Mobutu Sese Seko

• 1. Introduction

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  Mobutu Sese Seko was born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu on the 14th of October 1930 in Lisala, in the Belgian Congo. His father was a cook for a Belgian judge. His mother was a hotel maid who had fled a village chief's harem. These are origins about as far from power as it is possible to get. Yet by the time Mobutu died on the 7th of September 1997, he had ruled one of Africa's largest nations for more than three decades, renamed it, renamed himself, renamed its cities, and stripped from it a personal fortune that some estimates placed at five billion dollars. He would charter a Concorde to go shopping in Paris. He would build a runway in the jungle long enough to land one. He would take the title "Messiah" and put his face on the evening news descending through clouds like a god.

  How does a child raised by an uncle and a grandfather after his father's early death reach that point? How does a man who stowed away on a river boat as a teenager and was punished with a military conscription become the figure Philip Gourevitch would later call "the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation"? And how did the world's most powerful governments spend decades helping him stay there? These are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Making of a Schemer

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  At the Christian Brothers School in Coquilhatville, the young Mobutu ran the class newspaper and was known for pulling pranks. A classmate later recalled that whenever the Belgian priests, whose first language was Dutch, made an error in French, Mobutu would leap to his feet and point out the mistake. He excelled at academic subjects and was already restless, alert, and hungry to be noticed.

  In 1949, he stowed away on a boat downriver to Léopoldville to visit a girl. The priests found him weeks later. The punishment was seven years in the colonial army, the Force Publique, which was the standard sentence for rebellious students. It turned out to be exactly the education Mobutu needed. In army life he found discipline and a father figure in Sergeant Louis Bobozo. He borrowed European newspapers from Belgian officers and read books on sentry duty. His favourites were the writings of Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and the Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli.

  After the army he became a full-time journalist, writing for the Léopoldville daily L'Avenir. He went to Belgium in 1958 to cover the World Exposition and stayed to train in journalism. While there, according to researcher Susan Williams, he was recruited as an informer for the Belgian colonial government. Williams also describes how a CIA officer named Lawrence Raymond Devlin, working under cover at the US embassy in Brussels, retained Mobutu's services as an informer. By the time the Congo independence talks convened in Brussels in 1960, Mobutu was, as Williams put it, "working for both the Belgians and the Americans."

  At a US embassy reception for the Congolese delegation during those talks, one name kept coming up in the debrief, even though that person was not an official delegate. He was merely Lumumba's secretary. The ambassador noted that every staff member independently flagged the same young man as "extremely intelligent," perhaps immature, but someone with great potential. That young man was Mobutu.

• 3. Two Coups, One Man

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  On the 5th of July 1960, soldiers of the Force Publique stationed at Camp Léopold II mutinied over their all-white leadership. The revolt spread quickly. Within days the full Council of Ministers convened in an extraordinary session to debate who should take command of the Congolese Army. The two main candidates were Maurice Mpolo and Mobutu. Mpolo had shown influence over the mutinying troops, but was feared as a potential coup plotter. Mobutu was seen as calmer and more prudent. Lumumba favoured Mobutu's steadiness and gave him the post of Army Chief of Staff.

  The British diplomat Brian Urquhart, who was serving with the United Nations in Léopoldville, had just watched Mobutu promote himself from sergeant to lieutenant-colonel. In his account, on the day of Mobutu's first coup in September 1960, Mobutu appeared unannounced at UN headquarters and refused to leave until the radio announced the takeover, at which point he began repeating "C'est moi!" - "This is me!" - over and over. Urquhart, recognizing that Mobutu had only come in case the coup failed, ordered him out.

  That coup on the 14th of September 1960 was described as bloodless. Mobutu declared both Kasa-Vubu and Lumumba "neutralised" and set up a government of university graduates he called the College of Commissioners-General. But what followed was not bloodless. Lumumba fled in late November to reach his supporters in Stanleyville. Mobutu's troops captured him in early December and jailed him. On the 17th of January 1961, Mobutu's government transferred Lumumba to the rebelling State of Katanga, where he was executed that same day by secessionist forces under Moise Tshombe.

  Five years later, in November 1965, with Parliament in near-paralysis after an anti-Tshombe prime minister-designate was twice rejected, Mobutu seized power again in a second bloodless coup. He had turned 35 a month earlier. In his first speech to a crowd at Léopoldville's main stadium, he announced there would be no political party activity for five years, because politicians had brought the Congo to ruin in five years and it would take him at least that long to fix it. By the 30th of November 1965, Parliament had handed most of its legislative powers to him. By early March 1966 he had revoked their right to review his decrees. Two weeks later he suspended Parliament entirely.

