Hubert Maga

Hubert Coutoucou Maga was born in Parakou, in French Dahomey, on the tenth of August 1916, the son of a Hausa father and a Bariba mother. He took his teacher-training certificate at the École Normale William Ponty in Senegal (1937) and taught in colonial schools across French West Africa through the 1940s.

He was elected to the French National Assembly in 1951 as a deputy for Dahomey and held the seat through three successive Fourth Republic governments. He founded the Mouvement Démocratique Dahoméen in 1957 and led it through the late-colonial transition.

Dahomey became independent on the first of August 1960. Maga became the new republic's first President on the eleventh of December 1960. His government drew on the technocratic Francophone elite trained at William Ponty, maintained continued French commercial relationships, and pursued a moderate Pan-Africanist alignment alongside Houphouët-Boigny (also placed in this archive) and Mokhtar Ould Daddah of Mauritania.

He was deposed by the military coup of the twenty-eighth of October 1963 — the first of five successive coups that would shape Dahomey's politics across the 1960s. He returned to the presidency briefly in 1970-72 as the senior member of a three-man Presidential Council under the rotating-presidency formula that the country adopted to defuse ethnic tensions.

He was deposed again by the Mathieu Kérékou coup of the twenty-sixth of October 1972 and held under house arrest until 1981. He retired from active politics on his release.

He died in Cotonou on the eighth of May 2000, age eighty-three.

He is honored here as the first president of Dahomey-Benin and a founding member of moderate Francophone West African independence.