Bokassa, a former French army officer, launched the coup on New Year's Eve 1965, with the help of Captain Alexandre Banza, after Dacko had built up a gendarmerie under Jean Izamo as a counterweight to the army. Bokassa's men captured Izamo and locked him in a cellar at Camp de Roux. After midnight Dacko, returning to the capital, Bangui, was arrested and forced to resign. Bokassa would rule for 13 years, crowning himself emperor in 1977.
Bokassa, a former French army officer who had served in Indochina and the French colonial forces, moved against his cousin David Dacko's government amid rumors that Dacko intended to replace him as army chief of staff. Troops seized key points in the capital, Bangui, overnight, and by dawn Bokassa announced over the radio that he had taken control to save the nation from chaos and corruption.
What followed was one of the strangest and most brutal regimes in postcolonial African history. Bokassa styled himself first as president, then Marshal, and finally, in 1977, staged a coronation as 'Emperor Bokassa I' that cost an estimated one-third of the impoverished country's annual budget, complete with a diamond-encrusted crown and a golden throne shaped like an eagle.
His rule grew increasingly erratic and violent, marked by the massacre of schoolchildren who had protested against compulsory school uniforms, and by accusations of cannibalism of which he was later acquitted. French paratroopers finally toppled him in 1979, reinstalling Dacko. Bokassa returned from exile in 1986, was tried and sentenced to death, later commuted, and died in 1996—a cautionary tale often cited in discussions of Cold War-era France's entanglement with client dictators in Africa.