• 4. Authenticity and Its Costs

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  Starting on the 1st of June 1966, Mobutu began stripping the Congolese map of its colonial names. Léopoldville became Kinshasa. Stanleyville became Kisangani. Élisabethville became Lubumbashi. In October 1971, the country itself was renamed the Republic of Zaire. The following year, Mobutu renamed himself: he became Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, a name he translated as meaning "The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."

  The campaign, called authenticité, reached into daily life with remarkable intrusiveness. European names for Zairian children were forbidden; priests who baptized a child with a European name faced five years' imprisonment. Western attire was banned. Men were required to wear a Mao-style tunic called an abacost, the name being shorthand for the French phrase "à bas le costume" - "down with the suit." Christmas was moved from December to June on the grounds that June was a more "authentic" date. Mobutu himself traded his military uniform for a walking stick, thick-framed glasses, and a leopard-skin toque made in Paris.

  In 1974, a new constitution made the Popular Movement of the Revolution, or MPR, the "single institution" of Zaire. All citizens automatically became members of the MPR from birth. The party's president - Mobutu - was automatically the sole candidate for the presidency, confirmed by referendum every seven years. He was re-elected three times under this system, each time with implausible margins of 98 percent or more. At the 1970 presidential election, voters had chosen between a green ballot, deemed a vote for hope, and a red ballot deemed a vote for chaos. According to official figures, Mobutu received 10,131,669 votes to only 157 votes against. It later emerged that nearly 30,500 more votes had been cast than the actual number of registered voters.

  The 1974 elections dispensed with ballots entirely. Candidates were presented at public locations around the country and applauded into parliament.

• 5. Kleptocracy in Practice

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  In a speech on the 20th of May 1976, delivered in a football stadium in Kinshasa before some 70,000 people, Mobutu offered his citizens unusually candid advice: "If you want to steal, steal a little in a nice way, but if you steal too much to become rich overnight, you will be caught." The Congolese historian Emizet F. Kisangani documented the system this produced: public officials knew that regardless of their inefficiency or degree of corruption, they could reenter the government. Effectiveness and a good conscience were, in his words, major obstacles to political advancement.

  Between November 1965 and April 1997, Mobutu reshuffled his cabinet 60 times. The perpetual rotation was deliberate: ministers never knew how long they would hold office, which encouraged them to steal as much as possible while they could. As early as 1970 it was estimated that Mobutu had stolen 60% of the national budget for that year.

  His personal fortune was estimated, as of 1988, at no less than US$50 million. He held most of it in Swiss banks; after he was ousted, only $3.4 million was declared found there, a comparatively small sum. Some estimates of his total wealth ran as high as $5 billion. In 1989, the Zairian government was forced to default on international loans from Belgium. The country's infrastructure virtually collapsed. Public service workers went months without pay. A popular saying emerged: "the civil servants pretended to work while the state pretended to pay them." Only the Special Presidential Division, on whom Mobutu's physical safety depended, was paid adequately or regularly.

  The Forces Armées Zaïroises suffered from low morale, irregular salaries, and a venal officer corps. Soldiers supported themselves by robbing the civilian population. Roadblocks became a recurring feature of daily life, with soldiers extorting money from drivers of passing vehicles. Rampant inflation eroded the real value of salaries at every level, feeding a wider culture of corruption that extended far beyond the government itself.

  According to Pierre Janssen, who married Mobutu's daughter Yaki, the president's indifference to cost was total. Yaki's wedding included three orchestras, a wedding cake costing US$65,000, Yaki's own gown worth US$70,000, and jewels valued at US$3 million. Mobutu's daily routine, as Janssen documented it, included several daily bottles of wine, retainers flown in from overseas, and lavish meals. He owned a fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, a yacht named Kamanyola for cruising the Congo, and a palace in Gbadolite he styled a "Versailles of the jungle." He had the Gbadolite Airport built with a runway long enough to accommodate the Concorde. In 1989, he chartered Concorde aircraft F-BTSD for a trip beginning on the 26th of June to deliver a speech at the United Nations in New York, then again on the 16th of July to attend French bicentennial celebrations in Paris as a guest of President François Mitterrand.

• 6. Cold War Shield

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  Mobutu's stated political ideology was "neither left nor right, nor even centre." What this meant in practice was fierce anti-communism, which made him a useful client for the West throughout the Cold War. The United States was the third largest donor of aid to Zaire after Belgium and France. Mobutu befriended several US presidents including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. During Reagan's presidency, Mobutu visited the White House three times, and American criticism of Zaire's human rights record was effectively muted. During a state visit in 1983, Reagan praised Mobutu as "a voice of good sense and goodwill."

  The relationship had its rough patches. In 1974-1975, Mobutu's increasingly radical rhetoric, which included denunciations of American foreign policy, cooled relations sharply. In the summer of 1975, Mobutu accused the CIA of plotting his overthrow and arrested eleven senior Zairian generals. Critics, including one of his sharpest opponents, Nzongola-Ntalaja, speculated that Mobutu invented the plot to purge the military of talented officers who might threaten him. Relations quickly thawed when both countries found themselves backing the same side in the Angolan Civil War.

