Sky Eclat
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 17, 2012
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To the French who’d once ruled the Central African Republic, Colonel Jean Bedel Bokassa must at first have seemed a good bet. For it was soon clear, after he seized power in 1966, that he longed to be more French than they. He worshipped De Gaulle and Napoleon and tried to set up in his capital of Bangui the sort of art, ballet and opera societies characteristic of a French provincial town. He made concessions to French companies; allowed the French army a base; and entertained French president Giscard D’Estaing several times on his own private game reserve, which occupied most of the eastern half of the country.
He was also extremely generous with gifts – particularly of diamonds, one of the few commodities his dirt-poor country produced. By 1977, though, even the French must have begun to suspect that this ugly, violent little man was beginning to losetouch with reality. For, spurred on by constant viewings of a film of the coronation of British Queen Elizabeth, he’d decided to emulate his hero Napoleon and have himself crowned Emperor. He’d even ordered a dozen prisoners held in Bangui Jail to be released from the general prison population and given exercise and proper rations in the run-up to the $20 million show.
French diplomats and businessmen, for all this, were among those who gratefully accepted invitations, and they were welcomed by brand-new Mercedes limousines paid for via a French government credit. They attended the comic-opera coronation and after the ceremonial parade – in which Bokassa rode in a gold carriage drawn by eight white horses over the only two miles of paved road in his capital – they assembled at his palace for a banquet, little knowing that among the delicacies served up them on specially-ordered Limoges porcelain were what remained of the Bangui-Jail prisoners… It still took the French two years to move against Bokassa, who by that time had run mad.
He’d become obsessed, for example, by the fact that the barefoot children of Bangui’s only high school had no ‘civilized’ French-style uniforms. So he jailed them and then had them one by one beaten to death when they failed to show up at ‘uniform inspections’ properly dressed. When news of this reached the French Embassy, they were finally forced to act. As Bokassa was leaving his ‘Empire’ for a state visit to Libya, an opposition politician was shaken awake in Paris and bundled on a plane to Bangui, where he called upon the French Foreign Legion troops who were hard upon his heels to ‘aid the people’ in Bokassa’s overthrow.
The legionnaires soon uncovered the mass grave where the schoolchildren had been buried in the grounds of Bangui Jail. The bones of another thirty-seven were found at the bottom of the swimming pool in Bokassa’s palace – they’d been fed to his four pet crocodiles. In the palace kitchen were the half-eaten remains of another dozen victims who’d been on the Emperor’s menu in the days before his departure.Bokassa first took refuge in the Ivory Coast in West Africa.
But he soon showed up in a chateau in a Parisian suburb, where he entered a new career as a supplier of safari suits to African boutiques. President Giscard d’Estaing of France, meanwhile, made a personal donation to a Bangui charity school of $20,000 – which he said was the value of the diamonds Bokassa had given him.