Emperor's child

  To the children and grandchildren, this was a time of fear. They all remember when screaming soldiers threatened to execute them. They remember the days when they were hiding inside the Ivorian embassy in Bangui, and the flight out of their homeland. For JB, these were days of utter horror, and he was unable to speak for over a year after the event.

They stayed in Côte d'lvoire for some time, until, during the 1980s, the overthrown emperor and his family moved to France, and their own private castle west of Paris, the Chateau Hardricourt.

"My mother and I only stayed one year in the castle," says JB, "then we moved on to Nancy, but we did visit my grandfather at Christmas and every holiday."

Meanwhile, the new government in Bangui sentenced the emperor to death in his absence. But to the surprise of the whole world, Bokassa suddenly decided in 1986 to return on his own, only to be arrested immediately at the Bangui airport, jailed and sentenced to deadi.

The death penalty was, however, commuted to life imprisonment, but in 1993 he was amnestied and released. He then returned to his home village and the ruins of his presidential palace.

Three years later, Bokassa died of a heart attack. During the evening of his life, he proclaimed himself the "13th apostle" of Jesus Christ and talked about secret meetings with the Pope.

Says JB: "He just wanted to return home and die, but it was the French who tricked him onto that plane."

When I met JB in Paris in December 2007, it was the first time in many years that any member of the Bokassa family had spoken with a journalist.

"My mother protected me from the press when I was young," he says. "We stayed away from the horror stories about grandfather, it is only now, as a grown-up, that I can handle the past."

He continues: "The French have reacted very positively to my book, lots of people have come up to me and said that they had no idea what really happened in Central African Republic during my grandfadier's rule."

JB is not the first Bokassa to write a book - his grandfather wrote one titled Ma Verite (MyTruth) in 1985 about his business and relations with President Valery Giscard dv Estaing, but the book was immediately banned by the French authorities.

The two other Bokassas who have had successes as writers are both daughters of die emperor - Marie Ange "Kiki" Bokassa, who has published books for children and art books in her (other) home country, Lebanon; and Marie Yokowo Bokassa, who was born in Angola, but is now living in the USA where she has written several highly-recommended poetry books, translated into English and French. But none of them have mentioned anything about their father or their personal lives. "What caused me to write was my mother Martine, and the book is really about her life," explains JB.

Martine Bokassas life is an adventure worthy of a movie-script. When Jean Bedel Bokassa was a young officer in the French army and the French Foreign Legion in 1953, he took part in the Vietnam War, at the time French Indochina. It was there he met and married a young Vietnamese woman called Nguyen Thi Hue, who was to give him a daughter.

Pic 1, 2 and 3 : Princesse Marie-Ang Bokassa, emporor Bokassa's daughter.