Shortly before midnight on August 10, 1960, the famous writer André Malraux stepped onto a balcony in front of a large crowd in Fort-Lamy, the capital of the French colony of Chad. As French minister of culture, he had come as President Charles de Gaulle’s official representative to preside over the ceremonies marking the territory’s independence. While Malraux invoked Chad’s historical role as a launching pad for Free French Forces in the Second World War and the linked destiny of the two nations, the lights suddenly went out. A power shortage had plunged Fort-Lamy into darkness. Someone in Malraux’s entourage scrambled to find a flashlight so he could finish the speech and so François Tombalbaye, Chad’s leader, could read his. With this inauspicious beginning, independent Chad would soon embark on a tragic path leading to decades of violent conflict, foreign interventions, state collapse, and bloody dictatorship.