Who ruled Kinshasa?

Kinshasa spreads along the south bank of the Congo River at Pool Malebo, a broad lake-like widening of the river just above a long chain of rapids. Below the pool the river plunges towards the Atlantic through falls that no boat can pass; above it, thousands of kilometres of waterways reach deep into central Africa. That break in navigation made the pool a natural meeting point for river traders and, later, the place where a colonial railway met the river steamers. Facing it across the water is Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, and the two form the closest pair of national capitals in the world apart from Rome and the Vatican.

The country around Pool Malebo was settled by Bantu-speaking farmers, part of the long Bantu expansion across central and southern Africa. By the 1500s the region lay on the north-eastern edge of the Kingdom of Kongo and close to the lands of the Teke. Teke and Humbu villages along the south shore, among them Nsasa (Kinshasa) and Ntambo, held busy markets where river traders such as the Bobangi brought ivory, cloth, food and captives from upstream. Many of the captives were marched overland to the coast and sold into the Atlantic slave trade. Crops from the Americas such as cassava and maize spread inland along these same routes.

In 1881 the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, working for King Leopold II of Belgium, set up a trading station on the shore of the pool and named it Léopoldville. It became a key post of the Congo Free State, Leopold's personal domain, which was notorious for forced labour and violence in the collection of rubber. At first all goods had to be carried by porters around the rapids; the railway from the port of Matadi, completed in 1898, made Léopoldville the hinge between ocean shipping and the river network. After Belgium took over the territory as the Belgian Congo in 1908, the town grew steadily, and in the 1920s it replaced Boma as the colonial capital.

Colonial Léopoldville was laid out as a segregated city, with European districts by the river separated from African neighbourhoods by a buffer zone of parks and markets. Migrants from across the colony made Lingala the common language, and by the 1940s and 1950s the African townships had developed a lively urban culture, including the Congolese rumba that would later dominate African popular music. Riots in January 1959 hastened the end of Belgian rule.

On 30 June 1960 the country became independent with Léopoldville as its capital, and Patrice Lumumba became its first prime minister, only to be deposed within months and killed in 1961 during the Congo Crisis. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in 1965 and in 1966 renamed the city Kinshasa, after one of the old villages on the site; from 1971 the country itself was called Zaire. Mobutu built showpiece towers and hosted the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match, but corruption and economic collapse left the city's services in ruin, and unpaid soldiers looted it in 1991 and 1993. In May 1997 Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebels entered Kinshasa and Mobutu fled. The following year forces backed by Rwanda and Uganda came close to taking the city during the Second Congo War, and fighting broke out in its streets again after the 2006 elections.

Kinshasa is now the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in Africa, with an estimated population of well over 15 million.