57 Fun Facts About Chad

What is the capital and largest city of Chad?

N'Djamena. It was still a small riverside settlement at independence in 1960, and it has been fought over in the civil wars since: Libyan troops occupied it in 1980-81.

Under what colonial name did the French found Chad's capital?

Fort-Lamy. It was named for a French major killed in the battle across the river that won the region for France, and the name outlasted colonial rule by more than a decade.

Which explorer hired boatbuilders from Lake Chad to build Ra, the papyrus boat he sailed into the Atlantic?

Thor Heyerdahl. Reed boats like those of the pharaohs' Egypt were still being made on Lake Chad, so he hired its builders; Ra broke up short of the Americas in 1969, but a second papyrus boat reached Barbados a year later.

Which two languages are official in Chad?

French and Arabic. French is the language of government and schooling, while a local form of Arabic, carried in by migrants from the east, became the language of the markets for around half of all Chadians.

Chad's vertical tricolour flag is often noted for its similarity to the flag of which European country?

Romania. The flags differ only in the shade of one stripe, and in 2004, amid reports that Chad had asked the United Nations to step in, Romania's president declared: 'The tricolour belongs to us.'

Which colour is the central stripe of Chad's vertical tricolour flag?

Yellow fills the middle stripe, for the sun and the desert north. The design first proposed in 1959 was green, yellow and red, but green gave way to blue because other new African states had already taken those colours.

Who was France's president when Chad became independent in 1960?

Charles de Gaulle had let France's African colonies vote in 1958 on joining a French-led community. Chad voted yes and became a self-governing republic that year, then took full independence two years later.

Who was Chad's first president, overthrown and killed in 1975?

François Tombalbaye lost even his southern supporters after making yondo, a harsh initiation rite from his own ethnic group, compulsory for civil servants. Soldiers killed him in the 1975 coup.

Which Chadian dictator, "Africa's Pinochet", was sentenced to life in prison by a tribunal in Senegal in 2016?

Hissène Habré fled to Senegal when he was toppled in 1990 and stayed for decades. Survivors of his jails kept pressing until he was arrested there in 2013 and tried by a court created for his case.

The 1987 final phase of the Chadian-Libyan war is nicknamed after which vehicles used by Chadian troops?

Toyota pickup trucks, fast on sand and fitted with anti-tank missiles, carried the Chadian fighters who routed Libya's tank forces in 1987, so the campaign became known as the Toyota War.

Which court ended Libya's claim to the Aouzou Strip in 1994 by awarding it to Chad?

The International Court of Justice found that a 1955 treaty between France and Libya had already fixed the border, so Libya had to pull its troops out of the desert strip it had occupied since 1973.

Which president ruled Chad for 30 years until killed fighting rebels in April 2021?

Idriss Déby had just been projected to win a sixth term when he went to visit troops at the front. He died of wounds suffered there, and a military council led by his son took over.

Chad's former prime minister Moussa Faki chaired the commission of which organisation for eight years from 2017?

The African Union elected Moussa Faki to run its commission in 2017. When his first term ended he stood again unopposed and won the backing of 51 of its 55 member states.

Which jihadist group has raided Chadian villages and army posts around Lake Chad since 2015?

Boko Haram carried its insurgency across the lake in 2015, striking the Chadian shore and then bombing the capital, and Chad answered by declaring a state of emergency across the lake region.

Which volcano is the highest point in Chad and in the entire Sahara?

Emi Koussi rises about 3,400 metres above sea level, with a vast crater at its summit. Its shape is so like the Martian volcano Elysium Mons that scientists have used it as a stand-in for studying Mars.

Which mountain range in Chad's far north contains the Sahara's highest peaks?

The Tibesti and the rest of Chad's desert north stayed under French military administration until 1965, five years after independence, when Chad's own troops finally replaced the French soldiers.

The Guelta d'Archei, a desert pool where camels drink beside relict crocodiles, lies on which sandstone plateau?

The Ennedi's crocodiles are survivors from a wetter age when the species lived right across the Sahara, before the drying climate left only a few isolated colonies. UNESCO lists the plateau for its canyons and rock art.

Which antelope, once declared extinct in the wild, has been bred in captivity and released in Chad since 2016?

The scimitar-horned oryx once crossed Chad in herds of a thousand or more, until hunting and drought finished it off in the wild. Animals bred in captivity have been released into a vast Chadian reserve since 2016.

What keeps Chad's Lakes of Ounianga full in the middle of the Sahara?

Ancient groundwater, stored beneath the desert since the Sahara was green, seeps up to replace what the sun evaporates, and mats of floating reeds shade the freshwater lakes and slow the loss.

Dust blown from Chad's Bodélé Depression carries phosphorus that helps fertilise which distant ecosystem?

