Gbadolite – Gbadolite, Democratic Republic of the Congo | Atlas Obscura Please separate multiple addresses with commas. We won't share addresses with third parties. Subscribe me to the Atlas Obscura Newsletter Once a small village on the edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that was barely even mentioned on most maps, Gbadolite was transformed into the extravagant seat of a dictator who changed the face of the country, but now the tiny town is a ruined complex of despotic extravagance gone to seed. When former journalist Mobutu Sese Seko took power in 1965 with the help of the CIA, he dug deep into the country’s coffers to turn his ancestral village into a glimmering jewel where he could live and entertain like a king unrivaled. Before Mobutu’s reign, Gbadolite was simply a small community of less than 2,000 people living in earthen huts, but the dictator constructed a trio of palaces nearby, a full-service airport, a hospital, a five-star hotel with over 100 rooms, and a land transportation infrastructure that could service the remote area.

During Mobutu’s reign the lifestyle for the ruling powers in Gbadolite was lavish and extravagant with fine wines, rare cuisine, and full service entertainment facilities that catered to the dictator and his guests despite the poverty surrounding them and the corrupt source of the wealth. Mobutu’s rule ended in a coup in 1997 and during the ensuing war, much of the extravagant flourishes that the ruler had put in were damaged or destroyed and the shining seat of Mobutu’s power slid into ruin. Today Gbadolite is once again a remote village although some of Mobutu’s remaining supporters still tend to the remains of his crumbling palaces, conducting tours of the once gilded halls and making sure that the memory of the village’s time in the sun doesn’t completely fade.

Legacy of corrupt and ruthless dictator who built Versailles in the jungle | The Independent Legacy of corrupt and ruthless dictator who built Versailles in the jungle `He held on to power by keeping rivals in disarray and buying off his enemies' Sunday 4 May 1997 23:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Kinshasa (Reuter) - President Mobutu Sese Seko, one of Africa's longest-serving strongmen, now trying to negotiate a dignified exit from power, has ruled Zaire for more than three decades with a blend of military ruthlessness and political acumen. A master of the power game, he exploited the West's strategic fears during the Cold War and gave his sprawling and chaotic country at the heart of Africa a badly-needed focus in the turbulent aftermath of independence from Belgium in 1960. A reluctant convert to democracy, he started pushing, in public at least, for much-delayed multi-party presidential elections - confident that his support in rural areas would enable him to legitimise his rule through the ballot box. "The democratic process must inevitably be crowned by free and fair elections," he said in a 1996 New Year address.

"I am perhaps the only dictator in the world who is calling for such elections," he once told a television interviewer. But prostate cancer and a Tutsi-dominated revolt intervened, weakening his grip on the mineral-rich nation of 40 million people. As Laurent Kabila's rebels have advanced from the east, capturing towns and territory, Mr Mobutu's popularity faded. Ordinary Zaireans, weary of the ravages of his notoriously ill-disciplined army, poverty and widespread official corruption, have welcomed the rebels as liberators. Mr Kabila insisted he must quit. "There can be no ceasefire or indeed elections in this country until Mobutu and all he represents is removed and thrown away," he said. President Mobutu offered to resign and hand over to an elected successor, but Mr Kabila is insisting that power be transferred to his rebel alliance in the transition process. The son of a cook and a hotel maid, Mr Mobutu, who stands 6ft tall, was born in Lisala, in Equateur province in 1930. Denounced as everything from a dictator to a thief, his critics accuse him of ruining what is potentially Africa's richest nation with a wealth of minerals and rich farmland.

A journalist turned soldier, he seized power in 1965 after the old Belgian Congo descended into chaos after independence. Adopting a leopard-skin cap and bird-handled ebony cane as his trademarks, he has held onto power by keeping rivals in disarray, or by buying off his enemies. He amassed a personal fortune and solidified his grip on the country with a system of economic and political patronage that made millionaires of his close associates. Most Zaireans remained mired in poverty. The word "kleptocracy", meaning a bureaucracy in which corruption is endemic, was coined with Zaire in mind. Despite human rights abuses and his use of his position to enrich himself, Mr Mobutu became the darling of the United States and others in the West as a buffer against the Communist bloc. Washington relied on Zaire as a supply route for the US-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) rebel movement fighting a 17-year guerrilla war against the Marxist government of neighbouring Angola. President Mobutu's usefulness to Washington faded as Soviet influence declined in Africa and Communism finally collapsed. His erstwhile friends began to look more closely at his human rights record.

Under pressure to make reforms, the Zairean leader opened a Pandora's box, when he permitted multi-party politics in April 1990 after more than two decades of single- party rule. At the same time, the mineral-based economy collapsed as production from vital copper mines in the south plummeted. Mr Mobutu angered his Western backers, particularly Belgium, when his soldiers attacked a student hostel in 1990, killing dozens of students. Belgium cut aid in response. Mass opposition to Mr Mobutu grew through 1991. Surrounded by his Israeli-trained presidential guard, he retreated to his opulent northern palace in Gbadolite, dubbed "Versailles in the Jungle", hurling defiance at his opponents. But the soldiers, angry at not receiving a pay rise, ran amok in Kinshasa in late 1991. France and Belgium sent in troops to protect foreign nationals. Looters killed at least 250 people.

Mr Mobutu's sacking in December 1992 of the reformist Prime Minister Etienne Tshisekedi, a one-time ally turned enemy, and the intimidation of the pro-democracy interim parliament by his presidential guard, brought further rebukes from abroad. France barred him from visiting his villa in the Riviera, while other countries denied him and his entourage visas. Shrewd political manoeuvring enabled Mr Mobutu to neutralise a groundswell of public sympathy for Mr Tshisekedi. An impeachment threat by a transitional parliament came to nothing. Mr Mobutu, a pragmatist, began a process of rehabilitation with key donors - France, Belgium and the United States. The 1994 exodus from Rwanda of over a million Hutus, fearing reprisals for the genocide of minority Tutsis there, worked in his favour. His co- operation helped to ease a humanitarian nightmare, bringing about a partial thaw in ties with the West. France softened its stance after he co-operated with a French military expedition to halt the Rwanda killings. In April 1996, Paris announced a resumption of aid after a five-year freeze.

