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Above: In exile, 6 Dec 1984: Bokassa poses with seven of his children in front of his Parisian home, the Chââteau d’Hadricourt. Left: Charlemagne Bokassa, one of the emperor’s sons, lived for years in extreme poverty inside the Paris metro, where he was found dead in 2001, aged 31. The news of his death led his mother, Marie-Joell, to commit suicide in her home in Gabon

peared 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. During their trial in Bangui in 1987, Bokassa denied that he had ordered the murder of his adoptive daughter and her newborn son. 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 Dèèvèèavodèè, 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. Apparently, the emperor’s appetite for