Like most other countries in Africa, there are quite a few leaders who seem to be going a little mad for power and turning into tyrants of the worst kind – not to mention a handful who were like that from the start! A few days ago we published an article entitled 10 Worst Dictators of Africa. In this article, we take a look at ten of the most famous of these dictators, in chronological order of birth.
1. Hastings Kamuzu Banda (c. March/April 1898 – 25 November 1997)
Banda became Prime Minister of what was then Nyasaland, a British colony, in 1963 and took it to independence as Malawi a year later. Two years later he proclaimed himself President of the new Republic of Malawi and then made it a one-party state under the Malawi Congress Party. In 1970 he was appointed President for Life of the MCP and in 1971 President for Life of Malawi. However, he was a split personality – some hailed him as a hero for dramatically improving his state’s education system and infrastructure and supporting women’s rights while others called him a corrupt tyrant for the 6,000 (at least) people imprisoned without trial during his regime , tortured and even killed (some put the number as close as 18. 000) and for supporting apartheid in South Africa. In 1993 his one-party state was ended when international protests prompted a referendum, and he was stripped of all positions and powers by a special assembly immediately afterwards. To put his blame on him, he ran for the following democratic elections – at the age of ~96! – but not won. He died three years later, in 1997, in South Africa.
2. Jean-Bedel Bokassa (February 22, 1921 – November 3, 1996)
Born in French Equatorial Africa, Bokassa served 21 years in the French colonial army, but when David Dacko, a distant cousin, became president of the country as the newly independent Central African Republic (CAR) in 1960, he was invited to lead its armed forces – and six years later dismissed his cousin and declared himself President in 1972, then President for life and finally Emperor (of the “Central African Empire”) from 1976 to 1979. His ceremony of investing himself as emperor cost $20 million and nearly bankrupted the country! His reign was one of terror, in which he took over all important government posts for himself and instituted judicial beatings and punishments,
He had hundreds of school children arrested, refused to wear uniforms he had made and is said to have massacred 100 of them – while he looked on. Deposed by French paratroopers in 1979, he reinstated his cousin as president and the country as Central African. With a fortune he had embezzled, he went into exile in France. He was convicted of treason and murder and sentenced to death in absentia and when he returned in 1986 this was put into effect, although the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment – then he was freed in 1993 to live as a private citizen in Central Africa until his death to live in the republic.
3. Ahmed Sekou Touré (January 9, 1922 – March 26, 1984)
Born in the French colony of French Guinea, Touré began his career in politics when he joined the Postal Workers’ Union (PTT) in 1945. In 1952 he worked his way up to leader of the Democratic Party of Guinea. The African colonies gained independence from France in 1958 (the rest joined in 1960), but the French were quite angry when they left Guinea. In 1961, Touré was elected President for a seven-year term. Of course, after declaring his party the only legal party and leading it, he was unchallenged. he then repeated this in the next three elections. His policies were based on Marxism and sustained by the arrest and imprisonment or exile of opposition groups – this earned him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1961! His tyranny developed slowly; At the end of the 1960s, members of the opposition were taken to internment camps by the secret police.
4. Robert Mugabe (21 February 1924 – present)
Good things came to Mugabe late in life, but despite his advanced age he seems to be reaping the benefits – he became Prime Minister of Zimbabwe at 56, president at 63 and is in office after being re-elected six times at the age of 89. His political career gained international fame when he became secretary-general of the Zimbabwe African National Union in conflict with Ian Smith’s conservative white minority government in the 1960s. and he became a political prisoner in Rhodesia from 1964-1974. After his release he fought with Edgar Tekere in the Rhodesian Bush War until it ended in 1979 and became a hero to many Africans. In the general elections of 1980 he became the first prime minister of the newly independent Zimbabwe.
He has been a force for peace in general, intervening in various local wars to help settle them (although some have described this as a tactic to control the areas’ natural resources and thereby strengthen Zimbabwe’s economy), but since reunification In the 21st century, his government vigorously corrects the unequal distribution of land between the white minority and the black majority that was a legacy of the colonial years. This program was increasingly enforced, including economic sanctions, and the policy was (predictably) condemned by the losers, both nationally and internationally, while other African nations with similar disparities praised it.
5. Idi Amin Dada (c. 1925 – August 16, 2003)
Another notorious but famous African dictatorwas Idi Amin Dada.Amin served in the British Colonial Army in Kenya and Somalia from 1946. After Uganda’s independence, he became a major general in the Ugandan army and then commander. In January 1971 he ousted then-President Milton Obote and seized power in a military coup (promoting himself to Field Marshal a while later). Amin was a tyrant. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed during his regime, and nepotism, corruption, economic mismanagement, ethnic persecution and human rights abuses were rampant. He ended up “shooting himself in the foot” when he tried to annex a province from Tanzania in 1978. This, along with growing dissent in Uganda, led to the Uganda-Tanzania War and caused the fall of his regime the following year. He had to go into exile, first to Libya, then to Saudi Arabia, where he died.
