Zaïre: the Shattered Illusion of the Integral State

Abstract

Zaïre, by the early 1990s, by some accounts had all but vanished. One senior American diplomat described it as nothing more than the presidential vessel ‘Kamanyola’ anchored safely offshore in the Zaïre River, an élite praetorian guard compensated in hard currency, the remote marble city of Gbadolite, a shrivelled state superstructure nourished by diamond smuggling. Its perennial President, Mobutu Sese Seko, was characterised contemptuously by a French official as ‘a walking bank account in a leopard-skin cap’. More than a decade ago, a former publicist for the central régime had relegated the once-powerful state to a zone of non-existence: ‘The state does not exist or no longer exists in Za’. The 1992 National Conference resolved to expunge Zaire from history by restoring its earlier colonial and post-colonial nomenclature of ‘Congo’.