Mobutu Built a Versailles in the Jungle With a Runway for the CONCORDE — Then His Country Went Broke

It's a Saturday evening in May 1997, deep in the rainforest of northern Zaire, and a cargo plane is waiting at the end of a runway long enough to land the Concorde. A sick old man in a leopard-skin cap is hurried aboard, and as the plane starts to roll, his own presidential guard opens fire on it. Up the hill sits the palace the foreign press called the Versailles of the Jungle, and within hours it will be stripped down to the walls. This is the true story of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who ruled Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for 32 years, and of Gbadolite, the village of mud-brick houses he turned into a jungle Versailles. Carrara marble, Venetian chandeliers, swimming pools with loudspeakers playing Gregorian chant, pink champagne by the thousands of bottles, a Coca-Cola plant, a nuclear bunker and a 3,200-meter runway for chartered Air France Concorde flights to New York, Paris and Marseille. From Patrice Lumumba and the 1965 coup to the Kawele palace, the collapse of Zaire's economy, civil servants paid about $1 a month, the army lootings of 1991 and 1993, Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebellion and Mobutu's flight from Gbadolite on 17 May 1997, to his death in exile in Rabat and the overgrown ruins that stand in Gbadolite today. Should the Congo bring Mobutu's body home to Gbadolite, or should he stay where he is? Tell me in the comments. If you love watching the most powerful men on earth build golden palaces and then lose everything in a single night, subscribe. There's always another one, and every one of them really happened. Today the trees are growing through his palace, the pools are empty, and the Concorde is never coming back. The runway was built so a king could land, and the last thing it ever did for him was let him leave.