Wherever Kiki goes, a crowd follows. “Dauphine,” they call her, and sometimes “princesse” or even “impératrice.” Few call her “madame la présidente.” Maybe it’s easier to think of her as a princess than a head of state.
Some call her father’s name as well as her own. “People heard of this place in the emperor’s time,” says a young woman named Solange who is far too young to have remembered that time. “There weren’t all the civil wars then,” adds a man in castoff army trousers and a black T-shirt, whose name I don’t catch.
That people are actually nostalgic for Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s reign is a sign of how far the Central African Republic has fallen. People did hear of the place during his time, but not at all in a good way. A distant cousin of the CAR’s founding father Barthélemy Boganda, Bokassa seized power on New Year’s Day 1966, and ten years later declared himself the first Emperor of the Central African Empire. He ruled amid absurd Napoleonic pomp, and his coronation, taking place a full year into his reign, would have bankrupted the country had not France footed most of the bill.
His fall began with a shockingly petty instance of financial peculation: the 1979 award of an school-uniform monopoly to a company owned by one of his wives. When schoolchildren protested the expensive uniforms on the streets of the capital, he had more than a hundred killed, and, if later court testimony is accurate, murdered several of them personally. Within a few months, French troops were on the streets of Bangui and Bokassa’s cousin David Dacko, who he had overthrown, was once again in power.
Dacko’s second presidency proved even shorter than his first: by the time Bokassa made his quixotic return to Bangui in 1986, the country was ruled by André Kolingba. A trial was hastily organized by a government that had never expected him to return, and he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but Kolingba commuted the sentence to life imprisonment and eventually let him go. He died alone in his home village in 1996, claiming that he was the thirteenth apostle of Jesus and that he’d had secret meetings with the Pope.
So much for the father, then, but what about the daughter?
Her background is easily stated. Marie-Ange Bokassa Deeb is the twenty-sixth of Bokassa’s forty-plus children, born in Paris in 1975 to his eleventh wife Alda Adriano Geday, herself the daughter of a naturalized Beirut casino director and his Egyptian Jewish wife. She spent her earliest years in Central Africa, but has few memories of that time; after the emperor’s fall, she lived in Paris again and eventually in her mother’s homeland of Lebanon, where she married and had a son. She talks little about her father except simply to say that he
was her father: she doesn’t defend his memory, but asks the world to accept that a man who was a ruthless dictator might also be a loving parent.
Four years ago, Kiki, as she is universally called, was known largely within the Lebanese art scene. She is a self-taught conceptual artist who has worked in an eclectic range of media, perhaps best known for editing a celebrity children’s book and painting in public for 72 uninterrupted hours. She was a co-founder of a Beirut-based group promoting social change through art, and she traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East in support of that cause.
How she went from there to the presidency of the poorest country on earth is, perhaps, another sign of how far that state has fallen.
In 2011, Kiki was invited to Bangui by the then-minister of youth, sports and culture – her half-brother Jean-Serge, newly elected to the National Assembly – to promote cultural links between the CAR and Lebanon. She arrived in the midst of protests over the re-election of President François Bozizé, who had originally taken power in a military coup and who had fought bush wars in the hinterland for most of his time in office. Something – as with many of her inspirations, she still isn’t sure what – impelled her to join the protests, and she did so in the most public manner possible: she staged a performance-art piece in the Place de la République depicting the nation symbolically bound and gagged. The result was a two-month prison sentence and the beginning of her involvement in Bangui civil society.
As in Lebanon, her primary focus was human rights through art. This would seem a quixotic enterprise in a nation where artistic expression is several steps up Maslow’s hierarchy from the needs of a great majority of people – but, she says, this is exactly why she did it. “The only way to convince people there is more,” she explains, “is to show them what that more can be.”
Maybe she is right, at least after a fashion. Art did little to stop the CAR’s downward spiral, but one would have to be a cynic to say it did nothing. When the mostly-Muslim Séléka militia drove Bozizé from power and the nation descended into civil war between them and the Christian Anti-Balaka (anti-machete) factions, she held artistic “peace camps” to which fighters from both sides were invited. Few attended, but of those who did, most renounced violence.
