DR Congo's culture: carried by missions, soldiers and dance bands

Why the missions taught more Congolese than the state

Belgian rule rested on what is usually called a colonial trinity of state, missions and private companies, and of the three it was the missions that reached into villages. In 1948, 99.6% of the educational facilities in the Belgian Congo were run by Christian missions. The enrolment figures for 1960, the year of independence, show the proportions at the moment the colony ended: 1,773,340 pupils in all, of whom 1,359,118 were in Catholic mission schools, 322,289 in Protestant mission schools and 68,729 in institutions the state itself organised. Higher education came late. The Catholic Lovanium University near Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, opened to black and white students in 1954.

Curricula carried Christian and Western values, and conversion to Catholicism was an objective in its own right beside reading, writing and arithmetic. Schooling rates for children aged 6 to 14 rose from 12% in 1940 to 37% in 1954.

The arrangement outlived Belgian rule. In 2014 the Catholic Church counted about 35 million members in the country, organised into six archdioceses and 41 dioceses. Its schools have educated over 60% of the nation's primary pupils and more than 40% of its secondary pupils, and it owns hospitals, clinics, farms, ranches, stores and artisans' workshops. Schatzberg described it as the country's "only truly national institution apart from the state".

This matters for culture because the country is not one people with one language. Over 250 ethnic groups have been identified, and about 242 languages are spoken among a population the record puts at 105,789,731 on 1 January 2023. Anything shared across that range had to travel through an institution that reached far beyond one group's home region.

How Lingala became the language soldiers and singers share

The constitution makes French the official language and names four national languages beside it, Kikongo, Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba, which the state undertakes to promote without discrimination. A survey in 2021 found that 74% of the population could speak it, and in 2018 about 49 million Congolese, 51% of the population, could read and write it. Around 12 million people spoke it as a first language in 2024.

The four national languages are mostly second languages, learned after the language of a person's own ethnic group, and each spread along a different line.

Lingala is the case that explains the rest. It was the trade language of the river, and then the official language of the Force Publique, the colonial army. It stayed the language of command after independence, and under Mobutu it was the official language of the military. Its second carrier was music. The lyrics of Kinshasa's popular music are in Lingala, and that use has encouraged its adoption well beyond the capital. The national broadcaster, Radio Télévision Nationale Congolaise, transmits in Lingala and French.

What schools did to the four languages

The Belgian Congo was one of the few African colonies in which local languages were taught at primary school: Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba and Swahili, which produced literacy in African languages during colonial rule. Independence reversed it, and French became the sole language of education at every level. Since 1975 the four national languages have returned for the first two years of primary school, with French taking over from the third year, although many urban primary schools use French from the first.

How one speaker moves between them

Most Congolese are multilingual, and the choice of language marks the setting. The standard illustration is a government official who uses French with another official to set a tone of formality, Lingala when buying goods in a market and the local language in his home village. English has spread in the east since the end of the Mobutu period, carried by eastern and southern African influence. Kinshasa also has its own slang, Indubil, noted since around the 1960s and still changing.

What the Congolese churches grew out of

Christianity reached the lower Congo through the Kingdom of Kongo, which covered present-day northern Angola, the western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and parts of the Republic of the Congo and Gabon. In 1491 the king, Nzinga a Nkuwu, and his son Mvemba a Nzinga were baptised as João I and Afonso I. Afonso, who took the throne early in the sixteenth century, opened relations with the Vatican.

Kongo also had a prophetic Christian movement of its own, two centuries before Kimbangu. The Antonians, led by Beatriz Kimpa Vita, occupied the abandoned capital, Mbanza Kongo, with the aim of founding a new Christian Kongo kingdom, and Pedro IV, who reigned from 1696 to 1718, had her tried and executed as a heretic.

Under Belgian rule the church was segregated in practice. Congolese generally attended different services from whites, and where both worshipped under one roof the Congolese sat on benches at the back while the whites sat on chairs at the front. Near the end of the colonial period songs and dances once condemned as pagan were brought into worship.

Published estimates of the religious composition disagree widely. One set of figures for 2013 counts Christians at 93.7% of the population: Catholics 29.7%, Protestants 26.8%, other Christians 37.2%, with Kimbanguists at 2.8% and Muslims at 1%. An older breakdown printed in the Wikipedia article on Congolese culture gives Catholics 50%, Protestants 20%, Kimbanguists 13% and followers of indigenous beliefs alone 11.5%. Sixty-two Protestant denominations are federated in the Church of Christ in the Congo, which reports more than 25 million members. Islam has been present since the eighteenth century, brought by Arab traders.

Why a colonial prisoner has a public holiday

Simon Kimbangu was born in a village near Kinshasa and educated by a Protestant mission. In April 1921, at the age of 39, he reported a vision calling him to reconvert his people, and he was soon credited with healing a sick woman and with miracles that drew crowds so large that thousands of Congolese left their work to hear him. The Catholic organisations protested to the authorities, the Protestant church abandoned him, and in June the Belgians arrested him for inciting revolution and civil disobedience. He was sentenced to death four months later. King Albert I commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Kimbangu died in prison in 1951.

