Mobutu Sese Seko

For more than three decades, from 1965 to 1997, the army officer Mobutu Sese Seko held power over the vast central African state he renamed Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A Cold War ally of the West, he ran a one-party state built on patronage, a personality cult and the repression of opponents, and his government became a standard example of what scholars call kleptocracy, rule by theft.

He was born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu on 14 October 1930 at Lisala, in the Belgian Congo, into the Ngbandi people. Educated at a Catholic mission school in Coquilhatville, he was sent in 1949 to serve in the colonial army, the Force Publique, as a punishment for running away. He left the army in 1956 to write for a newspaper in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), joined Patrice Lumumba's Congolese National Movement and became Lumumba's personal aide. Several accounts state that he was also passing information to Belgian intelligence and to the CIA.

Independence in 1960 was followed almost at once by an army mutiny and the secession of Katanga, the start of the Congo Crisis. Mobutu was made army chief of staff with the rank of colonel. When President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Prime Minister Lumumba tried to dismiss each other in September 1960, Mobutu took power on 14 September, sidelining both. Lumumba was later captured by his troops and, on 17 January 1961, handed over to the Katangan secessionists, who killed him that day. Through the early 1960s Mobutu remained the dominant figure in the army, which put down the Simba and Kwilu rebellions.

On 24 November 1965, amid a deadlock between president and parliament, Mobutu staged a second coup and took power himself. Parliament was suspended in 1966, and in May of that year a former prime minister and three ministers accused of plotting a coup were hanged before a crowd of about 50,000. From 1967 his Popular Movement of the Revolution was the only legal party, and a 1974 constitution gave its leader, Mobutu, virtually all governing power. He was re-elected as sole candidate with official results of 98 per cent or more.

Under the slogan of authenticité, cities lost their colonial names, the country became Zaire in October 1971, and citizens were told to replace European names with African ones. Mobutu himself took the long name Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa za Banga in 1972. Suits gave way to the abacost tunic, and his image, with leopard-skin hat and walking stick, appeared everywhere. In 1974 Kinshasa hosted the Ali–Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle", which he agreed to stage.

The nationalisation of foreign businesses in 1973–1974, handed largely to allies, combined with a collapse in copper prices to wreck the economy, and inflation and debt followed. Ministers were reshuffled constantly, and corruption ran through the state. Estimates of Mobutu's own fortune vary enormously, from about $50 million to as much as $5 billion. Western governments tolerated his rule as a bulwark against communism; Moroccan troops airlifted by France in 1977, and French and Belgian troops with American support in 1978, repelled invasions of Shaba province.

The end of the Cold War removed much of that support. In 1990 Mobutu ended single-party rule, the same year security forces killed students at Lubumbashi, but he kept control of the army and key ministries. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Hutu militias based themselves in eastern Zaire. A rebellion backed by Rwanda and Uganda, led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, swept west in 1996–1997 as Mobutu was undergoing cancer treatment abroad. He fled in May 1997, and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He died of prostate cancer in Rabat, Morocco, on 7 September 1997 and is buried there.

Our 1945 map shows the Belgian colony where he grew up, and our 1960 and 1985 maps show the newly independent Congo and then Zaire under his rule; see the Democratic Republic of the Congo for its later story.