President Laurent Kabila of the Congo, who died on January 17th, was a cheerful, rubicund rogue, portly in middle age, who had spent most of his life in exile, engaged partly in the illegal diamond trade and partly in wild schemes to overthrow the dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu, his predecessor.
Along the way, he engaged the services in 1965 of Che Guevara, as well as the armies of Uganda and Rwanda, which eventually helped to bring him to power in May 1997.
His skills at political survival served him well over more than 25 years of opposition politics in exile, but deserted him once he had moved into the presidential palace.
Forty years ago, at the dawn of the Congo's independence from Belgian colonial control in 1960, Laurent Kabila, aged 20, was one of the young men who might have become a star in the country's politics. Yet after UN intervention and the assassination in January 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the independence leader, the cream of the radical Congolese cadres were dispersed abroad.
Laurent Kabila studied briefly in Paris and Belgrade, before returning to the Congo in 1963. For a short period, he was an elected assemblyman in North Katanga, but when the parliament was closed down later that year, he joined with other former adherents of Lumumba to help stage a widely-supported rebellion, launched in four separate areas of the country.
Backed by both the Chinese and the Russians, as well as by half a dozen radical African states, the Lumumbist rebellion had soon attracted the attention of the US. A plan was masterminded by Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance that involved a coup d'etat (putting a reliable western ally, Moise Tshombe, into the presidential palace), and the despatch of emergency military assistance.
Laurent Kabila, who had established himself at Albertville (Kalemie) in a "liberated zone" on the western shores of Lake Tanganyika, was soon forced by US-backed mercenaries to retreat to the north, to the borders of Rwanda and Burundi.
He turned to Cuba for assistance and Che Guevara arrived on the Tanzanian-Congo border with a small contingent of guerrilla fighters in April 1965.
Guevara was initially impressed by Laurent Kabila, recording that "he made an excellent impression" on first acquaintance. Subsequently, he was obliged to reconsider his view.
After six months the rebellion petered out. The Cubans went home, Mobutu seized power from Tshombe, and Laurent Kabila began 30 years in a political wilderness.
He did not reappear on the international stage until May 1997, when his forces captured Kinshasa after a lightning 10day campaign. Inaugurated as the new president, he renamed the country as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Mobutu had decreed in 1971 that it should be called Zaire) and he indicated that he would create a liberal and competent government.
Hardly were the words out of his mouth before he fell out with his Ugandan and Rwandan backers. Mistakenly believing that they could topple him as they had once destroyed Mobutu, they assisted a new Congolese rebellion in August 1998.
Ugandan-backed rebel forces once again advanced from the north-eastern borders and threatened to seize Kinshasa. Laurent Kabila invoked his friendship with the erstwhile leftist governments of Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, and their troops arrived in time to fight off this new rebellion.
Subsequently, he established a one-party state, promised elections that were never held and alienated foreign investors by refusing to make payments on the gigantic foreign debt incurred by his profligate predecessor.
Well-meaning brokers like Nelson Mandela sought to mediate an end to the war but he refused to take any notice. His mercurial temperament, and his ability to change sides, left him with few friends, either at home or abroad.
His early promise as a potential leader was dissipated in his futile attempt to retain the Congo as his fiefdom, much as Mobutu had done before him.
President Laurent Kabila: born 1939; died, January 2001