Uniforms and Insignia of the Central African Empire
Here I will attempt to say something about the uniforms and insignia of the Central African Empire, to the best of my very limited ability. So far as I can see, the uniformology of this tragic, grotesque era has never been explored in any detail whatsoever, and so in these pages I hope to be able to provide a rough sketch of this hitherto neglected topic. If any visitors are able to improve on my knowledge (a low bar to clear, I should think) their contributions would be very welcome.
I set the material out as follows:
Ceremonial and Honour Guard uniforms
Emperor Bokassa I
Sources, and the lack of photographs on these pages
In the absence of any real literature on this topic, I have gone to the news footage and editorial photo archives for most of my information. This material is, of course, jealously guarded by its copyright-holders, and so I reproduce almost none of it here, except a few tight close-ups on a “fair use” basis, where I consider them vital to illustrate some point or other.
My limitations
The text and illustrations here are, essentially, me trying to work out the system behind the uniforms I see in the source material, and then writing up my conclusions. I’ve made conjectures where I think I can prudently do so, but I’ve refrained from any outright guessing. The international press was well on hand to photograph the Bangui Conference of March 1975, and Bokassa’s coronation in December 1977, but other periods are relatively murky. In particular, the post-coronation era (where, in theory, there was room for further development of the uniforms along more explicitly “imperial” lines) seems not to have been extensively recorded. No doubt the local archives, if they still exist, would be much more useful.
I am certain, therefore, that I’ve made mistakes here, both of pure omission and of misinterpreting the material I do possess. Any comments, corrections, etc., which anybody can offer would be very sincerely appreciated.
For the absolute avoidance of doubt, when I describe something as illegible or indecipherable I mean illegible or indecipherable to me, as a result of low-quality footage or low-resolution photos. My comments on the degree of uncertainty/conjecture behind any particular illustration are set out in the text.
Colours
This issue —which I hadn’t at all anticipated as I began this enterprise— has managed to cause me more vexation than most others. I have found that, in the source material, gold and silver are often hard to identify and distinguish — gold, reflecting light, can appear silver, silver is susceptible to appearing like gold in warm lighting. This is often true for the very best colour photographs, and is certainly true for the low-quality news footage which is my main source. This usually doesn’t present too much of a problem, and the correct colour can usually be arrived at by analogy with other armies or general military practice. But I note this here as a general warning, especially for cases where analogy is of limited use. Dark blue, for the same reason, often shows up as black in the footage.
Acknowledgments
I cannot draw, as will be painfully evident to the reader as he peruses the illustrations in the following pages. The insignia drawings are all (regrettably) my own, but the uniforms are borrowed heavily from the military uniform MS Paint illustration scene on DeviantArt and elsewhere. In this connection I’m deeply obliged to tsd715 (DeviantArt) and Kallyo and Saven (Pixel Marshals server) for their considerable assistance. Certain items on the figures are also borrowed from Theranger1302. I’m grateful to everyone at Pixel Marshals for their encouraging comments.
Numbering
Illustrations ending in A, B, etc. are the result of me awkwardly slotting new illustrations into the existing numbering system, without having to shift all the subsequent numbers up by one. Use of letters isn’t intended to imply the lettered illustrations are ancillary to the non-lettered ones.