Chad, in long form the Republic of Chad, in Arabic جمهورية تشاد, is a country in Central Africa without access to the sea, located south of Libya, east of Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon and in northern Central African Republic and western Sudan. Its capital is N\Djamena. Geographically and culturally, Chad is a crossing point between North Africa and Black Africa. Covering an area of 1,284,000 km2, it is the fifth largest country in Africa. Chad is divided into three major geographical areas: from north to south, there is successively a desert region, a semi-arid space, then the Sudanese savannah. Lake Chad, which gives the country its name, is its main body of water; the highest point of the country is the Emi Koussi, in the Tibesti massif. Different states and empires have succeeded each other in the central part of the country since the end of the 1st millennium BC. J.-C., trying to control the trans-Saharan trade. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, France gradually asserted its sovereignty over the entire territory of present-day Chad, which it incorporated into French Equatorial Africa in 1920. The country obtained its independence in 1960, with François Tombalbaye as the first head of state; he nevertheless retains a privileged relationship with the former colonizer who has since intervened militarily on several occasions. The country is the scene of almost permanent unrest, linked to internal dissension, and more recently to the overflow of the conflict in Darfur. In 2003, the country became an oil exporting country, while its economy was mainly based on the production of cotton, groundnuts and beef; this considerably increased the financial resources of the Chadian state, whose current leader is Idriss Déby. In its 2012 annual report, the United Nations Development Program ranks Chad as the fourth least developed country in the world, giving it a human development index of 0.395. Three years later, in 2015 Chad took third place in the Africa Performance Index (API), a rating and ranking tool for public sector institutions in Africa2. According to the dictionary of the origin of names and nicknames of African countries3 by Arol Ketchiemen, Chad is nicknamed "the dead heart of Africa" because of its isolation in the center of the continent and its particularly desert climate.
