On October 28, 1963 Colonel Christophe Soglo, chief of staff of Dahomey's 800-man army, took control of the country to halt an escalating crisis he framed as preventing civil war, ending the presidency of Hubert Maga, independent Dahomey's first head of state. A general protest movement had grown out of an obscure affair involving a deputy in a murder case and swollen into strikes by students and trade unions against the regime's opulence, austerity wages, and one-party measures, peaking while Maga was returning from an extended foreign tour. Soglo dismissed the cabinet, dissolved the Assembly, suspended the constitution, banned demonstrations, and had Maga sign his resignation the same day, initially retaining Maga, Sourou Migan Apithy, and Justin Ahomadegbe Tometin as ministers of state in a provisional government.
In early December Soglo blamed Maga for an alleged assassination plot; Maga resigned his post on December 4 and days later was placed under house arrest with four former cabinet members, later convicted of corruption after the conspiracy charge was dropped. Released after a March 1964 retrial, he went into exile. It was the first of Dahomey's six coups between 1963 and 1972.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Target identified in Coup Atlas research: President Hubert Maga, forced to sign his resignation on October 28, 1963; briefly kept as a minister of state, he was placed under house arrest in December 1963, held through trial proceedings, released after a March 1964 retrial, and went into exile.
RESEARCHED NAME
Key figures
Christophe Soglo (colonel, army chief of staff, coup leader and provisional government chairman)
Hubert Maga (deposed first president)
Sourou Migan Apithy (vice president, made minister of state, president from January 1964)
Justin Ahomadegbe Tometin (opposition leader, made minister of state)
The trade union movement and student protesters (drivers of the October strikes)
Sources
On October 28 chief of staff of the 800-man Dahomeyan Army Christophe Soglo took control of the country to prevent a civil war, dismissed the cabinet, dissolved the Assembly, suspended the constitution, banned demonstrations, and after having Maga sign his resignation the same day gave Maga, Apithy, and Ahomadegbe Tometin the powers of the Ministry of State; the strikes ended the next day.
In early December Soglo discovered an alleged plot to assassinate him and blamed Maga, who resigned his post on December 4; a few days later Maga was placed under house arrest along with four former cabinet members, and at the official inquiry the conspiracy charge was dropped but Maga was found guilty of corruption, being released after a March 1964 retrial, after which he went into exile in Paris.
SOURCE REVIEWEDWikipedia, Hubert Maga (via the 1963 coup account)open source ↗
A contemporary biographical account records that the movement which overthrew Maga began with an obscure conflict over a deputy involved in a murder case, escalating into a general protest beginning in Porto-Novo and spreading to Cotonou, involving especially students and trade unions, while Maga was on an extended tour of the Far East; on October 28 the army commander announced outside trade union headquarters that he was taking power.
Soglo, a decorated veteran of the French army who became Dahomey's army chief of staff at independence, had previously declared loyalty to Maga's government; after reorganizing the government he gave up power on 25 January 1964, allowing Sourou Migan Apithy to become president, before overthrowing that government too on 27 November 1965.
Fate sequencing: the dataset's house arrest occurred in December 1963, weeks after the October 28 deposition, following the alleged anti-Soglo plot; on the day of the coup itself Maga was unharmed and even retained in the provisional government. Accounts of Maga's release and exile vary in detail: one account has him released after the March 1964 retrial and moving to Paris, another has him released in 1965 and taking refuge in Togo before Paris; both versions are noted rather than reconciled. Arc links: Soglo's second coup of November 27, 1965 and the 1972 Kerekou coup that ended the era both descend from this event.
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Hubert Maga, forced to sign his resignation on October 28, 1963; briefly kept as a minister of state, he was placed under house arrest in December 1963, held through trial proceedings, released after a March 1964 retrial, and went into exile..
Baseline coding: Incumbent executive removed from power. Recorded leader fate: deposed; placed under house arrest. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset, v2.2.2
Peyton, Buddy, Joseph Bajjalieh, Michael Martin, and Andrea Gerald. 2026. Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. V.2.2.2. February 17. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. doi: 10.13012/B2IDB-9651987_V10
“Dahomey’s Army Chief Unseats Day-Old Regime,” October 29, 1963
“One Million Votes in Dahomey,” January 20, 1964
“Fatal to Governments,” by Alfred Friendly Jr., December 19, 1967
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →