The beauty of chad is embedded on its various local cultures and traditions. Commonly knowns as the craft of humanity and Toumai country, Chad accounts many different ethical groups with their own languages and traditions. 

Cultural Life

Chad has a rich cultural heritage thanks to its diverse population and languages. The Tibesti Mountains contain a plethora of caves and rock overhangs where you may find the country's famous old rock paintings. Gonoa and Zouar have sites that are especially well-preserved. The early Sao culture is thought to have left behind terra-cotta heads and sculptures that were discovered at Gaou, close to Lake Chad.

N'Djamena, the capital of the nation, has a cosmopolitan vibe and is home to a number of bustling sidewalk cafés, taverns, and discos. These locations are occasionally utilized for a contemporary domestic tradition known as pari-match, in which a private party is held in a hired bar or public space, with the proceeds from alcohol sales going to the host to assist with paying for household expenditures like school tuition and maintenance. The city is particularly well-known for its bazaars, which provide locally made traditional products and crafts like pottery, carpets and jackets made of camel hair, and textiles. The National Museum, which houses traditional and ancient relics, is also situated in the nation's capital.

A modest but reputable music business exists in Chad. Contemporary Chadian musicians blend traditional songs and instruments with pop that is influenced by the West. An important example of an indigenous instrument is a three-stringed lute with a camel skin-covered sound box in the shape of a bowl. These lutes can only be played by men according to tradition. Ballad singer Clément Masdongar, who has developed a following in the French-speaking nations of Africa and made multiple performances at European music festivals, is one of Chad's most well-known recording artists. A Chadian dance-music group called Tibesti has also performed abroad.

Traditional competitions of strength and skill have long been a favorite pastime for the people of Chad. In the south, footraces with courses up to a hundred miles long have frequently been a part of many communities' coming-of-age ceremonies. These competitions have frequently been held in conjunction with festivals and other occasions. In the drier, hotter north, traditional winter celebrations are still honored alongside Muslim holidays, and they are marked by camel races, archery contests, and wrestling matches.

Basketball and football (soccer), more recent competitive sports, are also widely played throughout Chad, but intramural competitions are uncommon due in large part to a lack of funding for travel and the majority of the year's impassability of Chad's predominantly dirt roads. Because of this, Chadians have not been able to enter teams in many regional contests or get the experience that comes with playing against different teams. Chad first competed in the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, but it has yet to take home an Olympic medal.

History of Chad

Neolithic sites have been found that prove to the presence of Neolithic people in the eastern Sahara and Sudan, from Fezzan, Bilma, and Chad in the west to the Nile river in the east. Herodotus' account of the dark-skinned cave dwellers who lived in the region south of Fezzan suggests that they were representative of the early populations. The region's anthropological history shows how this fundamental stock was gradually altered by the continuous infiltration of nomadic and increasingly Arabicized white African elements, arriving from the north via Fezzan and Tibesti and, more so after the 14th century, from the Nile valley via Darfur. According to mythology, the Sao were the first people to live in the region surrounding Lake Chad. A medieval civilisation known for its terra-cotta and bronze production was discovered in the 1950s in the country of the Kotoko, who today are most likely a representation of this extinct people.

The Saharan Imazighen (Berbers), led southward by their constant hunt for pasturage and easily able to impose their hegemony over the fragmentary indigenous civilizations of agriculturalists, were the creators of the comparatively big and politically complex kingdoms of the central Sudan. The spread of Islam accelerated this trend. Early in the eighth century, there are signs that a sizable influx of pagan Imazighen people entered the central Sudan.

16th to 19th centuries

When Kanem-Bornu, the most significant of these states, was at its most powerful in the latter 16th century, it owed its supremacy to its control of the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade route to Tripoli.

The kingdoms of Bagirmi and Ouadda, which arose in the early years of the 17th century out of the process of conversion to Islam, were products of the Islamized Sudanese culture that spread from Kanem. By conquering eastern Kanem in the 18th century, the Arab dynasty of Ouadda was able to escape Darfur's rule and increase its territory. All of these Muslim regimes were prosperous as a result of slave raiding at the expense of the animist communities to the south. However, they were completely in decline in the 19th century, ripped apart by wars and intra-state conflicts. They were all defeated by the Sudanese explorer Rabi az-Zubayr between 1883 and 1893.

French leadership

The division of Africa among the European powers had reached its culmination by this point. Rabi was deposed in 1900, and with French assistance, the ancient Kanembu dynasty was reinstated. In 1910, Chad joined the French Equatorial African Federation. By 1914, the current republic's entire region had hardly been made peaceful, and French control during the interwar years was unprogressive. The French National Assembly never approved an agreement between Italy and France to hand over the Aozou Strip to an Italian-ruled Libya, but it served as a pretext for Libya to occupy the region in 1973. The Free French cause received unwavering backing from Chad throughout World War II. Following 1945, the region participated in French Equatorial Africa's constitutional advancement. It was elevated to the status of a French Republic overseas territory in 1946.

Liberation of Chad

When Gabriel Lisette, a West Indian who had become the head of the Chad Progressive Party, established the first territory government in 1957, a significant amount of autonomy was granted under the constitutional statute of that year (PPT). In the reorganized community, full independence was obtained on August 11th, 1960, and an autonomous republic within the French Community was established in November 1958. Tensions between the Black and frequently Christian populations of the more economically developed southwest and the conservative, Muslim, non-black leadership of the old feudal states of the north threatened the country's stability, and its issues were made even more difficult by Libyan involvement.

N'Garta (François) Tombalbaye, a trade union leader from the south, who later took office as the republic's first president, replaced Lisette with a colleague who was more popular with some members of the opposition. In order to create the new Union for the Progress of Chad, Tombalbaye succeeded in fusing the PPT with the main opposition group, the National African Party (PNA), in March 1961. But in 1963, a purported Muslim plot resulted in the dissolution of the National Assembly, a brief state of emergency, and the detention of the top PNA-affiliated ministers. The fresh elections in December 1963 included only government candidates, establishing the one-party state.