Bongor, city in southwestern Chad, capital of Mayo-Kébbi Prefecture, 240 km (149 mi) south of the Chadian capital, N'Djamena. Located on a marshy floodplain along the Logone River, Bongor is on an important road to the Central African Republic and has an airfield and barge services. Roads are usually submerged and impassable from June to November, when canoes, known as pirogues, are often the only means of transportation. The local economy is based on cotton, rice, and fishing. Most of the city's inhabitants are Christians or practice animism (the belief that nature and natural objects have a conscious life). The locally dominant Massa is a Nilo-Saharan group who herd, farm and fish, and traditionally worshiped a rain god. The Muslim Bagirmi and Fulani people have settled around watering holes in the area.
Part of the Sao cultural region around AD 1000, Bongor was conquered by several Muslim states, including the Bornu and Sokoto caliphates and frequently victimized by Fulani and Arab slave raiders up to the end of the 1800s. The city was colonized by the Germans until World War I (1914-1918), after which it was occupied by the French and joined to French Equatorial Africa. In Chad's series of ethnic civil wars which pitted the north against the south since independence in 1960, Bongor has been a center of political and military resistance to northern powers. Ethnic bitterness was reinforced in 1982, when victorious northern rebels committed a series of atrocities in the city. Population (1993) 196,713.
