IMPERIAL COURT OF BERENGO

At the first intersection, an end-of-life fire stands ahead of the entrance of this ancient sanctuary, while huge Chinese bamboo montent over the other side. An imposing portal in rusty iron, vestiges of past splendour, serves as the main access. By this entry would enter all guests, but only the family of Bokassa had the right to borrow it. A first buffer zone, before crossing the walls of the Imperial Court, is still inhabited by the military, the court having been recycled into training and training centres for young recruits.
The roads are still there, the lights too, but the light bulbs like tracing on the ground have been missing for so long that the time seems to have stopped in Bérengo. Accompanied by the Chief of the military, the visitor finally enters the holy saints, where he suddenly finds himself almost nose with the immense metal statue of Bokassa. She has remained before her grave since it was removed from her base, as if she had been thrown out of the sky. Behind the statue, a huge white stele is dotted with some colorful plastic flowers. Here we are in the "lounge", symbolizing the entrance of the grave of Bokassa, whose skeleton is actually in the "chamber", after a long maze of underground. On the right, the ruins of the first house he built being a young soldier still standing, but there remains only the facade. On the left, the entrance of the large imperial courtyard is surmounted by a sun in rusty metal. In the interior, the Treasury building was accessible only by an underground, one of the secret tracks of which the entire basement is full. The former Council of Ministers, a few tens of metres, was also connected to underground for a failure in the event of force majeure. But the chances of getting one day the plans are minimal, Bokassa having executed most of the masters of work…

The first house, in the form of a boat and nicknamed the boat Saint-Sylvester - now inhabited by the military - housed his second wife. Just across the way, the old rotting wooden chalet was called Villa Mbata: Bokassa alone slept here. The most majestic house is its first woman, Catherine, who is still at the bottom of the courtyard, facing an Olympic swimming pool now filled with a brackish swamp, in which the metal reinforcement of a brinquebalant slide is poured. The splendeurs have been plundered, but the military are always inclined to evoke, with emotion, the memory of the good of yesteryear.