Reading the newspaper the other day, I came across a story about one of the world's longest reigning rulers, second only to Cuba's Fidel Castro, facing an electoral challenge in which five opposition candidates were trying to deny him re-election. Little chance, I thought cynically, the "election" will again be rigged. And I read on about the events that had marked his 36 years in power.
I remembered how he got there. Forcefully urged by my impatient wife the day before, I had been cleaning out the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet of folders containing dusty, flimsy copies of stories I had written long before coming to the St. Petersburg Times, now almost three decades ago. I probably hadn't seen those folders since.
One was marked Togo, a sliver of a country 32 miles wide at the coast and 365 miles long almost lost on the bottom half of Africa's bulge. And it was the story of one Sylvanus Olympio, whose name few even elder readers may never have heard of. It was also the story of a 27-year-old former French sergeant, Etienne Eyadema, whom you've probably never heard of either even though he is now a general and has ruled Togo since 1967.
Olympio led the way to the independence of Africa. He was a member of the West African Ewe tribe and had a Brazilian great grandfather who'd been a slave trader in neighboring Dahomey. Olympio was a senior official in the big United Africa Company, a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch Unilever global empire. He was fluent in four languages: German, English and French, in addition to Ewe. Togo was a German colony from the late of the 1880s until World War I. Afterward it was French and English and finally just French.
But after Olympio's victory in the 1958 election, despite French rigging, they couldn't deny his insistence on Togo's independence, and Togo got it in 1960. Olympio balanced the small budget and promoted a favorable balance of trade. Other colonies began insisting on independence, too, and one by one began to achieve it. In Africa and the Far East as well. A new era was beginning.
I was in Africa trying to report what was going on. I used to stop in Togo regularly on the day's drive along the old Slave Coast between Nigeria and Ghana, Togo's western neighbor. More than a century earlier, local tribes had sold other Africans to unscrupulous Europeans and Americans who shipped them across the Atlantic jammed into the holds of their ships to be sold into slavery.
Several times I had interviewed President Olympio. Sometimes we would speak in French, other times in English. In January 1963, I had left Togo and was in Ghana when the radio announced there had been a coup in Togo. A day or so later, it reported that Olympio had been killed. It turned out that U.S. Ambassador Leo Poullada had found his body, shot three times, just inside the gate to the chancery. He had been trying to reach what he mistakenly thought was the safety of the tiny embassy.
Finally after a day or so, I was allowed back into Togo, and went looking for the leaders of the coup. And in a tent in the army camp just outside the capital of Lome, I was led to Sgt. Eyadema.
He was one of a few dozen Togolese soldiers who had been released from the French army expecting to be incorporated into the forces of their home countries. But Olympio said he couldn't afford them. He didn't think he needed more than the company or so of soldiers he had. On a Saturday evening, the now-unemployed soldiers suddenly arrested several of his ministers. Just after midnight, Eyadema then led a nine-man commando raid to arrest the president, who, Eyadema said, fired at them from his second-floor bedroom window before jumping down in his bare feet and fleeing.
Eyadema sent for reinforcements and they began searching for Olympio. Just as it was getting light, Eyadema said they found him, wearing only a pair of brown shorts and an undershirt, crouched under the steering wheel of a parked car in adjacent embassy grounds. He had scaled a 6-foot wall.
"I made him get out and told him to get dressed so that we could take him to camp. He tried to flee, and then we fired at him."
"Who fired?" I asked.
"It was I," he said. "I would not have shot him if he hadn't run."
That was his story. It was postcolonial Africa's first military coup.
I went back to Togo several months later for the last time. Togo had a new president, a man who had previously held the job as a French puppet. But the military men and Eyadema held the power. The former Sgt. Etienne Eyadema had become Gen. Gnassingbe Eyadema. When they last tried to hold elections in 1998, he cut short the count of the results and sent in troops to put down his opponents. Amnesty International reported several hundred were killed. Several Western countries cut off aid, and Sunday's elections were held at their urging.
In 1963, Togo had an estimated population of 1.5-million. Today's population is put at 5.2-million. Since the 1980s, per capita income has fallen from $600 a year to $300.
I saw Eyadema one more time. In the 1990s, he flew to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, in a noisy old presidential 707 for a summit conference of the French-speaking states. I went on the press plane of President Jacques Chirac. I couldn't get anywhere near Eyadema, then the president of the organization, who stumbled over the beautiful French that was written for his opening speech.
This has been a historic time in the news. President Bush has been in the Middle East trying to set his road map to peace between Israel and the Palestinians in motion. June 6 was the 59th anniversary of the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy in World War II. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II was the center of a colorful ceremony at Westminster Abbey on the 50th anniversary of her coronation. An international court has been trying to arrest Liberian President Charles Taylor. It was hard to find a mention of poor Togo.
The day after the Togolese elections, several presidential candidates were claiming victory, but the electoral commission announced that with 40 percent of the votes counted, Eyadema had 59 percent. The next day, a Tuesday, the troops came out again to arrest the protesters and Eyadema's major opponent went into hiding. Eyadama had "won" again. If Olympio had lived, I would guess that Togo's fate might have been far different. But aside from its inhabitants, who really cares about a minuscule country on the southern shore of Africa's bulge?
Wilbur G. Landrey is the retired chief correspondent of the Times.
