Start with the part that sounds invented. Between 1960 and 1981, the Central African Republic was governed almost continuously by two men from the same extended family, from the same corner of the same country — and the moment one of them was removed, the other was flown in by a foreign army to replace him. Not once. The second time, the man being flown in was the same man who had been thrown out fourteen years earlier, by the cousin he himself had promoted.

Every element of that sentence is documented. None of it requires the lurid material that usually fills articles about this period, and which this one will come to and correct.

Boganda, and the crash that started everything

The Central African Republic became independent from France on 13 August 1960, with its capital at Bangui. The man who should have led it was not there.

Barthélemy Boganda was the founder of the country's nationalist movement, the author of its flag and its motto, and by common agreement the political father of the republic. He died on 29 March 1959, when his aircraft came down on a flight inside the territory. He was 48. The cause was never satisfactorily established, and suspicion of sabotage has followed the case ever since — which is exactly why this page will say only that the crash killed him and that no finding of sabotage was ever proved.

Boganda's death left a vacuum at the precise moment independence was arriving. Into it stepped his relative, a former schoolteacher in his late twenties.

Dacko: the schoolteacher president

David Dacko was born in 1930 in the Lobaye region, from the same M'Baka community as Boganda. He trained and worked as a teacher — a school director before he was a minister — and his rise came through Boganda's movement rather than through the army or the party machine. When Boganda died, Dacko took over the leadership and, at independence in 1960, became the first president of the Central African Republic.

He was thirty years old. He inherited a landlocked country of fewer than two million people, with diamonds, timber and cotton, no coastline, almost no road network, and a French administrative structure that had simply changed its letterhead.

And he made a decision that defines everything that followed. He needed a commander for the new national army, and he appointed a relative — a distant cousin with twenty-three years of service in the French army behind him, including Indochina, who had come home with the rank of captain and a chest of French decorations.

Dacko gave Jean-Bédel Bokassa the army. Five years later, Bokassa used it on him.

New Year's Eve, 1965

On the night of 31 December 1965 into 1 January 1966, Bokassa's troops seized Bangui. Dacko was removed and imprisoned. Bokassa declared himself president, abolished the constitution — dismissing it as a dead body that no longer represented the people — and took the major offices of state for himself.

Then comes the detail that most accounts skip, and it is the strangest in the whole story. Dacko did not go into exile and did not stay in prison forever. He was eventually released and, by the late 1970s, was serving as Bokassa's personal adviser. The man whose government had been overthrown was working inside the palace of the man who had overthrown him.

Whether that was survival, patronage, family obligation or some mixture of all three is not something this page can tell you. Both men are dead, and neither left an account that can be checked. What can be stated is the position he held and when.

What Bokassa actually did

Bokassa ruled from January 1966. He made himself president for life, and on 4 December 1976 he abolished the republic and proclaimed the Central African Empire, with himself as Emperor Bokassa I.

His rule was violent and personal. He supervised judicial punishments himself and introduced a scale of mutilation for theft — an ear for the first and second offence, a hand for the third. He took personal control of the country's diamond and ivory extraction and its coffee trade, and treated the treasury as private money.

The coronation

On 4 December 1977, one year after proclaiming the empire, Bokassa crowned himself in a stadium in Bangui, in open imitation of Napoleon, whose coronation he had studied.

Roughly one twelfth of everything the country produced in a year, spent on a single afternoon in which guests sat in extreme heat and watched a man place a crown on his own head.

And much of it was paid for by France. Bokassa said so himself, in terms that leave nothing to interpret: that the French were asked for money, gave it, and it was wasted.

France was not watching. France was in the room.

This is the part that gets edited out of the short versions, and it is the part that matters.

Under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, France and the Central African Empire were close allies. Giscard hunted in the country, corresponded with Bokassa, and in 1973 accepted diamonds from him — which surfaced years later as the Diamonds Affair and did lasting damage to his presidency. Much of the material apparatus of the coronation, the crown and the eagle throne among it, came from France.

When Bokassa began drifting towards Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, French interests in the country looked exposed. And when the killing of schoolchildren made him internationally indefensible, France removed him.

Jacques Foccart, the man who had built and run French Africa policy for decades, called that removal France's last colonial expedition. His own side's description, not an opponent's.

What actually brought him down: the children

Not the crown. Not the rumours. This.

