Barthélemy Boganda

Barthélemy Boganda (born April 4, 1910, Bobangui, Moyen-Congo, French Equatorial Africa [now in Central African Republic]—died March 29, 1959, near Bangui) was the major nationalist leader of the Central African Republic (formerly Ubangi-Shari) in the critical decolonization period of the 1950s. His strong popular support was unmatched by that of any other political figure in the four colonies of French Equatorial Africa. Stridently anticolonial but pragmatic, he could (and did) make deals with the colonial administration and European businessmen to gain his ends.

Boganda was born of a peasant family and became the first African Roman Catholic priest in Ubangi-Shari. He was sponsored by the Catholic missions as a candidate in the November 1946 elections to the French National Assembly and won against an administration-backed candidate. However, he soon denounced the missions as well as the colonial administration, and he left the French Catholic party (the Republican Popular Movement) and the priesthood. In 1949 he founded his own party, the Social Evolution Movement of Black Africa, which he dominated completely. In the 1951 campaign a French administrator briefly arrested him for “endangering the peace.”

Subsequently, Boganda’s prestige was essentially unchallenged. Even the French government realized it was useless to oppose him and made efforts to conciliate him. In 1956 he also came to an agreement with French businessmen, who offered him financial support in return for European representation on municipal and territorial election lists.

In 1957 Boganda became the president of the Grand Council of French Equatorial Africa (which also included Chad, Gabon, and the French Congo). He hoped for a federation of these states under African rather than French control and for the eventual creation of a “United States of Latin Africa” that would also include Angola, the Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, and Cameroon. By late 1958 this dream was shattered, and he turned his attention again to the future Central African Republic.

In December 1958 Boganda became the prime minister of the Central African Republic, which would not receive its official independence from France until 1960. Under Boganda the government drafted a constitution for the republic. Boganda died in a plane crash in 1959 under suspicious circumstances. Many speculated that expatriate businessmen from Bangui’s Chamber of Commerce, the French Secret Service, or Boganda’s estranged wife may have had a hand in his death. Boganda remains revered by Central Africans as a national martyr.