Military fatigues, machine gun on his shoulder and red beret, this is how Christian Malanga Musumari, relatively unknown until then, burst onto the scene in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Sunday May 19. This 41-year-old Congolese, naturalized American, appeared surrounded by several dozen men, including his son Marcel Malanga, 21, in a video broadcast on social networks where he claimed to have taken power by brandishing the Zaire flag, the old name of the DRC. A brief demand which ended tragically the same day with his death, that of four of his associates and the arrest of around 40 others, according to the spokesperson for the Congolese army.
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In the early morning, around 4:30 a.m., the commando attacked the home of Vital Kamerhe, the Minister of the Economy, then still waiting to be elected President of the Assembly, in the upscale district of Gombe. Two police officers and an assailant died in the exchange of fire, according to General Sylvain Ekenge, army spokesperson. The attackers then invested not far from there the “Palace of the Nation”which houses the offices of Félix Tshisekedi.
Christian Malanga’s story begins in Kinshasa on January 2, 1983, before his family took refuge in South Africa and then in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States, in 1998. Christian Malanga introduces himself in his biography online like “a businessman, philanthropist and former Congolese military veteran”. After being a car dealer for a time in Utah, he returned to the DRC in 2006, at the age of 23, to carry out his military service and became a captain in the Congolese army.
Self-proclaimed president
In 2011, he ran as an independent in the legislative elections. A failure. After this setback, Christian Malanga returned to the United States in 2012 where he founded the United Congolese Party, an opposition microparty based in Washington. Five years later, he created an alternative government, the “new Zairian government in exile” in Brussels, from where he proclaims himself “president of New Zaire”.
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Although he does not hesitate to appear during military training in videos filmed in Switzerland, Belgium or the United States, Christian Malanga is also launching into the mining sector in the DRC, at the head of the Malanga Congo company. In Mozambique, in 2022, he founded CCB Mining Solutions, a mining investment company seeking artisanal gold concessions, according to the specialist site Africa Intelligence. He controls it equally with two Americans: Cole Ducey and Benjamin Zalman-Polun. The latter, active in the medicinal cannabis sector in the United States, is part of, people arrested by the Congolese army on May 19.
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