The barefoot general

The barefoot general who fought off a coup from his bedroom

When Major General Abou Issa woke at 3am one night in December last year to the sound of a crash outside his three-storey house in Cotonou, Benin, he “didn’t register it as a coup”, says Michael Phillips in The Wall Street Journal. But moments later, the commander of the president’s Republican Guard called to warn him that a top general had been kidnapped by plotters, and that he might be next. His wife stepped on to the balcony and a bullet slammed into the wall behind her. Issa told his colleague: “The assailants are already at my house.” Unable to breach the steel door to the upper floors, the rebels set up a machine gun outside and started firing. Issa, barefoot in a pair of Adidas drawstring shorts, located his AK-47 and fired back, successfully holding them off until the arrival of an elite Quick Reaction Force (QRF) team. Unfortunately, that team was stuffed with plotters, and they bundled Issa into a car headed for the Nigerian border, and possible execution.

Meanwhile in the city, Colonel Dieudonné Tévoédjrè, head of the Republican Guard, had realised he was the “last man standing”. He took 100 loyalists to guard the president’s palace in Chinese-made armoured vehicles. After a street battle, the rebels fled to the national TV station – Tévoédjrè only learned that the QRF operative he had sent to save his friend Issa was a plotter when he saw him reading out their demands live on air. But the insurgents were quickly dislodged from the station with a well-aimed bazooka, and after a short stand at the airport and back at the QRF base, they scattered and the coup was over. On the Nigerian border, Issa’s kidnappers nervously started calling him “big brother”. He forgave them.

🐓🪖 The soldiers who laid siege to Issa’s house were terrified of him. His “dark powers”, they suspected, had allowed him to survive the fierce assault – common beliefs in the country that gave birth to voodoo. “If I had magic powers,” Issa told them, “I wouldn’t be here right now.” Just to be sure, the soldiers cracked two raw chicken eggs on his head and smeared the contents over his body, a traditional method for neutralising the supernatural.

Nigel Johnson-Hill