Authenticité (Zaire)

Authenticité, sometimes Zairianisation in English, was an official state ideology of the Mobutu regime that originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in what was first the Republic of Congo-Léopoldville, later renamed Zaire. The authenticity campaign was an effort to rid the country of the lingering vestiges of colonialism and the continuing influence of Western culture and to create a more centralized and singular national identity. The policy, as implemented, included numerous changes to the state and to private life, including the renaming of the Congo and its cities, as well as an eventual mandate that Zairians were to abandon their Christian names for more "authentic" ones. In addition, Western style attire was banned and replaced with the Mao-style tunic labeled the "abacost" and its female equivalent. The policy began to wane in the late 1970s and had mostly been abandoned by 1990.

Not long after Mobutu Sese Seko's declaration of the beginning of the Second Republic following his successful coup against the failing democratic government of President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, he declared his new nationalistic ideology in the Manifesto of N’Sele of May 1967. Over the next several years, Mobutu gradually instated the various policy measures that would come to define the campaign. More than anything, the retour à l’authenticité ("return to authenticity") was an effort on behalf of the self-declared "father of the nation" to create a national identity that could take precedence over regionalism and tribalism while reconciling those claims with the exigencies of modernization. He described the ideology as follows:

Authenticité has made us discover our personality by reaching into the depths of our past for the rich cultural heritage left to us by our ancestors. We have no intention of blindly returning to all ancestral customs; rather. We would like to choose those that adapt themselves well to modern life, those that encourage progress, and those that create a way of life and thought that are essentially ours.

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