Word: bokassa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...beer) in sidewalk cafés, grow up on French textbooks and must be familiar with Racine and Corneille by the tenth grade in school. Most of all, the top men are firm partisans of Charles de Gaulle. "I consider the general my adopted father," says Brigadier Jean-Bedel Bokassa, ruler of the Central African Republic and a former officer in the French colonial army. "Politics does not enter into our relationship...
...Central African Republic, beset by everything from Chinese subversion to ministerial embezzlement to a staggering civil service payroll of 50,000 (for a population of 1.4 million), President David Dacko was overthrown by Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa, his cousin, who announced that he had acted "to head off two other coups, one against me and one against President Dacko...
...first time in its history as a unified nation instead of a federation of four mutually suspicious parts. The Congo's Mobutu, having decreed efficiency, was having a hard time making his civil service understand what he was talking about. But in the Central African Republic, Colonel Bokassa was fast off the mark with two immediate economic reforms: he reduced the tax on bicycles and announced that the government from now on will pay for all funerals...
...Volta actually carried signs asking the army to take over. As products of austere French military traditions, the army commanders abhorred frivolity and waste. "France gives us money, and all we do is waste it," said Colonel Lamizane after ousting Yaméogo. In the Central African Republic, Colonel Bokassa used almost exactly the same words as he instituted a "moral cleanup" campaign for government officials: no bars, dance halls, riding in taxis. Also forbidden: tom-tom playing during working hours...
Once in power, Dahomey's Soglo and the C.A.R.'s Bokassa immediately broke relations with the Red Chinese, whom they accused of meddling in domestic affairs. Colonel Bokassa claimed to have found evidence that the Red Chinese had been planning a coup against the government, and summarily packed the entire 32-man embassy staff on a Brazzaville-bound airliner...