10. A Macabre Modern Emperor
Bokassa’s rule was marked by a reign of terror in which he personally supervised the judicial beatings of criminal suspects. He decreed that thieves were to lose an ear for the first two offenses, and a hand for the third. He also oversaw the torture of political opponents to death and added a macabre twist to the proceedings by feeding their corpses to crocodiles and lions he kept in a private zoo. To make matters even more macabre, there were also widespread accusations of cannibalism, triggered by photographs published in Paris-Match magazine of a refrigerator in one of his residences, that contained the bodies of children. Among Bokassa’s sundry atrocities, the most infamous began with the arrest of hundreds of schoolchildren in 1979. Their crime? They had refused to buy school uniforms from a company owned by one of Bokassa’s wives.
Emperor Bokassa I personally supervised the murder of over 100 children by his imperial guard. That was a final straw, and soon thereafter, French paratroopers deposed the deranged ruler. He went into exile in France, but within a few years, he had managed to waste the millions he had embezzled and squirreled away in overseas accounts. He was reduced to penury, and his dire financial straits became news when one of his children was arrested for shoplifting food. Bokassa returned to Central Africa in 1986, where he was tried and convicted of murder and treason, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, however. He was released in 1993 and lived another three years before he died in 1996.