Marien Ngouabi

Marien Ngouabi was born in Ombélé, in the Owando region of French Equatorial Africa (the Congo Brazzaville), on the thirty-first of December 1938. He took his early education at Saint-Cyr — the French military academy — graduating in 1962 with a commission as second lieutenant in the French Army. He returned to Congo-Brazzaville after independence (which had been granted on the fifteenth of August 1960 under Fulbert Youlou).

He served in the Congolese armed forces through the early 1960s under successive presidents Fulbert Youlou and Alphonse Massamba-Débat. He led the army faction that brought down Massamba-Débat in the coup of the thirty-first of July 1968 and took the presidency on the first of January 1969.

He renamed the country the People's Republic of the Congo on the thirty-first of December 1969 — the first openly Marxist-Leninist state in continental Africa — and the new ruling Congolese Labour Party was the only legal political organization for the remainder of his rule. He nationalized the country's oil sector under the Société Nationale des Pétroles du Congo, established close diplomatic and military relationships with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China, and supported the MPLA of Angola (under Agostinho Neto, also placed in this archive) through the Angolan independence war.

He survived several coup attempts through the early and mid-1970s. On the eighteenth of March 1977 he was killed in his office at the People's Palace in Brazzaville by a four-man military assassination team led by Captain Barthélémy Kikadidi. He was thirty-eight.

The principal Brazzaville university (Université Marien Ngouabi) and the city's central airport bear his name.

He is honored here as the Marxist-Leninist president of Brazzaville Congo whose assassination ended an eight-year experiment in continental African Marxism.