At Kinshasa’s riverfront, where the Congo River rolls past Brazzaville on the opposite bank, the scale of the country is hard to miss. This is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, second-largest in Africa by land area, with more than 124 million people, French as its official language, and over 200 indigenous tongues carried through daily life, from Lingala in the capital to Swahili in the east.

Its story begins long before any border on a map. Central African foragers lived here around 90,000 years ago, and the Bantu expansion between about 2000 and 3000 years ago brought new settlements and states. In the west, the Kingdom of Kongo endured from the 14th to the 19th century, while the Luba and Lunda empires ruled the centre and east, all shaped by the Congo Basin’s rivers and forests.

Then came King Leopold II of Belgium. In 1885 he took rights to the territory and turned it into the Congo Free State, a private possession worked through forced labour and rubber concessions. The 1904 Casement Report exposed the violence, and in 1908 international pressure forced Leopold to hand it over as the Belgian Congo. Brussels ruled directly, but extraction and repression remained the pattern.

Independence arrived on 30 June 1960, with Patrice Lumumba as prime minister and Joseph Kasa-Vubu as president. But within weeks the Force Publique mutinied, Katanga and South Kasai broke away, and Lumumba was dismissed on 5 September. On 17 January 1961 he was executed by Belgian-led Katangan troops, a death Belgium later said it was morally responsible for. The crisis deepened after Dag Hammarskjöld died near Ndola in September 1961.

Colonel Joseph Mobutu seized power in 1965 and renamed the country Zaire in 1971, part of his Authenticité campaign. He kept the state in a tight grip through one-party rule, while corruption hollowed out roads, wages, and institutions. He met Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, but after the Cold War his support faded, and by 1997 he fled into exile in Morocco, where he died that September.

War returned from the east. Refugees from the Rwandan Civil War fed the First Congo War in 1996, and Laurent-Désiré Kabila entered Kinshasa in 1997, restoring the name Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Second Congo War followed in 1998, pulling in Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, and killing an estimated 5.4 million people. Kabila was assassinated in 2001, and his son Joseph Kabila took over.

A peace process brought elections in 2006, but the east never fully settled. Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP rebelled, Bosco Ntaganda seized Goma in 2012, and more than 100 armed groups still operate, especially in Kivu. In 2019 Félix Tshisekedi became the first president to take office through a peaceful transition since independence, then won reelection in December 2023, while Judith Suminwa became the first woman prime minister in 2024.