In August 1996, Mobutu had prostate cancer surgery in Switzerland. In October, rebels took up arms in the east. As the Tutsi-led revolt spread, the rebels seized towns and territory and now control more than three- quarters of Zaire. Mr Mobutu, who spent much of the war convalescing in Europe, returned home on 22 March, in what many Zaire watchers saw as an attempt to negotiate a dignified withdrawal. More about: Where Concorde once flew: the story of President Mobutu's 'African Versailles' | Cities | The Guardian Urban decay Where Concorde once flew: the story of President Mobutu's 'African Versailles' For posturing dictators, only putting a new city on the map will do. Fifty years on from Mobutu Sese Seko’s ascent to the presidency of Congo, David Smith explores what’s left of his personal Xanadu, Gbadolite President Mobutu’s former palace in Gbadolite, DRC, in 2015.

Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian Cities is supported by Tuesday 10 February 2015 07.58 EST Last modified on Tuesday 30 June 2015 10.19 EDT Share on Messenger Close “One hundred thousand trees, 20,000 tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu’s mountain. Contents of Xanadu’s palace: paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many another palace — a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised; enough for 10 museums; the loot of the world ... Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself.” So trumpets a voiceover in the opening scenes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane , the story of a plutocratic newspaper baron and empire-builder: “America’s Kubla Khan”. But we have already seen that Kane is dead and his Florida folly slowly turning into a dilapidated ruin. The same fate has befallen the grandiloquent mansions of other men before and since.

But never, perhaps, quite so violently and definitively as that of another journalist turned billionaire with passions for art and politics: Mobutu Sese Seko . President Mobutu's ruined jungle paradise, Gbadolite - in pictures Read more President Mobutu’s personal Xanadu was his birthplace, deep in the jungle of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the biggest country in sub-Saharan Africa and one of the world’s poorest and longest-suffering . In the early 1970s, Gbadolite was a remote village of 1,500 people living in mudbrick huts and not even marked on maps. But thanks to unlimited hubris and riches, a new town was hacked out of the tropical rainforest, with houses, schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, a five-star hotel, a 3,200m runway for the supersonic Concorde and – the pièce de résistance – three palaces of kleptocratic kitsch.

Gbadolite remains the vision of a totalitarian master builder, like Astana in Kazakhstan, Naypyidaw in Myanmar, Oyala in Equatorial Guinea and one that never got off the drawing board: Adolf Hitler’s Germania . For posturing dictators it seems the transience of power and wealth is not enough. Only putting a new city on the map, shaped in their own image, will do. Each seems determined to take the inscription on Christopher Wren’s tomb at St Paul’s Cathedral to a new level: “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.” (If you are seeking his monument, look around you.) Pinterest Mobutu Sese Soko. This year’s 50th anniversary of Mobutu’s ascent to the presidency of Congo will be no cause for celebration. Congo had just emerged from the catastrophe of Belgian rule: King Leopold II, arguably the most egregious of all colonialists, turned it into a personal fiefdom, killing and enslaving the population to enrich himself with ivory and rubber.

But when the CIA helped Belgium assassinate independence prime minister Patrice Lumumba , opportunity knocked for Joseph Desire Mobutu, who had worked as a reporter and editor before returning to the army and climbing the ranks. In 1963 he was invited by president John F Kennedy to the White House and effectively recruited to the capitalist side in the cold war’s African battleground. Two years later he declared himself head of state, renamed his country Zaire, renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu wa za Banga (meaning “the all-powerful warrior who, because of endurance and an inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake”) and adopted his infamous leopard-skin hat. Pinterest The ‘African Versailles’ emerged from the remote jungle village where President Mobutu was born. Photograph: Sean Smith America, his patron, appeared willing to bankroll or turn a blind eye to any excess. Mobutu rapidly set the tone for his rule by ordering the public hanging of four former ministers at a sports stadium for an alleged coup plot.

He continued with a Machiavellian combination of murder, detention and torture on the one hand and bribery, corruption and patronage on the other. The mineral-rich nation’s coffers were looted on a mind-bending scale as Mobutu amassed an estimated fortune of $5bn and lavish properties around the world. “When he left power he was universally excoriated as Africa’s greatest kleptocrat,” noted Mobutu’s obituary in the Guardian in 1997. Pinterest Government soldiers inside Mobutu’s Gbadolite palace in 2001. Photograph: Saurabh Das/AP There was no greater symbol of excess than Gbadolite and its palaces, for which he hired the Tunisian-born French architect Olivier Clement Cacoub and Senegal’s Pierre Goudiaby Atépa. His private palace, seven miles outside town in Kawele, brimmed with paintings, sculptures, stained glass, ersatz Louis XIV furniture, marble from Carrara in Italy and two swimming pools surrounded by loudspeakers playing his beloved Gregorian chants or classical music.

It hosted countless gaudy nights with Taittinger champagne, salmon and other food served on moving conveyer belts by Congolese and European chefs. Visiting in 1988, a New York Times journalist recorded : “At a marble-tiled terrace, voices rose from banquet tables set against a backdrop of illuminated fountains. Liveried waiters served roast quail on Limoges china and poured Loire Valley wines, properly chilled against the equatorial heat. ‘Bon appetit,’ said the 58-year-old president.” Guests over the years reputedly included Pope John Paul II, the king of Belgium, French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali, self-declared emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, American televangelist Pat Robertson, oil scion David Rockefeller, businessman Maurice Tempelsman and William Casey, director of the CIA.

“It was an African Versailles,” says politician Albert Moleka, who reckons $400m was spent and recalls how in 1985 France’s Gaston Lenôtre, the leading pastry chef in the world, flew in on Concorde with a birthday cake for Mobutu. “It was a big decorated cake with white cream. Another time he invited Paul Bocuse and other top chefs from Europe for a special occasion. Normally Mobutu liked traditional local food, like antelope, and fish and eels. He also had one of the best wine cellars in the world.” Mobutu once presented Moleka, now a senior member of the opposition Union for Democracy and Social Progress , with a bottle of Cheval Blanc of 1928 vintage. He lost it when the president was toppled by rebel Laurent Kabila and Moleka’s home was ransacked. The end of the cold war had left Mobutu living on borrowed time and, suffering from prostate cancer, he fled the country when Kabila’s troops marched a thousand miles to Kinshasa, the capital, in 1997. He died in Morocco shortly after, aged 66.

