Mathieu Kérékou, Dictator Who Ushered In Democracy in Benin, Dies at 82
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Version 0 of 1. Mathieu Kérékou, who seized control of the West African nation of Benin in a military coup in 1972 and proclaimed a one-party Marxist state, but nearly two decades later presided over the region’s first peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy, died on Wednesday in Cotonou, Benin. He was 82. His death was announced by his elected successor, Thomas Boni Yayi. Mr. Kérékou led Benin, an impoverished cotton-growing country the size of Pennsylvania on the Gulf of Guinea, in two different guises: as its strongman from 1972 to 1991, and as its democratically elected president from 1996 to 2005. In that transformation, from one to the other, is where is his most enduring legacy lies. Under pressure from a conference of prominent citizens he had convened, he agreed to hold free elections in 1991 and then agreed to give up power when he lost. The decision set off an unraveling of one-party rule across West Africa, inspiring movements toward multiparty democracy. He returned to power in 1996 in a free election and served two terms. Nicknamed the Chameleon for his protean politics, Mr. Kérékou could also be mercurial in his behavior. On a trip to the United States in 1999, he stunned an all-black Baltimore church congregation by falling to his knees and begging forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role that Africans played in the slave trade. In 1975, he burst into the home of his interior minister, found him committing adultery with Mr. Kérékou’s wife, and ordered him shot to death as the man fled naked. Mr. Kérékou was born on Sept. 2, 1933, in Kouarfa, in the northwest of what was then Dahomey, a French colony. He studied at military schools there and in France, served as an aide to the Dahomeyan president after France granted the colony independence in 1960, and later became chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council after his cousin ousted the incumbent president. A lieutenant colonel at the time, Mr. Kérékou seized power in 1972, in the fifth coup since the colony had become independent. (He was a general by the time he retired from the army in 1987.) Mr. Kérékou adopted a Marxist-Leninist platform two years after the coup, renamed the nation the People’s Republic of Benin (after a kingdom that flourished in the 17th century) and nationalized its oil companies and banks. Over time his People’s Revolutionary Party became less revolutionary and captivated fewer and fewer people, but Mr. Kérékou was nothing if not adaptable. (“The stick cannot break in the arms of a chameleon,” he liked to say, and his own swagger stick was decorated with a picture of one.) He pursued an increasingly moderate socialist agenda as the economy worsened, following the lead of the Warsaw Pact nations in abandoning Marxism altogether in 1989. A year later, he publicly confessed guilt for his mistakes to the local Catholic archbishop and asked forgiveness for his government’s flaws. The gesture, however, was not enough to generate the popular support he needed to win in the first democratic presidential election in 1991. In his return to power in 1996 and again in 2001, he squeaked by to victory after disputed vote counts. The country’s Constitution limited him to two terms and in any case barred him from running again because he was older than 70. Information on his survivors was not immediately available. In 2005, after dominating Beninese politics for nearly three decades — more than half the country’s existence — Mr. Kérékou, then 72, announced that he would not try to overturn the two-term limit. “If you don’t leave power,” he said, “power will leave you.” |