[The Conversation Africa] On the night of 13 January 1963, Togo's President Sylvanus Olympio was shot dead by rebels in the first military coup staged in Africa. A long list, as shown below, was to come. From the 1960s to the end of the millennium, there were an average of four military coups a year on the continent. By the end of the 1990s this phenomenon seemed to have faded away.
