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Cheick Modibo Diarra
He navigated spacecraft to Venus and Mars, then lost a country in eight months to men with guns.
The rise
Born at Nioro du Sahel in 1952, Diarra studied in Paris and took a doctorate in mechanical engineering at Howard University before joining NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an interplanetary navigator, working on the Magellan mission to Venus, the Ulysses solar probe, Galileo and Mars Pathfinder. He left full-time NASA work in 1999 to found the Pathfinder Foundation for African education, opened a solar-energy laboratory in Bamako in 2002, and from 2006 chaired Microsoft Africa.
What they did
In April 2012, weeks after soldiers overthrew President Touré and armed groups seized the north, the junta named him acting prime minister. He spent eight months seeking an international intervention while the coup leaders kept real power. On the night of 10 December soldiers arrested him at home; hours later, before dawn, he resigned on state television.
The full picture
He accepted office from a junta that had just destroyed Mali's constitutional order, and the appointment gave the coup a civilian face. His government failed to stop the advance of armed groups across the north — French troops intervened a month after he fell — and his own presidential ambitions were widely read as the reason the soldiers turned on him.
Why it matters
The Sahel enters this collection mostly through empires and soldiers. Diarra is the modern Sahelian technocrat, and his eight months are a cold lesson: expertise without a political base is borrowed authority, and the men with guns can take it back in a single night.
“I, Cheick Modibo Diarra, am resigning along with my government.”