In February 1978, Prime Minister Henri Maïdou announced, at Bokassa's instruction, that all schoolchildren must wear a specified uniform by 1 October. Jewellery and hats were banned, and pupils who refused faced suspension. The uniforms were expensive, and they were manufactured by a textile company connected to Bokassa's own family — sources differ as to whether it was held by the family generally or by one of his wives.

In a country where most families could not afford them, this meant children being shut out of school to enrich the ruler's household.

By January 1979 there were student protests in Bangui, and stones were thrown at the emperor's car. In April, the armed forces were sent to break up the agitation and arrest the pupils. Hundreds of teenagers were taken to Ngaragba prison. Around one hundred children were killed there — beaten to death, in some accounts over a period of days as they were removed from the cells one by one.

Bokassa was later convicted in court of these murders. Reports that he personally took part in the killings circulated widely; the conviction is the fact, the details of his personal role are contested.

An emperor survived a golden throne, mutilation as sentencing policy and a bankrupted treasury. He did not survive dead schoolchildren, because that was what the world's newspapers finally printed.

The night they flew Dacko home

Dacko — still, at this point, Bokassa's adviser — got himself to Paris. There, the French persuaded him to take part in the removal of his cousin and to resume the presidency.

On the night of 20 to 21 September 1979, while Bokassa was in Libya meeting Gaddafi, French paratroopers landed in Bangui in an operation codenamed Caban. There was no resistance. The empire was abolished, the republic restored, and David Dacko was installed as president — fourteen years after being removed from that same office by the man he had promoted.

A second, longer operation, Barracuda, ran from 1979 to June 1981: protecting French nationals and the Dacko government, then rebuilding and instructing the Central African armed forces. When it ended it was replaced by a French military assistance mission that stayed in the country until 1998.

What happened to everyone

The story that travelled, and the story that was proved

Almost everything published in English about this period leads with cannibalism. It is the detail that made Bokassa a cartoon, and it is repeated today in fifteen-second videos by people who could not place Bangui on a map.

The court that had him in the dock, in his own country, with the evidence in front of it, acquitted him of that charge.

It convicted him of murdering children.

Those two sentences ought to be the whole lesson. The spectacular accusation is the one that survives in popular memory; the proven one fades, because a ruler who beats schoolchildren to death over uniform contracts is an ordinary kind of monster, and ordinary monsters do not trend.

There is a second cost to the cannibal story, and it is worth naming. It flatters the outside world. A ruler who eats people is a figure from a colonial cartoon, and he allows European readers to feel that what happened in Bangui was beyond their comprehension and outside their responsibility. A ruler whose coronation was financed by French aid, who gave diamonds to a French president, and who was removed by French paratroopers when he stopped being convenient, is a much less comfortable figure. He implicates other people.

Why Dacko is the one to remember

David Dacko is not a hero of this story, and this page does not offer him as one. His first government was authoritarian in its own right — he built a one-party state before his cousin took it from him. He accepted restoration at the hands of a foreign army, which makes his second presidency dependent on Paris in a way no elected leader should be. And he was overthrown again within two years.

But he is the figure through whom the whole period becomes legible. A schoolteacher who inherited a country because its founder died in a plane crash. A president who handed the army to his cousin and lost everything to that decision. A man who then served the person who had ruined him. And, finally, a politician who let a foreign power carry him back into his own capital at night.

Bokassa tells you what one man can do to a country. Dacko tells you what a country was, that such a thing could be done to it twice.

Verified: 23 September 2026.
Sources: standard reference accounts of the Central African Republic and the Central African Empire; documentation of Operation Caban and Operation Barracuda; contemporary reporting on the coronation of 4 December 1977 and its costs; accounts of the 1978 school uniform decree issued under Prime Minister Henri Maïdou and of the Ngaragba prison killings of April 1979; and reporting of the 1986–87 trial and its verdict. Figures for the coronation vary between accounts, with totals of US$20 million and US$25 million both reported; the lower figure is used here and the difference noted. The number of children killed is generally given as around one hundred and is not a precise count. Ownership of the textile company that supplied the uniforms is described in different sources as resting with Bokassa's family or with one of his wives. Reports that Bokassa personally took part in the killings are widely published but are not established by the conviction itself, which is what this page relies on. The cause of the 1959 air crash that killed Barthélemy Boganda was never established; no finding of sabotage exists. Corrections are welcome and will be published in full.