Sylvanus Olympio

Sylvanus Épiphanio Olympio led Togo to independence and became its first president, then was shot dead outside the American embassy in Lomé in January 1963 — the first successful military coup in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, and a template for dozens that followed. He was born in 1902 at Kpandu, in what was then the German protectorate of Togoland and is now the Volta Region of Ghana, into a prominent merchant family descended from the Brazilian trader Francisco Olympio Sylvio. He studied at the London School of Economics and joined Unilever, rising to manage the company's African operations, an unusual position for an African in the colonial economy of the 1930s. His politics were shaped by Togo's status as a United Nations trust territory, which gave him a platform the ordinary colonial subject lacked: he petitioned the UN directly for unification and self-rule. His party won the UN-supervised elections of 1958, making him prime minister, and he became president when Togo gained full independence from France in 1960, confirmed by the election of 1961. In office he pursued a deliberately independent line, keeping his distance from both France and Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, which claimed the Ewe-populated west of the country. That independence cost him. He refused to expand the small Togolese army by absorbing several hundred Togolese veterans demobilised from the French forces after the Algerian War, judging the expense unaffordable for a state of Togo's size. A group of those veterans, among them Étienne Eyadéma, stormed his residence before dawn on 13 January 1963 and killed him as he tried to reach the embassy gates. Eyadéma took power outright in 1967 and ruled Togo for thirty-eight years, and the presidency passed to his son in 2005.

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