Zaire, officially the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1971 and Republic of Zaire from 1971 to 1997, was a country in Central Africa headed by Mobutu Sese Seko from 1965 to 1997. It was, by area, the third-largest country in Africa after Sudan and Algeria, and the 11th-largest country in the world from 1965 to 1991. With a population of over 23 million, Zaire was the most populous Francophone country in Africa. Zaire was strategically important to the West during the Cold War, particularly the U.S., as a counterbalance to Soviet influence in Africa. The U.S. and its allies supported the Mobutu regime with military and economic aid to prevent the spread of communism which made it a key player for U.S. involvement in Africa.

The country was a one-party totalitarian military dictatorship, run by Mobutu Sese Seko and his Popular Movement of the Revolution. Mobutu seized power in a military coup in 1965, after five years of political upheaval following independence from Belgium known as the Congo Crisis. Zaire had a strongly centralist constitution, and foreign assets were nationalized. The period is sometimes referred to as the Second Congolese Republic.

A wider campaign of , ridding the country of the influences from the colonial era of the Belgian Congo, was also launched under Mobutu's direction. Weakened by the termination of American support after the end of the Cold War, Mobutu was forced to declare a new republic in 1990 to cope with demands for change. By the time of its downfall, Zaire was characterised by widespread cronyism, corruption and economic mismanagement.

Zaire collapsed in the 1990s, amid the destabilization of the eastern parts of the country in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and growing ethnic violence. In 1996, , the head of the AFDL militia, led a popular rebellion against Mobutu. With rebel forces making gains westward, Mobutu fled the country, leaving Kabila's forces in charge. In 1997, the country's name was restored to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Mobutu died less than four months later while in exile in Morocco.

Etymology

The country's name, , was derived from the name of the Congo River, sometimes called in Portuguese, which in turn was derived from the Kikongo (). The use of Congo seems to have replaced Zaire gradually in English usage during the 18th century and Congo was the preferred English name in 19th-century literature, although references to Zahir or Zaire as the name used by the local population (i.e. derived from Portuguese usage) remained common.

History

Mobutu

In 1965, as in 1960, the division of power in Congo-Léopoldville (a former Belgian colony) between President and Parliament led to a stalemate and threatened the country's stability. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu again seized power. He announced the renaming of the country as the Republic of Zaire on 27 October 1971.

When, under the authenticité policy of the early 1970s, Zairians were obliged to adopt "authentic" African names rather than European monikers. Mobutu dropped Joseph-Désiré and officially changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, or, more commonly, Mobutu Sésé Seko, roughly meaning "the all-conquering warrior, who goes from triumph to triumph".

In retrospective justification of his 1965 seizure of power, Mobutu later summed up the record of the First Republic as one of "chaos, disorder, negligence, and incompetence". The new constitution was submitted to popular referendum in June 1967 and approved by 98 per cent of those voting. Rather than government institutions being the emanation of the state, the state was henceforth defined as the emanation of the party. It meant, to begin with, the incorporation of youth groups and worker organisations into the matrix of the MPR.

Mobutu was careful also to suppress all institutions that could mobilise ethnic loyalties.

With the January 1973 reform, another major step was taken in the direction of further centralisation.

In reality, the conspicuous lack of popular enthusiasm for Salongo led to widespread resistance and foot dragging (causing many local administrators to look the other way).

The Battle of Kolwezi, fought in May 1978, resulted in an airborne operation in an aim of rescuing Zairian, Belgian and French miners held as hostages by pro-Communist Katangan guerrillas.

Pope John Paul II made a papal trip to Zaire on 2 May 1980, on the centenary of Catholic evangelization. During his tour, he greeted over a million people, making him the first pontiff to visit Africa as a "messenger of peace". He left Zaire four days later on 6 May shortly after 9 people were trampled to death trying to attend mass.

In 1981, despite slow progress, Zaire launched an economic reform to revive its economy in order to keep up its rescheduled payment on the country's tremendous debt of $4.4 billion, which had recorded a small rate of economic growth in the last three quarters of 1980.

During the 1980s, Zaire remained a one-party state. Although Mobutu maintained control during this period, opposition parties, most notably the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social—UDPS), were active. Mobutu's attempts to quell these groups drew significant international criticism.

As the Cold War came to a close, internal and external pressures on Mobutu increased. In late 1989 and early 1990, Mobutu was weakened by a series of domestic protests, by heightened international criticism of his regime's human rights practices, by a faltering economy, and by government corruption, most notably his massive embezzlement of government funds for personal use. In June 1989, Mobutu visited Washington, D.C., where he was the first African head of state to be invited for a state meeting with newly elected U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

In May 1990, Mobutu agreed to the principle of a multi-party system with elections and a constitution. As details of a reform package were delayed, soldiers began looting Kinshasa in September 1991 to protest their unpaid wages. Two thousand French and Belgian troops, some of whom were flown in on U.S. Air Force planes, arrived to evacuate the 20,000 endangered foreign nationals in Kinshasa.

