NAIROBI, Kenya — Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled Zaire for nearly 32 years with a combination of brutal repression and unbridled greed that impoverished his citizens while earning him millions, died in Morocco on Sunday, less than four months after being driven into exile by leaders of a popular rebellion.
Mobutu, who died at 66 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was for years the epitome of the African strongman. More than a dictatorship, his regime was often called a "kleptocracy."
He strode the African and world stages dressed in a trademark leopard-skin hat and carrying an ebony, ivory-tipped walking stick. He looted the treasury of his mineral-rich country, spending some of it on European homes and fine champagne and, reportedly, socking much of it away in Swiss bank accounts. Stern and imperious, he was little loved and mostly feared. When he was deposed in May by the onrushing troops of an old foe, Laurent Kabila, Mobutu was so ill that he could barely walk. And yet only one country, Morocco, agreed to accept him.
Mobutu once bragged in an interview on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" that he was one of the world's richest men--this as Zaire's infrastructure crumbled. Many of the country's paved roads had been swallowed up by the encroaching jungle, hospital patients were forced to provide their own medicine, and almost every police officer, regular army soldier and civil servant had resorted to banditry as a means to survive.
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Joseph-Desire Mobutu was born Oct. 14, 1930, in Lisala, in what was then known as the Belgian Congo. The son of a cook and hotel maid, he first pursued a career in journalism before becoming a soldier. In 1960, shortly after independence from Belgium, he was named army chief of staff. When the Belgians pulled out, Mobutu was one of the country's few literate, high-school-educated non-Europeans. Recognizing that the United States was locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, Mobutu sewed up a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.
The first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, whom the CIA suspected of Marxist tendencies, was quickly killed, and the U.S.-backed Mobutu spent the next few years maneuvering himself into position to become dictator.
On Nov. 24, 1965, he brought down the first post-colonial government--of Joseph Kasavubu--and declared himself president of the Second Republic. His hold on power remained unchallenged until the early 1990s, when the fall of communism in Eastern Europe stirred winds of democracy in Africa.
