors, and on the Central African side people also speak Sango, the national language. Sunni Islam has been part of Runga life for generations and governs family law, dress and the religious calendar.

The colonial border left two separate communities. In Chad the Runga are mostly rural, living in farming villages around Am Dam. In the Central African Republic they are concentrated in the thinly populated northeast, in Vakaga and Bamingui-Bangoran. Ndélé, the old capital of Dar al-Kuti, is there, and Runga traders have long had a visible role in the region's commerce.

Recent decades have been hard. For most of the years since independence, the government in Bangui neglected the Central African northeast, and armed movements grew up to fill the gap. One of them, the CPJP, recruited heavily from Runga communities around Ndélé and became a pillar of the Séléka coalition that seized the capital in 2013. The reprisals that followed struck Muslims in general and drove out Runga families who had played no part in the fighting. The group's name was dragged into national politics in ways its ordinary villagers never chose. On both sides of the border, the Runga are a small people with a large history.