In 1992, after previous similar attempts, the long-promised Sovereign National Conference was staged, encompassing over 2,000 representatives from various political parties. The conference gave itself a legislative mandate and elected Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya as its chairman, along with Étienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, leader of the UDPS, as prime minister. By the end of the year Mobutu had created a rival government with its own prime minister. The ensuing stalemate produced a compromise merger of the two governments into the High Council of Republic–Parliament of Transition (HCR–PT) in 1994, with Mobutu as head of state and Kengo wa Dondo as prime minister. Although presidential and legislative elections were scheduled repeatedly over the next 2 years, they never took place.

First Congo War and demise of Zaire

By 1996, tensions from the neighbouring Rwandan Civil War and genocide had spilled over to Zaire (see History of Rwanda). Rwandan Hutu militia forces (Interahamwe), who had fled Rwanda following the ascension of an RPF-led government, had been using Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire as bases for incursion against Rwanda. These Hutu militia forces soon allied with the Zairian armed forces (FAZ) to launch a campaign against Congolese ethnic Tutsis in eastern Zaire, known as the Banyamulenge. In turn, these Zairian Tutsis formed a militia to defend themselves against attacks. When the Zairian government began to escalate its massacres in November 1996, the Tutsi militias erupted in rebellion against Mobutu, triggering the First Congo War.

The Tutsi militia was soon joined by various opposition groups and supported by several countries, including Rwanda and Uganda. This coalition, led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, became known as the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL). The AFDL, now seeking the broader goal of ousting Mobutu, made significant military gains in early 1997, and by the middle of 1997 had almost completely overrun the country. The only thing that seemed to slow the AFDL forces down was the country's ramshackle infrastructure; irregularly used dirt paths and river ports were all that connected some areas to the outside world. Following failed peace talks between Mobutu and Kabila, Mobutu fled into exile in Morocco on 17 May. Kabila named himself president, consolidated power around himself and the AFDL, and marched unopposed into Kinshasa three days later. On 21 May, Kabila officially reverted the name of the country to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Legacy

After the collapse of Zaire, its legacy was claimed and partially continued by various factions which emerged from Mobutu's former supporter and loyalist network. These factions were headed by former "barons" of the regime as well as Mobutu's family members, and included political parties such as the Union of Mobutist Democrats and the MPR-Fait privé. Several of these groups continued to use Zaire's symbols and invoke its traditions. In 2024, opposition politician Christian Malanga led a coup attempt against the Congolese government in the name of his self-proclaimed "New Zaire", raising the old flag of Zaire in Kinshasa. The coup attempt was defeated, and Malanga was killed.

Government and politics

thumb|Presidential standard of Zaire

The country was governed by the Popular Movement of the Revolution as a unitary Revolution, described as a "truly national revolution, essentially pragmatic", meant "the repudiation of both capitalism and communism". Starting in 1976 the IMF provided stabilizing loans to his regime. Much of this money was embezzled by Mobutu and his circle. Blumenthal stated that there was "no chance" that creditors would ever recover their loans. Yet the IMF and the World Bank continued to lend money that was either embezzled, stolen, or "wasted on elephant projects". "Structural adjustment programmes" implemented as a condition of IMF loans cut support for health care, education, and infrastructure.

This decision was curious, given that the name Congo, which referred both to the river Congo and to the mediaeval Kongo Empire, was fundamentally authentic to pre-colonial African roots, while Zaire is in fact a Portuguese corruption of another African word, Nzadi ("river", by Nzadi o Nzere, "the river that swallows all the other rivers", another name of the Congo river). General Mobutu became Mobutu Sésé Seko and forced all his citizens to adopt African names and many cities were also renamed.

Some of the conversions are as follows:

  • Léopoldville became Kinshasa
  • Stanleyville became Kisangani
  • Élisabethville became Lubumbashi
  • Jadotville became Likasi
  • Albertville became Kalemie

In addition, the adoption of Zairian, as opposed to Western or Christian, names in 1972 and the abandonment of Western dress in favour of the wearing of the abacost were subsequently promoted as expressions of authenticity.

Critics of the regime were quick to point out the shortcomings of Mobutism as a legitimising formula, in particular its self-serving qualities and inherent vagueness; nonetheless, the MPR's ideological training centre, the Makanda Kabobi Institute, took seriously its assigned task of propagating through the land "the teachings of the Founder-President, which must be given and interpreted in the same fashion throughout the country".

Zaire's IOC code was ZAI, which the nation's athletes used at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events like the All-Africa Games. It has since changed to COD.

Notes

References

Works cited

  • .
  • Macgaffey, J., 1991. The Real Economy of Zaire: The Contribution of Smuggling and Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Callaghy, T., The State–Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, .
  • Young, C., and Turner, T., The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, .