Democratic Republic of the CongoRépublique démocratique du Congo

Before colonial rule the Congo basin held some of Central Africa's most complex states. The Kingdom of Kongo, centred on Mbanza Kongo in today's northern Angola, ruled the lower river from the 14th century; its king Afonso I (reigned 1509–1542) became a Christian, wrote to the Portuguese king complaining about the slave trade, and made Kongo a Catholic kingdom. Further inland, the Kuba kingdom produced famous raffia textiles and carvings, and the Luba and Lunda empires of the south-east built networks of tributary chiefs across the savanna.

Henry Morton Stanley's journey down the Congo in 1874–77 caught the attention of King Leopold II of Belgium, who hired him to sign treaties with chiefs. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 recognised the Congo Free State as Leopold's personal property. To profit from the rubber boom, his agents and concession companies imposed quotas enforced by hostage-taking, flogging, burning of villages and the cutting-off of hands. Deaths from violence, famine and disease were in the millions.

Missionaries, the British consul Roger Casement and the journalist Edmund Morel exposed the abuses, and in 1908 the Belgian parliament took the colony from the king. The Belgian Congo became a model of 'paternalism': mining in Katanga (copper, later uranium for the Hiroshima bomb), plantations, railways and mission schools, but almost no university graduates by 1960.

Independence came on 30 June 1960. At the ceremony Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba answered King Baudouin's praise of colonialism with a speech listing its humiliations. Within days the army mutinied, Katanga and South Kasai seceded with Belgian and mining-company support, and UN troops arrived. Lumumba, turned to the Soviet Union for help, was deposed, handed to Katangan secessionists and murdered in January 1961 with Belgian involvement; a Belgian parliamentary inquiry later acknowledged moral responsibility.

Army chief Joseph-Désiré Mobutu took power in a second coup in 1965 and ruled for 32 years with Western backing as a Cold War ally. He renamed the country Zaire in 1971, ordered Congolese to drop Christian names (becoming Mobutu Sese Seko), nationalised foreign businesses and built a system of personal patronage that emptied the state. Kinshasa hosted the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle' between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

By the 1990s the state had collapsed into looting and unpaid salaries. When Rwanda's genocidal army and a million Hutu refugees fled into eastern Zaire in 1994, Rwanda and Uganda backed a rebellion led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, which marched across the country and took Kinshasa in May 1997.

Kabila fell out with his Rwandan and Ugandan backers, who invaded again in 1998. The Second Congo War drew in armies from Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad and Sudan on Kinshasa's side and Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi against it; armed groups multiplied and plundered minerals. Most of the millions who died were killed by hunger and disease. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001; his son Joseph took over, peace accords in 2002–03 ended the formal war, and elections followed in 2006.

The east never settled. More than 100 armed groups operate in the Kivus and Ituri, fighting over land, ethnicity and minerals such as gold, tin and coltan. The M23, a Tutsi-led movement backed by Rwanda according to UN experts, took Goma briefly in 2012, re-emerged in 2021 and captured Goma in January 2025 and Bukavu in February 2025. A US-brokered DRC–Rwanda agreement (June 2025) and Qatar-mediated talks with M23 produced frameworks but, as of 2026, not a return of the cities (check).

The UN peacekeeping mission (MONUSCO), one of the largest ever, began withdrawing in 2024 at Kinshasa's request. Virunga National Park, Africa's oldest, lost more than 200 rangers to armed groups over the years and is closed to tourists.

The DRC has more than 200 ethnic groups. Four national languages carry daily life — Lingala in Kinshasa and along the river, Swahili in the east, Kikongo in the west, Tshiluba in Kasai — with French for government, schooling and business. Kinshasa, with perhaps 17 million people, is the largest French-speaking city in the world.

About 95% of Congolese are Christian. The Catholic Church runs many schools and hospitals and played a leading role in pressing for elections; revival churches fill stadiums; and Kimbanguism, founded by the prophet Simon Kimbangu, who was imprisoned by the Belgians in 1921 and died in prison in 1951, is one of Africa's largest independent churches.

Batwa and Mbuti forest peoples live in the Ituri forest and elsewhere, facing displacement by parks, logging and conflict.

Congolese rumba grew in Léopoldville's bars in the 1940s and 1950s from Cuban son records and local guitar styles. Joseph Kabasele's 'Indépendance Cha Cha' became the anthem of 1960; Franco and TPOK Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau, then Papa Wemba, Koffi Olomidé and Werrason took soukous and ndombolo across Africa. Today Fally Ipupa and Innoss'B fill stadiums, and UNESCO listed Congolese rumba as world heritage in 2021.

Kinshasa's popular painters — Chéri Samba, Moke, Chéri Chérin — made bright, satirical street paintings that reached international museums. The Académie des Beaux-Arts trains new artists, and the Musée national de la RDC, built with South Korean support, opened in 2019, while Belgium has begun returning objects taken in the colonial era.

La Sape, the art of elegant dressing shared with Brazzaville, and the theatre of Kinshasa's streets — wrestlers, preachers, 'shegués' street children, traffic police — are part of the city's self-image as a place of noise, humour and survival.

The Congo River drains a basin of about 4 million km², crosses the equator twice and drops through the Livingstone Falls below Kinshasa to the Atlantic at Banana. The central basin is rainforest and swamp; the south is savanna and the copper plateau of Katanga; the east rises to the Rwenzori (5,109 m) and the Virunga volcanoes, including Nyiragongo, whose 2002 and 2021 eruptions sent lava into Goma.

Five of the DRC's national parks are UNESCO sites: Virunga, Kahuzi-Biega, Garamba, Salonga and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve. Bonobos live only here, south of the river; okapi only in the north-east forests.

Katanga's copper belt and cobalt deposits make the DRC the world's largest cobalt producer, central to electric-car batteries; artisanal mining, child labour and Chinese and Western company interests shape its politics. Coltan and gold from the east fund armed groups.