Gnassingbe Eyadema
, 69, who died of a heart attack on Saturday [Feb. 5, 2005], came to power himself in a
military coup and led his tiny, impoverished country - just over two-thirds the size of
Scotland - for 38 years, making him the world’s longest-serving ruler after
Cuba’s
Fidel Castro.
He was one of the last of Africa’s so-called "Big Men". A general when he died, he was a sergeant when he came to power after the assassination of the country’s democratically elected president, Sylvanus Olympio.
Eyadema ruled with a rod of iron through the military, which he kept loyal through a system of patronage. His regime has been compared to that of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in terms of its brutality, the repression of suspected dissidents and the terrorising of the country’s five million people, most of whom are illiterate or semi-literate peasants surviving through subsistence agriculture. Torture and extra-judicial killings were common under Eyadema, and an estimated one million Togolese have left the country since he came to power in 1967.
