Mobutu Sese Seko — 32 years of looting, swept away by a rebel march

In mid-May 1997, Mobutu Sese Seko fled the country he had ruled for nearly thirty-two years. A rebel column under Laurent-Désiré Kabila was closing on the capital, Kinshasa; the army Mobutu had starved and neglected melted away rather than fight; and the dictator, his body wasted by advanced prostate cancer, boarded a plane into exile. On 17 May 1997 Kabila’s forces entered Kinshasa unopposed, and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu died less than four months later, on 7 September 1997, in Rabat, Morocco, and was buried far from the nation he had treated as a private estate.

Mobutu had seized power on 24 November 1965 in a bloodless coup, his second intervention in the chaos that followed the Congo’s independence from Belgium. As army chief he had earlier helped engineer the removal of the elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, whose handover to secessionists in Katanga ended in Lumumba’s murder in 1961. Backed by the United States, France, and Belgium as a Cold War bulwark against communism, Mobutu consolidated absolute power, banned rival parties, and in 1967 made his Popular Movement of the Revolution the only legal party — one every citizen was deemed to belong to by birth.

He recast the country in his own image. In 1971 he renamed the Congo “Zaire” and launched a campaign of authenticité, ordering Zairians to drop Christian names and Western dress; he took the name Mobutu Sese Seko, “the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest.” Behind the nationalist theater, the state became a machine for personal enrichment. He nationalized foreign businesses and handed them to relatives and cronies who looted them, amassed one of the largest private fortunes on earth — by some estimates rivaling the size of the national debt — and let the country’s roads, hospitals, and schools rot while he built a palace in his jungle hometown and chartered Concorde flights to Paris. Ordinary Zairians, sitting atop some of the richest mineral deposits in the world, grew steadily poorer.

The regime outlasted the Cold War only briefly. When the Soviet collapse removed Mobutu’s value as an anti-communist client, Western support cooled. The decisive blow came from the east: the 1994 Rwandan genocide spilled millions of refugees and armed génocidaires into Zaire, and in 1996 Rwanda and Uganda backed a rebellion that gathered Zairian opponents around Kabila and marched across the vast country in months. Mobutu, dying and abandoned, could not stop it. His fall removed a kleptocrat, but it opened a far bloodier chapter: the wars that followed would draw in much of the region and kill millions.