Bokassa did not build a palace so much as a small private state. At Berengo, his home village, he laid out an airport, separate residences for himself and for Empress Catherine, individual apartments for his advisors, and lodgings for his ministers. The compound was meant to declare that Central Africa, one of the poorest nations on Earth, had produced a sovereign to rival Europe's. For the coronation he commissioned a throne shaped as a giant golden eagle, wings spread, and robes and regalia copied from Napoleon's imperial wardrobe. The total bill came to roughly $25 million, close to a quarter of the country's annual budget, much of it underwritten by France. It was theater on a national scale, paid for by a population that mostly went without. The grandeur was real, and so was the hunger beyond the gates.

The reign ended in blood. In early 1979, Bokassa ordered every student in the country to buy uniforms made by a company tied to his family. Many families could not afford them, and when the students refused, protests spread through the capital until the schools and the police were, as one account put it, practically at war. That April, around a hundred schoolchildren and young people were arrested and beaten to death at Ngaragba Prison in Bangui. Survivors reported that the emperor himself took part, striking children with his cane. The killings, remembered as the Bangui Children's Massacre, turned the world against him; foreign governments cut their aid. On 20 September 1979, French paratroopers swept in under Operation Barracuda and seized Berengo while Bokassa was abroad. The empire was finished. These were real children, with names and families, and their deaths are why this palace is remembered at all.

Bokassa stunned everyone by returning from exile in 1986, expecting a welcome. Instead he was put on trial for murder, treason, and worse, convicted, imprisoned, and eventually released. He died in 1996 and was buried at Berengo, the seat of his vanished empire. The tomb is no grand mausoleum. It is a low slab faced with ordinary bathroom tiles, sheltered by a few concrete pillars and a sheet of corrugated steel, the resting place of a man who once crowned himself in diamonds and gold. Visitors who reach the site describe a strange quiet, the ruins of a stage set returning to forest, the ambitions of an emperor reduced to weeds pushing up through cracked stone. Whatever else he was, Bokassa belonged to this village, and to this village he came back.

Berengo never stayed empty for long. In 2013, during the civil war that tore through the country, some 2,000 Seleka fighters occupied the palace and turned it into a training camp. When an Anti-balaka offensive drove the instructors out that December, a few hundred fighters were left besieged among the ruins, reduced to carving wooden weapons and hunting for food before they were finally evacuated to Bangui. Then, in early 2018, satellite images caught a newer presence: Russian instructors from the Wagner Group, training government soldiers in the same halls where an emperor once held court. The Bokassa family still claims ownership. The walls keep changing hands.