Mobutu's favourite book as a schoolboy was Machiavelli's The Prince
As a mission-school pupil in the Belgian Congo, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu devoured history, admired Napoleon and de Gaulle, and prized Machiavelli above all. Punished with seven years in the colonial army for running away, he rose from sergeant to army chief within a decade and then ruled his country for more than thirty years.
Mobutu was born in Lisala in 1930 to a hotel maid and a cook who worked for a Belgian judge; the judge's wife taught the boy fluent French. His father died when he was eight. At a Catholic boarding school he shone academically, edited the class newspaper and delighted in correcting the Dutch-speaking priests' French. In 1949 he stowed away on a riverboat to the capital, and the penalty was enlistment in the Force Publique, the colonial army. There he found a mentor in Sergeant Louis Bobozo, read Churchill and de Gaulle on sentry duty, and began writing journalism. According to historian Susan Williams, by the late 1950s he was informing for Belgian intelligence and later for a CIA officer, Lawrence Devlin.
He joined Patrice Lumumba's nationalist movement and became his personal aide. After independence in 1960 an army mutiny led the cabinet to choose Mobutu as chief of staff, promoted to colonel. When Lumumba sought Soviet aid against a secession in the south and President Kasa-Vubu dismissed him, each man ordered Mobutu to arrest the other. In September 1960 he instead declared both neutralised in a bloodless coup. The government he installed arranged Lumumba's execution in 1961, and in 1965 Mobutu seized power outright with American and Belgian backing.
He banned every party but his own in 1967, renamed the country Zaire in 1971 and himself Mobutu Sese Seko the next year, and pursued a campaign of national authenticity to erase colonial culture. A personality cult, a patronage network and widespread human rights abuses sustained his rule. Anti-communism brought military and financial support from the United States, France and Belgium. Estimates of his fortune range from $50 million to $5 billion, amassed while Zaire suffered runaway inflation and crushing debt, and his shopping trips to Paris by Concorde became notorious. His rule is often described as a kleptocracy.
Economic collapse forced him to accept a multiparty system around 1990. In May 1997 rebels led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila took the country and drove him abroad. He was by then gravely ill with prostate cancer and died in Morocco on 7 September 1997.
Source: Mobutu Sese Seko
