Background
Born in Soudouré, near the capital, Niamey, Diori was the son of a public health officer in the French colonial administration.
Born in Soudouré, near the capital, Niamey, Diori was the son of a public health officer in the French colonial administration.
From 1923 to 1930 he went to the Niamey Regional School and the Victor Ballot School at Porto Novo in Dahomey, followed by a course at the William Ponty Teacher’s Training College at Dakar, Senegal.
He returned home to become a teacher in 1936 at Niamey and Maradi. In 1938 he left to teach his own Djerma language and Hausa at the French National Overseas School in Paris. He returned in 1946 to become headmaster of the Filingue school. In the same year he was a founder, with Boubou Hama, of the Niger Progressive Party (PPN), the local wing of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, set up in Bamako in October 1946. In November he was elected as PPN candidate to be deputy for Niger to the French National Assembly.
Standing again in the elections of January 1951, he was defeated largely because of his quarrel with Djibo Bakary, which led to a split in the RDA and the setting up of Bakary’s rival Nigérien Democratic Union Party (UDN). He returned to teaching as a director of the Hamani Diori School, reorganising the PPN into a fighting force. In the January 1956 elections, he fought a bitter contest with Bakary and
narrowly defeated him. But Bakary turned the tables in the 1 erritorial Assembly elections of May 1957, when he won 41 seats to 19 for the PPN, though Diori won his own constituency at Zinder. Later he was elected Vice-President (Deputy Speaker) of the French Nation Assembly.
The struggle with Bakary’s party, renamed Sawaba, continued. Diori gradually rallied the chiefs, traditional elements and the Hausa, the largest ethnic group in the country, to his side. His chance came in the de Gaulle referendum of September 28, 1958, when he led the PPN campaign for autonomy within the French Community and won an overwhelming victory by 358,0 to 98,000 votes for Bakary’s UDN, which wanted full independence. Elections followed in December and he capitalised his triumph by winning 54 seats to six and becoming Chairman of the provisional government and later Prime Minister. By October 1959 he was strong enough to ban the opposition, imprisoning many of its leaders, with Bakary going into exile.
Following the lead given by Mali, he led his country to full independence on August 2, 1960, and was unanimously elected President on November 9. But Bakary, living in exile in Socialist Mali and backed by the Arab and militant states, continued to foment unrest. 1 o counter this, he maintained strong links with Houphouet Boigny and his allies in RDA. He was one of the strongest supporters of the Entente Council, which loosely links the like-minded states of Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Volta and Niger, and later of the Afro-Malagasy Joint Organisation (OCAM). In March 1963 he invited all Sahara states to meet and discuss common problems.
Meanwhile, he encouraged contact with the Communist countries and reestablished diplomatic relations with Mali early in 1963. In March 1964 Modibo Keita visited him and promised that he would no longer support the Sawaba rebels. He exposed a plot (probably inspired by Bakary) in
December 1963. Attacks on frontiei posts on the border followed in October 1963. To make an example he ordered that seven captured terrorists be shot in public in Niamey with 23 others sentenced to death.
But the Sawaba refused to give up. On April 13, 1965, a bomb was thrown at him at the Tabasqui mosque in Niamey. Lucky to escape alive, he blamed the rebels and the support they received in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. This incident proved to be the Sawaba’s last real throw; in September 1965 Diori was re-elected President for a further five-year term and in August 1967 he was strong enough to commute the death sentences on the 1963 plotters and, in February 1968, give political amnesty to all political prisoners.