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The Witch Doctor President and Other Horrific Rulers

Khalid Elhassan December 25, 2019 32 min

14. The Napoleon Fan Boy

The coronation of Emperor Bokassa I. Reddit

Bokassa was not just an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte, but an outright worshipper of the French emperor. So he emulated his idol by crowning himself Emperor of Central Africa. In the process, Bokassa bankrupted his impoverished country with a lavish coronation that cost about 80 million dollars, including a diamond-encrusted crown that cost 20 million.

His rule was marked by a reign of terror in which Bokassa personally supervised the judicial beating of criminal suspects, decreeing that thieves were to lose an ear for the first two offenses, and a hand for the third. He also oversaw the torture of suspected political opponents, then fed their corpses to crocodiles and lions he kept in a private zoo. There were also widespread accusations of cannibalism, triggered by photographs in Paris-Match magazine which showed a fridge containing the bodies of children.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.