69-+-Seg 1.
Afristory production
“The night may be long but the day comes. And that big day, so much desired, now has
arrived …” Olympio
Sylvanus Olympio, the founding father of the independent Republic of Togo, was a gifted
orator. Fluent in 3 languages French, Germany and English and strongly anti french. However,
some people did not like him and his rhetoric, Three years after independence on 13th Jan
1963, they struck.
The attack on the Togolese president’s residence in Lomé began at 11pm; and the assassination
took place the next morning, at 7:15 am, in front of the gates of the US embassy.
Between the attack and the assassination, eight long hours had passed, in which phone
calls were made and orders were given… Eight hours about which the United States and France
know much, yet remain silent, over 50 years on.
Olympio’s death has been documented as the first death during a military coup in Africa.
Witnesses have testified. Documents have been declassified but Will we ever know the truth?
Also, his assassination opened flood gates to countless coups on the continent amounting
to over 200 as well as high-profile political assassinations among which included Thomas
Sankara, Haile Selassie, Abubakar Mustafa Balewa, Sarduna of Sokoto among other leaders
shook Africa.
In this episode of Afristory, we look at the First-ever presidential assassination in Africa
of Sylvanus Épiphanio Olympio why was he assassinated, Who killed him, and what was
the aftermath for Togo and the continent? To answer all this we need to go back in time.
ow it happened
As Ghana neared independence in 1957, Togo a former German colony was being administered
by the British and the French.
In British Togoland, the British held a referendum that would give the people of British Togoland
the option to either remain with Togo or join the soon-to-be-independent country of Ghana.
A majority of the people voted to join with Ghana. The outcome led to a split of the Ewe
people who were the minority in British Togo between the two countries.
For its part France moved its region of Togo towards independence, attempting to install
a puppet regime under the leadership of Nicolas Grunitzky a relative of Olympio from 1945
to 1958.
You see In 1956, Togo had become an autonomous republic within the French Union. The pro-French
Prime Minister Nicolas Grunitzky favoured a model that would grant the country greater
autonomy as a French territory as they deemed Togo not ready for full independence.
The nationalists, in opposition, insisted on nothing less than immediate and full independence.
And so nationalists won the general elections in 1958, compelling the French to sign an
agreement for full independence.
On April 27, 1960, Sylvanus Olympio and His party, the Committee for the Unity of Togo
(CUT) that had struggled hard for the country’s freedom from the French colonial empire officially
declared the independence of the Republic of Togo 80 years after successive German,
British and French domination.
Before and after independence, Olympios wasn't short of enemies. In 1961 there was an unsuccessful
attempt on Olympio's life in which Grunitzky's Togolese Progress Party and the Juvento movement
under Antoine Meatchi were accused, in response Olympio outlawed , centralised power and established
a one-party state under the CUT.
Just after independence, in May 1960, Togo’s first president told Agence France-Presse
(AFP): ‘’I will do my best to ensure my country can thrive without France.’’
Unlike the Guinean Sékou Touré, he did not openly oppose France. In early 1963, Olympio
considered leaving the franc zone (CFA), and creating a Togolese currency backed by…
The Deutsche Mark. Togo, through its balancing policy, risked offering a model of emancipation
to all former French colonies.
Ultimately, according to Paris, Olympio was more dangerous than Sékou. This explains
Foccart’s sneer the day that he welcomed Olympio on the steps of the Élysée Palace.
In 1960 describing Olympio Foccart said ‘’Sylvanus Olympio was not one of our friends,“With
him, my relations were never as cordial as those I had with Nicolas Grunitzky.’’
In addition to the French in 1962 Olympio was faced with a challenge when several hundred
Togolese army veterans were repatriated back to Togo following the demise of the French
colonial empire.
When the soldiers demanded to be part of the newly formed Togolese army. Olympio refused
and even rejected a compromise that would have incorporated just 60 of the most qualified
veterans.
Olympio argued that Togo, small in size and poor in resources, had to develop slowly so
that it would not become dependent on the french.
He saw in their demand, the conniving hands of his former pro-French opponents that were
attempting to destabilize his government.
For him, mercenaries who had fought against freedom fighters had no place in a respectable
army. This disagreement led to the coup in 1963 that left Olympio dead and a civilian
pro-French government in place.
Furthermore, to him having an army was a luxury the country could not afford. He argued that
Togo's shaky economy of which only 7% of the country's 1,500,000 persons had regular jobs
did not permit a large military budget.
Olympios was in fact opposed to the entire idea of having a national military but with
threats from Nkrumah being a concern, he caved in and agreed to a small military of only
250 soldiers.And we shall come back to Nkrumah later in the Episode.
