Félix Éboué

Adolphe Sylvestre Félix Éboué was born on 26 December 1884 in Cayenne, French Guiana, the grandson of enslaved people. He was one of five brothers, the son of a gold prospector and a shopkeeper who raised her sons in the Guianese Creole tradition. His date of birth is sometimes given as 1 January 1884.

Éboué was educated in France and graduated from the prestigious École Coloniale in Paris. In 1908 he entered the colonial service and was posted to Ubangi-Shari, now the Central African Republic. In the early 1920s he built contacts with leaders in France, including Blaise Diagne, the first African deputy in the French National Assembly.

His career rose steadily. In 1932 he became secretary-general and then acting governor of Martinique, and in 1936 he was appointed governor in Guadeloupe, where he introduced reforms associated with France's Popular Front government. He was the first Black Frenchman appointed to a high post in the French colonies.

In 1938–39 he became governor of Chad. After the fall of France in June 1940, when most colonial officials sided with the Vichy regime, Éboué wrote to General Charles de Gaulle offering to keep fighting. On 26 August 1940 he formally declared Chad's allegiance to Free France, a decision that drew other parts of French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon into de Gaulle's camp. Vichy sentenced him to death in absentia.

De Gaulle appointed him Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa in November 1940, and Éboué introduced social reforms and was influential in the Brazzaville Conference on colonial reform in early 1944. He died of a heart attack while on leave in Cairo on 17 May 1944. In 1949 he became the first Black person buried in the Panthéon in Paris. His wife, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, was elected to the French Senate in 1946.