Chad culture

Chad culture people, food and festivals 

NAME:	Chad
LOCATION:	Africa & The Middle East
GOVERNMENT:	Republic
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE:	French (official), Arabic (official), Sara (in south), more than 120 different languages and dialects are spoken as well.
MAJOR RELIGION(S):	Muslim 51%, Christian 35%, animist 7%, other 7% .
MAJOR ETHNIC GROUPS:	200 distinct groups; in the north and center: Arabs, Gorane (Toubou, Daza, Kreda), Zaghawa, Kanembou, Ouaddai, Baguirmi, Hadjerai, Fulbe, Kotoko, Hausa, Boulala, and Maba, most of whom are Muslim; in the south: Sara (Ngambaye, Mbaye, Goulaye), Moundang, Moussei, Massa, most of whom are Christian or animist; about 1,000 French citizens live in Chad as well.

A landlocked country in north-central Africa, Chad is about 85% the size of Alaska. Its neighbors are Niger, Libya, the Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Nigeria.

Chad is a vast, ethnically diverse African country. It gained independence from France in 1960 after a sixty-year colonial period rule that did not create a meaningful national unity. Within the country's borders one may distinguish several national cultures that are based on the ethnoregional and religious affiliations of the population groups. Many of the cultures can be traced back to a complex precolonial history of competing indigenous states and sultanates.

The name Chad is derived the from designation of the great Lake Chad (originally called Kuri) by the sixteenth century author and imam Ibn Fortu. Chad is somewhat similar to Sudan in that it has a northern part inhabited by an Islamic (and partly Arabic-speaking) population of pastoralist semidesert peoples, and a southern part of Christians and traditional religious people, engaged in mixed agriculture, crafts, and trade. These two parts each comprise about half of the population. Postcolonial Chad has, like Sudan, been marked by deep regional-ethnic divisions and a violent history of struggle for power among the various elites that have alternative visions of the state and their place within it. Armed rebellions and years of protracted and destructive civil war, in which the role of Libya was at times notable, have characterized Chad's recent history. Starting in 1993, the armed conflicts subsided and some sort of democratization process was instigated

Islam was brought in the course of the Muslim conquest of the Sudan region, in the case of Chad complete in the 11th century with the conversion of the Kanem-Bornu Empire. Christianity arrived in Chad with the French, by the end of the 19th century.