The Emperor Revealed!

 

Bokassa 1er by Pierre Pean, editions Moreau, 1977 and L’Ogre de Berengo by Bernard Loubat, editions Lefeuvre, 1981, are books in French about Jean Bedel Bokassa who, in 1977, crowned himself emperor of Central Africa.  I was there at the coronation as the gift bearer from the U.S. government.  At the time I was the desk officer at the Department of State for the Central African Republic. I volunteered for the task of carting the gift, a clipper ship etched into Stubben glass, to Bangui.  (There is a piece about the coronation in my book My African Anthology).  I had previously served a two-year tour (74-76) as a junior diplomat at the embassy in Bangui and would return in 1992 as ambassador. By then a much more mentally feeble Bokassa was in prison. He was released in the aftermath of the election of 1993 and confined to house arrest until his death a year or so later.  This aside is to state that I met Bokassa on several occasions in the 1970s. I congratulated him on becoming emperor in 1977. Bokassa wrote me letters in my capacity as ambassador while he was incarcerated in the 90s, but I judged it wise not to reply.  Nor did it seem wise for me to visit him once he was released from prison. 

Without doubt, Bokassa was a key figure in the history of Oubangui-Chari/Central African Republic/Central African Empire.  These two books delve at great length into his chaotic reign.  Bokassa1er is a biography. It relates Bokassa’s rise from the village, his 27-year stint in the French army, back to Bangui in the nascent army at independence, his 1965 coup d’etat and subsequent life as president à vie, then emperor.  The author tells many of the stories that are outrageous, funny, or horrifying that characterized Bokassa’s tenure as head of state.  He ruled through intimidation and fear and did not hesitate to murder or imprison his enemies. Additionally, the book reports extensively on the coronation itself, and France’s complicity in the event. Pean also provides the context of a nation being run into the ground economically by the greed and capriciousness of its leader.

In the L’Ogre de Berengo Loubat expands on these themes.  Further, he reports in detail the massacres of January and April 1979 that led to Bokassa’s ouster, as well as the ouster itself by French paratroops in September 1979. However, about half of L’Ogre is a recitation of three weeks author Loubat spent in Bangui in the summer of 1979 in a quest to get the emperor on record through a filmed interview.  It was a Kafkaesque sojourn. Loubat, his cameraman and a sycophantic (to Bokassa) French guide were feted, praised, spied upon, reviled, and feared as they periodically called on the emperor. They listened to his tirades and suffered from the bizarre protocols of the imperial court and the fearful hesitancy of its councilors. In the interim the journalists carefully sounded out “sources” in the capital and gleaned many views about the emperor and the state of the nation.  Candidly reported, the chronicle paints a sad picture of a megalomanic, paranoic, narcissist leader sowing the seeds of his own demise while leading a nation to ruin.

While reading these books in the spring of 2026, I could not help but seeing parallels between the personalities and actions of Jean Bedel Bokassa and Donald J. Trump.

These books gave my French a workout. The texts jumped about, used lots of colloquialisms, metaphors and odd vocabulary. My dictionary was quite useful.