A dictatorial leader, his divisive policies as president led to factional conflict and a pattern of authoritarian leadership and political instability that are still relevant in Chad today.

A native of the south of the country and a member of the Sara ethnic group, Tombalbaye began his career as a teacher during French colonial rule and joined the Chadian Progressive Party (PPT) in 1946.

In 1962, he declared the PPT the sole legal party and presided over a corrupt dictatorship characterized by extreme favoritism to his southern-based patronage network.

In 1973, he founded a new party, the National Movement for the Cultural and Social Revolution (MNRCS), changed his name to N'Garta Tombalbaye and attempted to further Africanize the country through a program of authenticité.

As a young man, Tombalbaye studied to become an educator in the Republic of Congo's capital of Brazzaville, due to the lack of in-country schools.

After a Muslim trader mocked the Sara people as mere beasts in November 1947, he helped to direct violent protest in N'Djamena.

In 1952, he won a seat in the colonial territorial assembly and was elected to French Equatorial Africa general council in 1957, where he served as vice-president.

Tombalbaye managed to create a coalition of progressive forces from both the north and south of the country and isolating the more conservative Islamic factions in the center as a colonial legislator.

Tombalbaye's Africanization program failed to account for the large population in the north and center of the country, who were Muslim and did not identify with the Christian and animist south.

Meanwhile, in the south, where Tombalbaye had his greatest support, he responded to a strike by students by replacing the popular Chief of Staff Jacques Doumro with Colonel Félix Malloum.

Christianity was disparaged, missionaries were expelled, and all non-Muslim males in the south between the ages of sixteen and fifty were required to undergo traditional initiation rites known as yondo to gain promotion in the civil service and the military.

Meanwhile, the drought worsened throughout Africa, so to improve the dismal economy, people were forced to "volunteer" in a major effort to increase cotton production.

Finally, on 13 April 1975, after some of the country's leading officers had been arrested for involvement in an alleged coup, he was reportedly shot in his own palace, succumbing to his gunshot wounds afterwards.