The Belgians banned the movement and it continued underground. Mobutu took the opposite approach and gave the church official status. Its formal name is the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, it has about three million members, mainly among the Bakongo of Kongo Central and Kinshasa, and its followers abstain from tobacco and alcohol and practise monogamy. Presidential ordinance No. 23/042 of 30 March 2023 made 6 April a public holiday under the name Journée du combat de Simon Kimbangu et de la conscience africaine, so the state now marks the day of a prophet the colonial state imprisoned for thirty years.

What older beliefs still do

Indigenous beliefs are held exclusively by a minority and are familiar to most. They share a creator god who is rarely the direct cause of events, ancestor spirits who reward and punish the living, and nature spirits tied to particular places such as whirlpools or springs. Ceremonies take place at sacred trees and in grottoes, and at crossroads. Belief in witchcraft has spread from the countryside into the cities, and some churches, including Pentecostal churches of American inspiration, have led accusations against children and the elderly. Children accused in this way, known as enfants sorciers, are often put out of their homes. Exorcisms of them, which could be violent, have recently been outlawed.

What happened when Zaire legislated authenticity

Mobutu's government set out its doctrine in the Manifesto of N'sele, published in May 1967, which named nationalism, revolution and authenticity as its themes. Mobutu defined authenticity as being conscious of one's own personality and values and at home in one's own culture.

Place names went first. In 1966 Léopoldville became Kinshasa, Elisabethville became Lubumbashi and Stanleyville became Kisangani. On 27 October 1971 the country itself was renamed the Republic of Zaire. The choice has been called curious: Congo referred both to the river and to the Kongo kingdom, while Zaire is a Portuguese corruption of Nzadi, the word for river, from Nzadi o Nzere, "the river that swallows all the other rivers".

In 1972 Zairians were required to replace Western and Christian names with African ones, and Western dress gave way to the abacost. Mobutu dropped Joseph-Désiré and became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

The programme collided with the institution the colony had left in charge of schooling. The nationalisation of the universities of Kinshasa and Kisangani, the ban on Christian names and the opening of JMPR sections in every seminary brought the Catholic Church and the state into open conflict. A law of December 1971 allowed the state to dissolve "any church or sect that compromises or threatens to compromise public order", and scores of unrecognised sects were dissolved and their leaders jailed. In 1975, after considerable pressure from the Vatican, the regime agreed to tone down its attacks and returned some control of the school system to the church.

A second measure borrowed from the colony itself. From 1973 salongo, the Lingala word for work, obliged every citizen to give one afternoon a week to agricultural and development projects, with penalties of one to six months in jail. By the late 1970s most Zairians avoided it. Britannica's account judges that the authenticity campaign "did little to lend respectability either to the concept or to the brand of leadership for which it stood". The country carried the name Zaire from 1971 to 1997.

How Kinshasa's orchestras made Congolese rumba

The earliest popular partnered dance music on record in the region was maringa, a Kongo dance from the former Kingdom of Loango. In the 1920s and 1930s it brought bar dancing to Léopoldville, played on a bass drum, an accordion and a bottle struck as a triangle.

In the 1940s and 1950s imported records by Cuban son groups such as Sexteto Habanero and Trio Matamoros, often mislabelled as rumba, reshaped maringa into what became Congolese rumba. Antoine Wendo Kolosoy, Henri Bowane, Paul Kamba, Franco Luambo, Le Grand Kallé, Nico Kasanda, Tabu Ley Rochereau and Papa Noël Nedule built the style in those two decades. Wendo, who lived from 1925 to 2008, had a hit with "Marie Louise" in 1955 and was brought back to the stage in the late 1990s when enthusiasts rediscovered it. In the nightclubs of the Matonge quarter of Kinshasa in the 1950s, musicians forged the sound Britannica calls African jazz, or OK jazz.

The 1960s and 1970s brought Zaïko Langa Langa and soukous, an urban dance music that grew from rumba and split into offshoots. Ekonda saccadé took its rhythm from the Mongo, and mokonyonyon copied a dance movement of the Tetela. New dance steps such as the cavacha spread across Africa. Papa Wemba, known as le sapeur, set the tone for a generation of young men who dressed in expensive designer clothes, and the musicians who followed him, many from the band Wenge Musica, are counted as the fourth generation of Congolese music.

The Mobutu government supported musicians. The political and economic troubles of the same years also pushed many of them out, to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Europe and Asia. The quartet Ry-Co Jazz toured West Africa, the Caribbean and France. By the 1980s many Congolese musicians were based in Europe, and Congolese lead guitarists were hired by bands abroad that wanted the sound.

UNESCO inscribed Congolese rumba on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021, in a joint file with the Republic of the Congo. The inscription traces the dance to nkumba, which means waist in Kikongo, and records that it is used for mourning as well as celebration, in private, public and religious spaces, and that women led the development of its religious and romantic styles. It is passed on through neighbourhood clubs, where musicians train apprentices both to play and to make instruments.