The home of the looter-in-chief was now itself stripped bare by soldiers who smashed furniture, tore down silk wallpaper and stole everything down to the last bauble in an orgy of pillaging. Pinterest A decaying brown-and-gold gateway still marks the edge of Mobutu’s former estate. Photograph: Sean Smith Just 18 years later, this Xanadu is a pathetic and pitiful shell, a mockery of Mobutu’s insane opulence. A decaying brown and gold gateway still stands on the edge of the grand estate opposite a cluster of small homes made from mud, wood and dried grass. Mami Yonou, 26, who lives among them, comments: “We are not happy how much Mobutu spent while local people were suffering, although he brought us gifts and clothes and money.” Children heave rusting pieces of scrap metal to allow vehicles access, past vegetation and anthills and the control box where security staff would once have vetted visitors, up a winding drive of nearly 3km – doubtless once intended to intimidate or awe those in each Mercedes back seat.

Finally, through a tunnel clad with rough red bricks, there it is: a tiered fountain in the style of Versailles that used to play instrumental music. Now the giant circular bay that once held water is dry, cracked and sprouting weeds. Beyond it is the imposing entrance arch and, up four steps, what was once the atrium with a dozen marble-clad pillars and what was presumably another fountain with statues of lions on each corner. Only two of the forlorn big cats are still in position. Slightly off centre is a long corridor that leads to Mobutu’s old bedroom. Here the showman could proudly flick a switch and, through a hidden mechanism, panels would slide apart to reveal his bed, rising from the floor as if by magic, flanked by bronze sculptures of females named “The Sleep” and “The Wake”. Now that same alcove contains a pond of green slime. Pinterest A bed would rise up through the floor of Mobutu’s palace bedroom. Photograph: Sean Smith The entire roof of the palace has gone, leaving only a skeleton of red steel girders punctuated by tall trees. Mattress foam, smashed marble and slivers of glass crunch underfoot.

Slowly but surely, the palace is being reclaimed by the jungle. Bushes, flowers, vines, weeds, even trees shoot up through every available crevice in a living testimony to the fragility of civilisation. Hives and nests cling to the walls. From a winding marble staircase springs a single pink flower. In what is said to have been the bedroom of one of Mobutu’s sons, who was nicknamed “Saddam”, a spiky tree trunk rises higher than what used to be the ceiling. At the back of the palace is a veranda where, in a screenwipe of imagination, one can picture dapper-suited diplomats sitting on sultry evenings, making smalltalk over a gin and tonic and watching the setting sun amid a chorus of crickets. One thing remains unchanged – the vista is stupendous: the green, tree-dotted, hilly landscape of an Africa seen in so many nature documentaries and tourist fantasies. The old kitchens lie empty save for graffiti and ominously hanging insects. In other rooms are the twisted remnants of chandeliers, four cables dangling at crazy angles, and two shards of an Asian vase portraying a red fish.

The surrounding terrain includes a toilet bowl discarded in thick grass and the rusting skeleton of a burned-out car succumbing to the embrace of a tree. Down an overgrown staircase at one side are two swimming pools, their crumbling blue tiles again yielding to multiple flora and long grass, with algae dominating the little vestige of water. Bees buzz and make honey above the bigger one. The former garage has been gutted and coated with sharp-edged rubbish, but above, sections of a faux-classical ornamental wall are still intact. Pinterest Francois Kosia Ngama in the dried-up swimming pool at the president’s palace. His grandmother taught Mobutu’s mother. Photograph: Sean Smith Yet the shattered palace is not quite deserted. It is still haunted by a handful of Mobutu loyalists whose parents or grandparents used to work here. They charge visitors $20 for a tour, carry out routine maintenance to prevent it turning to dust, and hope that one day the old autocrat’s children, who continue to dabble in politics, will restore it for the nation. Among them is Francois Kosia Ngama, 30, whose grandmother was a teacher to Mobutu’s mother.

In its heyday, he recalls, the palace employed 700 to 800 chauffeurs, chefs, servants and other staff, plus more than 300 soldiers. There are many more rooms underground that can now longer be accessed, he says. “When I used to come here, I would feel I was in paradise. It was wonderful. Everyone would eat according to his wish.” Remembering the days when Concorde came to town, he beams and stretches his arms wide. “It was this big. Its nose pointed up. Before it arrived, Mobutu informed everyone and sent lorries to take them to the airport. “People were poor but at the time we couldn’t see it. We thought everyone was OK. The army was organised and well paid. There were clothes from the Netherlands and women had money to buy them. In education, teachers were on good salaries and couldn’t complain too much. Some needed big bags to carry all the money each time they were paid. Most teachers had their own means of transport but now it is not the case.

Coca-Cola employed 7,000 people but now they are unemployed.” The decline of Mobutu’s palace fills the jobless Ngama, who has been caring for it for 10 years, with sadness. “A white man from France came here and when he saw it, he wept. I take care of this place because it’s from one of our own. Although Mobutu died, he left it for us.” This palace and two others in Gbadolite – one designed as a cluster of Chinese pagodas, the other for state business and now occupied by the military – are in terminal decline, but the town itself survives with a population of 159,000, a bustling marketplace and a sprinkling of bars and restaurants. It has more night-time brightness than many remote parts of Africa thanks to a hydro-electric dam that Mobutu built on the Ubangui river in 1989. Pinterest Gbadolite’s water ministry building was halted mid-construction and now serves as a school. Photograph: Sean Smith Without presidential patronage, however, Gbadolite too has seen better days.

