The Sentence of an Emperor

The courtroom in Bangui was dense with heat and a quiet, focused hatred. Jean-Bédel Bokassa, once the dictator who had crowned himself emperor in a ceremony costing a third of his nation’s annual income, now sat as a defendant. He wore a simple suit. The charges were not about extravagance. They were about murder, torture, and cannibalism. Witnesses testified. They spoke of a massacre of schoolchildren in 1979, of prisoners beaten to death in his private dungeon. They spoke of a freezer in his palace, alleged to contain human remains. The prosecution was precise. It presented evidence, cited dates, named victims. Bokassa protested. He called the trial a political sham. The judges listened, their faces impassive. On June 12, 1987, they delivered their verdict: guilty. The sentence was death by firing squad. The pronouncement was clean, judicial, a stark ledger of accountability. It did not dwell on the opera of his reign—the Napoleonic coronation robes, the throne shaped like an eagle. It addressed only the crimes. The grotesque irony was left unspoken: the man who had played at being a god of a fantasy empire was reduced to a man awaiting a bullet. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and he would eventually be released. But on that day, the law, in measured tones, attempted to draw a line through a period of madness. It was an administrative end to a rule that had been anything but.