1966 Upper Voltan coup d'état

The 1966 Upper Voltan coup d'état was an event which took place on 3 January 1966 in the Republic of Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso), when following large-scale popular unrest the military intervened against the government, forced President Maurice Yaméogo to resign, and replaced him with Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana. Lamizana would go on to rule until 1980, when yet another military coup d'état overthrew him. The 1966 coup would prove to be the first in a long line of Upper Voltan and later Burkinabé coups, both failed and successful such, and marked the beginning of half a century of military rule.

French Upper Volta, a small, landlocked and largely impoverished colony of France had been decolonized in 1960. Maurice Yaméogo, a close ally of the Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, created a single-party dictatorship, making his own Voltaic Democratic Union the sole legal political party in the country. Opposition parties, like the African Regroupment Party, were either merged with it or dissolved.

Yaméogo's government would come to face charges of neocolonialism, as it aligned closely with the French government. Originally favouring a pan-Africanist policy, in favour of a West African federation, he eventually dropped these policies in favour of the anti-federalism of France and his friend Houphouët-Boigny. He joined the Conseil de l'Entente together with some other pro-French leaders. Additionally, Yaméogo closely supported Israel, becoming the first African leader to visit the country, strongly opposing the Arab Republic of Egypt and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

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