And The West Made Mobutu: How the West Built and Destroyed a Dictator

For thirty years, the West called Mobutu Sese Seko a reliable ally. Then, within months, it called him a monster.Nothing had changed in Zaire. Not the repression. Not the looting. Not the Swiss accounts. What changed was a single variable: strategic utility. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Cold War was over. Mobutu was no longer useful.This book asks a simple question with an uncomfortable answer: who made Mobutu? Not just the man himself — the dictator who plundered one of Africa’s richest countries for three decades. But the system that installed him, financed him, protected him, celebrated him, and then abandoned and demonized him when he became inconvenient.Washington. Paris. Brussels. The IMF. Western newsrooms. Each played their role. None ever acknowledged it.And The West Made Mobutu is not a biography. It is an anatomy of complicity — of how Western democracies sustained a regime they knew to be predatory, then erased that history behind a theatrical denunciation.Essential reading to understand not only yesterday’s Congo, but today’s uncomfortable alliances — in the Sahel, in cobalt mines, in the meeting rooms where it is quietly decided who deserves support and who deserves to be discarded. Read more