Sylvanus Olympio

Sylvanus Épiphanio Olympio was born in Kpando, in the German colony of Togoland, on the sixth of September 1902, the son of a wealthy Brazilian-Togolese coffee merchant of the Olympio family. He took his secondary education in Lomé, undergraduate study at the London School of Economics, and worked at the Lomé branch of the United Africa Company through the 1930s and 1940s.

He founded the Committee of Togolese Unity (CUT) in 1941, led the Togolese nationalist movement through the United Nations trusteeship period of the 1950s, and prevailed in the 1958 plebiscite that gave the CUT the political mandate to lead Togo to independence. Togo became independent on the twenty-seventh of April 1960 — the first of the French West African colonies to do so. Olympio became the country's first president.

His brief tenure was marked by sustained economic independence from France: he refused to integrate Togo into the French CFA franc zone, attempted to issue a separate Togolese currency, and pursued direct foreign investment from West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom in preference to continued reliance on French capital. The French government and the French-trained Togolese military establishment regarded these choices with progressive hostility.

In the early morning of the thirteenth of January 1963, soldiers of the French-trained Togolese army — led by Sergeant Étienne Eyadéma (later Gnassingbé Eyadéma) — surrounded the presidential residence in Lomé. Olympio attempted to escape to the United States embassy. He was shot dead in the embassy compound by Eyadéma personally. He was sixty.

This was the first successful coup against an independent African head of state. Eyadéma went on to rule Togo for thirty-eight years until his own death in 2005. His son Faure Gnassingbé succeeded him. The Olympio assassination established the template for the African military coup that recurred in roughly fifty subsequent cases across the continent through the next four decades.

He is honored here as the first president of independent Togo, and the first African head of state to be killed in the office.