MOBUTU PALACES
In 1967, two years after his coup d’état, the dictator Mobutu transformed the small villages where he was raised into a city with great infrastructure where three opulent palaces rose from the African bush. Fourteen years after the President’s departure, nothing remains of these developments. Destroyed by weather, overwhelmed by vegetation and devastated by robberies, the palaces of the supreme leader are little more than mere skeletons of their former selves, wholly devoid of their former splendour for the eyes of visitors.
The ballroom of the official palace of Mobutu in Gbadolite became the playground of the soldiers’ children who squat the place. They find balls of glass and crystal, which formerly decorated the monumental chandeliers still hanging from the ceilings, they use as marbles.
The presidential palaces built by Marshal Mobutu compose a delirious but unfinished architectural complex. The Supreme Guide did not have time to finalize the last floor of the main building.
The ballrooms worthy of an episode of " The Empress Sisi" are now squatted by soldiers’ families. Completely plundered and damaged by the rigors of the Congolese climate, they remind henceforth more the movie " Mad Max ", in a tropical version.
Soldiers’ family are squatting the buildings of the presidential palaces.
One can reach the office of the Marshal-President using a spiral staircase.
The Chinese palace is without doubt the most unusual of all in the middle of the African bush.
The Chinese palace is made of several pagodas with beams decorated with paintings and gardens of water lilies with their fountains.
Mobutu, unmistakably influenced by his visits in China, had made build an other Chinese palace not far from Kinshasa, on the presidential site of Nsele.
The swimming pool of the former residence of Mobutu in Nsele, near Kinshasa.
