Félix Éboué

governor general of French Equatorial Africa

Also known as: Adolphe-Félix-Sylvestre Éboué

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Félix Éboué (born Dec. 26, 1884, Cayenne, French Guiana—died May 17, 1944, Cairo, Egypt) was a black colonial administrator who reached the highest level of the French colonial administrative system and played a crucial role in the adherence of French Equatorial Africa to Charles de Gaulle’s Free France in 1940.

Éboué graduated from the École Coloniale, a prestigious school of the colonial administration, in 1908 and was sent to Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), where he spent most of his career. During an extended leave in the early 1920s, Éboué broadened his contacts with leaders in France, including Blaise Diagne, the first African deputy to the French National Assembly. Although Éboué eventually reached the rank of administrator in chief in 1930, his promotions were slow—not because of his colour, he believed, but because of the low status of Africa and its administrators in the French colonial empire.

In 1932 Éboué was appointed secretary-general and later acting governor of Martinique, and finally (1936) he was made a full governor in Guadeloupe, where he introduced many reforms associated with the Popular Front government in France. But he also made enemies there who probably influenced his transfer in July 1938 to Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa. There he became the key figure in rallying to General de Gaulle that strategically located colony as well as all of French Equatorial Africa. In return, de Gaulle named him governor-general over the entire federation and further honoured him in 1944 by holding the Brazzaville Conference (to discuss postwar colonial reforms) in Éboué’s capital. A few months later Éboué died while on leave in Cairo, and in 1949 he became the only black to be buried in France’s Panthéon of heroes in Paris.