Alphonse Massamba-Débat
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Alphonse Massamba-Débat (February 11, 1921 – March 25, 1977) was a political figure of the Republic of the Congo who led the country from 1963 until 1968 in a one-party system.
Biography edit
Alphonse Massamba-Debat was born in Nkolo, French Equatorial Africa in 1921 to a Bakongo family. He attended missionary school and primary schooling at the Boko Regional School. He then received training as a teacher at the Edouard Renard school in Brazzaville. By the age of 13, he was a teacher and went to teach in Chad from 1945 to 1948. In 1940, he joined the anti-colonial Chadian Progressive Party, and he joined the Congolese Progressive Party upon returning to the French Congo in 1947.
By 1957, Massamba-Débat had joined Fulbert Youlou's Democratic Union for the Defense of African Interests party (UDDIA), stopped teaching and became the Minister of Education and two years later he was elected to national assembly. In 1959, he was made president of the assembly and remained in power, later serving as minister of state and of planning but he began to criticize the administration of Congo's first president, Fulbert Youlou, whom many perceived to be overly reliant on France.
After Youlou was overthrown in a coup d'etat in 1963, Massamba-Debat became the new President, and he attempted to implement Marxist socialism in the Republic of the Congo. Massamba-Debat aligned towards the Soviet Union and China and allowed for communist guerrillas to operate out of his country, and he formed popular militia units in 1966 with help from Cuban soldiers.
The ideology of his regime was on the left and the Congo was closing in on countries of a socialist nature, especially Cuba and China, while moving away from capitalist countries. Che Guevara comes to meet Massamba-Débat in January 1965. Diplomatic relations were severed with the United States. Relations are strained with the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose political path is increasingly influenced by mobutist ambitions. Consequently, the Tshombe government expels the citizens of Congo-Brazzaville who live in the former Belgian Congo.
The culmination of this atmosphere of "terror" is the kidnapping and murder in February 1965 of three judicial personalities whose positions are not to the liking of the regime, the president of the Supreme Court Joseph Pouabou, the prosecutor Lazare Matsocota and the director of the Congolese Information Agency Anselme Massoueme to whom their degree of participation cannot be corroborated.
From June to July 1966, Massamba-Debat's loyal soldiers and the Tropas put down an uprising by the military after Massamba-Debat attempted to centralize the military, and Massamba-Debat gave in to some of the coup leaders' demands in order to retain power. However, Massamba-Debat was overthrown in a military coup led by Marien Ngouabi in 1968.
Following the bloodless coup of 1968 Massamba-Débat was forced to leave politics and Massamba-Débat returned to his home town. A few hours after Ngouabi's assassination Massamba-Débat was placed under arrest. When Ngouabi was murdered in 1977, many people were arrested and tried for plotting the assassination, including Massamba-Débat. Massamba-Débat was executed on the night of March 25, 1977, by firing squad.