The Coca-Cola bottling plant shut down and was turned into a UN logistics base. Concrete multi-storey municipal buildings were halted mid-construction and became improvised schools, breaking every health-and-safety rule in the book as they throng with children in blue and white uniforms. The once pristine Boulevard Mobutu has lost its lustre. The compound that oversaw industry during the boom years now has a fading, almost unreadable sign and a deathly hush. Jean-Nestor Abia, 50, who has worked here since 1984, says: “We are weeping because Mobutu is no longer alive. He was like my father. I loved and worshipped him. He was not a dictator – he was a good man who wanted to unify people. “At the palace I was at ease, I was happy. He would hold my hand and say, ‘You are a good friend of mine.’ I thought, how could I be with the president of the republic? It was exciting. He would joke with me: when I was eating, he would take my spoon and eat with it. At that time we thought Mobutu would never die.

We thought he was eternal.” Pinterest Gustave Nbangu, coordinator of the once five-star Motel Nzekele. Photograph: Sean Smith The five-star Motel Nzekele, opened in 1979 with decor to match, still has an image of Mobutu at the front gate but can only offer ghosts in its shabby reception, arid fountains and pools, red-walled bar and nightclub with exotic paintings of bare-breasted women. The empty cinema has ripped seats and holes where the projector used to be. To stay in one of the hundred rooms costs $50 a night. The pope, the Belgian king and French president François Mitterrand all stayed here, says coordinator Gustave Nbangu, 49, explaining: “It was a beautiful hotel, five stars. It was a great centre of development. Remember this was once a jungle, a forest, with nothing here. But Mobutu was born here and when he became president he decided to build this and settle his people.

He was like the father of the family.” No one could accuse Mobutu, who brought Muhammad Ali and the eyes of the world to Kinshasa for “ the rumble in the jungle ”, of failing to think big. Gbadolite airport enabled him to charter Concorde, the fastest passenger plane in the world, for extravagant trips to Europe. In 2015 the vast runway, bordered by wild growing grass, welcomes only two or three tiny aircraft a week from the UN and one commercial operator. Most of the portable staircases lie idle and broken near the remnant of a helicopter engine and a row of flagless poles while, at the top of the defunct control tower, two windows lie shattered on the floor. Pinterest The mural of President Mobutu outside the mayor’s office in Gbadolite. Photograph: Sean Smith At the check-in desk a luggage conveyor belt appears long dead, while wall paintings of topless women and muscle-bound men are peeling away. Up a stairway that lacks bannister or handrail, 25-year-old mosaics of African villages are surrounded by graffiti. At the nearby VIP arrivals lounge, uniformed soldiers camp out with music pounding from a stereo.

The airport office has no record of Concorde’s flights here. The paperwork was lost for ever when the town fell and, like so much else in Gbadolite, that moment in the sun is fading into mythology. But Mobutu survives in another image outside the mayor’s office. The painting depicts him in crisp white military tunic with cap, spectacles and green sash, his hands gripping a rail as if surveying an adoring public. Egide Nyikpingo, who has been mayor for seven years, says industry died out with Mobutu. “When I arrived in 2008 I was sad at the way the airport looked. When I drove from the airport to downtown, I felt very sick. We destroyed our most beautiful town. I still feel sad about it.” Nyikpingo, 42, is aware of the ambiguities around Mobutu’s legacy. “He was a dictator. Everybody knows that. But the local people don’t mind the way he was behaving. They still like him. He did well when he decided to build this town, but the social conditions were not equal for everyone.” Pinterest Sculptor Alfred Liyolo sold several bronzes to the president.

Photograph: Sean Smith Seven hundred miles to the south, in Kinshasa, there are still some who remember Xanadu’s landlord fondly . Alfred Liyolo, 71, one of Congo’s leading sculptors , sold several bronzes to the palace in Gbadolite and designed a church and tomb for Mobutu’s first wife; all were lost or destroyed in the looting. “He was a dictator, that’s right, but he was also a builder,” Liyolo insists. “He was a man of culture who wanted his home furnished by local artists. He was generous and allowed local artists to be known throughout the world and immortalised. “But after his death, people destroy and don’t preserve. Today the town is just a shadow and nature has taken back its right. If I went back there today, I would feel desolation.” Elias Mulungula, who was Mobutu’s interpreter for four years, echoes the sentiment: “If I go to Gbadolite today, I can’t avoid crying just as Jesus cried when he beheld Jerusalem.” Pinterest ‘Mr Interpreter’: Mobutu’s translator Elias Mulungula, who went on to become a government minister.

Mulungula, 52, went on to become a government minister but admits: “I always feel more proud when people greet me as ‘Mr Interpreter’ than when they say ‘former minister’. Being interpreter for Mobutu was a privilege. He was a very kind leader, a gentleman. He couldn’t eat without making sure other people had eaten already. He was open and liked making jokes.” Unswervingly devoted, Mulungula adds: “President Mobutu was a positive dictator, not a negative one. He knew what methods to use to preserve unity, security and peace for his people. You could feel at home anywhere in the Congo under Mobutu’s regime. There is no freedom without security. He understood what the people needed at the time.” Even Mobutu’s long-time foes suggest that he was preferable to the current president, Kabila’s son Joseph, whom they accuse of corruption, human rights abuses and attempting to cling to power beyond his term limit. Joseph Olenghankoy, arrested 45 times by Mobutu’s regime and subjected to electric shocks in prison, argues: “With Mobutu we had a state, but he was a dictator.

Today we don’t have a state – it’s a jungle. Kabila is killing more than Mobutu. Kabila is three times richer than Mobutu. Mobutu was respected in the international community; Kabila is doing things in a wild and brutal manner.” Olenghankoy, president of the opposition Forces for Union and Solidarity party, also expresses sorrow at the decline of Gbadolite. “Mobutu is a man, he is gone, but all these things should remain state property. The mistake of this country is they have destroyed and looted everything. They were doing that to rub out Mobutu’s memory, but the history should be preserved. The history might be positive or negative but it remains our history and we should pass it from one generation to another.” The palace at Gbadolite is testament to the death of memory. In the final scenes of Citizen Kane, the protagonist’s childhood sledge, “Rosebud”, is thrown on a fire and lost. For Mobutu, the final surrender is to flowers, leaves and the African wilderness.

