Marien Ngouabi

Marien Ngouabi was born on the thirty-first of December 1938 in the village of Ombellé, in the Owando region of the Cuvette, then part of French Equatorial Africa and today the Republic of the Congo. He was a son of the Kouyou people. From 1947 to 1953 he attended primary school in Owando, and in 1953 entered the military children's school in Brazzaville — the beginning of a life bound to the army and, in time, to the destiny of his nation.

His path to a commission ran through France. After service as a sergeant with the tirailleurs in Cameroon between 1958 and 1960, he studied at the École Militaire Préparatoire in Strasbourg and then, in 1961, at the École Inter-armes at Coëtquidan, the successor school of Saint-Cyr. He returned home a second lieutenant in 1962 and rose swiftly, commanding the country's paratroop battalion.

In 1968 the ousting of President Alphonse Massamba-Débat brought Ngouabi to the fore, and from 1969 he served as the fourth head of state. He renamed the country the People's Republic of the Congo and proclaimed it Africa's first Marxist-Leninist state, founding the Congolese Workers' Party (Parti Congolais du Travail) as its sole legal party and pursuing a program of social equality and structural reform.

On the eighteenth of March 1977, at the age of thirty-eight, Marien Ngouabi was shot and killed at his residence in Brazzaville. A soldier who became a statesman, he gave his name to the university of his capital and remains woven into the memory of the Congo he sought to remake. May his convictions and his sacrifice be remembered with honor.