Exclusive Interview

Morocco-DRC: Tea in Rabat with the Mobutus

By Fadwa Islah

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Posted on October 1, 2021 17:01

Firefox_Screenshot_2021-10-01T12-31-37.071Z Seated in the centre, Mama Bobi Ladawa, Mobutu’s widow, surrounded by Ngawali (left) and Yalitho, two of the marshal’s daughters. Standing, Nzanga (left) and Nyiwa, his sons and grandson © HOC for JA
Seated in the centre, Mama Bobi Ladawa, Mobutu’s widow, surrounded by Ngawali (left) and Yalitho, two of the marshal’s daughters. Standing, Nzanga (left) and Nyiwa, his sons and grandson © HOC for JA

Friday 20 August 2021. On this holiday, the streets of Rabat are almost always deserted; the ambassadors’ residential area is no exception. Each year, the kingdom celebrates the anniversary of the ‘revolution of the king and the people’, a period during which Moroccans protested against Mohammed V’s forced exile to Madagascar in 1953.

Along the wide palm tree-lined alleys – which are usually filled with the cars of ministers, generals and other senior government officials – time seems to have stopped. The silence is occasionally interrupted by a whistling garden hose or a rustling door at one of the booths for the guards who ensure the safety of the wealthy villas’ inhabitants.

One of the villas, which was built in the same neo-Moorish style as the others, has been the home of Bobi Ladawa, widow of the late Zairean leader Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko, and some of the former Zairean president’s descendants for a quarter of a century. Her twin sister Kosia also lives in Rabat, but was in Europe at the time of our visit.

Ever since her hasty departure from Kinshasa on 16 May 1997, after her husband was overthrown by Laurent Désiré Kabila, Ladawa has been very discreet. This is the first time that she has agreed to talk to a

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