Mathieu Kerekou
Mathieu Kerekou ran a Marxist-Leninist state for seventeen years, gave it up at a conference he had called himself, and was elected president again five years later. Dahomey after independence was known for its instability even by the standards of the period: six coups and a dozen changes of government in twelve years, and a presidency rotated between three regional leaders by agreement. He was a paratrooper officer who took power in 1972 and, two years later, declared the country Marxist-Leninist, renamed it Benin after a kingdom that had never been on its territory, and nationalised the banks, the schools and the oil trade. The economy did not respond. By the late 1980s the state could not pay its teachers or civil servants, the banks had collapsed, and strikes ran for months. In February 1990 he convened a national conference of five hundred delegates - unions, churches, professional bodies, exiles - intending to manage the crisis. It declared itself sovereign, stripped him of power, appointed a prime minister and wrote a new constitution, and he accepted the verdict rather than sending the army. That is the whole significance of the episode. The Benin conference became the template copied across francophone Africa over the following three years - Congo, Mali, Togo, Niger, Zaire all held one - and it is the first time an African head of state was removed by a deliberative assembly rather than by a bullet or a ballot. He lost the election of 1991 and conceded, which was rarer still. He won the elections of 1996 and 2001, served two constitutional terms, refused to amend the age limit that barred a third, and left office in 2006.
- Lived: 1933 CE – 2015 CE
- Nationality: Beninese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
