‘Mobutu's Game’: political thriller about rise and fall of former Congolese dictator airs

Belgians over 50 are familiar with the clichéd images of former Congolese dictator Mobutu. People remember a man with a leopard hat, sometimes wearing his Mao suit, sometimes in his white, gold-studded army uniform, smiling broadly and waving his sceptre at his dancing followers.

Mobutu dined with kings and presidents, was one of the few African leaders with a direct line to both the White House and France’s Elysée Palace, as well as the Belgian royal palace in Laken. But who was he really? Who manipulated who? This is what the series ‘Mobutu's Game’ is determined to find out.

Shadow of Lumumba

Mobutu is a child of Belgian colonialism. He studies at a Belgian school, is called to serve in the army and appears on the Congolese political scene as a confidant of fighter for independence Patrice Lumumba. But when the West drops the latter, who served as Congo's first prime minister, Mobutu, like a true Judas, goes all out for his own career and commits treason.

When Lumumba's house is surrounded by both the United Nations and the Congolese army, he literally turns his back on Lumumba. One of his associates is on the plane taking the arrested Lumumba to Kinshasa. Daughter Juliana Lumumba is convinced that the UN, Belgians and Americans whispered to Mobutu ‘only when Lumumba is gone can you make a career for yourself’.

Mobutu returns Congo to 'authenticity'

This is how Mobutu emerges as a political strategist angling for more power. ‘I visited him for coffee every day, and he read ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli,’ CIA chief Larry Devlin lets slip.

When Mobutu gets into trouble as an inept army commander, he has his Western allies come to his rescue. He knows only too well that the Cold War is also raging on the continent of Africa and that the Americans need Congolese copper and cobalt for their war in Vietnam.  At the same time, he manages the picture of decolonisation his own people see. He changes the country's name to ‘Zaire’ and, under the guise of authenticity, gets rid of all colonial symbols.

But it is only a façade. His one-party state, led by the MPR party, is a hollow shell, increasingly serving the one leader. Mobutu Sese Seko, ‘the eternal one, who will never disappear’. His personality cult becomes grotesque. He has dancers applaud him, his portraits hang everywhere, and messianic images of his face over a blue sky appear on state television.... A messiah who simultaneously indulges in institutionalised sexual abuse and widespread corruption.

Mobutu and his inner clique get richer and richer, the Congolese people poorer and poorer. In one of the most striking images in the documentary, the camera follows the streets of Kinshasa. First the poor neighbourhoods full of rubbish, broken pavements and street shops, then the wide avenues in the Gombe district on the Congo River, ending in the luxurious villa of Leon Engulu, Mobutu’s faithful lieutenant. The latter glorifies his former boss, saying without blinking that corruption, enrichment and dictatorship are fine. ‘I was shaped by whites. And therefore I imitate them.’

Descent into Hell

The distance between the kleptomaniac leader and his people grows. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mobutu was still trying to impress the outside world with stunts like the megalomaniacal Inga hydroelectric plant, not for electricity for the Congolese, but for the mines in Katanga. ‘We negotiated the contract,’ says the then-US ambassador Herman Cohen.

But Mobutu also becomes a paranoid autocrat. Any form of protest is brutally crushed. We are shown the planes and helicopters from which political opponents are simply thrown into the river.

Even a tentative letter of criticism from 13 MPs is met with arrests and violence. His country's growing debt burden, partly due to disappointing copper prices, cannot bother the leader. Mobutu lets the money flow and while his people groan under poverty, he continues to enrich himself without any sense of moderation.

Until 1989. The Berlin Wall falls, and to his own horror, Mobutu watches on TV as his close friend, the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu and his wife, are executed to popular acclaim. Mobutu becomes terrified and realises that the same fate could also befall him.

Disaster beckons after my departure

‘Comprenez mon émotion’ (Understand my emotions). These are Mobutu's historic words when he reluctantly announces a multiparty system in Congo in 1991. It’s the beginning of the end. New names like Etienne Tshisekedi emerge. People react with elation and outrage. The post-Cold War West no longer needs the dictator as a dam against Communism.

‘We thought he had gone far enough,’ says then Belgian foreign minister Mark Eyskens. The ground is beginning to sink from underneath Mobutu’s feet. We still see decadent images of an ailing leader handing out bags of money to supporters at his luxury palace in Gbadolite, money he himself had illegally printed.

When the Rwandan genocide erupts in 1994, and his former ally François Mitterrand asks him to take in Rwandan refugees, Mobutu sees an opportunity for a comeback on the international stage and eagerly accepts.

It was an erroneous and fateful assessment: Laurent-Désiré Kabila, becomes Rwanda’s ideal stooge to invade Congo and overthrow Mobutu once and for all. Mobutu, once so powerful and untouchable, will die a few months later in Moroccan exile.