The history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo covers most of the basin of the Congo River, the second largest in the world: a vast country of equatorial rainforest, southern and northern savannas, the copper and cobalt plateau of Katanga and the volcanic highlands of the Great Lakes. Long before Europeans arrived, its peoples built some of the most sophisticated states in Africa, among them the Kingdom of Kongo near the Atlantic and the Luba, Lunda and Kuba kingdoms of the interior. The Atlantic slave trade and then raiders from the east tore at these societies, and in the 1880s King Leopold II of Belgium made the whole basin his private property, extracting rubber through a system of terror that killed and displaced people on an enormous scale. Belgium ruled the colony until 1960. Independence was followed within days by mutiny and secession, the murder of the first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and thirty-two years of dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko. Since 1996 the country has suffered two continental wars and a conflict in the east that continues in 2026.

Some of the earliest evidence of complex human behaviour comes from the Congo's eastern edge. At Katanda on the Semliki River, near Lake Edward, archaeologists found finely made barbed harpoons of bone dated to around 90,000 years ago, used to catch catfish. Nearby at Ishango, a bone tool engraved with groups of notches, around 20,000 years old, has been read by some scholars as a tally or even a simple counting system. The equatorial forest was home for many millennia to hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of the Mbuti, Twa, Aka and other forest peoples, who today make up a small minority but whose presence predates all later arrivals.

Around 3,000 years ago farmers speaking Bantu languages began moving into the region from the north-west, in what is known as the Bantu expansion. Spreading along the rivers through the forest and around it into the southern savannas, they brought yams, oil palms, pottery and later ironworking, and gradually absorbed or lived alongside the forest foragers. Bananas, which arrived from South-East Asia via the Indian Ocean, became a staple in the forest.

In the Upemba Depression of northern Katanga, a land of lakes and marshes on the upper Congo, fishing and farming communities flourished from at least the fourth century. Their cemeteries at Sanga and other sites, used from around the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, contain rich graves with copper jewellery, fine pottery and small cross-shaped copper ingots that served as a currency, evidence of growing wealth and social ranks. These were the forerunners of the later Luba kingdoms. Copper from Katanga, salt and dried fish were already traded over long distances, and by the end of the first millennium glass beads and cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean were reaching the interior. Around Pool Malebo, the wide lake on the lower river where Kinshasa now stands, federations of small states emerged that would give rise to Kongo.

The Kingdom of Kongo was founded around 1390, when a ruler from north of the Congo River crossed south and built a new state through conquest and marriage alliances with neighbouring lords, notably the ruler of Mbata. Its capital, Mbanza Kongo, now in northern Angola, lay on a hill above fertile valleys, and its eastern provinces of Nsundi and Mbata lay in what is now the western DRC. The king, the manikongo, governed through appointed governors, collected tribute in cloth, shells and labour, and concentrated war captives around the capital, which became one of the largest towns in central Africa. Raffia cloth woven in Kongo was famous for its fineness, and nzimbu shells from the coast served as money.

The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo in 1483. In 1491 King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised, and his son Afonso I, who ruled from about 1509 to 1542, made Christianity the religion of the state, sent young nobles to study in Lisbon and saw his son Henrique consecrated a bishop. Kongo became a Christian kingdom in its own right, with its own lay teachers, churches and syncretic forms of worship, and exchanged ambassadors with Portugal and the papacy. It also became deeply involved in the Atlantic slave trade, at first selling war captives to the sugar plantations of São Tomé. In 1526 Afonso wrote to the king of Portugal protesting that Portuguese merchants were kidnapping free Kongolese, even members of noble families, and set up a board to regulate the trade, but he could not stop it.

The Portuguese Empire founded Luanda to the south in 1576, and relations grew hostile as its governors raided Kongo's southern provinces. Kongo defeated a Portuguese invasion in 1622–1623 and allied with the Dutch Republic when the Dutch seized Luanda in 1641. In 1665 a Portuguese army defeated Kongo at the Battle of Mbwila and killed King António I. The kingdom then dissolved into civil war between rival royal houses, the capital was abandoned, and huge numbers of people were captured and sold into slavery. In this crisis a young noblewoman, Kimpa Vita, claimed to be possessed by Saint Anthony and led a movement to reunite the kingdom and reoccupy the capital; she was burned as a heretic in 1706. King Pedro IV restored a weakened unity in 1709, and Kongo survived in reduced form until Portugal absorbed what remained in the early twentieth century.

