Word: mobutu
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...been uninspiring. He has represented the President overseas on five major tours, but mostly in areas dominated by right-wing dictatorships, whose leaders he has flattered more than protocol demands. His praise of such oppressive black rulers as Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and the Congo's Joseph Mobutu, suggesting that U.S. black leaders emulate them, was a major gaffe. He is even more hawkish on the war than Nixon, and his seeming willingness to escalate military conflict would make him a dangerous President. He even initially opposed Nixon's overtures to China...
...eight months Mobutu Sese Seko (formerly known as Joseph Desire Mobutu), President of the former Belgian Congo, has been preoccupied with a search for national "authenticity." He has changed dozens of place names reminiscent of colonial times, and the country itself is now known as the Republic of Zaïre. Mobutu has also decreed that all Zaïrians-beginning with himself-should discard their Christian names in favor of "authentic" African ones. As a final symbol of the new order, Mobutu changed the principal national holiday from June 30-its independence day-to November 24, the anniversary...
Though many of Mobutu's 21.5 million countrymen may giggle at their new names, most of them respect the President's motive: to give them something of their own to be proud of. They felt degraded by Belgium's harsh colonialism under which they were called macaques (apes) and treated as backward children. Mobutu's "authenticity" campaign, going back as it does to their own precolonial tribal roots, at least gives them something to hold...
...case, they have little choice but to accept Mobutu's ideas, because he is firmly in control. He runs the only party, the "nonpolitical" Popular Revolutionary Movement, and holds a tight rein on the provincial governments by rotating their leaders frequently. Most important, he appears to be in complete charge of the army, especially of the elite corps of 5,000 paratroopers that he himself created...
With his unchallenged power, Mobutu has succeeded in giving his country the two things it needed most: a measure of peace and relative stability. In consequence, Zaïre is beginning to attract foreign investment on a rising scale. A Japanese mining group is about to open a large new copper mine near Lubumbashi (the former Elisabethville), for instance, and to the northwest of Lubumbashi an international consortium has discovered what may be the world's richest bed of copper ore. In Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, four auto manufacturers are planning to open assembly plants, Goodyear has just completed...