Dahomey: Sounds in the Night

Leaping from his bed one night last January, Dahomey’s President Hubert Maga excitedly telephoned military headquarters to report that his residence was being shelled. He soon went back to sleep. As it turned out, the tough, jolly, former schoolteacher had been aroused by the clatter of windblown coconuts pelting down on the mansion’s tin roof.

Last week the sounds in the night came from real gunfire as angry mobs swept through the former French West Africa colony, located between Togo and Nigeria on the Gulf of Guinea. In Cotonou, the capital, and nearby Porto-Novo, the ragged crowds carried black-draped coffins and chanted war songs as they ransacked government offices, burned cars, hauled down the green, yellow and red national flag from public buildings, and demanded Maga’s ouster. Bariba tribesmen from Maga’s native northern region leaped into the fray in his defense and killed two demonstrators with bows and arrows. Finally the President resigned in favor of Colonel Christophe Soglo, commander of Dahomey’s 800-man army, who became head of state and promptly suspended the constitution.

Squandermania. It was the latest in a series of coups that have shaken Africa’s new nations, including Dahomey’s neighbor, Togo, where President Sylvanus Olympic was assassinated last January, and the former French Congo, whose President Fulbert Youlou was deposed in August (the ex-Belgian Congo also witnessed a near-coup three weeks ago). Plots have been uncovered in Senegal, Chad and the Ivory Coast.

The sources of trouble are essentially the same in all the countries involved: moribund economies, vast numbers of unemployed, strong and hostile labor unions. In Dahomey (pop. 2,200,000), the situation is aggravated by the fact that it once supplied civil servants for many other French colonies and boasted that “brains are our biggest export”; now it has an increasingly serious white-collar unemployment problem, for newly independent West African nations train their own government officials. The Dahomey rioters also denounced President Maga’s “squander-mania,” notably the magnificent palace he built himself for $3,000,000.

On the Warpath. Colonel Soglo, 54, who has spent most of his adult years as a professional soldier in the French army, included his friend Maga in the interim government as Foreign Minister. He is trying hard to balance his government between the unions, which still howl for Maga’s complete removal, and the northern Bariba tribesmen, who are on the warpath to win Maga’s complete reinstatement. Though massive French aid helped the new nations in the area to achieve a measure of economic progress and political stability, Dahomey and the other former French colonies are now threatened with tribal and sectional wars that could spread disorder through much of West Africa.