Further inland, the southern savanna was the heart of a family of related kingdoms. The Luba Empire grew from the Upemba Depression. Its founding traditions tell of the cruel ruler Nkongolo, the "rainbow king", and of the hunter Mbidi Kiluwe, whose son Kalala Ilunga overthrew Nkongolo and founded a line of sacred kings, the balopwe. Congolese historians tend to date its origins before the fifteenth century, while some Western scholars place the centralised state in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Luba kings ruled through a council of titled officials and through a society of court historians, the Mbudye, who recorded the kingdom's history on beaded memory boards called lukasa. Luba sculptors produced some of Africa's most celebrated art, including stools and staffs carved with female figures that expressed the role of women in royal ideology. Between about 1700 and the 1860s the Luba extended their influence by tribute and by planting client kingdoms on their frontiers.

To the south-west, the Lunda Empire took shape in the seventeenth century, according to tradition when the Luba hunter Chibinda Ilunga married the Lunda princess Lueji. Its rulers, who took the title Mwaant Yav, built the state into a loose commonwealth of tributary chiefdoms, held together by a system of perpetual kinship in which each new ruler inherited the name and relationships of his predecessor. The first well-attested ruler, Nawej, ruled around 1700. Lunda colonists carried this model east and west, founding the kingdom of Kazembe on the Luapula River in what is now Zambia and chiefdoms in Angola. From its capital, the Musumba, the Lunda traded slaves, ivory and copper towards both coasts.

Between the Kasai and Sankuru rivers, the Kuba kingdom was united around 1625 by Shyaam a-Mbul a Ngoong, remembered as a reformer who brought new crops and ideas from the west. Its kings, the nyim, ruled with councils of titled officials and courts, and Kuba raffia textiles and carved royal portraits are among the masterpieces of African art. In the north, the Zande and Mangbetu built powerful kingdoms in the nineteenth century, and the Tio kingdom controlled trade at Pool Malebo.

Over three and a half centuries the Atlantic trade carried millions of people from the Congo basin and its coast to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America; along the stretch of coast around the mouth of the river, perhaps four million people were shipped out in all. The trade reached deep into the interior through networks of traders such as the Bobangi of the middle river. In the nineteenth century a second wave came from the east, as merchants from the Swahili coast and Zanzibar, armed with guns, pushed past Lake Tanganyika in search of ivory and captives. The most powerful, Hamad bin Muhammad, known as Tippu Tip, built a commercial empire based at Kasongo and Nyangwe on the upper Congo. In Katanga a trader from Tanzania named Msiri created the Yeke kingdom around his capital at Bunkeya, and the Chokwe, armed with firearms, overran the Lunda heartland in the 1880s. By the time Europeans arrived in force, the great savanna states were already badly weakened.

The British-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley crossed Africa and followed the Congo to the sea in 1874–1877. King Leopold II of Belgium, determined to have a colony, hired him through supposedly humanitarian and scientific associations, and from 1879 Stanley founded posts along the river, among them Léopoldville at Pool Malebo, and signed treaties by which local chiefs signed away their land. During the Scramble for Africa, the powers gathered at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 accepted Leopold's claim, and the Congo Free State became the king's personal possession, not a Belgian colony. Its army, the Force Publique, of African soldiers under European officers, fought a war from 1892 to 1894 against the Swahili-Arab traders in the east, and in 1891 a Free State expedition killed Msiri and brought Katanga under Leopold's flag.

The Free State was run for profit. Leopold declared all "vacant" land, in practice most of the country, to be state property and granted huge concessions to companies in which he held shares. From the 1890s, as the bicycle and the motor car created a boom in demand for rubber, villages were ordered to deliver quotas of wild rubber. The Force Publique and company sentries enforced them by holding women and children hostage, flogging with the chicotte, a whip of hippopotamus hide, burning villages and killing those who resisted or fell short. To prove they had not wasted ammunition, soldiers were made to present the severed hands of those they had shot, and hands were also cut from the living, including children. Famine, flight into the forest, the collapse of birth rates and epidemics of sleeping sickness and smallpox added to the toll.

No census was taken until 1924, and the number of deaths cannot be known. Contemporary critics and some modern writers have estimated that the population fell by around ten million, perhaps half; more recent demographic research points to a smaller but still enormous decline, of the order of one to several million people, through violence, disease and falling fertility. Missionary testimony, the 1904 report of the British consul Roger Casement and the campaign of E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association made the Free State an international scandal, and a commission appointed by Leopold himself confirmed the abuses. In 1908 the Belgian parliament annexed the territory. Leopold had the Free State's archives burned before handing it over.

