Chad's industrial capital — Logone River markets, Gala brewery, and the cotton-belt gateway to the south
Moundou is Chad's second-largest city and its economic engine — a southern lowlands city on the Logone River that produces most of the country's cotton, hosts the Gala brewery (the country's only), and serves as the commercial hub for Chad's more fertile southern région before the landscape gives way to the Sahel. It has none of N'Djamena's capital-city formality — Moundou is a market city, animated by cross-border trade with Cameroon and the Central African Republic, riverside fish smoking, and a genuinely thriving local food culture centered around millet beer and grilled Logone River fish.
Moundou developed as an administrative and commercial centre during the French colonial period (Territoire du Tchad, 1900–1960) and grew rapidly as the southern cotton zone's main processing hub. The French built a cotton ginning factory in the 1930s that remained operational into the postcolonial era. The Sara people — the largest ethnic group in southern Chad — are the dominant community; their territory spans the Logone basin across what are now Chad and the Central African Republic. Sara resistance to French colonial taxation and labour demands was sustained and occasionally violent; the…