The history of the Republic of the Congo

The Republic of the Congo, often called Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from its much larger neighbour across the river, stretches from a short Atlantic coastline around Pointe-Noire through savanna and dense equatorial rainforest to the Congo and Ubangi rivers. Its peoples include Kongo, Vili, Teke and Mbochi communities and the forest-dwelling Aka and other groups often called Pygmies. Before colonial rule the land was divided among the Kingdom of Loango on the coast, the Teke (Tio) kingdom on the plateaus and the fringes of the Kingdom of Kongo. France took control from 1880, ruled it as part of French Equatorial Africa and made Brazzaville the capital of Free France in 1940. Independent since 1960, the country passed through a Marxist-Leninist one-party state, a brief democratic opening and two civil wars, and since 1997 has been governed by Denis Sassou Nguesso, who first took power in 1979.

The oldest inhabitants of the region were hunter-gatherers of the rainforest, ancestors of today's Aka, Baka and related peoples. Their way of life, based on detailed knowledge of the forest, its game, honey and plants, survives in parts of the north, though they have long faced discrimination from their farming neighbours.

From around 1500 BCE Bantu-speaking peoples moved into the area as part of the wider Bantu expansion, bringing farming, pottery and, later, ironworking. Over many centuries they absorbed or displaced much of the earlier population along the rivers and savannas. Iron smelting became central to political life: oral traditions suggest that the link between kingship and the craft of the smith developed among the Tio and spread from there to Loango and Kongo.

By the 13th and 14th centuries several federations had formed in the western Congo basin. The Tio, or Teke, kingdom took shape in the 14th century on the plateaus north of Malebo Pool, the broad lake in the Congo River where Brazzaville and Kinshasa now face each other.

To the south lay the Kingdom of Kongo, founded around 1400 with its capital at Mbanza Kongo in what is now Angola. Its influence reached into the south of the present republic. On the coast north of it, the Kingdom of Loango emerged by the mid-16th century; it is first recorded around 1561, when the Kongo king sent missionaries there, and it later broke free of Kongo's overlordship. Its ruling people were the Vili, speakers of a northern form of Kikongo, and its capital was Buali, near modern Diosso. At its height in the 17th century Loango's influence stretched along the coast from southern Gabon almost to the mouth of the Congo, alongside the smaller kingdoms of Kakongo and Ngoyo.

The Loango kings claimed sacred authority, though succession was often disputed, and long interregnums became common; after the death of King Buatu in 1787 no new king was chosen for more than a century. Loango's wealth came from trade in copper, ivory, redwood and finely woven raffia cloth, which served as a currency across the region. Inland, the Tio kingdom controlled Malebo Pool and the river trade that ran through it, and grew stronger after the Kongo civil wars of the late 17th century.

The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo River in 1484, opening contact between the region and the Portuguese Empire. Missionaries followed, and a Loango king was baptised in 1663, although no lasting church took root there as it did in Kongo.

From the 17th century the Loango coast became one of the busiest sources of captives for the Atlantic slave trade. Dutch, French, English and Portuguese ships anchored offshore, trading cloth, guns and metal goods through royal brokers called mafouks, without permanent European forts. Vili caravans brought captives from deep in the interior, many taken in wars or raids far up the Congo basin. Hundreds of thousands of people were shipped from Loango, Malemba and Cabinda to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America. The trade enriched the coastal elites while spreading violence inland, and it continued illegally well into the 19th century after European states began to ban it.

In the Scramble for Africa, France and King Leopold II of Belgium competed for the Congo basin. The French naval officer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, born in Rome in 1852, travelled up the Ogooué River and reached the Tio kingdom in 1880. On 10 September 1880 he signed a treaty with the Tio king, known by his title Makoko, placing the lands north of the river under French protection. A French post founded at Mfoa on Malebo Pool grew into Brazzaville, while Leopold's agent Henry Morton Stanley established a station across the water that became Kinshasa. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 left France the north bank and Leopold the vast lands to the south, the future Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The territory was renamed French Congo in 1891 and Middle Congo in 1903. To exploit it cheaply, France handed most of the land to around forty private concession companies in 1899, granting them monopolies over rubber, ivory and timber for thirty years. The result was a system of forced labour, hostage-taking and brutal punishment similar to the abuses in Leopold's Congo Free State. Famine, sleeping sickness and violence caused severe population losses. Brazza himself, sent to investigate in 1905, reported the abuses shortly before his death. Resistance continued in many places, including the revolt of Mabiala Ma Nganga in the south between 1892 and 1896.

In 1910 Middle Congo was joined with Gabon, Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic) and later Chad to form French Equatorial Africa, with Brazzaville as its capital. In 1911 France ceded a large area to German Cameroon in exchange for a free hand in Morocco, recovering it during World War I.

The most notorious project of the interwar years was the Congo-Ocean railway, built between 1921 and 1934 to link Brazzaville with the new port of Pointe-Noire over 511 kilometres of forest and mountains. Workers were conscripted from across French Equatorial Africa and laboured with hand tools in appalling conditions; estimates of the African dead range from about 14,000 to more than 20,000. The scandal drew criticism in France, notably from the writer André Gide.

