Notes

Guy Tillim first visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996 for a photo story he proposed to a German magazine to travel by boat from Kisangani to Kinshasa. Thereafter he visited the Congo region repeatedly, notably for three months in 2003 to continue photographing traces of the colonial occupation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium as well as to document vestiges of more recent plunder under Zairian military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Tillim exhibited his photographs as single images and in diptychs and triptychs, the latter juxtaposing historical sites in the Congo and Belgium with contemporary views of daily life in Congo. This photograph describes the remnants of Mobutu’s presidential complex in Gbadolite, the remote village in north-western Congo that in the 1970s was transformed into a “marbled Versailles of the jungle”1 replete with an international airport capable of Concorde landings. It was Mobutu’s last place of residence in the Congo before, in 1997, he fled to Togo in advance of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s soldiers. The palace complex, which included several bronze sculptures and a church designed by Congolese sculptor Alfred Liyolo were completely looted by soldiers.

 1. Robert Block, ‘Mobutu goes cruising as his country burns’, The Independent (UK), 14 February 1993.

Exhibited

Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Guy Tillim: Leopold and Mobutu, 12 May to 19 June 2004