Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa

Les Harding is the author of The Voyages of Lesser Men: Thumbnail
Sketches in Canadian Exploration and The Journeys of Remarkable Women:
Their Travels on the Canadian Frontier.

In 1966, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a long-serving and much-decorated member of
the French colonial army, seized power in his remote homeland, the
Central African Republic. Until his overthrow by French paratroops in
1979, Bokassa ruled his country as an absolute dictator. He would
probably have been unnoticed by the wider world were it not for his
uniquely flamboyant style, which was expressed most dramatically when he
transformed his country into the Central African Empire and himself into
Emperor Bokassa I.

In what was a desperately poor nation, Bokassa staged an elaborate,
costly, and outrageous coronation for himself—a coronation based on
that of Napoleon Bonaparte. Emperor Bokassa rapidly became an
embarrassment to other African leaders, as well as to President Giscard
of France who had family commercial interests in Central Africa. The
French were prepared to tolerate summary executions and imprisonments
without trial, but when bizarre stories of ritualistic cannibalism
(possibly inverted by the French themselves) and the murder of
schoolchildren emerged, they had the excuse they needed to topple
Emperor Bokassa.

The author provides an interesting, readable, and thoroughly researched
examination of a corner of Africa that few English-speaking people know
anything about. He also analyzes the nature of personal dictatorship in
Sub-Saharan Africa and France’s paternalistic and self-serving role in
the affairs of its former colonies. Although his book portrays Bokassa I
as a cruel, corrupt, and frequently arbitrary dictator, Titley concludes
that he was far from being the worst dictator Africa has had to endure.