Mobutu Sese Seko, 66, Longtime Dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko, 66, Longtime Dictator of Zaire By HOWARD W. FRENCH As Powers Dimmed, a Death Foretold obutu Sese Seko, Zaire's longtime dictator and the last of a generation of Cold War rulers who grew fabulously rich by providing a bulwark against communism, died in exile Sunday in Rabat, Morocco, after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 66. Having held Zaire together for 31 years, Mobutu was chased from power in May after a seven-month rebellion led by a lifelong opponent, Laurent Desire Kabila. Throughout his rule, Mobutu swore that he would never be known as a former president, but only as the late president. In another characteristic boast, he often said that before him there was no Zaire, and that his country would not survive him either. If Kabila's army of footsoldiers put a lie to Mobutu's first claim, history ironically proved the second boast true.

Hours after Mobutu's own mutinous army fired on the cargo plane that he had used to flee the country from his opulent palace in his native village, Gbadolite, the victorious rebel leader proclaimed himself president. In his first official act, Kabila renamed the country the Congo, restoring the name used by Belgian colonists and changed by Mobutu in 1971. Mobutu's panicked flight into exile was merely the beginning of a humiliating end for a man whose almost constant presence at the front and center of the African political stage had turned him into one of the world's most vainglorious leaders. France, Mobutu's close ally until the bitter end refused to give him asylum. Similarly, Togo, a West African state ruled by another longtime dictator, Gnassingbe Eyadema, asked Mobutu and his large entourage of family and aides to leave the country just days after the exiled leader landed there. Finally, Morocco, another ally, took Mobutu in. For most of his four months there, the longtime dictator's failing health kept him confined to hospitals.

After seizing power in a 1965 coup, Mobutu formed one of the continent's archetypal one-party states, tolerating no dissent and encouraging a strong personality cult. The chosen symbols of his power became a trademark leopard-skin cap and wooden walking stick, carved with the figure of an eagle at the top. Under the banner of an ideology dubbed "authenticity," and later simply known as Mobutuism, he sought to legitimize his rule by reawakening pride in values supposedly unique to Africans, all the while enhancing his own power as the country's undisputed chief. He built his political longevity on three pillars: violence, cunning, and the use of state funds to buy off enemies. His systematic looting of the national treasury and major industries gave birth to the term "kleptocracy" to describe a reign of official corruption that reputedly made him one world's wealthiest heads of state.

Bernard Kouchner, a minister in the government of former France President Francois Mitterrand, referring to Mobutu's wealth, estimated by some to be as great as $5 billion, once described the African leader as "a walking bank vault with a leopard-skin cap." Mobutu's rapid rise from obscurity, beginning at the outset of his country's chaotic independence from Belgium, was also due in no small part to the help of Washington and other Western powers who saw in him a valuable ally against instability and Communist encroachment in Central Africa. Playing this strategic card to the hilt, Mobutu allowed his huge country, which borders nine other African nations, to be used as a staging ground for supporting Western client states and anti-Communist guerrilla movements throughout the region, most notably next door in oil-rich Angola. By the same token, Mobutu was able repeatedly to call on his Western allies to help put down the rebellions that have almost continuously marked his country's history after independence.

Mobutu's aid in the effort to contain Soviet influence in Africa, and his country's status as a repository of immense mineral wealth earned the Zairian leader direct contacts -- unmatched by any other leader of black Africa -- with every American president from Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush. Only late in the Bush administration did Washington officially begin to shun Mobutu, denying him visas to visit the United States, and encouraging him to organize free national elections. Mobutu had managed to outlast a stern generation of famously wealthy, rightist dictators who ruled over much of the developing world throughout the Cold War, from the Duvaliers of Haiti to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. But by the 1990s, with much of Africa and the rest of the world swept up in a new spirit of democratic politics, Mobutu's traditional Western backers had begun to see him as an embarrassing dinosaur. From Lowly Informer to All-Powerful Warrior uring his long public life, Mobutu rose from being a lowly colonial police informer, journalist and army sergeant to become chief of staff of his country's armed forces, military dictator and ultimately president.

He changed his name from Joseph Desire Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga, which, according to most translations means "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake. According to an alternate translation, the name meant: the rooster that watches over all the hens. Likewise, the name Congo was changed to Zaire, an old Portuguese corruption of a local name for the country's greatest river. Similarly, as all European-derived place names were replaced with African names, the capital, Leopoldville, was renamed Kinshasa. For over two decades, Mobutu's drive for "authenticity" meant that Zairians were forbidden from using Christian names, bleaching their skin and straightening their hair, or even playing most kinds of foreign music on the radio. Rather than employing the terms Mr.

or Mrs., Zairians were enjoined to address each other as "Citizen." And in the place of the Western business suit, Mobutu imposed his own creation, a two-piece outfit of pants and a tunic, patterned after the so-called Mao suits worn in China. These clothes, designed to be worn with a foulard at the neck, were dubbed "abacost," a contraction of "a bas le costume," or down with the suit. Initially, Mobutu's ideology also contained a strong component of economic nationalism, and in 1973, the government began taking over foreign-owned industries and plantations, particularly Belgian ones. The distribution of these assets among the president's closest domestic allies instantly created a class of nouveaux riches, but within two years had nearly brought the once prosperous economy to a crash, forcing Mobutu to reverse direction. For Mobutu, by far the most important aspect of his ideology was its attempt to legitimize his absolute rule by reference to supposedly traditional African political values.

According to Mobutu and his regime's enforcers, Africa's ancestral culture was incompatible with Western-style democracy, and called instead for an all-powerful and unifying chief whose wealth and prestige were the best gauges by which the governed could measure their own fortunes. For a time, as long as Mobutu was heavily courted by Western powers, and prices for Zaire's immense supplies of copper, cobalt and diamonds remained high, this strategy seemed to succeed brilliantly, leading several African presidents to copy features of his style of rule. But the Zairian leader was the most extreme, amassing one of the world's largest private fortunes, a process that continued even after his country's economy had begun a prolonged nose dive. Mobutu, who collected luxurious mansions around the world, enjoyed traveling on extended vacations and going on lavish shopping trips to destinations like Disneyworld or Paris with large numbers of relatives and courtiers in specially chartered Boeing 747 and Concorde jets. At home, he converted his northern village of Gbadolite into a gaudy, white marble retreat that was often called the "Versailles of the Jungle," but in fact was modeled after the Belgian monarchy's Laeken Palace.

