Word: dahomey
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Leaping from his bed one night last January, Dahomey's President Hubert Maga excitedly telephoned military headquarters to report that his residence was being shelled. He soon went back to sleep. As it turned out, the tough, jolly, former schoolteacher had been aroused by the clatter of windblown coconuts pelting down on the mansion's tin roof...
...national flag from public buildings, and demanded Maga's ouster. Bariba tribesmen from Maga's native northern region leaped into the fray in his defense and killed two demonstrators with bows and arrows. Finally the President resigned in favor of Colonel Christophe Soglo, commander of Dahomey's 800-man army, who became head of state and promptly suspended the constitution...
Squandermania. It was the latest in a series of coups that have shaken Africa's new nations, including Dahomey's neighbor, Togo, where President Sylvanus Olympic was assassinated last January, and the former French Congo, whose President Fulbert Youlou was deposed in August (the ex-Belgian Congo also witnessed a near-coup three weeks ago). Plots have been uncovered in Senegal, Chad and the Ivory Coast...
...sources of trouble are essentially the same in all the countries involved: moribund economies, vast numbers of unemployed, strong and hostile labor unions. In Dahomey (pop. 2,200,000), the situation is aggravated by the fact that it once supplied civil servants for many other French colonies and boasted that "brains are our biggest export"; now it has an increasingly serious white-collar unemployment problem, for newly independent West African nations train their own government officials. The Dahomey rioters also denounced President Maga's "squander-mania," notably the magnificent palace he built himself...
...futile attempt to name as the fact-finding mission the old 1954 Indo-China International Control Commission, which included Poland. But after behind-the-scenes bargaining, the Assembly decided to let Sosa Rodriguez choose the delegation. He appointed to it the U.N. representatives of Afghanistan, Brazil, Ceylon, Costa Rica, Dahomey, Morocco and Nepal. The mission was expected to leave this week...