Jean-Bédel Bokassa

Who is Jean-Bédel Bokassa?

Jean-Bédel Bokassa was born in Bobangui, a relative of Barthélemy Boganda, and served in the French colonial army during the Second World War and the First Indochina War before joining the newly independent Central African Republic's armed forces as chief of staff. In 1966 he seized power in a coup that deposed President David Dacko, ruling first as President and head of the single MESAN party. In December 1976 he proclaimed himself Emperor Bokassa I of the renamed "Central African Empire," staging an extravagant and enormously costly coronation ceremony in 1977 modeled on Napoleon Bonaparte's. His rule became known internationally for severe human rights abuses, arbitrary violence, and the near-bankrupting of the impoverished country through personal extravagance. He was overthrown in September 1979 by a French-backed operation that restored David Dacko, and fled into exile. Bokassa returned to the Central African Republic in 1986, was tried and convicted on charges including murder, had his death sentence commuted, and was released under a general amnesty in 1993. He died in Bangui in 1996. His reign remains one of the most documented cautionary chapters in the country's history.

Sources: Brian Titley, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997) · Pierre Kalck, Historical Dictionary of the Central African Republic · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jean-Bédel Bokassa"