Current Time in Bégoua, Central African Republic

Begoua lies in the Central African Republic on the northern edge of Bangui, the national capital, in the prefecture of Ombella-M'Poko. The town stretches along the main road that leads north out of the city towards Boali and Bossangoa, in country where the last of the equatorial forest gives way to wooded savanna. Low hills, red laterite soil and tall grass surround it, and the climate is hot and humid with a long rainy season from May to October.

More than a hundred thousand people live in Begoua and the communities immediately around it, and the number has risen quickly as Bangui has expanded and as families displaced by conflict elsewhere in the country have settled here. Its role is that of a suburb and market town, supplying the capital with cassava, plantains, maize, groundnuts, charcoal, firewood and building materials, and providing housing for people who work in Bangui.

The settlement has its roots in villages of the Gbaya and other peoples of the region, whose farms occupied these hills long before the colonial period. French administration established Bangui on the Ubangi River in 1889, and the road north through Begoua became one of the main routes into the interior, carrying cotton, coffee and timber to the river port. As the capital grew after independence in 1960 the villages along this road merged into a continuous belt of housing, workshops and markets. The instability that has affected the country since the 1990s, and especially the crisis that began in 2013, brought fighting, displacement and humanitarian camps to the area, and its people have shown considerable resilience in rebuilding community life.

Begoua has no monuments of the kind found in older cities, and its interest lies in the everyday. Roadside markets sell produce brought in by bicycle and on foot each morning, brickmakers dig and fire clay in the valleys, and mechanics, carpenters and tailors work in open-fronted workshops along the highway. The waterfalls of Boali on the M'Bali River, one of the country's few developed tourist sites, lie about a hundred kilometres north, and the Ubangi River, the Boganda National Museum and the markets of Bangui are close at hand.

Sango and French are the everyday languages, and life is organised around family compounds, churches of many denominations, mosques and neighbourhood associations. Food is based on cassava in the form of gozo, plantain, greens cooked with palm oil and peanut, smoked fish from the river and bush meat, and music combining traditional rhythms with Congolese styles is heard everywhere. Football is played on every open patch of ground.

Shared taxis and minibuses run continually into Bangui, whose port on the Ubangi and international airport provide the country's principal links to the outside world, and the northern highway carries long-distance traffic. Primary and secondary schools serve local children, with the University of Bangui a short distance away.

Begoua matters as one of the fastest-growing settlements in the Central African Republic, a working community on the doorstep of the capital.