When Togo’s president, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, died on 5 February, the story of Togo’s future began like an old African folktale with a predictable ending. Africa’s longest-serving leader may have passed away, but he followed the old African way, leaving his people impoverished and his son to rule over them.
Death came suddenly for the man who ruled over this small West African state of 5.5 million people, if indeed anything can be called sudden in a country where one man ruled for 38 years and long-promised democratic reforms had always moved with glacial slowness.
Until President Eyadéma’s death from a heart attack—reportedly on board a plane which was about to take him abroad for emergency medical treatment—only Fidel Castro, who has ruled since 1959, has been in power for a longer period. Even in Africa, he was the elder statesman of an elite but disappearing clique of rulers-for-life; President Omar Bongo of Gabon came to power in 1967, a few months after Eyadéma, while Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi has been head of state for a mere 36 years.
Eyadéma was among the last of Africa’s ‘Big Men’, those rulers who seized power by military means and then remained there for life even as the world around them embraced democracy. Such leaders of African countries were, for many years after independence in the 1960s, the rule rather than the exception.
The death of President Eyadéma was, therefore, a crucial test of African democracy, but a test that few expected Togo to pass.
The man who would become the ‘father of the nation’ was born in 1935 to a peasant family in northern Togo. Even before he became president, Eyadéma was a man accustomed to distinction—he was a wrestling champion; he rose rapidly through the ranks of the French army for whom he served in Indochina and Algeria; and, in 1963, was the driving force behind independent Africa’s first military coup in which Togo’s democratically elected president, Sylvanus Olympio, was killed.
Not content with a secondary role he took the top job for himself in 1967. Thereafter he secured his position by stacking the military and senior bureaucratic positions with members of his own Kabye tribe. Eyadéma also had powerful friends who included every French president from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac. At home, he kept dissent in check by, according to Amnesty International, imprisoning, torturing and even killing his political opponents. All the while he