Top 15 Toppled Dictators
After 42 years in power in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi met his demise Oct. 20. TIME takes a look at other dictators who have been overthrown by their own people
The archetypal African dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, a military officer, rose to power in the Congo by displacing populist, left-leaning leader Patrice Lumumba. Burnishing his nationalist chops, he renamed the resource-rich, strategic former Belgian colony "Zaire," a pronunciation of a local Kikongo word for "the river that swallows all rivers." Mobutu swallowed all his country's politics, building a highly centralized state where power radiated from his presidential palace and tales of his nepotism and corruption — including Concorde-borne shopping trips to Paris — were legion. Propped up with aid from the West — for years, Zaire was one of the biggest recipients of U.S. funds in Africa — Mobutu presided over the country for some four decades, despite myriad reports of abuses and human rights violations. The end of the Cold War prompted him to embark upon hesitant political reform, but it took civil strife and the victory of armies loyal to Laurent Kabila to unseat Mobutu in 1997 — he died shortly thereafter in exile in Morocco, of prostate cancer.
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