Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Congo basin was home to the Kingdom of Kongo in the west, the Luba and Lunda states in the south, and many other polities, all touched by the Atlantic and, in the east, the Indian Ocean slave trades. In the 1880s King Leopold II of Belgium acquired the entire basin as his personal property, the Congo Free State, and ran it as a rubber-extraction regime of forced labour, mutilation, and killing that is estimated to have caused millions of deaths. International outrage forced Belgium to take it over as a formal colony in 1908.

Independence came abruptly in 1960 and collapsed almost immediately into secessions, a UN intervention, and the murder of the first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in 1965, renamed the country Zaïre, and ruled for 32 years, enriching himself and his circle while the state decayed.

Mobutu was overthrown in 1997 by a rebellion backed by Rwanda and Uganda. The Second Congo War that followed, from 1998, drew in nine African countries and dozens of armed groups and, mostly through disease and starvation, is estimated to have killed several million people — the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. A formal peace came in 2003, but eastern Congo has never been fully pacified: the M23 rebellion, backed by Rwanda, captured the cities of Goma and Bukavu in early 2025.

With more than 200 ethnic groups, the DR Congo is one of the most diverse countries on Earth. Broad regional identities — Kongo in the west, Luba in the centre-south, Mongo in the forest, and the Swahili-speaking peoples of the east — sit alongside hundreds of smaller communities and the Mbuti and other forest hunter-gatherers of the Ituri.

The country's greatest cultural export is music. Congolese rumba, born in Kinshasa and Brazzaville in the mid-twentieth century and evolving into soukous and ndombolo, dominated African popular music for decades and is inscribed on UNESCO's heritage list. Kinshasa's art scene, its sapeurs in their dandy suits, and its painters and sculptors have an international following.

Most Congolese are Christian — Catholic, Protestant, and the home-grown Kimbanguist church — with Islam in the east and traditional beliefs throughout. Family, church, and neighbourhood solidarity are what hold daily life together in the near-absence of a functioning state in many areas.

Kinshasa, on the Congo River facing Brazzaville, is one of the largest French-speaking cities in the world, with well over ten million people and very little formal employment; most residents survive through trade, hustle, and family networks (Article 15 — "fend for yourself" — is the wry national motto).

The DR Congo holds an enormous share of the world's cobalt and coltan, along with copper, gold, diamonds, and tin, much of it dug by hand in artisanal mines, including by children, in conditions that have drawn global scrutiny. This mineral wealth has funded armed groups and foreign interference far more than it has funded schools or roads.

Outside the cities and mining towns, life is rural and hard: farming cassava, maize, and plantain, fishing the rivers, and gathering forest products, often cut off from markets by the collapse of the road network. The eastern conflict has displaced more than six million people inside the country.

Congolese cooking centres on cassava — as fufu, as the leaf stew pondu (also called saka-saka), and as chikwangue loaves — and on plantain, rice, and maize. Moambe chicken, cooked in a sauce of palm-fruit pulp with chilli, is the dish most often called national, served with rice or fufu and greens.

Freshwater fish from the Congo and its tributaries, and makayabu (salted cod), are important proteins, grilled or steamed in leaf parcels (maboké or liboké). Grubs, caterpillars (mbinzo), and bushmeat feature in forest areas. Groundnut sauces, okra, and fiery pili-pili season most dishes.

Palm wine and locally brewed maize or sorghum beer are traditional; bottled lager is popular in the cities, and strong sweet tea and coffee are common in the east.

In peaceful times, the DR Congo's draws are extraordinary. Virunga National Park, the oldest in Africa, protects mountain gorillas on the forested slopes of the Mikeno volcano, and Nyiragongo, whose summit crater holds one of the world's few permanent lava lakes — an overnight climb to the rim is a bucket-list trip when the park is open and secure. The park's rangers have paid a heavy price defending it.

Kahuzi-Biéga National Park near Bukavu is the main refuge of the eastern lowland (Grauer's) gorilla; Garamba in the northeast holds savanna wildlife; and Salonga, deep in the central forest, is the largest rainforest reserve in Africa and a stronghold of the bonobo, the great ape found nowhere else. The Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa cares for orphaned bonobos.

The Congo River itself — the second by volume in the world — is the country's spine, navigable for long stretches and travelled by barge, with the Livingstone Falls thundering below Kinshasa. Access to nearly all of this is currently constrained by insecurity, and any visit needs current, on-the-ground advice.