6. Mobutu Sese Seko (October 14, 1930 – September 7, 1997)
Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku was Ngbendu wa Za BangaBorn Joseph-Desiré Mobutu in the Republic of the Congo, which he renamed Zaire in 1971. He was installed and backed by the West, notably Belgium and the US, for his strong anti-communism stance, but once in power apparently went to his head and his regime became notorious for its usual corruption, human rights abuses and nepotism – and in after its fall it also amassed enormous personal wealth, in part through the embezzlement of US funds, which led some to refer to its rule as a ‘kleptocracy’. After six years of pledges by Laurent Kabila to halt economic decline and unrest by sharing power with opposition leaders while deploying the army,
7. Laurent Kabila (November 27, 1939 – January 18, 2001)
After studying political philosophy in France and Yugoslavia, Laurent Kabila no doubt seemed a much more likely possibility of leading Zaire, now renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, out of the dark days of Mobutu’s reign of terror and into the light of the modern world, but unfortunately things stayed off doesn’t quite work that way. When Congo gained independence in June 1960, Kabila was an officer in the youth wing of the Balubakat (the General Union of the Baluba people of Katanga) and joined the first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba, in the political forum even after Lumumba had died a few months later assassinated in Mobutu’s coup. He helped organize a revolutionary army in eastern Congo,
Kabila then turned to running a bar in Tanzania, with the occasional smuggling on the side. In 1967 he and his supporters formed the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP) and formed a secessionist Marxist state west of Lake Tanganyika in South Kivu Province. Over the next twenty years he amassed considerable wealth through extortion and robbery, then suddenly disappeared and presumed dead in 1988 – reemerging as a Marxist in 1996 to start the First Congo War. This culminated in his takeover of the country a year later, but unfortunately he behaved just as badly as Mobutu and was denounced as “another Mobutu” within months. Not surprisingly, then, only four years later he was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards and by his son Joseph,
8. Colonel Gaddafi (c. 1942 – 20 October 2011)
Libyan Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-GaddafiHe was interested in politics while still at school before attending a military academy and joining the military himself. There he formed a revolutionary cell and in September 1969, at just 27 years old, took over the lands of then-King Idris in a bloodless coup d’Age! He immediately dissolved the monarchy, declared a republic, and began ruling by decree with the intention of making his country an Islamic socialist country. Both in the “People’s Revolution” in 1973, which included the start of the General People’s Committees (GPCs), and in 1977, when he dissolved the republic in favor of Jamahiriya (a “mass state” partly ruled by the GPCs), he retained personal control over the most important ones Decisions.
He claimed from his “Third International Theory” as described in his publication “The Green Book”. Because of its hostile attitude toward other countries (and alleged culpability for the Lockerbie bombs), Libya was labeled an “international pariah,” and its ties with Britain and the US eventually led to the imposition of economic sanctions. When the civil war broke out, NATO provided military support to Gaddafi’s opponents and overthrew Gaddafi’s rule in August 2011. He retreated to Sirte, where he was captured and killed by some of the anti-Gaddafi rebels who had just defeated him. He ruled Libya for 42 years, mainly as “fraternal leader and leader of the revolution of Libya”.
9. General Sani Abacha (September 20, 1943 – June 8, 1998)
Sani Abacha was born in Nigeria and was pro-amilitary; He attended a Military Training College (in Nigeria) and the Mons Officer Cadet School (in England) before being commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in 1963. He helped plan the counter-group in July 1967 (and possibly the 1966 phases as well) and over the next three decades played a prominent role in most of his country’s major coups (of which there were several). In 1983 he became Chief of Army Staff and in 1990 Minister of Defense. Finally, in November 1993, after General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the June 1993 elections (because he had not won), Abacha took over the interim government. The following year, his regime assumed absolute power and became the virtual dictator of the country.
Nigeria, however, did not stand up for the human rights abuses and corruption that plagued his government, as some had – and when it emerged that he had announced elections in August 1998, he had no intention of having the votes honestly counted when they began build up riots above. Then things got weird – a pastor asked people not to demonstrate about the elections, saying that Abacha would not benefit from them – and a few weeks before the elections, Abacha mysteriously died out of the spotlight and was immediately buried without an autopsy. according to Muslim tradition. So the pastor was right, but how exactly Abacha died will never be known. He was presumably poisoned by political rivals via the prostitutes with whom he kept company. but officially it was just a sudden heart attack. After his death, it was revealed that he had embezzled around $3-4 billion during his short tenure – most of which eventually agreed to return… but not all!
10. Charles Taylor (January 28, 1948 – )
Liberian politician Charles McArthur GhankayTaylor was a little more civilized dictator than some – instead of just killing heaps of people, and when he felt like it, all he did was commit “war crimes” and embezzlement… He started straight out of college, for the Liberian government to work but was arrested for embezzlement from; He then went to Libya, trained as a guerrilla soldier, and returned to Liberia at the head of a Libyan resistance group to start the First Liberian Civil War. He overthrew and executed the current government headed by Samuel Doe (it was the same government that sacked him years earlier), then ruled much of the country as warlord,
Then allegations of war and humanitarian crimes began to surface during his tenure, eventually causing the start of the Second Liberian Civil War and forcing his resignation in 2003. He went into exile in Nigeria but was extradited back to Liberia in 2006 and held in The Hague until 2012. When he was tried on various charges, including terror, murder and rape, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison, where he remains to this day.
Maybe crime doesn’t pay after all. In the end anyway.