Barthélemy Boganda
Barthélemy Boganda was the first Catholic priest ordained in Ubangi-Shari, the colony's first deputy in Paris, the founder of the Central African Republic and the author of its name, and he died in a plane that came apart in the air eight months before the independence he had arranged. He was born in 1910 in a village of the Lobaye, in the concession-company country where the rubber quotas had been enforced by hostage-taking; his mother was beaten to death by company guards when he was a child, and the mission took him in. He was ordained in 1938, the first of his people, and in 1946 the church allowed him to stand for the French National Assembly, where he sat as the deputy of a colony that had a hundred thousand voters, married his French secretary, and was suspended from the priesthood for it. His movement, MESAN, founded in 1949, was a party of the villages: he toured them on foot and by canoe, took up the cases of peasants against the companies, and was jailed in 1951 for defending a market crowd against the police, which made him. When de Gaulle's loi-cadre gave the colonies self-government in 1956 he swept the elections, and when the referendum of 1958 offered the choice of community or independence he chose the community, because he wanted something larger than his own poor territory: a United States of Latin Africa taking in the four colonies of French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, under a flag he designed with a stripe for each. The neighbours declined. On 1 December 1958 he proclaimed the Central African Republic as an autonomous state within the community, with himself as its head of government, and on 29 March 1959 the aircraft carrying him home from Berbérati exploded over the forest. The French inquiry found traces of explosive and the report was never published. His cousin David Dacko took the country to independence in August 1960 and to the dictatorship after; his nephew Bokassa crowned himself emperor. The flag is still Boganda's, and the anthem, and the motto.
- Lived: 1910 CE – 1959 CE
- Nationality: Central African
- Roles: head_of_government, priest, nationalist
