In 1965, Joseph-Desire Mobutu seized power in a military coup, ending five years of political chaos known as the Congo Crisis that had followed independence from Belgium. He was not new to intervention; he had played a decisive role in a similar power grab in 1960. This time he stayed. A new constitution, approved by referendum in 1967 with a claimed 98 percent support, redefined the state as an emanation of his party, the Popular Movement of the Revolution. Youth groups, worker organizations, and ethnic institutions were absorbed into its structure. On October 27, 1971, Mobutu announced that the Republic of the Congo would henceforth be the Republic of Zaire -- a name derived from the Portuguese corruption of the Kikongo word Nzadi, meaning "river." The irony was considerable: Mobutu justified the change as reclaiming African authenticity, yet Congo, the name he discarded, had deeper pre-colonial roots, referring to both the river and the medieval Kongo Empire.

The renaming was only the beginning. Under Mobutu's Authenticite campaign, Zairians were obliged to abandon European names in favor of "authentic" African ones. Leopoldville became Kinshasa. Stanleyville became Kisangani. Elisabethville became Lubumbashi. Western dress was banned in favor of the abacost, a Mao-collared suit. Mobutu himself dropped Joseph-Desire and became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. The Makanda Kabobi Institute, the party's ideological training center, was tasked with propagating the president's teachings "in the same fashion throughout the country." Critics noted the campaign's self-serving qualities: authenticity, in practice, meant obedience. In the 1970 presidential election, Mobutu was confirmed in office with over 10 million votes in favor and exactly 157 against. Parliamentary elections two weeks later offered voters a single party list approved with over 99 percent support. The charade of democracy was itself a statement of power.

Zaire was strategically important to the United States as a counterbalance to Soviet influence in Africa, and Washington rewarded loyalty with military and economic aid. The IMF began providing stabilizing loans in 1976, and the World Bank followed. Much of the money was embezzled. A former IMF official named Blumenthal stated bluntly that there was "no chance" creditors would ever recover their loans. Yet lending continued, funding what critics called "elephant projects" -- grandiose and useless -- while structural adjustment programs cut support for healthcare, education, and infrastructure. With a population of over 23 million, Zaire was the most populous Francophone country in Africa, and its people bore the cost of their leader's appetite. By the late 1980s, the end of the Cold War removed Mobutu's strategic value. American support dried up. In September 1991, unpaid soldiers looted Kinshasa, and two thousand French and Belgian troops arrived to evacuate 20,000 foreign nationals.

Mobutu agreed to multiparty reform in 1990, but the promise was hollow. A Sovereign National Conference in 1992 elected its own prime minister; Mobutu created a rival government. The stalemate dragged on while the country disintegrated. In 1996, the spillover from the Rwandan genocide ignited eastern Zaire. Hutu militia forces who had fled Rwanda were using refugee camps as bases for cross-border raids, and they allied with the Zairian army to attack Congolese Tutsis known as the Banyamulenge. When the Tutsi communities formed their own militia, a coalition led by Laurent-Desire Kabila and supported by Rwanda and Uganda swept westward under the banner of the AFDL. The only thing that slowed the advance was the country's ramshackle infrastructure -- dirt paths and river ports were sometimes all that connected regions to the outside world. On May 16, 1997, Mobutu fled to Morocco. The next day, Kabila marched into Kinshasa and restored the name Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu died in exile less than four months later. In 2024, an opposition politician named Christian Malanga attempted a coup in the name of a self-proclaimed "New Zaire," raising the old flag in Kinshasa. The attempt was defeated, and Malanga was killed -- but the ghost of Zaire proved difficult to bury.