The Belgian Congo, governed directly from Brussels, ended the worst excesses of the rubber regime but kept much of its logic. The colonial state, the Catholic missions and the great companies, such as the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, worked so closely together that they were described as a colonial trinity. Forced labour on roads and plantations, compulsory cultivation of cotton and other crops, the chicotte and a strict colour bar continued for decades, and the first university open to Congolese was founded only in 1954. Katanga became one of the world's great copper producers, and mines at Kilo-Moto produced gold and the Kasai diamonds.

Congolese resisted in many ways. In 1921 the healer and preacher Simon Kimbangu drew huge crowds in the lower Congo; the Belgian authorities sentenced him to death, commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1951, but the Kimbanguist church he inspired became one of Africa's largest independent churches. Revolts against forced labour, such as the Pende rising of 1931, were crushed. In the First World War the Force Publique fought German forces in East Africa, taking Tabora in 1916, and in the Second World War it helped defeat the Italians in Ethiopia in 1941. The colony's resources were vital to the Allies: much of the uranium for the first American atomic bombs came from the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga.

After 1945 rapid urbanisation, development schemes and better health care produced a small African middle class, the évolués, while political rights remained denied. A Belgian academic's 1955 proposal of independence within thirty years was seen as radical. But in 1958 Patrice Lumumba and others founded the Congolese National Movement (MNC), Lumumba attended the All-African People's Conference in Accra hosted by Kwame Nkrumah, and on 4 January 1959 riots broke out in Léopoldville after a banned meeting of Joseph Kasa-Vubu's ABAKO party, a Kongo association. Shaken, Belgium called a round-table conference in January 1960 that agreed to independence within six months.

The Congo became independent on 30 June 1960, during the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Kasa-Vubu as president and Lumumba as prime minister. At the ceremony in Léopoldville, after King Baudouin praised the "genius" of Leopold II, Lumumba answered with a speech recalling the humiliations and violence of colonial rule. Within a week the army mutinied against its Belgian officers, Belgian troops intervened, and on 11 July Moïse Tshombe declared the secession of mineral-rich Katanga with Belgian and mining-company backing; South Kasai followed in August. The United Nations sent a large peacekeeping force, but would not help crush the secessions, so Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for aid, making the Congo a front of the Cold War. Army attacks in South Kasai killed many Luba civilians.

In September 1960 Kasa-Vubu dismissed Lumumba, and the army chief of staff, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, seized power with American and Belgian support; the CIA had already plotted to poison Lumumba. Lumumba was arrested, flown to Katanga and shot there on 17 January 1961 by Katangese forces in the presence of Belgian officers. His murder made him a symbol of African independence across the world, and in 2001 a Belgian parliamentary inquiry found that Belgium bore a moral responsibility for it. The UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, died in a plane crash near Ndola in September 1961 while trying to negotiate an end to the Katanga conflict, and UN forces ended the secession in January 1963. In 1964 rebellions by Lumumba's followers, the Simba, seized much of the east and the north, proclaiming a people's republic at Stanleyville, until Belgian paratroopers carried by American aircraft and white mercenaries recaptured it. Che Guevara spent much of 1965 with rebels near Lake Tanganyika before abandoning the effort.

On 24 November 1965 Mobutu took power for the second time, now for good. He made his party the only legal one, had rivals publicly hanged in 1966, and in a campaign of "authenticity" renamed the country Zaire in 1971, changed colonial place names, so that Léopoldville became Kinshasa, banned Western first names and took the name Mobutu Sese Seko himself. In 1973 he seized foreign-owned businesses and handed many of them to political allies, with ruinous results. As a reliable anti-communist ally, he received strong support from the United States, France and Belgium. When rebels from Angola invaded Katanga, then called Shaba, in 1977 and 1978, Moroccan troops and then French and Belgian paratroopers rescued his regime.

Mobutu's Zaire became a byword for kleptocracy. Mobutu diverted copper revenues, state funds and foreign aid into a personal fortune of palaces and foreign bank accounts, while roads, schools and hospitals decayed and the state collapsed into a system of predation in which unpaid soldiers and officials lived off the population. With the end of the Cold War his foreign backers lost interest. He announced a return to multiparty politics in 1990, but obstructed the National Sovereign Conference that met in 1991 and 1992, while unpaid soldiers looted Kinshasa in 1991 and 1993.

