AFRICA
55 STATES, MANY HIGH-PROFILE ASSASSINATIONS
(June 6, 2026)
Public life, we know, is highly dangerous: it isn’t uncommon for those who wield power to be exposed to attacks and conspiracies where their lives are risked or lost.
A plot, the hand of a madman, or a random accident can cut a leader’s existence
short: we all studied at school that on March 15, 44 BC, as he came into the Senate, Gaius Julius Caesar received 23 stabs wounds, several of them fatal.
Even in the contemporary era, there’s no shortage of high-profile assassinations that sometimes alter the history of the countries where they take place.
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IN THE WORLD
LINCOLN, KENNEDY, AND THE OTHERS
In the US, for instance, a total of four Presidents out of 45 lost their lives:
Abraham Lincoln was shot while at the theater on the very evening of the signing of the agreements ending the American Civil War (1865);
James Garfield was killed just a few months after taking office (1881), while an anarchist took out William McKinley in September 1901.
The most famous crime, however, is that of November 22, 1963, in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy lost his life.
While traveling in an open-top car along the main street of Dallas, Texas, he was struck by gunfire.
Death came one hour later: subsequent investigations have failed to clarify who ordered and executed the murder that marked the modern history of this country.
In the 1960s, Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Francis Kennedy (1968) also fell victim to killers, who were perhaps hired hitmen.
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YITZHAK RABIN
Yigal Amir, a member of the Israeli extreme right, is the man who, on November 4, 1995, cut short the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—guilty, in his eyes, of having signed the 1993 Oslo Accords to end the conflict with the Palestinians.
According to him and others who backed him, those accords handed over West Bank territories to a future state of Palestine: those who succeeded him in office, Shimon Peres, but especially Benjamin Netanyahu, would render that agreement a dead letter, laying the groundwork for the conflicts of our day.
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GANDHI MOTHER AND SON
The contemporary history of India is marked by several political murders, starting with the one (January 30, 1948) in which M. K. Gandhi perished.
In 1984, Indira, and seven years later her son Rajiv, also fell victim to killers:
Mrs. Gandhi was deemed guilty of having ordered the assault on the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, which cost many lives;
Her son, who succeeded her, paid for the support given to the government of Sri Lanka, which was engaged in an atrocious internal war against Tamil separatists.
She was killed by a bodyguard; he was killed while accepting a floral garland packed with TNT from a female suicide bomber during the 1991 federal election campaign.
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IN EUROPE
In Europe, political assassinations are relatively rare:
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SPENCER PERCEVAL
In UK, since the office of Prime Minister has existed (1730), only Spencer Perceval, a Tory, was shot dead by a man with whom he was in a dispute.
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CARRERO BLANCO
In Spanish history, there is no shortage of political crimes.
At the end of the 19th century, Premier Cánovas del Castillo was sent to the next world by an anarchist.
The most sensational event occurred in December 1973 when Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, head of government at the twilight of the Franco regime, was blown up in his car packed with explosives.
The perpetrators of the attack were militants of ETA, who were fighting for the independence of the Basque Country and against the Caudillo Francisco Franco.
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IN ITALY
In Italy, both in the pre-fascist and republican eras, no premier has died violently: Camillo Benso di Cavour, Agostino Depretis, and Giuseppe Zanardelli passed away while in office, but their deaths were due to natural causes.
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KING UMBERTO I
However, in the era when anarchists were eliminating heads of state or government, Umberto I of Savoy, King of Italy, also fell victim to the gun of Gaetano Bresci (Monza, July 29, 1900).
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THE POPES
Across the Tiber, modern-day Popes have all passed away due to illness: some have raised hypotheses of a lethal conspiracy regarding the sudden demise of John Paul I, Card. Albino Luciani (September 28, 1978), after just 33 days of pontificate, but the Holy See has always denied it.
In the past, however, when supreme pontiffs were far more powerful, poison often opened the way to the election of a new Head of the Catholic Church.
Thus, it is said that the life of Alexander VI, Card. Rodrigo Borgia, was cut short by mushrooms eaten by the Pope during a dinner offered to him by a cardinal (August 1503).
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AFRICA
The contemporary history of post-colonial Africa is, by contrast, riddled with a multitude of dramatic events: more than 200 coups d’état and over twenty premiers and presidents slaughtered, sometimes barbarically.
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QUARTERED ALIVE
On April 12, 1980, for example, in Monrovia, William Tolbert, president of Liberia, was quartered alive in his bed by Samuel Doe, who wanted power and wealth at all costs: in 1990, Doe himself would die tortured by Prince Johnson, who wanted to know where he had hidden the diamonds before eliminating him.
Liberia, independent since the 19th century, as told by R. Kapuscinski, had always been in the hands of the descendants of former slaves from the United States who were brought back to Africa by a philanthropic society.
Once they arrived in the territory that would give life to the new state, they reproduced the exact same mechanisms of dominance they had experienced in the US: thus, they enslaved the locals, creating an oligarchy that effectively controlled everything for decades.
Doe, who was part of the army, was one of those who suffered the harassment of these colonists; so, when he got the chance, he vented all his accumulated rage on Tolbert, who lived in the most blatant luxury.
The new regime, however, ended up falling into the most ferocious despotism, and in the end, a bloodbath would tear this West African country apart for over a decade.
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IMPRISONED AND MALTREATED
The circumstances surrounding the deaths of Haile Selassie and Grégoire Kayibanda remain unclear.
The first was Negus Negesti of Ethiopia until September 12, 1974, when a group of officers—who formed the Derg, a kind of military junta—seized power, locking the elderly monarch in prison.
