Hamani Diori
Hamani Diori was the first president of Niger, from independence in August 1960 to April 1974, when the army removed him during a famine that had killed his cattle-herders while the aid grain sat in his ministers' warehouses. He was the schoolteacher from Soudouré who had been the colony's deputy in the French National Assembly. He governed fourteen years as France's most reliable friend in the Sahel and its most respected mediator. He was a Zarma from the river, trained at the William Ponty school in Dakar, the colony's teacher-training college that produced the generation. He founded the Nigerien Progressive Party in 1946 with Bakary, the cousin and rival whom he beat in the referendum of 1958, when Bakary campaigned for a no to de Gaulle's Community and Diori, with the French administration's help, for a yes. The yes won and Bakary went into exile in Mali for fifteen years. The fourteen years were the single party from 1959. There was the assassination attempt of April 1965 by a Sawaba grenade at the Niamey mosque that killed a child beside him. There were the guerrilla raids of Bakary's men from Ghana and Mali in 1964 and 1965 put down with French help, and the defence agreement with Paris that kept a French garrison at Niamey. There was the uranium found at Arlit in 1957 and mined by the French from 1971 at a price he spent his last year trying to raise. There were the francophone community that he did more than anyone but Senghor to found, and the mediation between Nigeria and Biafra in 1968. There was the drought of 1968 to 1974 that killed perhaps a third of the country's herds and an uncounted number of its people while the government's relief was sold in the markets by the ministers' wives. That was the thing the officers said when they came. Lieutenant-Colonel Kountché took the palace on 15 April 1974. His wife Aïssa was killed in the fighting. He was held for six years and under house arrest until 1987. He was born in Soudouré, near Niamey. He was released by Kountché's successor and went to Morocco, whose king he had befriended. He died at Rabat in April 1989, at seventy-two. The airport at Niamey carries his name, given back by a state that had removed him for the famine and had, by then, had two more.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 1989 CE
- Nationality: Nigerien
- Roles: president, teacher, politician
