CHAD, FLAG OF

vertically striped blue-yellow-red national flag. Its width-to-length ratio is unspecified. When French West Africa was under colonial rule, little was done to develop a sense of nationality; emphasis was on the culture and political and economic systems of France. The independence movement in Africa in the mid-20th century therefore found Chad, like most other territories, with few precedents for establishing its own symbols. When the Republic of Chad was proclaimed on November 28, 1958, it had no national flag; the French Tricolor still flew throughout the country. During the following months consideration was given by a legislative commission to a seal and flag. Its recommendation, made on June 30, 1959, was for a vertical tricolour of green-yellow-red. This was to stand for the fertile lands of the south, the desert of the north, and the readiness of citizens to shed their blood in defense of the nation. What the commission failed to take into consideration was that the same three pan-African colours were being used by other French territories and that the Mali Federation (composed of Senegal and the Sudanese Republic ) had already adopted the tricolour flag it proposed. A new design was therefore submitted in November 1959 and approved by acclamation on the 6th of that month. The dark blue stripe, substituted for the original green, is said to stand for hope and the sky, yellow is for the sun, and red is for the unity of the nation. (See also the flag histories of Senegal and Mali.) Whitney Smith History The region of the eastern Sahara and Sudan from Fezzan, Bilma, and Chad in the west to the Nile valley in the east was well peopled in Neolithic times, as discovered sites attest. Probably typical of the earliest populations were the Negroid cave dwellers described by Herodotus as inhabiting the country south of Fezzan. The ethnographic history of the region is that of gradual modification of this basic stock by the continual infiltration of nomadic and increasingly Arabicized white African elements, entering from the north via Fezzan and Tibesti and, especially after the 14th century, from the Nile valley via Darfur. According to legend, the country around Lake Chad was originally occupied by the Negroid Sao. This vanished people is probably represented today by the Kotoko, in whose country, along the banks of the Logone and Chari, was unearthed in the 1950s a medieval culture notable for work in terra-cotta and bronze. The relatively large and politically sophisticated kingdoms of the central Sudan were the creation of Saharan Berbers, drawn southward by their continuous search for pasturage and easily able to impose their hegemony on the fragmentary indigenous societies of Negroid agriculturalists. This process was intensified by the expansion of Islam. There are indications of a large immigration of pagan Berbers into the central Sudan early in the 8th century. From the 16th to the 19th century The most important of these states, Kanem-Bornu, which was at the height of its power in the later 16th century, owed its preeminence to its command of the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade route to Tripoli. Products of the Islamized Sudanic culture diffused from Kanem were the kingdoms of Bagirmi and Ouadda, which emerged in the early years of the 17th century out of the process of conversion to Islam. In the 18th century the Arab dynasty of Ouadda was able to throw off the suzerainty of Darfur and extend its territories by the conquest of eastern Kanem. Slave raiding at the expense of animist populations to the south constituted an important element in the prosperity of all these Muslim states. In the 19th century, however, they were in full decline, torn by wars and internecine feuds. In the years 188393 they all fell to the Sudanese adventurer Rabih az-Zubayr.