About a year later, his death was announced: rumors circulated persistently that the deposed monarch, in his day the holder of almost absolute power, died of deprivation or mistreatment by his jailers.
The second was the first President of independent Rwanda: on July 5, 1973, a coup d’état overthrew him. Kayibanda was also imprisoned and accused of various crimes. He died in 1976: in this case too, there was talk of mistreatment inflicted upon him by the country’s new leaders.
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DISSOLVED
We just spoke other times of the sad story of Patrice E. Lumumba, appointed prime minister of Congo-Kinshasa on June 23, 1960: after just a few months of government, a putsch removed him from power (September 14 of the same year).
Lumumba was placed under house arrest, but one day he escaped from his home to take refuge in the east of the country, where he had his political stronghold.
The Congo was being torn apart by the secessionist war unleashed by Katanga, which wanted to separate from the rest of the former Belgian colony.
In December, Lumumba was arrested and handed over to Katangese mercenaries who, after terribles tortures, executed him by firing squad on January 17, 1961: of his body, only two fingers and a tooth remained; the rest was dissolved in acid.
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LETHAL PUTSCHES
Several coups d’état carried out immediately after independence proved lethal for the deposed leaders.
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SYLVANUS OLYMPIO
On January 13, 1963, the Togolese armed forces rose up against the President of the Republic, Sylvanus Olympio. Caught by surprise, he attempted to take refuge in the US embassy; before he could enter, however, he was struck by several gunshots that killed him.
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FRANÇOIS NGARTA TOMBALBAYE
On April 15, 1975, a coup in Chad ended the life of François Ngarta Tombalbayes, the country’s first president;
After nearly 15 years of a strongman regime, the population welcomed his end with celebrations.
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MARIEN NGOUABI
On March 17, 1977, Col. Marien Ngouabi fell victim to a conspiracy. The military officer, who had been calling the shots in Congo-Brazzaville since 1968, fell victim yet again to a coup, which would soon be followed by another (February 5, 1979).
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JOAO BERNARDO VIEIRA
Joao Bernardo Vieira, known as Nino, made a name for himself during Guinea-Bissau’s liberation struggle against Portugal.
Obtained independence, he became a top leader of the country: President since 1980, on May 7, 1998, he was overthrown by a military uprising.
Years later he returned to power, but in March 2009 he was killed during another insurrection.
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On August 4, 1983, in Upper Volta, yet another military pronouncement took place: within the new regime, the figure of Thomas Sankara emerged, who changed the name of the country to Burkina Faso. During his four years of leadership, he denounced the interference of major powers in Africa and the policies of the International Monetary Fund, which, in his view, starved poor countries. Sankara was liked by many, especially abroad, but within the country, the prisons were full of political detainees. On October 15, 1987, a new coup occurred: Blaise Compaoré, the number two of the junta, overthrew and killed the leader. *** It’s still not clear who, on the night of April 6, 1994, launched a missile that destroyed the plane landing at Kanombe, the airport of Kigali. Traveling with him was his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira: there were no survivors. Their deaths triggered an orgy of violence that would mark the history of the African Great Lakes region for years. *** Not even the five African countries bordering the Mediterranean escape the list of those where a leader perished at the hands of a killer. *** Anwar al Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as President of Egypt after Nasser was struck down by a heart attack in September 1970. During the eleven years of his regime, the Yom Kippur War (1973) was fought, in which Israeli armed forces were caught by surprise in both the Sinai and the Golan by the simultaneous attack of Egyptians and Syrians. Five years later, Sadat flew to Tel Aviv and spoke of peace to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and the following year signed the Camp David Accords alongside Premier Menachem Begin. On October 6, 1981, while watching the military parade commemorating the 1973 war, a group of officers killed him. *** In Algeria, following independence from France (1962), power had always been held by the National Liberation Front (FLN): on June 19, 1965, the military deposed Ahmed Ben Bella, but the general political framework did not change until the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) emerged. The FLN wouldn’t stand for it: on January 2, 1992, President Chadli Bendjedid declared that there would be no second round, imposed martial law, and dissolved the FIS: this self-coup thus began an internal war that lasted for about a decade. During a public demonstration, Mohamed Boudiaf, a hero of the anti-French liberation war who had been appointed President of the Republic, fell victim to an assassination (1992). *** The events we told here are just some of the dramatic episodes that have marked the history of much of Africa. We could added many other names to the list of the fallen, such as that of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, the uncontested leader of Libya for forty-two years, or that of Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, the second President of Somalia, killed on October 15, 1969, shortly before Mohammed Siad Barre rose to power via a coup d’état. Not all the individuals we evoked are heroes; some, in fact, pursued a deplorable policy, such as the one practiced in South Africa by the white Boers, who for decades imposed oppressive and discriminatory laws on the black majority. Many of the fallen were dictators in their countries who concentrated immense power and boundless fortunes in their own hands. PIER LUIGI GIACOMONIMYSTERIES
On board was Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, who had signed an agreement in Arusha, Tanzania, with the Patriotic Front (RPF).ARAB AFRICA
ANWAR AL SADAT
MOHAMMED BOUDIAF
On December 26, 1991, the first round of legislative elections was held, and 188 FIS candidates won seats, laying the groundwork for a resounding victory.
Among the dead, there is also an Afrikaner, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa during the Apartheid era, who was killed while in Parliament (September 6, 1966).
Some, however, deserve to stand in a hypothetical gallery of humanity’s benefactors, both for the ideas they championed and for the benefits they brought to their people of origin.Related Posts:
