Mathieu Kérékou

Mathieu Kérékou was born on the second of September 1933 in the village of Kouarfa, in the Atakora region of northern Dahomey — present-day Benin. He came of a modest rural family of the Somba people (also known as the Betammaribe or Waaba) of the far northwest. Trained in colonial military schools in French Soudan (now Mali) and Senegal, he entered the French army and, after Dahomey's independence, rose through the ranks of the young nation's armed forces, serving for a time as aide-de-camp to President Hubert Maga.

On the twenty-sixth of October 1972, amid years of coups and regional rivalry, Kérékou seized power. In 1974 he proclaimed Marxism-Leninism as state doctrine, and in 1975 renamed the country the People's Republic of Benin, nationalizing banks and industry and steering a single-party revolutionary state for nearly two decades.

By 1989, with the economy collapsed, Kérékou did what few strongmen of his era would: he convened a national conference, renounced Marxism, and submitted to a democratic transition. Defeated at the polls in 1991, he yielded power peacefully — a rare and honored precedent on the continent.

He returned, this time by the ballot, winning the presidency in 1996 and again in 2001, before stepping down in 2006 in keeping with constitutional term limits. He died on the fourteenth of October 2015 in Cotonou, aged 82. May he be remembered as the soldier who learned to trust his people with their own future, and who left his nation its peace.