My wife Colette has lead an interesting life and as she tells intriguing tales of her adventures, I listen...because I'm her husband. Recently she began telling another, as we sat in the kitchen she told me the story of two princesses and how she was close friends with one of them.In the mid 80's my wife befriended a mixed African-Vietnamese woman about twelve years her senior and the two quickly became as close as sisters. Her name was Martine Bokassa. Martine and Colette met in Nancy, France worked and traveled together, even shared an apartment for a time. Martine was especially helpful during the birth of Colette's daughter Christine. One day Colette heard a very interesting rumor that her friend was actually the Princess of the Central African Republic.
Colette asked her friend "Are you the Princess?"
Looking shocked, Martine replied, "don't believe everything you hear."
She was very reluctant to discuss it further, but slowly her story emerged.
Her father, Jean-Bedel Bokassa joined the Free French Army in 1939 and took part in both World War II and the Vietnam War in the 1950s, and was decorated several times for his courage, with the Croix de Guerre. In February 195o her father, a sergeant in the French army in Indochina, said goodbye to his two-month-old daughter Martine and her Vietnamese mother, Nguyen Thi Hue and left Vietnam for good.
In 1961, Bokassa resigned from the French army and returned home to what is now Central African Republic. Within five years, Bokassa had taken power in a military coup and soon declared himself president for life.
In November 1970, after years of searching, Bokassa—now President of the remote little Central African Republic and the father of eleven children by his present wife—received word that the South Vietnamese government had found his first family. Martine, a shapely Saigon shopgirl, flew 11,000 miles to Bangui, her father's capital. Though she arrived at 4:30 a.m., a visibly moved Bokassa and thousands of his cheering countrymen were on hand to greet her.
But the daughter was an imposter.
In 1970 the Saigon newspaper Trang Den reported on this story very closely, The real Martine was intrigued with this fairy tale story and read everything she could. Studying newspaper photos she became convinced that the photos of President Bokassa was really her father. She tentatively went to a newspaper man with the story. In early 1971, the Vietnamese newspaper, Saigon Trang Den, revealed the sensational news that "Martine" was not Bokassa's daughter, but a fraud and that the real Martine was still in Vietnam living with her mother.
A few more weeks later, the real Martine arrived in Bangui; this time to no public reception and no media waiting at the airport. Bokassa was angry and accused France of planting a "spy" in his family. He threatened to deport the false Martine, but changed his mind after the French embassy in Bangui intervened, and instead adopted her as his own daughter on his 50th birthday in 1971. The real Martine was now called Martine Kota. She was a bit taller than her adopted sister. And, during something akin to a public auction, Bokassa offered both of them in marriage. Hundreds of young Central African men bid for the two girls. The eventual winners were a doctor and an army officer.
At a big, sumptuous wedding in Palacio de la Renaissance in 1973, which was attended by several heads of state, Martine Kota was married to the doctor, Jean-Bruno Deveavode, and the false Martine ended up with the army officer, Fidel Obrou.
Martine Kota had three children in this marriage; the first born was JB, while the false Martine had one child with her husband.
Three years later, in 1976, Fidel Obrou was executed for an attempted coup against Bokassa. As fate would have it, the false Martine was at the same time in a Bangui hospital giving birth to a son.
Two weeks after the birth, JB's father, the doctor Jean-Bruno Deveavode, killed the newborn with a lethal injection, apparently on the direct orders of the then President for Life, Jean Bedel Bokassa himself.
Then, on the first anniversary of Fidel Obrou's execution, the false Martine disappeared forever during a car ride to the Bangui airport, officially on her way back home to Vietnam. Two of Bokassa's bodyguards were alleged to have strangled her and hid her body somewhere along the road.
After the coup in 1979 that overthrew Bokassa, Martine Kota, JB and his younger brother and sister managed to escape to France. Martine's husband, Jean-Bruno Deveavode, was arrested and executed in 1981 after admitting that he killed the false Martine's child. While in France, Martine Kota and her children were forced into a new and completely different life. Together with her mother, Nguyen Thi Hue, Martine today runs two Vietnamese restaurants in France, one of them on the island of Corsica. And, rather wisely, she refuses to talk about her father. "For my mother, he was a husband; and for me he was a father," is all Martine will volunteer.
Colette lost contact with Martine in the late 80's. I started doing a little research and found Martine's son, Jean-Barthelemy Bokassa has recently published a book "Diamonds of Treason" about his mother's life story and we sent him a note asking to be put in contact with his mother.
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