What Congolese masks and figures were made to do

Congolese sculpture has tended to be classified by the region it came from, and Britannica sets it out that way. The southwest is associated with the nail-studded nkisi statues of the Kongo and the masks and figurines of the Yaka. The Kuba of the south-centre carved ndop, statues made in the likeness of the king that could stand in for him in his absence. Luba art in the southeast shows the influence of women through statuettes of motherhood, the Lega to the north produce masks and ivories, and the Mangbetu of the north carved figures with stylised elongated heads.

What the nkisi and the lukasa did

Most of these objects were made to be used. A Kongo nkisi was a vessel for medicines and divine protection, and it settled disputes: the parties' saliva went onto a peg or nail that was driven into the figure, and the force inside it acted according to whether the oath was kept. Missionaries destroyed most nkisi during colonisation. The Luba recorded the history of their kingdom and its royal line on the lukasa, a memory board set with beads of different sizes and materials that only kings and the elite were trained to read.

Masks belonged to initiation. The Yaka used raffia masks such as the Ndeemba to initiate young men, the Chokwe Pwo mask represented a mother losing her son to the world of men, and the Kuba mask Ngaady a Mwaash, commissioned by a queen, was danced alongside a king and a foreigner in a performance about women's place at court. The Bwami society of the Lega, which admitted women as well as men, used masks in songs and dances to pass proverbs on to initiates.

Who paints and writes in Kinshasa now

The Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, the country's only fine arts academy at university level, trains painters, sculptors, carvers, architects and ceramicists. Contemporary artists include Chéri Samba and Bodys Isek Kingelez, the painters Lema Kusa and Roger Botembe and the sculptors Alfred Liyolo and Freddy Tsimba. From 11 July 2015 to 10 January 2016 the Fondation Cartier in Paris showed Beauté Congo, a retrospective of 90 years of Congolese modern and contemporary art. A new National Museum of the DRC opened in November 2019, presenting music and other intangible heritage beside contemporary art, and there are national museums in Kananga, Mbandaka and Lubumbashi.

Congolese literature in French grew up around La Voix du Congolais, founded in 1945, with Antoine-Roger Bolamba and Paul Lomami-Tshibamba among its first writers. After independence V. Y. Mudimbe wrote as a novelist and poet and as a scholar, and In Koli Jean Bofane, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Sinzo Aanza and Blaise Ndala write now. Authors work in French, Lingala or local languages. The first Congolese feature film, La Vie est Belle by Mwezé Ngangura, came out in 1987, and the industry is held back by unauthorised distribution and scarce credit.

None of this appears on the World Heritage List. All five of the country's properties on the World Heritage List in 2026 are natural sites: Virunga, Garamba, Kahuzi-Biega and Salonga national parks and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve.

What goes into a Congolese meal

Only 2.86% of the land is cultivated, and most of that for subsistence. Households add wild fruit, mushrooms and honey, hunt and fish, and sell the surplus at markets or by the roadside. The staple crops are maize, rice, cassava, sweet potato, yam, taro, plantain, tomato, pumpkin, peas and nuts, eaten across the country with regional dishes on top, while coffee and palm oil go for export.

The dish usually named as national is moambe chicken: chicken braised in a sauce of palm nut that is mashed and extracted from the fruit of the oil palm, cooked with onion, garlic, chili and fresh tomato and served over rice. Liboké wraps chicken or fish with vegetables in banana leaves, which are then boiled or steamed, or baked in an oven. Fufu, made from cassava, yams or plantains boiled and shaped into balls, is served as the side to many dishes.

How football reached the Congo through a mission school

The people of the Congo River had their own sports before colonisation: races in long, low dugout canoes driven by two dozen rowers, running over short and long distances, and wrestling. Missionaries brought basketball and volleyball as well as football.

Organised football began, like the schools, with the Catholic Church. A Catholic school in Léopoldville formed the country's first team early in the twentieth century, and Raphael de la Kethule, a schoolboy at the time, went on to found the capital's first sports association and built its first stadium in 1937. In 1974 that stadium held the heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman known as the Rumble in the Jungle.

The men's national team, the Leopards, won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1968 and 1974. At the 1974 World Cup, playing as Zaire, it conceded fourteen goals and scored none in a group with Scotland, Yugoslavia and Brazil. At the 2026 World Cup it drew with Portugal, finished third in its group, went through to the knockout stage and lost 2-1 to England in the round of 32. A national Olympic committee was formed in 1963 and recognised by the International Olympic Committee in 1968; a team went to Mexico City that year and next competed at Los Angeles in 1984, as Zaire.

Abroad the country is known for its professional basketball and football players, among them Dikembe Mutombo, known also for humanitarian projects at home, Jonathan Kuminga and the footballers Romelu Lukaku and Yoane Wissa, born in the country or of Congolese descent.