Over time, this extravagance earned the country's self-styled "redeemer" unflattering comparisons with King Leopold II of Belgium, whose wanton exploitation of the Congo -- not as a colony, but as his own private royal property -- became a subject of Joseph Conrad's 1902 novel, "The Heart of Darkness." Independence Fever Heats Big Ambitions obutu was born on Oct. 14, 1930, in the northern town of Lisala in what was then the Belgian Congo. Born out of wedlock to a traditional chief of the Ngbaka ethnic group and Mama Marie Madeleine Yemo, Mobutu was adopted in his infancy by Alberic Gbemani, a cook for local Belgian missionaries who had married his mother. The young Mobutu was tutored in French and other subjects by Belgian missionaries who later helped him secure a place in missionary schools in Leopoldville and Coquilhatville, now known as Lisala.

In 1950, Mobutu, who was then 20, joined the colonial army, known as the Force Publique, working as a journalist and rising in the space of six years to the rank of sergeant, which for an African of that era was a considerable achievement. Leaving active duty in 1956, Mobutu went to work as a columnist for the Leopoldville newspaper, L'Avenir, drawing him close to the embryonic pre-independence political scene of the capital. In 1959, he was sent by the colonial administration to Brussels for fellowships at the Institute of Journalism and the Institute of Social Studies. During his stay in Belgium, Mobutu was able to attend the Brussels Roundtable Conference on Congo Independence and is widely believed to have funneled information to Belgian intelligence on behind-the-scenes discussions between Congolese participants. Mobutu returned to Leopoldville just in time for the pro-independence riots that swept the capital and dramatically accelerated Belgium's timetable for handing over power to its African subjects. Suddenly, a transition that had been measured in decades, and which seemed mostly theoretical to many Belgians, was prepared in the space of a few months.

At independence in 1960, Mobutu was called on by the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, to serve as his army chief of staff. Lumumba, a left-leaning, fiery African nationalist had shocked the Belgian delegation, led by King Baudouin, in his independence day speech by bluntly decrying the brutality and humiliation suffered by Africans at the hands of Europeans. The speech's biggest surprise, however, was Lumumba's announcement of the revocation of the Belgian officer corps that commanded the Force Publique, a 25,000-member corps that had hitherto included no African officers. The measure would prove fateful in many ways, almost immediately thrusting the country into a period of turbulence and repeated secession attempts, abetted by an embittered Brussels. It also placed Mobutu near the center of a political stage that he would dominate for nearly four decades. Mobutu's political savvy seemed to recommend him for the job of chief of staff of the armed forces, but it would not be long before the new military chief would betray the man who had appointed him. Strongman's Coup Gets Wink From Washington n Sept.

14, 1960, Mobutu, by then a colonel, "suspended" the country's political institutions, effectively, if temporarily, seizing power. The move came as the Congo was in the throes of a civil war with the copper-rich province of Katanga, now called Shaba, seeking to break away from the newborn country, and with Lumumba and the president, Joseph Kasavubu, locked in an irreconcilable power struggle. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, died in a mysterious airplane crash in 1961 as he attempted to fly into Katanga to settle the crisis. Mobutu is widely believed to have been strongly encouraged by Washington, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration. His action prevented Lumumba from making good on an invitation to the Soviet Union to help put down the Katangese secession. Continuing its support once Mobutu took over, Washington is known to have repeatedly supplied him with cash to pay his soldiers, and an American-piloted jet for travel around the country. To avoid arrest or assassination, Lumumba sought refuge at the U.N.

mission in Leopoldville, which for over two months was surrounded by Mobutu's soldiers. Lumumba escaped from the capital on Nov. 27, 1960, in a bid to reach his loyalists in the northeastern city of Stanleyville, now Kisangani, but was quickly captured. The deposed prime minister was tortured by Mobutu's agents before being flown to Katanga to be handed over to secessionist leader, Moise Tshombe, Lumumba's sworn enemy. Lumumba was killed in mysterious circumstances, and his body was never found. Mobutu formally restored power to civilian authorities in 1961, but continued working closely with the CIA in its efforts to help put down rebellions in eastern, central and southern regions of the country. On Nov. 24, 1965, Mobutu, now a lieutenant general, seized power again, but this time, with no intention of relinquishing it. The coup, one of the first military takeovers in Africa, came after U.S. financed mercenaries and other covert assistance had largely succeeded in suppressing the regional rebellions.

The pretext for the coup was renewed squabbling between President Kasavubu and the country's prime minister, Tshombe. Like Lumumba before him, Tshombe, who went into exile after Mobutu's coup, was killed under mysterious circumstances while being detained in an Algerian jail. Bankrupting a Country in Pursuit of Grandeur ack in control, Mobutu abolished party politics and for the next several years worked gradually at establishing his own uncontested authority. A year after his coup, Mobutu founded the Popular Movement of the Revolution, or MPR, the country's sole party whose membership was to become obligatory for all Zairians. By 1971, when he organized his first national elections, Mobutu's group had, in effect, become a state within a state. Mobutu ran unopposed in the presidential election, in which a green ballot paper symbolizing "progress" was to be used by voters supporting the incumbent. A red ballot paper, symbolizing "chaos" was, in theory, intended for those who did not wish to see Mobutu elected. After the voting, the government announced that only 157 voters had opposed the president.

With his carefully engineered election, Mobutu had reached the height of his powers and now virtually ruled as an absolute monarch. Under the latest version of a constitution that he had repeatedly tinkered with, the president was declared "the embodiment of the nation," and his decisions were placed "outside the scope of the various articles of the constitution that limit, to a certain degree, the powers of the president." Seated comfortably in power, Mobutu introduced his "authenticity" policy, adopted the tile of marshal, and launched a series of major projects intended to transform Zaire into an economic powerhouse in Central Africa. Instead, Mobutu's policies, from the nationalization of foreign businesses to the pursuit of huge prestige projects, nearly bankrupted the country. The largest of the projects, the Inga Dam, which alone was slated to produce one-third of the world's hydroelectric energy, and the construction of an 1,100-mile high tension power grid to the copper-producing Shaba region, proved to be disastrous. The launching of bids for these grandiose public works projects caused Mobutu to be courted anew by Western capitals and their countries' largest construction firms and banks.

