In a yellow plaster house with a red tin roof on the outskirts of Leopoldville, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, 29, bit his fingernails, answered the telephone, coped with a stream of visitors, and tried to ...

(CNN) -- Imagine being mugged as you walk down a street. But you can't turn to the authorities for protection because -- chances are -- they are the muggers. Now, imagine an entire country of 45 ...

Congo President Joseph Mobutu last week nationalized the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, the Belgian company that provided a living for 100,000 Congolese, accounted for about one-half of the government ...

The beauty of this book is that it makes sense of chaos. For the past few decades, the Congo, one of Africa's richest countries in natural resources, has been in an economic decline that has resulted ...

In September 1960, the very same month Ali won his Olympic gold in Rome, Joseph Mobutu staged a coup in the Congo and placed elected President Patrice Lumumba under house arrest. In November, Lumumba ...

The then newly created Organisation of African Unity, for instance, entrusted President Jomo Kenyatta with the task of reconciling Congolese warring factions in 1964 only for imperial powers to ...

In The Lumumba Plot (Knopf, Oct.) journalist Reid explores the life of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the CIA’s complicity in his 1961 murder. What ...

Young people gaze up at large photographs of Mobutu Sese Seko, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) national museum. A charismatic and outrageously corrupt former dictator, Mobutu seized power ...