Jean-Sylvanus Olympio, the founder and CEO of the consulting firm Consultencia, won a prestigious French entrepreneurship award earlier this month in Paris. The chief geek himself, Bill Gates, handed the Master de la Création 2007 award to Olympio at the Salon des Entrepreneurs conference in front of 6000 people.

Video of the ceremony (via Togocity)

Video of an interview with Olympio after he received the award (via Le Togolais)

So who is Jean-Sylvanus Olympio? Clearly he is Togolese, and he bears a rather famous name: Sylvanus Olympio was the first president of Togo and he was asassinated in 1963 by Gnassinbé Eyadema, the father of the current president. Olympio’s son, Gilchrist is a prominent opposition leader. He tried to run for president several times, but he was bumped out of the race by the RPT on technicalities. It sounds like Jean-Sylvanus Olympio might be a son of Gilchrist and a grand-son of the first president. There is some speculatioin to that effect in the discussion of the Togocity story. I’ll keep digging to see if that is confirmed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Palmwine, Warm/Fuzzy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.