Jean-Bedel Bokassa: From Coup Leader to Self-Crowned Emperor

Jean-Bedel Bokassa, born February 22, 1921, in Bobangui in what was then French Equatorial Africa, built a career in the French colonial army before returning to his newly independent homeland. On January 1, 1966, in what became known as the Saint-Sylvestre coup, Colonel Bokassa overthrew his own cousin, President David Dacko, and installed himself as head of state of the Central African Republic. He ruled for the next decade as president, steadily accumulating military titles, including a self-awarded promotion to field marshal, and declaring himself president for life in 1972.

Bokassa’s ambitions culminated in a dramatic reinvention of the state itself. On December 4, 1976, he decreed that the Central African Republic would become the Central African Empire, with himself as “His Imperial Majesty” Bokassa I. His formal coronation followed almost exactly a year later, on December 4, 1977, in an elaborate ceremony deliberately modeled on Napoleon Bonaparte’s own 1804 self-coronation, complete with a jewel-encrusted crown, an ermine-trimmed cape, and a gilded eagle throne. The event, largely funded by the French government of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, is commonly estimated to have cost around $20 million, roughly a third of the country’s annual budget, in one of the poorest nations on earth. Bokassa’s court adopted rigid protocols of deference befitting an imperial monarchy, requiring ministers and foreign visitors to observe elaborate displays of respect in his presence, part of a broader performance of monarchical legitimacy that scholars studying the episode have since described as strikingly hollow.

The empire proved short-lived. In January 1979, Bokassa’s government tried to force all Central African schoolchildren to buy expensive uniforms produced by a company linked to one of his wives; the resulting student protests were met with brutal repression, and by most accounts roughly a hundred students and children were killed at Ngaragba Prison in Bangui that April. The massacre badly damaged what remained of Bokassa’s domestic and international standing, and on September 20-21, 1979, while he was traveling in Libya, French paratroopers carried out a bloodless intervention, Operation Barracuda, that restored David Dacko to power and ended the empire.

Bokassa lived in exile, mostly in France, until returning to the Central African Republic in 1986, where he was arrested and tried for murder, treason, and other crimes, including long-circulating rumors that he had served human flesh to unsuspecting guests and officials. At his 1987 trial, a former cook testified to preparing such a meal, but the court ultimately did not convict him on the cannibalism charge, citing a lack of sufficient evidence, and Bokassa himself firmly denied ever having been a cannibal. He was convicted of the murder of schoolchildren and other crimes and initially sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement, and he was freed in a 1993 amnesty. He died in Bangui in 1996 and was posthumously rehabilitated by the Central African government in 2010.