81 Facts About Joseph Mobutu

Joseph Mobutu served as Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity from 1967 to 1968.

Joseph Mobutu installed a government that arranged for Lumumba's execution in 1961, and continued to lead the country's armed forces until he took power directly in a second coup in 1965.

Joseph Mobutu claimed that his political ideology was "neither left nor right, nor even centre", though nevertheless he developed a regime that was intensely autocratic even by African standards of his time.

Joseph Mobutu attempted to purge the country of all colonial cultural influence through his program of "national authenticity".

Joseph Mobutu presided over a period of widespread human rights violations.

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Joseph Mobutu received strong support from the United States, France, and Belgium, who believed he was a strong opponent of communism in Francophone Africa.

Joseph Mobutu built close ties with the governments of apartheid South Africa, Israel and the Greek military junta.

Joseph Mobutu was notorious for corruption, nepotism, and the embezzlement of between US$4 billion and $15 billion during his rule.

Joseph Mobutu was known for extravagances such as shopping trips to Paris via the supersonic and expensive Concorde aircraft.

Joseph Mobutu, a member of the Ngbandi ethnic group, was born in 1930 in Lisala, Belgian Congo.

Joseph Mobutu's mother, Marie Madeleine Yemo, was a hotel maid who fled to Lisala to escape the harem of a local village chief.

Belgian judge's wife took a liking to Joseph Mobutu and taught him to speak, read, and write fluently in the French language, the official language of the country in the colonial period.

Joseph Mobutu excelled in academic subjects and ran the class newspaper.

Joseph Mobutu was known for his pranks and impish sense of humor.

In 1949 Joseph Mobutu stowed away aboard a boat, traveling downriver to Leopoldville, where he met a girl.

Joseph Mobutu found discipline in army life, as well as a father figure in Sergeant Louis Bobozo.

Joseph Mobutu kept up his studies by borrowing European newspapers from the Belgian officers and books from wherever he could find them, reading them on sentry duty and whenever he had a spare moment.

Joseph Mobutu's favourites were the writings of French president Charles de Gaulle, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli.

Joseph Mobutu's contribution to the wedding festivities was a crate of beer, all his army salary could afford.

Joseph Mobutu became friendly with Patrice Lumumba and joined Lumumba's Congolese National Movement.

Joseph Mobutu gave Mobutu the office of Secretary of State to the Presidency.

Joseph Mobutu held much influence in the final determination of the rest of the government.

Joseph Mobutu assisted other officials in negotiating with the mutineers to secure the release of the officers and their families.

In those early days, Joseph Mobutu seemed a comparatively sensible young man, one who might even, at least now and then, have the best interests of his newly independent country at heart.

Joseph Mobutu received massive military aid and about a thousand Soviet technical advisers within six weeks.

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However, Joseph Mobutu still considered him a threat, and transferred him to the rebelling State of Katanga on 17 January 1961.

Under the auspices of a state of exception, Joseph Mobutu assumed sweeping—almost absolute—powers for five years.

In 1966 the Corps of Volunteers of the Republic was established, a vanguard movement designed to mobilize popular support behind Joseph Mobutu, who was proclaimed the nation's "Second National Hero" after Lumumba.

In 1966, Joseph Mobutu started renaming cities that had European names with more "authentic" African names, and in this way Leopoldville became Kinshasa, Stanleyville became Kisangani and Elisabethville became Lubumbashi.

Joseph Mobutu intended for the union to serve as an instrument of support for government policy, rather than as an independent group.

Under the circumstances, the result was inevitable–according to official figures, Joseph Mobutu was confirmed in office with near-unanimous support, garnering 10,131,669 votes to only 157 "no" votes.

Joseph Mobutu ordered the people to change their European names to African ones, and priests were warned that they would face five years' imprisonment if they were caught baptizing a Zairian child with a European name.

The document codified the emergency powers Joseph Mobutu had exercised since 1965; it vested Joseph Mobutu with "plenitude of power exercise", effectively concentrating all governing power in his hands.

Joseph Mobutu was reelected three times under this system, each time by implausibly high margins of 98 percent or more.

Early in his rule, Joseph Mobutu consolidated power by publicly executing political rivals, secessionists, coup plotters, and other threats to his rule.

Joseph Mobutu later switched to a new tactic, buying off political rivals.

Joseph Mobutu used the slogan "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer still" to describe his tactic of co-opting political opponents through bribery.

Kisangani wrote that Joseph Mobutu created a system of institutional corruption that greatly debased public morality by rewarding venality and greed.

In 1972, Joseph Mobutu tried unsuccessfully to have himself named president for life.

The businesses that Joseph Mobutu had just handed over to Zairians were in turn nationalized and placed under state control.

The poor performance of the Zairian Army during the both Shaba invasions, which humiliated Joseph Mobutu by forcing him to ask for foreign troops, did not lead to military reforms.

However, Joseph Mobutu reduced the size of the Army from 51,000 troops in 1978 down to 23,000 troops in 1980.

The most loyal and best of Joseph Mobutu's units were his bodyguards, the Israeli-trained Division Speciale Presidentille that was made up exclusively of Ngbandi and was always commanded by one of Joseph Mobutu's relatives.

