Jean-Bedel Bokassa

Biography

Jean-Bedel Bokassa was born in 1921 in Bobangui, in what was then French Ubangi-Shari. When he was six his father, a village chief, was beaten to death after defying a French forestry company, and his mother took her own life soon after. Educated at mission schools, he joined the French colonial army in 1939, served with the Free French in the Second World War and saw combat in Indochina, earning the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre.

He left the French army in 1962 to build the army of the newly independent Central African Republic, led by his cousin, President David Dacko. On the night of 31 December 1965 he and Captain Alexandre Banza seized power in the Saint-Sylvestre coup. Bokassa abolished the constitution and dissolved the National Assembly, later had Banza executed after Banza plotted against him, declared himself president for life in 1972 and kept close ties with France.

In December 1976 he turned the country into the Central African Empire and in December 1977 crowned himself Emperor Bokassa I in a ceremony costing about a third of the national budget. His rule was autocratic and violent. In April 1979 about a hundred schoolchildren arrested after protests over compulsory uniforms were killed in Ngaragba Prison, and in September 1979 French forces overthrew him while he was abroad, restoring Dacko. The later Diamonds Affair, over gems he had given Valery Giscard d'Estaing, hurt the French president.

After years of exile in Ivory Coast and France, Bokassa returned to Bangui in 1986 and was tried in a public court. In 1987 he was convicted of murder and other crimes, including the killing of the schoolchildren, and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted and he was released in 1993. He died in Bangui in 1996.