The Amazon rainforest depends on phosphorus carried across the Atlantic in Saharan dust. Much of it rises from the Bodélé, a dried-out lake bed made of the remains of tiny organisms that are rich in the nutrient.

Which animals fell from about 4,000 to 400 in Chad's Zakouma National Park between 2002 and 2010?

Elephants in Zakouma were shot for their ivory by poachers on horseback until nine in ten were gone. The nonprofit African Parks took over protection in 2010, and the herd has been growing again since.

Which two rivers meet at Chad's capital before flowing into Lake Chad?

The Chari and Logone join at the capital and supply most of the lake's water, yet in the rainy season part of the Logone's flood escapes westward into the Benue river system instead.

Which US president's administration covertly armed a Chadian rebel leader's bid for power, seeing him as a check on Libya?

Ronald Reagan signed a secret order for CIA support within months of taking office in 1981. The rebel leader captured the capital the following year and ruled as a dictator with American backing until 1990.

The seven-million-year-old skull nicknamed Toumaï, found in Chad, belongs to which genus?

Sahelanthropus surprised scientists by turning up in Chad, far to the west of the East African Rift Valley where most fossils of early human ancestors are found, so it showed they ranged much more widely than thought.

Chad's fossil skull Toumaï bears a name desert families give babies born around the dry season, meaning what?

Hope of life was the nickname given in 2002, when its finders presented the skull as the oldest known member of the human family. A Chadian member of the team, Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye, had found it in the desert the year before.

Which empire, centred northeast of Lake Chad, was the first and longest-lasting of the region's great trading states?

Kanem grew rich by controlling the southern end of a caravan route across the Sahara, a trade that dealt above all in slaves. Its ruling dynasty lasted, later from Bornu, into the 1800s.

Which sultanate east of Lake Chad, with its capital at Abéché, resisted French conquest into the 20th century?

Wadai owed its wealth to a caravan route north across the Sahara to the Mediterranean, which traders came to prefer in the 1800s because it was the safest crossing.

Which Sudanese warlord's army did French forces defeat at the Battle of Kousséri in 1900?

Rabih az-Zubayr, enslaved as a child, rose to lead an army of thousands and conquered the old kingdoms around Lake Chad in the 1890s. His death in this battle opened the region to French rule.

Which Black governor of Chad rallied the colony to the Free French in 1940?

Félix Éboué, born in French Guiana, brought Chad over in August 1940 and soon persuaded the neighbouring colonies to follow. In 1949 he became the first Black person buried in the Panthéon in Paris.

Which cash crop, introduced on a large scale under French rule, was Chad's main export before oil?

Cotton made the south so valuable to France that officials called it 'le Tchad utile', useful Chad, while farmers resented the quotas that forced them to grow it for low fixed prices.

Which lender part-financed Chad's 2003 oil pipeline to the Atlantic, then suspended its loans in 2006?

The World Bank had backed the pipeline on condition that most of the oil money went to development. When Chad's government changed the law to spend less of it that way, the bank froze its lending.

Which people of the south are Chad's largest ethnic group?

The Sara lived in the fertile south, the one region France administered closely, so they gained the schooling, army pensions and government posts that put them in charge at independence.

Which nomadic people herd camels and tend date-palm oases in the mountains and deserts of Chad's far north?

The Toubou live by their herds and keep their camps on the move. After Chad's government sent soldiers to run their mountains in 1965, their traditional leader left for exile in Libya and his son went on to lead a rebel army.

Which grain is the staple of Chadian cooking, eaten as balls of paste dipped in sauce?

The dish is called alysh in the north and biya in the south, and the grain also makes billi-billi beer.

Carcaje, a popular sweet red tea in Chad, is brewed from which plant?

Hibiscus gives carcaje its deep red colour. The same tart drink is known as karkady in neighbouring Sudan and in Egypt, and it is brewed not from the petals but from the dried calyx around the seed pod.

Which vanished people, by legend the first to live around Lake Chad, left behind fine terracotta and bronze figures?

The Sao did not vanish entirely: the Kotoko people, who live along the rivers south of the lake, are thought to be their descendants and are counted as heirs to the old Sao towns.

Chadian striker Nambatingue Toko scored in French cup final wins in 1982 and 1983 for which club?

Paris Saint-Germain won its first French cup in 1982 and kept it in 1983, with Toko on the scoresheet both times. He later joined the club's staff, scouting the teams it was about to face.

Which Chadian director's film A Screaming Man won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2010?

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun left Chad with severe war wounds and settled in France, yet he has set most of his films in his homeland, where an old cinema was renovated and reopened the year after his Cannes prize.

Chad's anthem, La Tchadienne, opens by telling Chadians to do what?