“People say I was foolish for focusing on one person at a time – they say that was less than a drop in the ocean,” she admits. “Maybe I was. But we can never discount the soul of one person. The nation is nothing but the people in it.”
She would ultimately prove that in ways that went beyond art. By late 2013, with hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians forced to flee their homes, the African Union was warning of an incipient genocide, and in December, sectarian riots convulsed the capital. Kiki, a Christian like the majority of people in Bangui, opened her home to Muslim refugees, sheltering hundreds, and made an appeal to Beirut that raised more than a million dollars to protect and house others.
That was a far more dangerous enterprise than protesting Bozizé’s fraud and repression: her life was in danger on several occasions before the riots finally subsided. But unlike her performance art, she knows exactly why she turned her house and garden into a sanctuary. “I’m part Lebanese,” she says. “I know what civil war is like, sect against sect. I grew up on stories of people who hid from men with guns and knives. When it happened here, what I had to do was obvious.”
Obvious or not, it made Kiki a political actor in the CAR. And when Séléka leader Michel Djotodia resigned the presidency in January 2014, leaving the country without a leader, she learned exactly how much of an actor she had become: to almost everyone’s surprise, not least her own, she was named interim head of state in his place.
One might well ask why. As I speak with her in the garden of the presidential palace, it becomes clear that her artistic idealism has made her politically naïve – something that was proven early in her presidency when a mob lynched a suspected Séléka militiaman just blocks from where she was making a speech about peace. I sense that she is mostly a symbol, and that the African Union is doing the heavy lifting of brokering a peace deal, just as troops from the African Union, France, and amazingly Lebanon are patrolling the cities and keeping what fragile peace exists.
Still, as a symbol, Kiki is a powerful one. She is undeniably popular, and even her strongest detractors acknowledge that her actions during the 2013 riots were heroic. With the Bokassa name, she is forgiven even for being half-Lebanese. Few Central Africans love the Lebanese, who are a merchant minority in the CAR as they are throughout the region, but they acknowledge Kiki, who speaks fluent Sango and Mbaka, as one of their own.
Maybe the National Assembly believed that a symbol was what the country needed: that the conflict had progressed to the point where it could no longer be resolved by ordinary politics.
If so, Kiki would agree. She freely acknowledges her Lebanese heritage and mentions it often in speeches, again emphasizing the similarities of her two homelands’ conflicts and insisting that the lessons of Lebanon are applicable in the CAR. “If we could make peace even while fighting an occupation,” she says, “anyone can make peace. But we also have to be sure not to make a temporary peace. Temporary peace is only another word for permanent war. We have to settle everything, or we settle nothing.”
That is a tall order for a president whose term is limited to one year and whose remit is only to make peace and organize elections. But she has ideas: a truth and reconciliation commission, staged return of refugees, jobs and counseling for demobilized soldiers, support for displaced children, a professional and nonpartisan gendarmerie to take the place of the army, and art, always art. She is willing to let the African Union handle the nuts and bolts of the peace process, but she is determined to be its soul.
She may get her chance. Three and a half months ago, the Séléka and Anti-Balaka signed a cease-fire, and thus far, it has mostly held. Little has changed on the ground – the militias haven’t yet disarmed, and refugees are too frightened to return to villages under the fighters’ control – but the African Union troops have begun to collect weapons, and Kiki has secured promises of international funding for some of her initiatives.
Looking out on the streets that surround the presidential palace, it’s hard to imagine that such things might make a difference. Kiki may believe in fighting for one person at a time, but there are four million desperately poor ones in the Central African Republic, and scarcity and hopelessness will always fight against their better natures no matter what food for the soul is offered. Nothing has saved the CAR yet, and many would say that nothing can.
But by that token, maybe Kiki has as much of a chance as anyone else.