But the debt crisis brought on by costly borrowing and the collapse of world copper prices ultimately thwarted those projects. Other bold strokes by Mobutu would also backfire, contributing to the slow, but irrevocable decline in his power. In 1975, Mobutu again consolidated his links with Washington by cooperating with the CIA in the launching of an assault on the Angolan capital, Luanda. The incursion of the Zairian army was aimed at helping a pro-Western guerrilla force, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, seize the capital on the eve on independence from Portugal. Instead, Cuban support enabled a rival group, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, to halt the march and rout the troops from Mobutu's most prestigious military unit, the Kamanyola Brigade, sent to assist the attack. Mobutu's clear taking of sides in the Angolan conflict would return to haunt him less than two years later, when Zairian opponents were allowed to use Angolan territory to attack the copper-rich Shaba province.

As Powers Dimmed, a Death Foretold obutu spent most of the 1980s wrestling with increasingly intractable economic problems brought on by the country's heavy debt, and exacerbated by the fall in copper prices and the regime's own constant theft of national resources. Zaire entered into a period of steep national decline. For years, Mobutu's only answers to the country's problems seemed to be continual reshuffling of government ministers and printing of virtually worthless new money to pay salaries. By the end of the decade, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of communism in most of the world, Mobutu had been stripped of any residual strategic importance. In 1990, when a democratization movement swept much of Africa, Mobutu responded at home by ordering a massacre of students at the University of Lubumbashi, in the country's far south. As word of the killings spread abroad, Belgium, Zaire's largest source of foreign aid, cut off assistance, demanding democratic reforms. Soon, the United States and France also joined in.

In April 1990, Mobutu announced the opening of the country to multiparty politics, and conceded to the organization of a "national conference," which sought to limit his powers sharply, eventually imposing a prime minister chosen from the opposition, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, and calling for national elections. Mobutu responded to the dwindling of his powers and his growing unpopularity by taking up residence on a luxury yacht, the Kamanyola, moored on the Zaire River, under heavy guard, at the edge of Kinshasa. Later, he left the capital altogether, moving to his palace in Gbadolite, nearly 1,000 miles to the north, forcing members of the government in Kinshasa to shuttle back and forth to conduct business with him. After appearing willing to bow to the decisions of the national conference, however, Mobutu did everything he could to frustrate the body, including printing huge amounts of money to buy off the votes of its participants, and ordering attacks by army hit squads on his opponents.

In September 1991, after heavy rioting in the capital, he bowed to opposition demands that he name Tshisekedi, his longest-standing opponent, as prime minister. Mobutu dismissed Tshisekdi only 12 days later, after the new prime minister attempted to establish his government's control over the Central Bank. Rioting again erupted in the capital in January 1993, when Mobutu's introduction of new bank notes to cope with triple digit inflation angered soldiers. The renewed rioting, in which the French ambassador to Zaire was killed in his office, again sharply raised international pressure on Mobutu to carry out democratic reforms. Mobutu's dwindling powers received a boost in 1994 when neighboring Rwanda exploded in a genocidal civil war that led to the massacre of over half a million people, mostly from the Tutsi minority, and sent over a million Hutu refugees streaming into Zaire. The Zairian leader's granting of permission to France to intervene in the Rwandan crisis eased Mobutu's international isolation, as did his country's taking in large numbers of refugees.

But Mobutu's perceived support for exiled Hutu militia members, who mounted repeated attacks on Rwanda from Zaire, ultimately proved costly. In October 1996, a newly formed Zairian militia, backed by Rwanda, routed government forces in a string of eastern Zairian cities, creating the most serious threat to Zaire's cohesion in years, at a time when Mobutu was already gravely ill with cancer and under treatment in Switzerland. Returning belatedly to face a crisis that was swallowing up his country, Mobutu included the complaint in virtually every public statement that he had been "stabbed in the back" by his neighbors. But for the swelling coalition of countries that brought Mobutu down and placed Kabila in power, the tables were merely being turned on a man who had spent his career playing kingmaker.

BBC News | From Our Own Correspondent | Congo's most curious town Monday, July 26, 1999 Published at 13:41 GMT 14:41 UK Congo's most curious town President Mobutu's now-derelict palaces dominate the town BBC Uganda Correspondent Anna Borzello visits Gbadolite: The opulent former home of the late President Mobutu Sese Seko, which has now fallen to rebels of the Congolese Liberation Movement. By nine at night Gbadolite's central boulevard was silent. Ugandan troops, backed by Congolese rebels, had captured the town five days earlier and the population were still adjusting to the lifting of the night-time curfew. Nonetheless, out of the dark, a figure appeared. A porter in a white suit inclined his body graciously and offered to help me with my bag. Gbadolite is an improbable creation. In the 1960s former President Mobutu Sese Seko decided to honour his birthplace.

Mobutu Sese Seko: His pet leopard is believed to stalk the town Gbadolite - a small town deep in the vast forests of northern Congo - was given wide boulevards, grand houses and an international airport. The population of Gbadolite - many of whom are directly related to Mr Mobutu - blossomed under the development. They had electricity and large brick houses. They also had jobs - working as servants in the three palaces that Mr Mobutu built around the town. Changing role A fleet of ruined limousines in the garage But in 1997 disaster struck Gbadolite. Congolese rebels, led by Laurent Kabila, marched across the country. Gbadolite was a symbol of Mr Mobutu's rule and as the rebels passed through the town they smashed the palaces and stole hundreds of luxury cars. While the rest of the world cheered the fall of Mr Mobutu - who was widely regarded as a dictator and a kleptocrat - Gbadolite mourned the end of a golden era. Mr Kabila became president, renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo - and Gbadolite was pushed to the margins of national life.

