Bouar

Bouar sits in the western highlands of the Central African Republic at an elevation that brings genuine relief from the lowland heat. The air here is different — thinner, cooler in the mornings, with a dryness that makes it easier to sleep. After days of savanna and lowland humidity, arriving in Bouar feels like a change of register, a different chapter in the same long book. The town itself is ordinary in the way that regional centers in central Africa often are — a market, a Catholic mission, a hospital, motos, dust, a few buildings of colonial vintage now put to entirely pragmatic use. It is not the town that brings you here.

The tazunu are what bring you here. These are the megalithic stone arrangements found on the outskirts of Bouar and at several other sites across the western highlands — upright stones, some reaching two meters, arranged in circles and alignments that archaeologists date to roughly 4,000 BCE, making them contemporaries of Stonehenge. The name tazunu means “the place of the ancestors” in the local Gbaya language, and the stones are still treated with the respect due to that designation. I drove out to the main site with a young man named Sylvain who worked at the town’s only guesthouse and offered to take me without making it into any kind of guided tour production. He drove, I sat in the truck bed, and nobody explained anything until we arrived.

The site is a cleared area of highland grassland with the stones rising from it in arrangements that suggest deliberate geometry but resist any easy interpretation. Some are grouped in circles. Some stand in short rows. Some have fallen and lie at angles that suggest they were once vertical. The grass around them is kept trimmed, not by any official maintenance operation but by the community, which speaks to something. I walked among them for an hour, touching the surfaces — rough laterite, warm from the morning sun — and trying to understand what kind of ceremony this place was built for. The wind came in from the west and the grass moved around the stones and there were no answers, which is the only honest relationship you can have with a site this old.

Sylvain, who turned out to have studied history at the University of Bangui before returning to Bouar for family reasons, told me what is known: the people who built the tazunu were not the ancestors of the current Gbaya population, who arrived later. Who they were is not definitively established. The stones predate the Bantu migrations. They are among the oldest human constructions in Central Africa and among the least documented. The UNESCO World Heritage tentative list includes them; actual inscription has not happened. The reasons for that gap between acknowledgment and action in the UNESCO process could fill a longer conversation than we had.

Back in Bouar the market was running its mid-morning rhythm, selling the particular mix of things available in a highland town with decent agricultural land: groundnuts, dried beans, sorghum, cassava, the occasional guinea fowl sold live in a small cage. I ate at a place near the market that served a peanut stew I keep measuring other peanut stews against. The man who cooked it was from Cameroon, which explained the particular spicing — dried pepper and something smoky — that distinguished it from the Bangui versions I had eaten. Bouar sits close to the Cameroonian border and shows it.

When to go: November through March for the highland dry season, when the roads from Bangui and from the Cameroonian border are at their most navigable and the air is at its most pleasant. Bouar’s elevation means it never gets truly intolerable in the wet season, but the roads that serve it deteriorate significantly.