Central African Republic–Sudan border

The Nile–Congo watershed

An Anglo-French convention of 14 June 1898 and a declaration of 21 March 1899 divided the British and French spheres in central Africa. Article IV of the declaration ran the frontier along the water-parting between the basins of the Nile and the Congo up to the 11th parallel north, with French territory, later Ubangi-Shari, on the Congo side and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on the Nile side.^[1]

An Anglo-French boundary commission surveyed the line between 1921 and 1923, using triangulation in the more open north and compass and perambulator traverses through the thick forest further south. Britain and France agreed its protocol by an exchange of notes on 24 January 1924, but it was not marked with pillars.^[1]

“It shall follow in principle that water-parting up to its intersection with the 11th parallel of north latitude.”^[1]

Two new states, then three

Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956 and the Central African Republic on 13 August 1960, and both inherited the 1924 line. In 1962 it ran about 725 miles, through tall-grass savanna with patches of dense forest and, outside the south, few people.^[1] Most of that line became the border between the Central African Republic and South Sudan when South Sudan became independent in 2011; only the northern end, up to the Chad tripoint, still divides the CAR from Sudan.

Where the three countries meet, local officials had long used the Mare de Tizi, a lake that blocks north–south travel, as the boundary between Chad and the CAR. Old maps put the tripoint in different places.^[1]

Refugees at Birao

Since war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, more than 35,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to the Central African Republic. By April 2026 about 22,000 of them lived in Korsi, a settlement in the border town of Birao, doubling the town’s population, and more than 6,900 Central Africans who had been refugees in Sudan had come home.^[2]