Alternately President of Dahomey, the People's Republic of Benin, then the Republic of Benin, Mathieu Kérékou bowed out on October 14, 2015. It is therefore now five years since the one who held the record of longevity at the head of this West African country is no longer. Opportunity to return to his "thousand and one political lives", through this article that I devoted to him in December 2015, the day after his disappearance...
His name was Mathieu Kérékou, but everyone called him "the chameleon". A nickname that appeared in the Beninese political universe on October 26, 1972, when this battalion commander - who later became a general - took power in the former Dahomey. "The branch will not break in the arms of the chameleon", he had then hammered. A profession of faith that will guide his entire political life and that will forge the personality of this man, who remained enigmatic even in death!
Everyone agrees, Mathieu Kérékou will have demonstrated a great capacity for adaptation in the Beninese political backwater that he dominated from head to toe. We recently learned that in fact, “the chameleon” (tchaa, in the waama language) is the exact meaning of his native first name. A whole symbol which also translates the totemic destiny of the native of Kouarfa! “Neither angel nor demon. Just a man, not like the others. Able, well before anyone else, to feel the direction of the wind and to draw up a political weather report, whose forecasts are rarely contradicted”, testifies moreover quite rightly the late Maurice Chabi, former director of publication of the pro-government daily "Ehuzu" - at the height of the revolution -, in his book "Once upon a time there was a chameleon named Kérékou", published in November 2013.
IMPENETRABLE
When, on October 14, 2015, Mathieu Kérékou bid farewell to the world which saw him (officially) born on September 2, 1933 in Kouarfa, a small town not far from Natitingou, in the north of the country, the tribute was unanimous in hailing the actions of a great man, craftsman of national unity and of the democratic process in Benin Republic. And we are still trying to decipher the many lives of the former "great comrade in the fight", who died at 82.
Elusive and impenetrable, Mathieu Kérékou "was also and above all a man of silences and discretion", will say Célestine Zanou, who was his chief of staff from 1997 to 2001. And if everyone went there with their antiphon to salute the memory of the he illustrious deceased is due in particular to the eminent role he played before, during and after the national conference of active forces in February 1990, the founding forum of Benin's democratic renewal. For that alone, and given the current turmoil in African socio-political life, the chameleon fully deserves its laurels.
Certainly, no one has forgotten the tumultuous revolutionary period, with its excesses and deprivations of fundamental freedoms. The stigmata of this dark period are still there, vivid in people's minds. But retrospectively, the entry on the political scene of Mathieu Kérékou, on October 26, 1972, will have at least had the merit of signing the last putsch to date of the former "sick child of Africa", who vegetated in a screaming instability since gaining independence on August 1, 1960.
IN THREE TIMES…
Finally, the one who was called "Zorro" in the army before he took power, because of his vigilante soul, will have led his country in three stages, for around thirty years. In fact, after 17 years of socialism in the style of Marxism-Leninism (1972-1989), the national conference quite naturally led the country into a year-long democratic transition (1990-1991), during which the "chameleon stood above the fray, somehow playing his new role as founding father.
And when, forced by the ballot box, he had to hand over power to a democratically elected but ill Nicephore Soglo, it was with the elegance of duty accomplished and the honors of the grateful people that this man with a caustic humor retired, the head held high, dressed all in white, in his Filaos residence, in Cotonou.
However, Mathieu Kérékou's retirement was short-lived. Just the time of a five-year term provided by Nicephore Soglo, and here is Kérékou again at the head of the Beninese state, brought to the Marina Palace by the ballot box. He will remain there for ten years, the full price of two consecutive five-year terms prescribed by the Constitution, and will definitively return to the presidential apron in 2006.
By taking his leave on October 14, 2015, Mathieu Kérékou leaves to all the testament of an essential icon of the political and democratic reference of Benin.
© Serge Mathias Tomondji
(in Fasozine N°60, November-December 2015)
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
