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The Witch Doctor President and Other Horrific Rulers

Khalid Elhassan December 25, 2019 32 min

13. Massacring Children

Bokassa and his family in exile. Rebel Circus

Among the sundry atrocities committed during Bokassa’s reign, the most infamous was the arrest of hundreds of schoolchildren in 1979 for refusing to buy school uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives. Bokassa personally supervised the murder of over one hundred children by his imperial guard. That was a final straw, and soon thereafter, French paratroopers deposed the murderous despot.

Bokassa got off the light. He ended in French exile, with millions looted from his country’s treasury. However, he managed to waste his embezzled fortune within a few years, and was reduced to penury. His poverty became international 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, and he was released in 1993, living another three years before dying in 1996.

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.