Terme de Glossaire

A Congolese politician. In 1950, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu was enrolled in the ‘Force Publique’ (Belgian colonial army). There he trained as an accounts and administration assistant. Posted to the military staff at Kinshasa (at the time called Léopoldville), he contributed to the journal L'avenir. Journalism would become his profession once freed from his military obligations, on January 1, 1957. He came to Belgium for the first time on the occasion of the 1958 World Exhibition and joined the team of Patrice Lumumba’s ‘Mouvement National Congolais’ in 1960. In the same year he was appointed secretary of state to the Presidential Council in Patrice Lumumba’s first government, then Chief of Staff of the army. On September 14 he replaced the politicians in power with technocrats. In 1965 a military coup swept him to power. In 1967 he created the MPR (Popular Movement of the Revolution), in a single party state, and was elected President of the Republic in 1970. He was subsequently re-elected in 1977 and 1984. The Congo, soon to be called Zaire, was thus living under a dictatorial regime which was becoming more and more challenged, notably by the church. In 1990 Mobutu was obliged to accept the return of political pluralism. His power would be challenged more and more up until the entry into Kinshasa, on May 17, 1997, of the troops of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Mobutu thus had to leave the Congo and, ill, took refuge in Morocco, where he died shortly afterwards. He left behind him a ruined country in the grip of civil war.