CENTRAL AFRICA: Death of a Strongman

The small, twin-engined plane had apparently been flying low, and investigators guessed that the distinguished passenger in the copilot’s seat must have ordered the pilot to do so because he wanted to get a closer look at the coffee plantations he owned in the area. The plane never reached its destination. Two days later a search party found its wreckage—and with it the body of the distinguished passenger: Barthélémy Boganda, 48, Premier of the Central African Republic.

Boganda was the son of a witch doctor and he liked to make offhand references to the fact that his father’s rites included the eating of human flesh. But Barthélémy Boganda was educated in the white man’s missions and later polished in France. He rose to head one of the most primitive of France’s colonies, but he emerged as a key African figure.

An ordained Roman Catholic priest, Boganda was unfrocked after marrying his French secretary when he was serving in Paris as a Deputy to France’s Assembly. While his country was still the territory of Ubangi-Shari, the French frequently took him to task for treating his Pygmy plantation workers almost as slaves. He was not above pretending to perform a miracle when an eclipse of the sun occurred, nor did he try to dissuade his people from the idea that he was immortal. To the French, he seemed at times one of the most exasperating men in Africa.

But as long as he was alive and his MESAN Party held its overwhelming majority in the Territorial Assembly, peace reigned among the tribes of the territory. Boganda dreamed of turning his country into the “Israel of Africa,” and his people gladly put their backs into his ambitious land-reclamation projects. Last year restive tribes in Chad to the north and the Congo Republic, where blacks have massacred blacks, petitioned to join his country. Coming from him, talk of a United States of Latin Africa consisting not only of parts of French Africa, but also the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola, did not seem mere idle chatter.

When he died, Boganda was in the midst of campaigning for this week’s elections to the Assembly. At the time, the results of the elections were a foregone conclusion. But last week worried Paris observers were predicting that the kind of tribal violence that its neighbors have known could well break out in the Central African Republic. Boganda’s strength had turned out to be his country’s most dangerous weakness: he had left no one behind big enough to take his place.