On March 29, 1959, Barthélemy Boganda, the prime minister of the Central African Republic under the French Union and in all likelihood the person who would lead the country after independence, died in a plane crash that has been the subject of conspiracy theories ever since. He was succeeded by, in turn, his cousin David Dacko and his cousin Jean-Bédel Bokassa, both of whom, despite their familial relationship to Boganda, were his polar opposites in terms of ability, character and (at least in Bokassa’s case) sanity. The rest, tragically, is history.
POD: The plane lands.
Boganda now faces the task of uniting and developing a country that was (a) brutalized by 19th-century slave raids and 20th-century concessionaire colonialism as bad as or worse than the Belgian Congo; (b) largely lacking in state-level precolonial societies; (c) ethnically divided; and (d) marked by poor infrastructure and difficult terrain. The post-independence generation in other countries like that generally… didn’t work out well. Could Boganda have done better?
There seems to be little doubt about his capability or integrity, and he would also lead the country into independence with enormous popular support. But ruling the CAR would be a daunting endeavor for anyone, and there are other factors that could point both ways. He would be an intellectual leader in the mold of Senghor, and would also have Senghor’s Catholic conservatism and respect for French culture (he also, like Senghor, married a Frenchwoman). He’d probably remain pro-Western and would stay away from the socialist or nonaligned bloc. This means that he wouldn’t start forcing people into Ujamaa villages. But on the other hand, his inclinations would also lead him toward a centralized state using French-speaking elites as administrators rather than encouraging the local lingua franca as a language of education and administration the way Nyerere did. He might lead an administration somewhat distanced from the people and might also have a hard time avoiding the development orthodoxies of the 1960s such as IMF-financed import substitution or one-party government.
The most likely option may thus be that Boganda’s rule would be like Senghor’s or Houphouët-Boigny’s but with more limited possibilities: not the worst thing that could happen to a country, and much better than the CAR’s first decades IOTL, but not optimal and vulnerable to destabilization like Côte d'Ivoire after Houphouët’s death. Worst case: he goes the personality-cult route (which he could easily have done: there were people who literally thought he could walk on water) and takes increasingly extreme and erratic measures to hold power, leading to a coup and a descent into Dackonian or Bokassan chaos. But best case… ? Were there any out-of-the-box development and nation-building strategies that could have worked in the CAR in the 1960s, and could Boganda have been visionary enough to implement them?
POD: The plane lands.
Boganda now faces the task of uniting and developing a country that was (a) brutalized by 19th-century slave raids and 20th-century concessionaire colonialism as bad as or worse than the Belgian Congo; (b) largely lacking in state-level precolonial societies; (c) ethnically divided; and (d) marked by poor infrastructure and difficult terrain. The post-independence generation in other countries like that generally… didn’t work out well. Could Boganda have done better?
There seems to be little doubt about his capability or integrity, and he would also lead the country into independence with enormous popular support. But ruling the CAR would be a daunting endeavor for anyone, and there are other factors that could point both ways. He would be an intellectual leader in the mold of Senghor, and would also have Senghor’s Catholic conservatism and respect for French culture (he also, like Senghor, married a Frenchwoman). He’d probably remain pro-Western and would stay away from the socialist or nonaligned bloc. This means that he wouldn’t start forcing people into Ujamaa villages. But on the other hand, his inclinations would also lead him toward a centralized state using French-speaking elites as administrators rather than encouraging the local lingua franca as a language of education and administration the way Nyerere did. He might lead an administration somewhat distanced from the people and might also have a hard time avoiding the development orthodoxies of the 1960s such as IMF-financed import substitution or one-party government.
The most likely option may thus be that Boganda’s rule would be like Senghor’s or Houphouët-Boigny’s but with more limited possibilities: not the worst thing that could happen to a country, and much better than the CAR’s first decades IOTL, but not optimal and vulnerable to destabilization like Côte d'Ivoire after Houphouët’s death. Worst case: he goes the personality-cult route (which he could easily have done: there were people who literally thought he could walk on water) and takes increasingly extreme and erratic measures to hold power, leading to a coup and a descent into Dackonian or Bokassan chaos. But best case… ? Were there any out-of-the-box development and nation-building strategies that could have worked in the CAR in the 1960s, and could Boganda have been visionary enough to implement them?