Tyrannical Ex-Dictator Dies At 75 African Killed His Opponents, Was Accused Of Eating Them

He was one of Africa’s most ruthless dictators, accused of killing and eating those who dared criticize his regime. But Central Africans still mourned Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who the government said Monday will be honored with a state funeral.

Bokassa died Sunday evening of a heart attack at a clinic in Bangui. He was 75 and had been in poor health since suffering a brain hemorrhage in October 1995.

National radio made no mention of the death, but word spread quickly and several thousand mourners gathered Monday outside the main hospital where Bokassa’s body lay in a morgue.

Some wept, and others sent messages of condolence despite a tyrranical rule from 1966-79 that included the massacre of 100 children after they had complained about school uniforms they were required to buy from his factory.

The army lieutenant colonel seized power on Jan. 1, 1966, six years after the country won independence from France. He was ousted in a French-backed coup in 1979 after a bizarre rule that had included proclaiming himself Emperor Bokassa I three years earlier.

Bokassa made a fortune during his years in power by exploiting the country’s mineral resources, particularly its diamond mines, while the living standard of his 3.4 million subjects plummeted.

Long backed by France, which had key interests in the country’s uranium trade, Bokassa found himself increasingly alienated because of human rights abuses.

Those included the 1979 slaughter of the schoolchildren in Bangui’s Ngaragba prison. Reports of the massacre led to international condemnation and a cutoff of U.S. aid.

Later that year, while Bokassa was in Libya, he was ousted in a bloodless coup by French troops. They reinstated the country’s first president, David Dacko, who had himself been tossed out by Bokassa.

Bokassa “treated Central Africans like they were animals, like dogs,” Dacko said years later in an interview.

A 1990 documentary about Bokassa was narrated in part by the late Michael Goldsmith, an Associated Press foreign correspondent who was arrested, beaten and imprisoned for a month by Bokassa in 1977 while on assignment in Bangui.

Bokassa spent seven years in exile in Ivory Coast and France, living in luxury with 15 of his children outside Paris, where he owned four chateaus, a hotel, a villa and an executive jet.

He returned to the Central African Republic in 1987 expecting to be welcomed. Instead, he became the first deposed African chief of state to be publicly tried on charges of murder, torture and cannibalism.

In the three-month trial, prosecutors claimed Bokassa’s old palace was filled with evidence of atrocities, including the frozen body of a schoolteacher hanging on a freezer hook and mounds of human flesh prepared for roasting.

Bokassa’s former cook testified that he had prepared meals with human flesh and had watched his boss eat them “with relish.” Other witnesses testified Bokassa had enjoyed fooling visiting foreign dignitaries by serving up his opponents as roast beef.

Bokassa tearfully denied the allegations. “I am not a cannibal,” he said.

He was acquitted of cannibalism charges, although he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison, and he was freed in September 1993.