Political protest took a new form with André Matswa, a Lari (Kongo) veteran of the French army, who founded an association in Paris in 1926 to defend the rights of people from French Equatorial Africa. The French dissolved it, arrested Matswa and exiled him. He died in prison in 1942, but many of his followers refused to believe he was dead, and for years a religious movement around him led Lari voters to boycott elections.

When France fell to Germany in June 1940, Félix Éboué, the Guianese-born governor of Chad, declared for Charles de Gaulle, and Middle Congo followed on 28 August. Brazzaville became the capital of Free France in Africa during World War II, and Éboué became governor-general of French Equatorial Africa, the first Black man to hold such a post. In early 1944 de Gaulle opened the Brazzaville Conference, which promised African representation and the end of forced labour and the indigénat code, though it ruled out independence.

After 1946 Congolese politics revolved around rival leaders and their ethnic bases: Jean-Félix Tchicaya among the Vili of the coast, Jacques Opangault among northerners, and Fulbert Youlou, a former Catholic priest, among the Lari of the south. Youlou became prime minister in 1958, when the territory voted to become an autonomous republic within the French Community, and clashes between his supporters and Opangault's in Brazzaville in February 1959 left around 200 dead. As part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, the Republic of the Congo became independent on 15 August 1960, with Youlou as president.

Youlou's attempt to impose a single party, and the corruption of his government, provoked trade unions and young radicals. In three days of strikes and demonstrations in August 1963, known as the Trois Glorieuses, he was forced to resign, and France chose not to intervene. His successor, Alphonse Massamba-Débat, declared a policy of "scientific socialism", nationalised parts of the economy and built ties with the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. In August 1968 a young paratroop officer, Captain Marien Ngouabi, took power.

In 1969 Ngouabi proclaimed the People's Republic of the Congo, the first self-declared Marxist-Leninist state in Africa, with the Congolese Party of Labour (PCT) as the sole party and a red flag bearing a hammer and hoe. The country aligned with the Eastern bloc in the Cold War, yet French companies continued to run its offshore oil, discovered in the late 1950s, which became the main source of state revenue from the 1970s.

Power gradually shifted from the southerners who had led the independence movement to northern officers such as Ngouabi, an Mbochi-speaker from the Cuvette. Ngouabi was assassinated on 18 March 1977 in circumstances that remain unclear. Former president Massamba-Débat was executed after a hasty trial, and Cardinal Émile Biayenda, the archbishop of Brazzaville, was also killed in the aftermath. Colonel Joachim Yhombi-Opango led a military committee until February 1979, when the party removed him and installed the defence minister, Colonel Denis Sassou Nguesso. Sassou Nguesso kept the Marxist framework through the 1980s while borrowing heavily against oil.

Falling oil prices, debt and the end of the Cold War undermined the one-party state. In 1991 a national conference stripped Sassou Nguesso of most powers and dropped Marxism-Leninism, restoring the name Republic of the Congo. In August 1992 Pascal Lissouba, a southern professor and former prime minister, won the presidential election, and Sassou Nguesso accepted defeat.

Politics quickly militarised along regional lines. Each major leader had a private militia: Lissouba's Cocoyes and Zoulous, the Ninjas of Bernard Kolélas, the leading Lari politician and mayor of Brazzaville, and Sassou Nguesso's Cobras, recruited among northerners. Disputed parliamentary elections in 1993 set off fighting in Brazzaville that killed about 2,000 people before mediation in early 1994.

In June 1997, ahead of a new presidential vote, government forces surrounded Sassou Nguesso's residence in Brazzaville, starting a four-month war that destroyed much of the capital. With help from Angola, whose troops entered the country in support of the Cobras, Sassou Nguesso's forces took Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire in October 1997, and Lissouba fled into exile. Fighting resumed in 1998 and 1999 in the Pool region and the south-west against Ninja and Cocoye militias, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and closing the railway, until ceasefires were agreed at the end of 1999. Tens of thousands of people died in the wars of the 1990s.

A new constitution in 2002 created a seven-year presidential term, and Sassou Nguesso won elections in 2002 and 2009 from which his main rivals were excluded or which they boycotted. Oil remained dominant, accounting in 2008 for about two-thirds of economic output and more than 90 percent of exports, but much of the population remained poor, and the country joined OPEC in 2018.

In 2015 a referendum, denounced by the opposition and accompanied by deadly protests, approved a new constitution removing the age and term limits that would have barred the president from running again. After his re-election in 2016, which opponents called fraudulent, fighting broke out again in the Pool region between the army and the Ninja rebels of Pastor Frédéric Ntumi. About 80,000 people were displaced before a ceasefire was signed in December 2017.

In the presidential election of 21 March 2021 Sassou Nguesso was declared re-elected with about 88 percent of the vote. His main challenger, Guy-Brice Parfait Kolélas, son of Bernard Kolélas, fell ill with COVID-19 and died on the day of the vote while being flown to France for treatment. A census in 2023 counted about 6.1 million people. On 15 March 2026 Sassou Nguesso, then in his early eighties, won a fifth consecutive term with almost 95 percent of the officially counted vote, in an election boycotted by major opposition parties and held during a nationwide internet shutdown; the Constitutional Court confirmed the result on 28 March. Brazzaville and Kinshasa still face each other across the Congo River, as they have since Brazza and Stanley founded their rival stations in the 1880s.