01/09/2023
Africa is on its feet
France’s Concern for Gabon’s Democracy Is Too Little, Too Late
Paris is complicit in the lack of social and democratic progress that prompted the coup.
By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
In December 1977, a style of rule associated with medieval Europe was visited upon a hitherto obscure country tucked away deep in equatorial Africa. There, Jean-BĂ©del Bokassa, a onetime commander of a 500-man army who had seized power in 1965 in a military coup, proclaimed himself president for life, and then, several years later, imperial sovereign of the country, which he rebranded as the Central African Empire.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France—the former colonial power of the newborn would-be empire—knew enough to stay away from Bokassa’s coronation, which cost around $20 million, the equivalent of 8 percent of the poor country’s entire annual GDP at the time. But Paris offered support in other ways. In addition to helping finance it, France sent troops to provide security for the lavish coronation. Its airplanes assured all of the logistical needs. And a French Army orchestra was even assigned to blare out the tunes that accompanied two days of official celebrations.
France was eventually embarrassed enough by its association with the clownish Bokassa to provide backing for a military coup that deposed him two years later, but that did not mean that Paris had draw
