Musée de Boganda

The Musée de Boganda is housed in a colonial villa on the Rue du Languedoc, established in 1964 and one of the few functioning museums in Central Africa. The collection covers the country's ethnographic diversity — pottery, ritual masks, traditional musical instruments, hunting tools, and objects from the country's many ethnic groups. There are also artefacts from the colonial period and photographs of early Bangui.

The building and some of the displays have seen better days, and staff may need to be found to open locked rooms. But the collection is genuinely interesting, and the museum provides context for the country that you won't easily find elsewhere. A few hours here, with a good guide if you can arrange one, is one of the better investments of time in Bangui.

things to do museum
A story
Barthélemy Boganda, for whom the museum is named, was the founding father of the Central African Republic — a remarkable figure, a Catholic priest turned politician who campaigned for an independent federation of all French Equatorial Africa. He died in a plane crash in 1959, just months before independence, never seeing the country he had brought into being. Whether it was an accident was never definitively established.