The first President of independent Dahomey, he was also one of the first African Presidents to fall victim of the post-independence backlash, when he was deposed after popular demonstrations in 1963. One of the “big three” Dahomeyan politicians who have dominated party politics for the last 25 years.
Background
Maga was born on August 10 or August 19, 1916 to a peasant family in Parakou, northern Dahomey.Maga claimed he was a descendant of the Kingdom of Bourgou's royal family. His Bariba mother and Voltaic father raised him in the Islamic faith.
Education
His education began at Parakou, where his teacher was Emile Derlin Zinsou's father, ollowed by schools in Bohicon and Abomey.[8] Maga moved to Porto Novo to be educated at the Victor Ballot School, where he remained for three years. During his subsequent schooling at the Ponty Normal School in Dakar, Maga became friends with Hamani Diori, the future president of Niger.
Career
In his twenties Maga converted to Roman Catholicism, which, according to journalist Ronald Matthews, "was not so common for a northerner". He became a teacher at Natitingou in 1935.He returned to Dahomey to teach in Natitingou where in 1945 after eight years’ service he was appointed headmaster of the school.
In 1947 he was elected as an independent for Dahomey’s General Council and in 1948 was elected to the Grand Council of the AOF (French West Africa). In the same year he became secretary-general of the Ethnic Group of the North formed in that year, and in 1951 he was chosen (with Apithy) as Dahomey’s representative at the French National Assembly in Paris. In 1952 he became Vice-President of Dahomey’s territorial assembly on the ticket of a new political party the Dahomey Democratic Movement (MDD).
In Paris he joined the Indépendants D’Outremer (IOM), and, from November 1957 to May 1958, was Secretary of State for Labour in the French government of Felix Gaillard (this he considered a prestige point over his co deputy Apithy, who never held a miniserial post in France). In 1958 he was attached to President Senghor’s federal¬ist grouping, but after elections in 1959, he had the chance to become the head of government, and acquiesced in the decision earlier that year of Apithy to take Dahomey out of the Mali Federation.
He had been Labour Minister in the Apithy government but it was his switch of alliances from Apithy to Ahomad-egbe that enabled him to emerge as Prime Minister in May 1959. In June that year he took Dahomey into President Houphouet Boigny’s Entente Council and attached his own party to the RDA. With the dissolution of Ahomadegbe’s UDD in August 1959, Maga presided over a single-party state, but the old regional strife continued under the surface. In 1961 Maga came down hard on Ahomadegbe who was jailed for plotting against the state.
At the same time he was building trouble for himself by combining an inability to solve Dahomey’s economic and financial problems (arising in part from the top-heavy costly civil service), and a wasteful extravagant life-style. The opulent Hollywood-Egyptian presidential palace he built in Cotonou is still known as “Maga’s folly”. Although he always claimed the money for it came from outside sources (it was reputed to have cost $3m), it stood as a monument to conspicuous consumption ill-placed at a time when Dahomey’s budget was plunging into ever-increasing deficit, which involved humiliating French subsidies. Maga also enjoyed overseas travel, so it was ironically suitable that the demonstrations which eventually brought his overthrow in October 1963 should have occurred when he was on an extended tour of the Far East.
The movement which overthrew Maga began with an obscure conflict over a deputy involved in a murder case, which escalated into a general protest against the regime, beginning in Porto Novo and spreading to Cotonou and involving especially students and trade unions.
On October 28 the army commander General Soglo made an announcement outside trade union headquarters that he was taking power. He set up an interim triumvirate of the three political leaders (Maga, Ahomadegbe, Apithy) hut it was clear that Maga’s rule was finished and in December 1963 he was placed under house arrest at Bohicon for “embezzlement and bad administration of public funds”.
After Apithy became President and Ahomadegbe Premier in January, there was a reaction from the north in the form of riots at Parakou. Northerners felt that the new regime was southern dominated. It was probably fear of offending the north that led to the abandonment of any attempt to prose¬cute Maga. In September 1965 Maga’s sister was acquitted of charges connected with the Parakou riots, and in November that year he was released on {he orders of Ahomadegbe, shortly before Soglo’s second coup.
For the next five years Maga was in exile in Paris, staying in an apartment belonging to the Ivory Coast President in the Avenue Macmahon. The effective boycott of the 1968 elections in the north was a testament to his continued Political support from the north, a point made even more dramatically after the 1970 elections. These were called off by the military directorate then in power following southern charges of election n8ging by Maga supporters. During the elections there had been an exodus of southerners working in the north, and the pro-Maga vote had been so well mobilised that he stood a good chance of narrowly winning the election. Thus when it was cancelled there was deep Pievance in the north, and an Assembly of the North threatened secession, there were even reports of northern soldiers forming a secessionist “army of the north”. But Maga chose the constitutional path and eventually emerged as the first President of the new three-man rotating Presidential Council. Back in office he showed all his old talents for compromise as well as all his old extravagance and love of foreign travel. His restoration of his “palace” for about £100,000 was the measure of how much he had learnt from his political experiences.
His two years as head of the Presidential Council fortunately coincided with a period of economic prosperity, owing principally to vastly increased smuggling to and from war-time Nigeria. The trade unions were quiescent, and a student agitation in November 1971 was suppressed and the students’ union banned. The chief headache of his last months was the army crisis which culminated in the attempt on the life of Colonel de Souza, the army chief. There were rumours that this was in fact the beginnings of a northern-inspired coup designed to keep Maga in power, but this seems doubtful. At all events, he became one of the very few African Presidents to have voluntarily surrendered the seals of office, on May 7, 1972, when he became merely a member of the Presidential Council. After the coup of October 26 he was arrested, and with the rest of the government taken to the military camp at Parakou.
Politics
He has retained the support of all the varied ethnic groups of northern Dahomey, the most underprivileged part of the country, despite his expenditure on a vast palace in Cotonou and the lack of regard the southern intelligentsia show for him. Possibly the knowledge of the contempt of the southerners has been a political asset. If he has some-times seemed easy to push around, this, too, he has been able to use to political advantage. The French preferred him because he was only too willing to do their bidding, which has earned him a “neo-colonial puppet” reputation. But he has undeniable authority in the north.
As one of the most qualified northern Dahomeyans, he was expected to play an important role in politics, although hitherto his main interest had been the scout movement
Connections
In 1939, he married a fellow Christian, a nurse by profession, and the daughter of a prominent Brazilian of Fon origins from Ouidah. Marriages between northern and southern Dahomeyans were uncommon at the time.