DR Congo

From the savanna kingdoms to Africa's heart

The Democratic Republic of the Congo occupies the vast forested basin of the Congo River, a land that gave rise to the Christian kingdom of Kongo and the savanna empires of Luba, Lunda and Kuba. Drawn into the Atlantic and eastern slave trades, the region was seized in the 1880s by King Leopold II of Belgium as a private possession whose rubber regime killed on a catastrophic scale. Independence in 1960 opened onto crisis, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the long dictatorship of Mobutu, and two devastating wars whose aftershocks still rack the eastern provinces.