Felix Eboue

Felix Eboue was a Black administrator from Cayenne who rose through the French colonial service to become governor of Chad. In August 1940 he brought Chad over to Charles de Gaulle's Free French, a decisive early move that gave the Free French a territorial base in Africa, and he was made governor-general of French Equatorial Africa. He promoted a policy of respecting African institutions within the colonial framework, a stance later read both as reformist and as a defense of indirect colonial rule. He died in Cairo in 1944 and was later honoured with burial in the Paris Pantheon.