When Mobutu announced the end of the single-party state, Régine was thirty-five and Ruffin was seven. Régine was headmistress at a Catholic girls’ school, Ruffin was just learning to read at a Catholic boys’ school across town. Régine had organized the teachers’ sit-in a few years before. When she heard that the MPR had lost its primacy, all she could do was dance. Ruffin was too young to understand the historical portent of the turnaround. He played soccer with his friends and began to dream of life as a priest. Yet both of them would become involved in the dictator’s fall, in totally different ways and at totally different moments, Régine in 1992, Ruffin in 1997. When it came to falling, Mobutu took his own sweet time.Régine Mutijima thought it might all go very quickly. “We really wanted Mobutu to step down after the elections and go on living honorably inside the country.”1 But in the period 1990–97, Mobutu kept hold of power with a stubbornness and cunning no one had thought possible.
