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In place of the old party-state, hundreds of parties were established—many of them simply ‘partis alimentaires’, ideology-free ‘eating parties’ designed to sell their support to various power-brokers, and filled with hungry cadres in search of (often pathetically small) financial rewards.

[...] while the powerful cultivated their image as a fruitful bough, the gifts made to underlings in these performances were in reality a tiny fraction of the whole, obscuring the fact that most wealth was being funnelled offshore. [...] the African trajectory differs in an important respect from t…

This form of distribution is often referred to in Weberian terms as ‘neo-patrimonialism’—the ‘neo’ indicating that the apparatus of a modern state is used to administer patronage, yet without the forms of institutional separation between individual networks and office said to be characteristic of modern forms of authority.

In this, Zaire’s catastrophe emerges not as sui generis, but as an extreme variant of a wider pattern of financial mise-en-dépendance.

Leopold’s ‘Free State’ was a paradigmatic Raubwirtschaft (predatory economy)