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| Vanity Of Vanities........ |
Jean-Bedel Bokassa, self-proclaimed Bokassa the First (1921 – 1996) was a military dictator of the Central African Republic from 1966 to 1979, who declared the small landlocked country an empire, and himself Bokassa I, Emperor of the Central African Empire. His years in power were marked by terror, corruption, and increasingly bizarre behavior.
He was a captain in the French colonial when Central Africa gained its independence from France, and the country’s new president, a distant cousin, invited Bokassa to head its armed forces. He accepted, and a few years later, staged a coup and seized power, declaring himself president.
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| ........All Is Vanity |
A worshipper of Napoleon Bonaparte, he emulated his example by crowning himself Emperor of Central Africa and bankrupted his impoverished country with a lavish coronation that cost about 80 million dollars, with a diamond-encrusted crown that cost another 20 million dollars.
His rule was marked by a reign of terror in which Bokassa personally supervised the extra - judicial beating of criminal suspects, decreeing that thieves were to lose an ear for the first two offenses, and a hand for the third.
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Making A Show Out of Just Anything,
Even Charles De'Gaulles Funeral |
He also oversaw the torture of suspected political opponents, then fed their corpses to crocodiles and lions he kept in a private zoo. There were also widespread accusations of cannibalism, triggered by photographs in Paris-Match magazine which showed a fridge containing the bodies of children.
Among the sundry atrocities committed during his reign, the most infamous was the arrest of hundreds of schoolchildren in 1979 for refusing to buy school uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives.
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| Salute To Empty Showmanship |
Bokassa personally supervised the murder of over 100 of them by his imperial guard. That was a final straw, and soon thereafter, French paratroopers deposed Bokassa.
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