The collapse came from the east. After the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, more than a million Hutu refugees, among them many of the soldiers and militiamen who had carried out the genocide, fled into eastern Zaire, where they rearmed in the refugee camps. In 1996 Rwanda and Uganda invaded, joined by Congolese Tutsi and an alliance of rebels led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a veteran of the 1960s rebellions. In this First Congo War Rwandan-led forces destroyed the camps and pursued fleeing Hutu across the country, killing tens of thousands of refugees, killings that a later UN mapping report said might amount to crimes of genocide if proven in court. Kabila's forces marched across the country in seven months, Mobutu fled in May 1997 and died in exile in Morocco, and Kabila renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In August 1998 Kabila turned against his Rwandan backers, and Rwanda and Uganda invaded again through rebel movements, the Rally for Congolese Democracy and Jean-Pierre Bemba's Movement for the Liberation of the Congo. Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent troops to save Kabila, and the Second Congo War drew in the armies of nine African countries and dozens of militias. The country was partitioned, and all sides plundered its gold, diamonds, timber and coltan. Kabila was assassinated by a bodyguard in January 2001 and succeeded by his son Joseph, who negotiated the withdrawal of foreign armies and a power-sharing agreement signed in 2002 and implemented in 2003. Most of the dead died of disease and hunger as health care and food supplies collapsed. The most widely cited estimate, from mortality surveys, is that 5.4 million more people died between 1998 and 2007 than would have done otherwise, while other researchers argue for a figure closer to three million. Either way, it was the deadliest conflict anywhere since the Second World War, and sexual violence was used on a massive scale.

A new constitution was approved in 2005, and in 2006 the Congo held its first multiparty elections since 1960, which Joseph Kabila won; he was re-elected in 2011 in a vote marred by fraud. Fighting continued in the east, where dozens of armed groups fought over land, ethnic identity and minerals. In the Kivus, the Rwandan Hutu FDLR, descended from the forces behind the genocide, faced Congolese Tutsi-led rebellions backed by Rwanda: the CNDP of Laurent Nkunda, and from 2012 the M23, which briefly took Goma in November 2012 before a UN intervention brigade with an offensive mandate helped defeat it in 2013. In Ituri, conflict between Hema and Lendu militias killed thousands, and the Ugandan-origin Allied Democratic Forces, later linked to the Islamic State group, massacred villagers around Beni. The country's mines became the world's main source of cobalt, essential for batteries, and a major producer of copper and coltan, often dug by hand in dangerous conditions. An Ebola epidemic in the east from 2018 to 2020 killed about 2,280 people.

Kabila's second and last constitutional term ended in December 2016, but elections were postponed, and protests against his staying on were met with lethal force. When elections were finally held in December 2018, Félix Tshisekedi, son of the veteran opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi, was declared the winner, though independent tallies suggested another opposition candidate, Martin Fayulu, had won the most votes. His inauguration in January 2019 was nevertheless the first transfer of power to an opposition figure since independence.

Tshisekedi broke with Kabila's camp in 2020 and 2021 and was re-elected in December 2023 with 73 per cent of the vote, in an election the opposition rejected. In late 2021 the M23 took up arms again and, with the support of Rwandan troops documented by UN experts, seized large areas of North Kivu in 2022 and 2023; Rwanda denies backing the group and accuses Kinshasa of working with the FDLR. In January 2025 the M23 captured Goma, and in February Bukavu, the main city of South Kivu, setting up its own administrations as several thousand Rwandan soldiers fought alongside it. Thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Under American mediation, the foreign ministers of the Congo and Rwanda signed a peace agreement in Washington on 27 June 2025, and in July the Congolese government and the M23 agreed a declaration of principles in Doha, followed by a framework agreement in November. The UN reported continued massacres of civilians in rebel-held areas. Later in 2025 a military court sentenced Joseph Kabila to death in absentia for collaborating with the M23. Presidents Tshisekedi and Paul Kagame of Rwanda signed the Washington Accords on 4 December 2025, but days later the M23 seized Uvira on Lake Tanganyika, near the border with Burundi, before announcing under American pressure that it would withdraw. In May 2026 the World Health Organization declared a new outbreak of Ebola in the country a public health emergency of international concern. As of 2026 fighting in the east continues, and the Congo remains one of the world's largest humanitarian crises, with millions of people displaced from their homes.