The former president's swimming pool, with a view of the rainforest This, however, was not the end of the town's woes. In August last year, Congolese rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda launched another rebellion - this time to oust Mr Kabila. Gbadolite was appointed headquarters for the Congolese government to fight back the rebel advance. Over the next 11 months, government troops camped in the town. People in Gbadolite told me that the soldiers raped women and looted property. It was, they said, like living in prison. Rebels welcomed Memories of the late president On July 3, however, the situation changed once more when the rebels finally captured Gbadolite. The goverment forces put up little resistance, leaping into canoes and rowing to neighbouring Central African Republic. They left behind an ecstatic population. Gbadolite gave a hero's welcome to the businessman-turned-rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba - even though Ugandan troops had done most of the fighting. Among the crowd were men wearing shirts printed with Mr Mobutu's image - and local officials sporting Mobutu-style leopard-skin hats.

Despite this rapturous welcome, the rebels have a difficult task ahead. Jobs are hard to find since the town lost status as presidential residence They have inherited a shattered town filled with hungry people skilled in tasks - like waiting on heads of state - for which there is no longer any call. The fabled palaces have also been vandalised - glass crunches underfoot and the walls are scrawled with graffiti. The four-storey state lodge has been stripped bare, and all that remains are black sunken bathtubs, and several monstrous chandeliers, too heavy for even the most determined looter to cart away. Mr Mobutu's pet leopard is said to stalk the overgrown gardens. Expectations Chandeliers too heavy to be stolen Only the Chinese temple complex remains structurally intact. When I walked around with a group of Ugandan soldiers, they were struck dumb by the ornamental pond, the coloured walkways - and the tiny dragon statues peering off the edge of the pagoda style roofs. People in Gbadolite told me that for the time being they are happy to be able to do simple things, like play their music loud at night, and walk along the streets without harassment.

But the rebels would be wrong to think that the battle for the hearts of the happy population is over. Gbadolite has no ordinary expectations. For 30 years the town was the favoured son of an extravagant dictator - and anything less, is likely to seem like second best. Colin Delfosse | BOZAR 17 June ’16 — 04 September ’16 Colin Delfosse Gbadolite, Versailles in the jungle Gbadolite © Colin Delfosse Versailles in the Jungle © Colin Delfosse Versailles in the Jungle © Colin Delfosse Gbadolite is a ruined utopia in the midst of the tropical jungle. Built at the end of the 1970s by order of President Mobutu, the city was to be a symbol of revival. To complete his dream, Mobutu spent millions equipping his native village with all the modern amenities that were lacking elsewhere in the country. Marble, stone and ostentatious luxury transformed the “Versailles in the jungle” into a parody of a city. Mostly unappreciated, Gbadolite crumbled with the downfall of the dictator behind it.

Photos of Mobutu’s legacy by Colin Delfosse, the Belgian photographer, will also be shown at BRASS from 19 May to 3 July. FREE ENTRANCE `Versailles of the Jungle' built by former Zaire dictator falling into ruin.(Knight Ridder Newspapers) - Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service | HighBeam Research APA Maykuth, Andrew. "`Versailles of the Jungle' built by former Zaire dictator falling into ruin.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)." Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 2000. Retrieved January 19, 2017 from HighBeam Research: Please use HighBeam citations as a starting point only. Not all required citation information is available for every article, and citation requirements change over time. `Versailles of the Jungle' built by former Zaire dictator falling into ruin.(Knight Ridder Newspapers) September 21, 2000 | Maykuth, Andrew | Copyright COPYRIGHT 1999 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.

All inquiries regarding rights or concerns about this content should be directed to Customer Service . Create a link to this page Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog: <a href="" title="`Versailles of the Jungle' built by former Zaire dictator falling into ruin.(Knight Ridder Newspapers) | HighBeam Research">`Versailles of the Jungle' built by former Zaire dictator falling into ruin.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)</a> GBADOLITE, Democratic Republic of Congo _ Three years after Mobutu Sese Seko fled Congo and died of cancer in exile, the memory of the man lives on in this Oz-like city he built in a remote rain forest. The dictator spent millions of dollars to erect an enormous airport, three palaces, a conference center and a Coca-Cola plant in Gbadolite, his ancestral home. It was the last place he stayed in Congo before he fled to Morocco in 1997. Gbadolite became a monument to surreal excess during Mobutu's time as leader of Zaire, the name he chose for Congo. He fashioned a mini-capital here, complete with scaled-down replicas of government offices.

His three palaces were dressed in jade and marble, surrounded by ponds and swimming pools and fountains and luxuriant gardens. While the rest of his country suffered, Mobutu built a model farm here and flew in sheep, cattle and plants from South America and Europe. Now the forest is rapidly reclaiming the town once called the "Versailles of the Jungle." Mobutu's palaces have fallen into ruins. They have been looted by two successive rebel armies. Several Soviet-era jet fighters and helicopter gunships lie in pieces at an airport built to accommodate the Concorde. … Gbadolite is a town in northern Equateur province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo . Gbadolite was the ancestral home of the president and dictator of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo ) Mobutu Sese Seko . Mobutu ensured that the people of Gbadolite enjoyed many of the spoils the rest of the country didn't have, such as reliable electricity. And the roads were some of the few well maintained in the country. Mobutu built Gabodolite into a luxurious town often knicknamed " Versailles in the Jungle".

He built a hydroelectric dam on the nearby Ubangi river, an international airport which could accommodate the Concord , and three large palaces. As a result, the people of the town had no trouble finding jobs, often as servants. Two palaces were built outside Gbadolite at Kawale. One an elaborate complex of chinese pagodas and the other a modern mansion, these were used as residences for Mobutu and guests. The three story palace in Gbadolite was used primarily for public functions. When Laurent Kabila successfully led a rebellion and ousted Mobutu from power in 1997, Gabolite was raided, and most of what was in the palaces was looted. The palaces are now being overun by vegetation. In 1998, the Ugandan backed MLC (Mouvement de Lib�ration du Congo) rebel group, lead by Jean-Pierre Bemba, captured Gbadolite from Kabila's government and it became the MLC's headquarters. This article is from Wikipedia . All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License .

Question: In the 1960's which dictator built the 'Versailles of the Jungle' at Gbadolite?
Answer: MOBUTU