However, The military returnees unhappy with these plans to make them unemployed pleaded
with Olympio but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
Prominent among them were two officers; Emmanuel Bodjollé 35 and Gnassingbé Eyadéma 28 who
had spent time in Indochina and Algeria fighting nationalists on behalf of the french
In 1963 the soldiers struck and launched an assault on Olympio's unguarded residence in
the night.
On Saturday, January 12, at 11pm, 6 rebel soldiers led by Bodjollé himself, attacked
the presidential residence – a villa surrounded by pines, about 150 meters from the Atlantic
Ocean.
A noise outside his gate disturbed Sylvanus and his wife, Dina, who were already in bed.
There was a heated discussion between his 2 guards and up to 10 armed men in combat
fatigues.
As the assailants talked among themselves and then took several minutes to break through
the heavy front door, Olympio sensing danger instructed his wife and other family members
to hide.
He then had time to put on a pair of beige Bermuda shorts and a shirt, rushed downstairs
barefoot, climbed through a window, crossing the garden and climbing the wall and landing
on the other side which happened to be the garden and parking lot of the US embassy.
While there He hid in car
Meanwhile, the armed men enter the house, find Dina Olympio's wife, shoot at her and
fired point-blank into the closets,
According to Dina they asked where her husband was. replying that She didn't know. “He’s
been downstairs for over an hour. I don’t know where he is,’’
Elsewhere in the city, the coup was well underway with the rebel soldiers having everything
under wraps the entire cabinet of ministers under arrest, and the military camp of Tokoin
in rebel soldiers’ hands for hours.
However Olympio the ultimate prize was still missing and until they found him they are
not sure if the coup is successful they began to fear for their lives, worrying whether
Olympio would succeed in turning the tables on them.
The soldiers concluded that the president cannot be far away so they deploy a search
party of four among them was sergeant Étienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma.
The search party scaled the wall and head straight for the car where Olympio is hiding.
They pull him out and, as day breaks, demand that he exit the grounds of the American embassy.
But who gave him away how did the search party know where and which car he was in exactly.
Well At 3:30am, according to the account of his daughter, Sofia, then-US Ambassador Leon
B. Poullada received a phone call at his residence, which was about two miles from his office.
According to Gilchrist Olympio, the son of the president, “At the end of 1964, almost
two years after my father’s death,’’ he says, “I met Poullada in Washington.
He had just left the State Department and was still traumatised. He [talked to] me for
three hours and told me that it was the French ambassador, Henri Mazoyer, who had warned
him that night that a coup was underway and that the president might have taken refuge
[at] his embassy.’’
When Poullada arrived with his vehicle in front of his embassy, he came face to face
with putschists who seemed drunk or high, and they threatened him. After an exchange,
he entered the embassy grounds. Olympio immediately told him what had happened.
The ambassador advised him not to move from the car and to wait until he returned with
keys to open the building.
According to Sofia, Poullada did not open the building because he was afraid that the
coup plotters would ransack it. Returning to his residence
Unwittingly, or so the theory goes, he had called the French ambassador to ask for advice,
not knowing that France was behind the coup and thus had given away the Togolese president’s
location.
At 6:40 am, Poullada called a young American diplomat vice-consul Richard L. Storch, who
was living in a building just across the street from the embassy.
Asking him to keep an eye on what was going on. Storch watched armed men come and go on
the street. At 07:10am, he saw a civilian in shorts and bare feet in the middle of the
coup plotters. At 07:15am, he went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. That’s
when he heard three gunshots at regular intervals. “The shots were too far apart to be fired
against a fleeing man,’’ he said in the report he wrote the next day
The founding father of Togo had been shot dead at the hands of sergeant Étienne Gnassingbé
Eyadéma.
In the days that followed, Sergeant Eyadema boasted to reporters from Le Figaro, Le Monde,
Paris Match, and Time Magazine that he had shot the president with his own hands: “I
shot him because he didn’t want to move.’’
In 1992, he retracted his statement on RFI. Was it really him? In the absence of a direct
witness, we will never know, but the fact is that his claim, made during the first hours
of the coup, brought him prestige in the troop and undoubtedly helped him gain precedence
over older and more senior comrades during the overthrow of Grunitzky in 1967.
After the successful coup d'état, the military junta announced the arrest undisclosed number
of Olympio supporters, including Olympio's son, Benito.
Olympio was buried in his native village of Agoue on January 15. About 2,000 people, attended
the funeral. In the end, we could say that President Sylvanus Olympio’s tampering with
the military hastened his downfall more governments would meet their demise due to the same blunder
chief among is Nkrumah and Haile Selassie.
