AHC: A Better Bokassa

As you all know, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former president of the Central African Republic was an idiotic maniac. He crowned himself the New Napoleon and renamed his country the Central African Empire. He also spent a third of this country's annual income in the ceremony and reportedly fed human flesh to the French Ambassador. After this, I began to wonder if he was more pragmatic and managed to improve the lifestyle of the common Central African. Maybe he could've intervened in the Chad civil war to expand his country or just decide to keep his nation a republic.

PS: He can still be a evil dictator who feeds political prisoners to zoo animals
 
Maybe France tries to exercise a restraining hand on their client?

And question...

How credible were the accusations of cannibalism? I seem to recall reading(probably in Martin Meredith) that they were based on a few comments he had made to people, but that nothing substantial was ever proven.
 
At the his trial, a bunch of generals accused him of cannibalism but no links were ever found. Even if he was a cannibal, there was no law against it back then.
 
As you all know, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former president of the Central African Republic was an idiotic maniac.

Like many things everybody knows, this isn't necessarily true. Brian Titley has argued that there was method to Bokassa's madness and that his coronation and other grandiose gestures were an attempt to forge a national political identity in an area where such identities were historically ethnic and village-focused. I'm skeptical of Titley's thesis - among other things, Nyerere showed that it's possible to create a national identity in ways that don't bankrupt one's country or involve mass murder - but it's always best to consider what Bokassa might have thought he was doing rather than dismissing it as bizarre.

Anyway, to improve Bokassa, you'd have to start with his grandfather, and I mean that literally. Bokassa was shaped by the conditions in what was then the colony of Ubangi-Shari during the 1920s, which was a horrific concessionaire colony along the lines of the Congo Free State. His father was killed by colonial authorities in an exceptionally brutal manner and his mother then committed suicide, after which he was educated by French clergymen, leading to his schizophrenic view of France as abusive parent that characterized his presidency and reign. Had his family not been brutalized, he might have grown up with a more balanced moral center and more belief in nonviolent methods of government and nation-building.

Also, even if a "better Bokassa" had sincerely wanted to improve the CAR, it would have been hard for him to succeed. The CAR was politically atomized even by regional standards - unlike many other parts of Africa, most of the CAR lacked precolonial state-level societies, its social structures had been disrupted by slave raids during the 19th century to the point where parts of the country were virtually depopulated, and its colonial experience was exceptionally brutal. Attempts to build infrastructure would run up against poverty and difficult terrain, and the fact that the CAR was a landlocked country meant that building an export economy (other than highly portable and expensive luxury goods such as diamonds) would have been virtually impossible. There are ways to develop a country like the CAR but those strategies weren't well understood in the 70s; at best, Better Bokassa would likely have run an "orthodox" IMF-financed import-substitution regime which would have rebounded on the country later as similar strategies did elsewhere.
 
Did Bokassa acquire 'kuru' from one of his victims?

WI cannibalism became the norm in CAR and emigrants regularly smuggled 'bush meat' into Europe or the Americas?

Could kuru become another deadly sexually transmitted disease?
 
As a model for Better Bokassa, you might also want to consider how his cousin Barthélemy Boganda might have ruled if he hadn't died in a plane crash in 1959. Boganda was one of the rare people who are ennobled rather than embittered by oppression, and wouldn't have committed Bokassa's excesses. He would likely have run a conservative, Catholic, pro-French quasi-one-party administration similar to Senghor in Senegal (who he resembled a great deal in terms of education and political views) and would have pursued development strategies that were orthodox for the 1960s and 70s. I'd guess that he would remain pro-Western rather than joining the socialist bloc or nonaligned movement and that he would have tried (unsuccessfully) to build a centralized state with an administrative class drawn from the French-speaking elite rather than adopting Nyerere's strategy of using the local lingua franca as a basis for unity, though on the other hand he probably would have avoided Nyerere's overreaching with things like the Ujamaa villages.
 
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