Rise and work is the gist of its first line, 'Peuple Tchadien, debout et à l'ouvrage'. The words were written for independence in 1960 by Louis Gidrol together with his students at St Paul's school.

Which currency does Chad share with Cameroon, Gabon and three other Central African states?

The CFA franc was created by France in 1945, when its initials stood for 'French colonies of Africa'. After independence the letters stayed but the words changed: in this region they now mean 'financial cooperation in Central Africa'.

Which foreign leader announced a plan in 1981 to merge his country with Chad?

Muammar Gaddafi's troops had just helped one Chadian faction take the capital. The unity plan caused an international outcry, and before the year was out the Chadian leader had asked the Libyans to leave.

As of 2025, Chad is one of the last six countries fighting which parasitic disease, nearly wiped out worldwide?

Guinea worm struck about 3.5 million people a year in the 1980s and only about ten in 2025. Chad was thought to be free of it until cases reappeared in 2010 after almost a decade without one.

General Leclerc's Free French marched from Chad across the Sahara to join British forces in which city?

Tripoli is where Leclerc's column, which had captured Italian desert garrisons on its way north, met the British Eighth Army in 1943. He went on to lead the division that liberated Paris the next year.

Which religion is followed by a majority of Chadians, mostly in the north and east?

Islam spread south across the Sahara about a thousand years ago and took root in the northern kingdoms, while Christianity arrived only with twentieth-century missionaries and spread in the south.

Which two countries are the only landlocked nations larger than Chad?

Kazakhstan and Mongolia are the only two. Being so far from the sea shaped Chad's oil boom: before it could sell a single barrel, it needed a pipeline more than 1,000 km long to the Atlantic coast.

Which of these countries meets Chad at Lake Chad and shares its shrinking waters?

Nigeria and Chad share a border only 85 km long, drawn straight across the lake. So much water has gone since the 1960s that most of that line now runs over dry land, swamp and islands.

Which colonial federation, governed from Brazzaville, included Chad alongside Gabon and Ubangi-Shari?

French Equatorial Africa treated Chad as the least of its four colonies. Officials avoided postings there, so jobs went to novices or men out of favour, and many posts stood empty.

Which rebel front, founded in 1966, led the northern revolt against Chad's southern-dominated government?

FROLINAT was founded in exile and soon split into rival armies. By the end of the 1970s the civil war was less a fight between north and south than one among its own commanders.

In February 2008, rebels fought their way across Chad's capital but were stopped just short of which building?

The presidential palace held out behind the army's tanks, and after two days the rebels pulled back east. French troops kept the airport throughout and used it to fly foreigners out.

Which of these countries is even bigger than Chad, Africa's fifth largest?

Algeria is nearly twice Chad's size. Chad's own 1.28 million square kilometres are far from evenly filled: the Saharan third of the country is home to only about 1% of its people.

Women around Lake Chad harvest and sun-dry dihé, green cakes of which algae sold worldwide as a health supplement?

Spirulina is skimmed from pools by the lake, drained on the sand and dried into cakes for crumbling into sauce. Scientists took no notice until a French researcher described it in 1940; it is now farmed worldwide.

Which dry, dusty wind blows from the Sahara across Chad between late November and mid-March?

The harmattan carries so much Saharan dust that it interferes with flights across the region and drifts hundreds of kilometres out over the Atlantic.

Which fish of Lake Chad's floodplains survives the dry season buried in dried mud, sealed in a mucus cocoon?

Lungfish can wait out the drought because they breathe air with true lungs, so they lie sealed in the baked mud until the floods return. Villagers even dig them out of dry river beds for food.

Which animal, last seen in Chad's Zakouma National Park in the early 1970s, was flown back from South Africa in 2018?

Black rhinoceros numbers in Chad were wiped out by poaching for horn. Six animals arrived from South Africa in May 2018 to restart the population, but two of them were found dead within months.

Which oil giant led the consortium that built Chad's export pipeline to the Atlantic, holding a 40% stake?

ExxonMobil held 40%, with Malaysia's Petronas and Chevron taking the rest. When the first tanker sailed from the coast in 2003, one of the world's poorest countries became an oil exporter.

From 2003, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled into eastern Chad from which war-torn region next door?

Darfur lies just across Chad's eastern border. Those who fled its militias after 2003 were joined by many more when war broke out again in Sudan in 2023, and by 2024 Chad was sheltering over a million refugees.

Toumaï, Chad's seven-million-year-old fossil skull, held a brain about the size of which living animal's?

A chimpanzee's brain is in fact slightly bigger. Yet the opening for the spinal cord sits underneath the skull, as in humans, which is why its finders argued that this small-brained creature already walked upright.