Joseph Mobutu was re-elected in single-candidate elections in 1977 and 1984.

Joseph Mobutu owned a fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles that he used to travel between his numerous palaces, while the nation's roads deteriorated and many of his people starved.

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In 1989, Joseph Mobutu chartered Concorde aircraft F-BTSD for a 26 June – 5 July trip to give a speech at the United Nations in New York City, then again on 16 July for French bicentennial celebrations in Paris, and on 19 September for a flight from Paris to Gbadolite, and another nonstop flight from Gbadolite to Marseille with the youth choir of Zaire.

Joseph Mobutu's rule earned a reputation as one of the world's foremost examples of kleptocracy and nepotism.

Joseph Mobutu was the subject of one of the most pervasive personality cults of the twentieth century.

Joseph Mobutu's portraits were hung in many public places, and government officials wore lapel pins bearing his portrait.

Joseph Mobutu successfully capitalized on Cold War tensions among European nations and the United States.

Joseph Mobutu gained significant support from the West and its international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

However, Joseph Mobutu tore up the treaty in 1974 in protest at Belgium's refusal to ban an anti-Joseph Mobutu book written by left-wing lawyer Jules Chome.

Alfred Cahen, career diplomat and chef de cabinet of minister Henri Simonet, became a personal friend of Joseph Mobutu when he was a student at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

Relations with King Baudouin were mostly cordial, until Joseph Mobutu released a bold statement about the Belgian royal family.

In 1971, Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing paid a visit to Zaire; later, after becoming president, he would develop a close personal relationship with President Joseph Mobutu, and became one of the regime's closest foreign allies.

In 1974, Joseph Mobutu made a surprise visit to both China and North Korea, during the time he was scheduled to visit the Soviet Union.

Joseph Mobutu did join the United States in condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that year.

Joseph Mobutu viewed the Soviet presence as advantageous for two reasons: it allowed him to maintain an image of non-alignment, and it provided a convenient scapegoat for problems at home.

Moscow was the only major world capital Joseph Mobutu never visited, although he did accept an invitation to do so in 1974.

Joseph Mobutu enjoyed a very warm relationship with the Reagan Administration, through financial donations.

Joseph Mobutu was befriended by televangelist Pat Robertson, who promised to try to get the State Department to lift its ban on the African leader.

Joseph Mobutu appointed a transitional government that would lead to promised elections but he retained substantial powers.

The anti-Joseph Mobutu government was headed by Laurent Monsengwo and Etienne Tshisekedi of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress.

Joseph Mobutu appointed Kengo Wa Dondo, an advocate of austerity and free-market reforms, as prime minister.

Joseph Mobutu welcomed the Hutu extremists as personal guests and allowed them to establish military and political bases in the eastern territories, from where they attacked and killed ethnic Tutsis across the border in Rwanda and in Zaire itself, ostensibly to prepare for a renewed offensive back into Rwanda.

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When Joseph Mobutu's government issued an order in November 1996 forcing Tutsis to leave Zaire on penalty of death, the ethnic Tutsis in Zaire, known as Banyamulenge, were the focal point of a rebellion.

Joseph Mobutu went into temporary exile in Togo, until President Gnassingbe Eyadema insisted that Joseph Mobutu leave the country a few days later.

Joseph Mobutu died there on 7 September 1997 from prostate cancer at the age of 66.

Joseph Mobutu is interred in an above ground mausoleum at Rabat-Sale-Zemmour-Zaer, in the Christian cemetery known as Cimetiere Europeen.

Joseph Mobutu married his first wife, Marie-Antoinette Gbiatibwa Gogbe Yetene, in 1955.

Joseph Mobutu died of heart failure on 22 October 1977 in Genolier, Switzerland, at the age of 36.

Joseph Mobutu's elder son from his second marriage, Nzanga Mobutu Ngbangawe, now the head of the family, was a candidate in the 2006 presidential elections and later served in the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as Minister of State for Agriculture.

Joseph Mobutu was the subject of the three-part 1999 Belgian documentary Joseph Mobutu, King of Zaire by Thierry Michel.

Joseph Mobutu was featured in the 2000 feature film Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck, which detailed the pre-coup and coup years from the perspective of Lumumba.

Joseph Mobutu featured in the 1996 American documentary When We Were Kings, which centred around the famed Rumble in the Jungle boxing bout between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali for the 1974 heavyweight championship of the world which took place in Kinshasa during Joseph Mobutu's rule.

Joseph Mobutu was played by the Belgian actor Marc Zinga in the 2011 film Mister Bob.

Joseph Mobutu was infamous for embezzling the equivalent of billions of US dollars from his country.

Joseph Mobutu had really staged a funeral for a generation of African leadership of which he—the Dinosaur, as he had long been known—was the paragon: the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation.

Joseph Mobutu was instrumental in bringing the Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to Zaire on 30 October 1974.

Joseph Mobutu was willing to fund the ten million dollar purse and host the bout, in order to gain international recognition and legitimacy in the process.

Joseph Mobutu gained Zaire and its people considerable publicity in the weeks even before the televised bout, as worldwide attention focused on his country.