Word: mobutu
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Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the heartbreaking squalor visible everywhere in Zaire these days is the extent to which the man responsible for it has insulated himself from the despair and the destitution. For more than 30 years Mobutu Sese Seko has imposed an uneasy unity on nearly 250 tribes strung across an expanse of Central Africa the size of Western Europe. The natural richness of this region and the willingness of Western governments to bankroll his regime have enabled Zaire's President to indulge in an uninterrupted saturnalia of misrule and kleptomania. He has squandered his country...
During the past five months, Mobutu's regime has rapidly and spectacularly begun to unravel. In the streets of Kinshasa his opponents have been clamoring for him to step down. In two of Zaire's most remote provinces, long-sputtering secessionist movements have burst into flames. But it is the full-scale rebellion now sweeping across five eastern provinces that seems most likely to bring Mobutu's rule to an abrupt and unceremonious conclusion...
...marches at the head of that insurrection is Laurent Kabila, 56, a short, rotund guerrilla leader who has been battling Mobutu for more than 30 years. Since the early 1970s Kabila has waged a haphazard and by several accounts rather incompetent struggle against Mobutu's government from the jungle highlands around Lake Tanganyika. Although Kabila's Marxist-inspired People's Revolutionary Party received support from the Soviet Union, China and Cuba (Che Guevara once spent several months training with them), the obscure group never amounted to more than a nuisance. But the experience did enable Kabila to forge a valuable...
...several different armies. Until recently, they were assisted by Mai-Mai tribesmen, who smoke marijuana, worship water and festoon themselves with bathroom fixtures--mainly faucets and hoses--in the belief that these fetishes will aid them in battle. For the moment, the rebel leader has established his headquarters in Mobutu's former home in Goma. He has dubbed his new residence "the Museum of Shame" because its ostentatious decor mirrors the incorrigible excesses of Mobutu's rule. Visitors to Kabila's headquarters, however, are struck by an even more telling reflection. Much like Mobutu's imprimatur these days, the elegance...
Leon Gast's documentary details the next step in Ali's career: Act III of a great and poignant pageant. This was the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire. That country's dictator, Mobutu Sose Seko, had laid out $10 million of his country's puny resources to play host to the fight and a festival of African and Afro-American music. "We left Africa in shackles and fetters and chains," said promoter Don King in a spume of eloquence. "We are coming back in an aura of splendor and scintillating glory. The champions...