Mobutu Sese Seko Quotes

In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.

Millions of dead' appears nowhere in the rich oral tradition of my ancestors, nor in Lumumba's speeches. Nor does it appear with Mobutu, who was born and raised in the Equator province, where the ABIR and the Anversoise exploited rubber.

But most people will draw their own conclusions on learning that the dictator’s official name, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, translates as ‘the cock who goes from hen to hen knowing no fatigue’.

Moest Lumumba destijds niet geweigerd hebben om de Congolese nationaliteit toe te kennen aan de kolonialen die dat wensten. Dan zou het economisch debacle van de zaïrisering vermeden zijn.

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.

reminds me of the soldier-thug Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who collaborated with Belgian intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington in 1961 to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically chosen prime minister. Four years later Mobutu, with American support, staged a military coup in Congo, a country he would rename Zaire and rule as a dictator for thirty years, enforcing policies as indifferent to human suffering and misery as Saddam Hussein’s, and, as Mobutu Sese Seko, amassing a personal fortune of some four billion dollars.