11. A Lavish Coronation Amidst Hunger
Bokassa bankrupted his impoverished country with a lavish coronation that cost about eighty million dollars. It included a diamond-encrusted crown that cost twenty million. His governance was marked by a reign of terror in which Bokassa personally supervised the judicial beating of criminal suspects. He decreed that thieves were to lose an ear for the first two offenses, and a hand for the third. Emperor Bokassa the First, as he came to style himself, tortured suspected political opponents, then fed their corpses to crocodiles and lions kept in his private zoo. There were also accusations of cannibalism, triggered by photographs in Paris-Match magazine that showed a freezer containing children’s bodies. Among Bokassa’s many atrocities, the most infamous was the arrest of hundreds of schoolchildren in 1979 for refusal to buy school uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives.
