Mobutu Sese Seko

Born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu in 1930, he rose to Chief of Staff of the Congolese Army during the 1960 Congo Crisis, when he deposed Patrice Lumumba's elected government with American and Belgian support and installed a regime that executed Lumumba in 1961. He seized full power in a second coup in 1965, declared the Popular Movement of the Revolution the only legal party in 1967, and renamed the country Zaire in 1971 and himself Mobutu Sese Seko in 1972. He presided over widespread human rights violations and a totalitarian system built on corrupt patronage, amassing between $50 million and $5 billion as his country suffered hyperinflation and debt. Cold War anti-communism won him decades of Western support and ties to apartheid South Africa, China, and Israel. By 1990 economic collapse forced him into coalition; in May 1997 Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebels overran Zaire and drove him into exile, where he died of prostate cancer three months later in Morocco.