Central African Republic Emoji & Symbols

The flag of the Central African Republic has four horizontal stripes, blue, white, green and yellow, crossed down the middle by a vertical red band, with a yellow five-pointed star in the top corner by the pole. It was designed by Barthélemy Boganda, the founding father of the country, and adopted on 1 December 1958. Boganda's idea is usually explained like this: the blue, white and red of France meet the green, yellow and red of Africa, the red band that crosses them all stands for the blood every person shares, and the star is the guiding star of an independent future.

The Central African Republic flag emoji 🇨🇫 is not one picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇫, spelling CF, the country's ISO code. Phones and apps that know the pair draw the flag; country flags have been in emoji since 2015, so every current phone shows it. Windows is the exception: its own emoji font draws no country flags, so on a Windows PC the character often shows as the letters CF while the person you send it to sees the flag.

Because the flag has five colours, people rebuild it with hearts: 💙🤍💚💛❤️ in that order, with ⭐ for the star. The string works in bios and usernames next to 🇨🇫, or on its own where flags do not display.

Central African Republic national symbols in emoji

The coat of arms puts the country's story on one shield: an elephant 🐘 for strength, a baobab 🌳, a diamond 💎 for the wealth under the ground, a hand, and in the centre a yellow star over a map of Africa 🌍. Two mottos run with it: the French Unité, Dignité, Travail (unity, dignity, work) and Boganda's Sango motto Zo kwe zo, "every person is a person". The national anthem is La Renaissance, sung in French and in Sango as E Zingo.

🕊️ is a popular emoji to attach to the country's name: 🇨🇫🕊️ is a wish for peace and for the country to come together, and it often turns up on national days.

Bangui, the Ubangi River and the wild south-west

The capital, Bangui, nicknamed Bangui la Coquette, sits on the north bank of the Ubangi River, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the other side. The river is the country's road to the sea: 🛶 for the dugout pirogues that cross it and fish it, 🎣🐟 for the catch, 🌊 for the river itself. The north is open savanna 🌾, the south-west dense rainforest 🌴🌿, and 🏞️ fits the Boali Falls north-west of Bangui and the parks.

The Central African Republic has two UNESCO World Heritage properties. Manovo-Gounda St Floris in the northern savanna is home to 🦁 🐆 🦒 buffalo 🦛 🐊. Dzanga-Sangha in the south-west forest, in the buffer zone of the Sangha Trinational site shared with Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo, is famous for western lowland gorillas 🦍 and for Dzanga Bai, a forest clearing where forest elephants 🐘 gather in dozens to drink from the mineral-rich ground. 🐒 🦜 are its monkeys and African grey parrots, and 🦋 its butterflies, which also gave Bangui a craft of its own: pictures made from butterfly wings.

💎 ⛏️ 🪙 🪵 are the words of the economy: diamonds and gold dug from the river gravels, and tropical timber from the forest. Coffee ☕ and cotton are the main crops grown for sale.

Central African food emoji: gozo, ngunza and peanut sauce

Cassava is the staple. Its flour is cooked into gozo, a stiff, smooth paste eaten with the fingers, the Central African cousin of fufu. There is no cassava emoji, so 🫜 (root vegetable) or 🍠 stand in. Gozo comes with a stew 🍲🥘: ngunza, pounded cassava leaves cooked down, often with peanut paste 🥬🥜; a peanut sauce with chicken 🍗🥜; or fish from the Ubangi 🐟, and a hot pepper 🌶️ on the side.

Plantain and banana 🍌, maize 🌽 and beans 🫘 fill the markets; in season mango trees shade whole streets of Bangui 🥭. Forest honey 🍯 is gathered in the south-west, and coffee ☕ is grown in the country.

Music, basketball and holidays: 🥁 🏀 🎉

The best-known music of the country is the polyphonic singing of the Aka (BaAka) forest people of the south-west, voices interlocking in many parts over hand-clapping and drums, recognised by UNESCO as a masterpiece of intangible heritage. Send it as 🎶🥁🪘. In Bangui's bars and weddings the sound is Central African pop and Congolese-style rumba and dance music, 🎤💃🕺.

Basketball is the country's proudest sport: the men's national team won the African championship in 1974 and 1987 and played at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, so 🇨🇫🏀🏆 carries real history. The football team are Les Fauves, "the wild beasts" ⚽🦁.

The big dates are 1 December, Republic Day, when the republic was proclaimed in 1958, and 13 August, Independence Day, 1960, both sent as 🇨🇫🎉. 29 March is Boganda Day, remembering the founder, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Most Central Africans are Christian and many are Muslim, so Christmas ⛪✝️🎄 and Eid 🕌☪️ are both holidays.

How to type French and Sango letters and the CFA franc

The Central African Republic has two official languages. Sango is the national language and the language of daily life: CLDR estimates about 2.8 million speakers, and as a lingua franca it is understood across the country of roughly 5.7 million people (CLDR estimates), next to dozens of local languages such as Banda and Gbaya. French, with about 1.6 million speakers by CLDR's estimate, is the language of school, government and the press; Lingala is heard along the Ubangi. French needs é è ê ë à â ç î ï ô ù û ü ÿ œ æ and the quotation marks « ». Sango marks tone on its vowels with the circumflex and the diaeresis, â ê î ô û and ä ë ï ö ü, as in the country's Sango name Ködörösêse tî Bêafrîka; in everyday texting the marks are often left out. See our Sango, French and Lingala collections for each language's full alphabet.

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0233 é, 0232 è, 0234 ê, 0235 ë, 0224 à, 0226 â, 0228 ä, 0231 ç, 0238 î, 0239 ï, 0244 ô, 0246 ö, 0251 û, 0252 ü, 0156 œ, 0171 «, 0187 ». On a Mac, Option + E then the vowel gives an acute, Option + ` a grave, Option + I a circumflex, Option + U a diaeresis, Option + C gives ç and Option + Q œ. On a phone, long-press the vowel: the circumflex and diaeresis forms Sango needs are all in the pop-up.

The currency is the Central African CFA franc, code XAF, shared with Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. It has no Unicode sign: amounts are written with FCFA or F CFA after the number, as in 5 000 FCFA. The old ₣ (French franc sign) is not used for it; in emoji, 💵 💰 stand for money in general.