  With the Shaba invasions of 1977 and 1978, the Western alliance showed its real commitments. France airlifted 1,500 Moroccan paratroopers into Zaire during the first invasion. During the second, France and Belgium deployed troops directly, with logistical support from the United States. The Carter Administration, despite putting some distance between itself and Kinshasa because of Mobutu's human rights record, still allocated nearly half of its sub-Saharan Africa foreign aid to Zaire.

  Mobutu also built ties with China after 1972, extending diplomatic recognition and visiting Beijing in 1973, where he met chairman Mao Zedong and received promises of $100 million in technical aid. In 1983, Chinese Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang announced on a trip to Zaire that the money would not have to be repaid. Mobutu even borrowed Mao's title of "Helmsman" for himself.

  With the Soviet Union's collapse, Mobutu's strategic value to the West evaporated. In 1993, the US State Department denied him a visa when he sought to visit Washington. He bitterly remarked: "I am the latest victim of the cold war, no longer needed by the US. The lesson is that my support for American policy counts for nothing."

• 7. The Rumble and the Regime

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  On the 30th of October 1974, the heavyweight championship of the world was contested in Kinshasa in what became known as the Rumble in the Jungle, the bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Mobutu was the reason the fight happened there at all. Promoter Don King had promised each fighter five million dollars and offered the bout to any African country that put up the money to host it in exchange for recognition. According to the documentary When We Were Kings, Mobutu agreed to fund the ten-million-dollar purse and host the event in order to gain international recognition and legitimacy.

  On the 22nd of September 1974, Mobutu presented the rebuilt the 20th of May Stadium to the Zaire Ministry of Youth and Sport and to the people of Zaire. A quote attributed to Ali in the film captured what the attention meant for Mobutu's project: "Some countries go to war to get their names out there, and wars cost a lot more than ten million dollars."

  In the 1996 documentary about the fight, dancers receiving the fighters can be heard chanting "Sese Seko, Sese Seko." The fight drew worldwide attention to Zaire at the peak of Mobutu's power and international standing, before the economic collapse of 1974-1975 began its long unraveling. The Rumble in the Jungle was not just a sporting spectacle staged in Mobutu's country. It was a deliberate act of statecraft, purchased with the national treasury and performed for a global audience.

• 8. Fall and Final Days

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  The seeds of Mobutu's downfall were planted not in Zaire but in Rwanda, where in 1994 approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in a genocide carried out by Hutu extremists aided by the Rwandan government. When the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front seized the country, hundreds of thousands of Hutus, including many of the perpetrators, fled into refugee camps in eastern Zaire. Mobutu welcomed Hutu extremists as personal guests and allowed them to establish military bases from which they attacked ethnic Tutsis in both Rwanda and Zaire itself.

  When Mobutu's government issued an order in November 1996 forcing Tutsis to leave Zaire on penalty of death, the Banyamulenge, the Zairian Tutsis, became the focal point of a rebellion. Forces backed by Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni and by Rwanda under Defense Minister Paul Kagame joined with local opponents of Mobutu under Laurent-Désiré Kabila and marched west toward Kinshasa. Burundi and Angola also supported the rebellion, which became the First Congo War.

  Ailing from advanced prostate cancer, Mobutu was in Switzerland for treatment and could not coordinate his crumbling defenses. The rebels' march was slowed mainly by Zaire's devastated infrastructure, the very infrastructure Mobutu's decades of looting had left in ruins.

  On the 16th of May 1997, failed peace talks were held aboard the South African Navy ship SAS Outeniqua in Pointe-Noire, with Nelson Mandela, then 78 years old, chairing the meeting between Kabila and Mobutu. A UN spokesman Timothy Montague Hamilton Douglas later recalled that Kabila refused to look into Mobutu's eyes throughout the meeting, staring at the ceiling, apparently afraid that the "Old Leopard" could curse him with his stare. Kabila's demand was simple: hand over power unconditionally. Mobutu, Douglas recalled, limped off the boat and refused to deal. Mandela had to prop him up as he walked to his car. Kabila did not bother to attend the next scheduled meeting on the 15th of May. His forces proclaimed victory the following day.

  Mobutu went briefly into exile in Togo before President Gnassingbé Eyadéma asked him to leave. From the 23rd of May 1997, he lived in Rabat, Morocco. He died there on the 7th of September 1997 from prostate cancer at the age of 66. He is buried in an above-ground mausoleum at Rabat, in the Christian cemetery known as Cimetière Européen. As of the time of writing, he remains there; a 2007 recommendation by the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that his remains be returned and interred in the DRC has not been carried out.