Gnassingbé Eyadéma
Gnassingbé Eyadéma was a sergeant of the French colonial army who took part in the first successful coup in independent Africa, in which Togo's first president was shot at the gate of the American embassy in January 1963, took power himself in a second coup in January 1967, and held it for thirty-eight years until he died in office, when the army gave the presidency to his son, who holds it still. He was born in 1935 in the Kabye country of the north, joined the French army at eighteen and served in Indochina and Algeria, and was one of several hundred demobilised veterans whom Sylvanus Olympio, the first president, refused to take into a national army he wanted small. On 13 January 1963 the veterans struck, and Eyadéma said for years that he had fired the shot that killed Olympio, until it became inconvenient to have said so. The civilian government the coup installed lasted four years, and on 13 January 1967, the anniversary, he removed it, dissolved the parties and the constitution, and in 1969 founded the Rally of the Togolese People as the only party. The regime was the French model of the era. There was a cult of the president with his face on watches and a ballet of his deeds, a plane crash in 1974 that he survived and made a national holiday, phosphate revenue spent on Lomé and the north, the Kabye in the army and the officer corps, and prisons for the rest. The wave of 1990 forced a national conference in 1991 that stripped him of his powers, and he took them back with the army in 1992 and 1993, when troops fired on demonstrators in Lomé and hundreds of thousands fled to Ghana and Benin. The European Union suspended aid for fourteen years. He won elections in 1993, 1998 and 2003, the second by stopping the count, the third after changing the constitution to allow it. He died of a heart attack on a plane to France in February 2005, and within hours the army installed Faure Gnassingbé, his son, against the constitution. The African Union objected, an election was held in April with the usual result, and the son has been re-elected ever since.
- Lived: 1935 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: Togolese
- Roles: president, army_officer
