The Emperor of Excess: Bokassa, France, and the Machinery of Impunity
This post chronicles the rise and fall of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the self-proclaimed emperor of the Central African Empire whose fourteen-year reign combined spectacular brutality with dependent relationships to French power. Through the arc of his rule—from coup to coronation to exile to amnesty—the writer traces how authoritarian pathology and great-power complicity reinforce each other.
Paris. 13th November, 1970. The man you see crying in the picture is no other than Jean Bedel Bokassa; dictator and former president of Central African Republic. He is seen here crying during the funeral of his "mentor" Gen. Charles De Gaulle.
He overthrew the first president of C.A.R in a coup in 1966 and declared himself president and began a reign of terror for the next 11 years.
He personally supervised the lashing of convicted criminals amongst whom were his enemies. He had 100 school children arrested and 50 of them killed because they refused to buy overpriced uniforms made in a company owned by one of his wives. He banned all political parties and was known to feed his enemies to the lions he kept in the grounds of his mansions. He was nicknamed 'The Butcher of Bangui.'
At first, France refused to recognise his government, but when he threatened to leave the CFA zone they cowered. He in turn supplied them uranium necessary for their electricity. They, as usual, supplied him with military backing.
In March 1972, he declared himself president for life.
On 4th of December 1977, he declared himself emperor of Central African Empire an accompanied that with a lavish ceremony that cost $80 Million in today's money. Since he wanted a Napoleon style coronation, French artists got the huge checks. Pierre Cardin, for example, designed his outfits. Hundreds of cases of champagne were flown in from France and the French minister of Defence sent a batallion to secure the ceremonies.
60 brand new Mercedes were ordered. The cars were shipped to Cameroon and were flown to C.A.R. He wanted Pope Paul VI to coronate him but the Pope turned down the invitation. So did many foreign monarchs. Even the French president at the time, Valery Giscard D'Estaing, turned down the invitation.
He was ousted from power by David Dacko while on a visit to Libya. He fled to Côte D'ivore and then later France where he lived on his pension as a former soldier of France.
While in exile in France, he wrote his memoir which never saw the light of day because the French government destroyed all 8,000 copies of the book that were printed. The reason? Bokassa had recounted stories of how he shared women with President Valery Giscard D'Estaing on his frequent visits to C.A.R.
He returned from exile in 1986. Was tried and found guilty of many of the charges levied against him. But was granted amnesty in 1993 with the return of democracy after serving 6 years of a death sentence that was commuted to life in prison.
He died a free man in Bangui in 1996 at the age of 75 but not without first proclaiming himself the 13th disciple of Christ. He had 17 wives and a reported 50 children.
One of his sons, Jean-Serge Bokassa, is the minister of Interior today.
May we receive sense #PoiseHistory.
Written in late 2018, the post reflects on a figure from the 1960s–1980s during a period when African governance and Franco-African relations remained live concerns in Cameroonian discourse. The invocation of Bokassa serves as a historical mirror to patterns of personalist rule, patronage, and the durability of compromised elites.
The post's power lies not in novelty but in its clarity: it names the French enablement of atrocity as structural, not incidental. Bokassa's survival through amnesty and his son's elevation to high office embody a broader pattern in which the architecture of post-colonial rule insulates perpetrators from accountability. Rereading it now, the piece remains urgent precisely because such patterns persist—the marriage of brutality and impunity, the recycling of power through family networks, the way external actors negotiate with dictators while claiming distance from their crimes.