As is usually the case with most military men, they possess limited skill and knowledge
in running the state. Emmanuel Bodjollé and his 9-member junta committee immediately called
for the return of 3 exiled Togolese political leaders to form a new government.
Of the 3, was ex-Premier Nicolas Grunitzky, brother-in-law of Olympio who had been in
exile in Benin for several years, returned on January 15th and agreed to form a civilian
regime to replace the military junta with Antoine Meatchi, as his deputy.
Well, as Soldiers preferred Meatchi, French intervention favoured the candidacy of Grunitzky.
The selection of Grunitzky after the coup reinstated the pro-French leadership from
the pre-independence era.
During this time the Togolese military tripled in size, largely by recruiting French colonial
army veterans. After implementing a multiparty system by
1966, Grunitzky's cabinet unravelled with members of former president Olympio's party
defecting over acute disagreements arising from the performance of cabinet members in
key posts.
As Popular unrest increased by factions loyal to Olympio's CUT party. These dissenters seized
the national radio and called for public demonstrations. Mass crowds responded to the radio appeal
and listened to addresses made by leading opposition party members.
The military eventually intervened to take back the radio station and quell demonstrations.
The unpopularity of Grunitzky's government had become a liability, for the military leaders
who could not allow the former president's party to assume power, fearing retaliation
for the assassination of Olympio.
Shortly afterwards, on the four-year anniversary of the Olympio assassination, the military
overthrew the Grunitsky's government.
Grunitzky was allowed to leave the country with several close aides. Although elections
were promised by army chief Kleber Dadjo, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who consolidated executive
power and established his own authoritarian government soon broke the promise.
Role of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in the coup In the coup's aftermath, there was a peculiar
involvement of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in Togolese politics at the time.
Ghana was implicated in the coup d’état and assassination, but no evidence was gathered
to support these allegations.
The relationship between Olympio and Nkrumah had been strained for some time. See Olympio
had hopes of uniting the Ewe people in French and British Togoland. However, Nkrumah destroyed
that dream when he courted British Togoland and in 1956, when a referendum was held and
the territory voted for a union with the Gold Coast.
This caused a rift between the two West African leaders with Olympio calling Nkrumah the “Black
Imperialist”. They failed to resolve their differences, blaming failed assassination
attempts on each other and hosting political exiles from the other’s countries.
Commenting on his assassination United States declared itself shocked by the act. The previous
year, Olympio had been “very warmly received,” as the White House statement read following
his murder, John F. Kennedy.
Impact on new African states The response to the actions of a small group
of Togolese soldiers led by Emmanuel Bodjollé and Eyadema is one that might surprise a generation
of Africans raised on a diet of military revolts.
Not only did other African leaders swiftly condemn the coup d’état, but Tanganyika’s
Julius Nyerere also wrote to the UN, calling for the new Togo administration to be left
out in the cold.
A Benin mission, headed by Commerce Minister Paul Garbous, flew to Lome on January 13th
and met with coup leaders to secure "information and to avoid any useless spilling of blood."
Another Benin mission that had gone to Ghana was said to have been promised by Ghanaian
President Kwame Nkrumah that he would not interfere "in any way in the Togo interior
conflict."
The mission issued a statement saying, “After the brutal murder of President Olympio, the
problem of recognition of a successor government has arisen. We urge no recognition of a successor
government until satisfied first that the government did not take part in Olympio’s
murder and second that there is a popularly elected government.”
The Togolese coup happened at a time when African leaders were looking forward to the
formation of a body, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in May that year that would be
a platform to advocate for the interests of the continent.
This coup cast a cloud of doom and raised doubts about the success of the initiative.
However, plans went ahead as planned but the chair that would have been occupied by President
Sylvanus Olympio was left conspicuously empty in the Conference Hall.
It was supposed to be a warning to potential coup-makers that military overthrows and assassinations
would not be tolerated on the continent.
Whereas the African leaders united to send a strong message through the OAU to potential
coup leaders and military men, the precedent set by the Togolese soldiers materialized
into a legacy of endless coup d'etats on the continent.
In the period between 1960 and the 1990s, an average of 25 coup d'etats every decade
took place on the African continent. To be exact, of the 32 countries that signed the
OAU charter in 1963, 26 had experienced military coups by the end of the 90s, most of them
more than once.
In his paper, The negative image of Africa’s military, Kenneth M Grundy puts it this way,
“What seems so pathetic is that there is no evidence that they had any definite plans
in mind for replacing the government they overthrew, or even that they had actually
planned to assassinate the President. Apart from some narrow, short term demands, the
coup was purposeless.”
Unfortunately, we will end this episode on a question that might linger on your mind.
Would things have been different if Olympio maybe just integrated the rebel soldiers?
For a fact we will never know .