Mobutu’s Authenticité is analysed here not as a question of cultural “truth” but as an experiment in symbolic state-building: a bid to monopolise legitimate classification through official nomination, regulated aesthetics, ritualised participation (animation politique), lexical engineering, and administrative uptake. The article reconstructs motives without psychologising by inferring function from infrastructure—legitimation, centralisation, moralisation of politics, elite consecration, and legibility—rather than from conjectures about interior belief. It then reframes the intentionalist–opportunist debate as competing diagnostic models with observable expectations, clarifying how strategic craft can concentrate in technique even when doctrinal coherence remains elastic. Finally, it traces contemporary afterlives under fragmented classificatory authority, where region, language, and autochthony claims become salient boundary-making resources. A concluding section on Mobutu nostalgia shows how the promise of a lost classificatory centre can be reanimated as a politics of comparison under present-day insecurity and institutional weakness. (Bourdieu, 1989, 2014; Hoffmann, 2010; Kakama, 1983; Scott, 1998; White, 2006; Young & Turner, 1985)