DR Congo's history: the estate that became a country

Which states ruled the Congo basin before Leopold

People were living in the basin long before any state did. In 1988 excavators at Katanda on the Semliki river found barbed bone harpoons about 90,000 years old, probably made to catch giant river catfish.

States began to form around 700, in three centres: one around Pool Malebo in the west, one around Lake Mai-Ndombe, and a third further south-east in the Upemba Depression. What grew from them divided along the line of the forest. On the southern savanna the Kongo kingdom in the west and the Luba and Lunda states in the east built kingships with appointed chiefs and standing force. In the equatorial rainforest the village and the household remained the unit, and Britannica's historians argue that this segmented pattern left the forest peoples less able to resist a full-scale invasion when one came.

The kingdom best documented in written sources had its capital outside the present country. Tradition dates the Kingdom of Kongo to about 1390 and a founder named Lukeni lua Nimi, and its capital, Mbanza Kongo, stood in what is now northern Angola. Portuguese ships arrived in 1483. The king and his son were baptised in 1491, and the son, ruling as Afonso I, organised the administration of the slave trade in 1526 in an attempt to stop free people being seized and shipped. The Portuguese killed the reigning king at the Battle of Mbwila on 29 October 1665, and after that Kongo went on existing without functioning as one kingdom.

The trade Afonso tried to regulate outgrew every African authority on the coast. Between about 1500 and 1850 roughly 4 million people were enslaved along a strip of coast about 400 kilometres long around the mouth of the Congo and shipped to Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States, and by 1780 more than 15,000 a year were leaving from the Loango Coast alone. Britannica's historians count that disruption among the reasons the savanna kingdoms yielded to European conquest as easily as they did.

How Leopold acquired a country as private property

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has the borders of a private estate. King Leopold II of the Belgians took an interest in the river after Henry Morton Stanley's descent of it in 1874 to 1877, and he set up a study committee, later renamed the International Association of the Congo, to open the interior to trade. Between 1879 and 1882 Stanley built stations on the upper river under its auspices and negotiated with local rulers. By 1884 the association held treaties with 450 African polities and claimed, on that basis, the right to govern all of the land concerned.

On 22 April 1884 the United States accepted the association's claims as lawful, the first government to do so. France recognised them the next day on condition that it had first option to buy the territory if the association ever sold. The Berlin conference that Otto von Bismarck convened in November 1884 then set the rules for colonial conquest and confirmed Leopold's control of the basin. On 29 May 1885 he announced the name État indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State.

It was not a Belgian colony. Belgium's only link to the Free State was that one man was king of both, a personal union, and the Belgian parliament passed a resolution making Leopold roi souverain of the new state. The Free State covered the whole of the present country, which the record measures at 2,344,858 square kilometres, and Britannica describes its frontiers as coextensive with the modern state's.

What the Free State took and how

Leopold could not pay for the Free State, so he declared most of it his. From the mid-1880s his decrees asserted state ownership of all terres vacantes, vacant land, defined as any land without a dwelling or a cultivated plot on it. That definition took in most of the territory. A decree of 1892 divided it into domains, and almost two-thirds of the country became the Domaine Privé, the exclusive property of the state, where Congolese were forbidden to sell rubber or ivory to anyone else and had to deliver quotas at a fixed price. In 1893 Leopold carved out a further 259,000 square kilometres as the Domaine de la Couronne, whose rubber revenue went to him directly.

Who enforced the rubber quotas

The money arrived after 1896, when world demand for rubber soared. Congolese rubber came from wild vines in the forest, and the collectors slashed the vines and let the latex dry on their own skin. Villages were tied to quotas through their chiefs. Leopold's agents took the families of men who fell short and held them until the rubber came in. The Force Publique, founded in 1885 as a private army of African soldiers under European officers, burned villages that resisted and cut off hands, children's included. Soldiers were required to hand in a hand for each cartridge spent, as proof that bullets had not been wasted on game.

Conquest ran alongside extraction. The Arab and Swahili slave trader Tippu Tip left for Zanzibar in 1890 and the slave traders of the Lualaba gave way. Katanga, with its copper, was taken in 1891 after an officer of a Free State expedition shot its ruler, Msiri. A railway was built between 1890 and 1898 around the rapids below Stanley Pool, and Stanley's own verdict on it was that "without the railroad, the Congo is not worth a penny".

Why the death toll cannot be settled

Nobody counted. The first census was taken in 1924 and put the population at about 10 million, so every figure for the Free State years is a reconstruction. A Belgian commission of inquiry, which parliament forced Leopold to appoint in 1904, concluded that the population had been "reduced by half". Roger Casement's report of the same year suggested that as many as ten million might have died. Britannica gives a decline from some 20 million to 8 million. The range in the Wikipedia history runs from 1.2 million to 13 million deaths from exploitation and disease between 1885 and 1908. The evidence that would narrow the range is gone as well: before giving up the Free State, Leopold had its archives of finance and of the interior destroyed.

The campaign against him was built in Britain. E. D. Morel, who handled Congo trade for the Liverpool shipping firm Elder Dempster, noticed that ships bringing rubber from the Congo went back loaded only with guns and ammunition; with Casement he founded the Congo Reform Association, whose supporters included Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. On 18 October 1908 the Belgian parliament approved the Colonial Charter by 90 votes to 48, with seven abstentions, and on 15 November 1908 Belgium took the Free State over. Britannica describes the annexation as essentially a purchase of the territory from its king.

How Belgium governed the colony it bought

The Belgian Congo kept much of the Free State's staff. Its last governor-general, Théophile Wahis, stayed in office, and most of Leopold's administration stayed with him. Article 3 of the 1908 charter stated that "nobody can be forced to work on behalf of and for the profit of companies or privates", and the colonial government went on imposing forced labour by less direct methods.

Rule rested on the so-called colonial trinity of state, missions and companies. Every major decision was taken in Brussels, by officials, with no African involvement, and no political activity of any kind was permitted in the colony. Belgium governed directly where the British and French generally ruled through chiefs, and it used chiefs as tax collectors and labour recruiters, deposing those who would not cooperate. The towns were segregated into European and African quarters.

Capital came in after the First World War, and the colony was organised around what it produced. The Union Minière du Haut Katanga, largely owned by the Société Générale de Belgique, exported more than 80,000 tons of copper ore in 1926. During that war peasants had been placed under cultures obligatoires, compulsory cultivation of export crops, and cotton output rose from 23,000 tons in 1932 to 127,000 tons in 1939. A law of 1922 bound African mine and plantation workers to contracts of four to seven years. In the Second World War the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga supplied uranium to the Manhattan Project.

Resistance was constant and mostly local. A rebellion in several eastern districts began in 1919 and took until 1923 to suppress. Anti-European religious movements spread in the 1920s, among them the church of the prophet Simon Kimbangu, whom the Belgians imprisoned. With parties banned, Congolese organised through cultural associations such as the Alliance des Bakongo, ABAKO, formed in 1950.

Why Belgium let the Congo go so fast

Belgium's own timetable was measured in decades. The Belgian professor A. A. J. van Bilsen had proposed a thirty-year plan for emancipation, and in 1956 ABAKO answered it with a manifesto demanding self-government immediately. Municipal elections and parties were allowed from 1957. Patrice Lumumba and others founded the Mouvement National Congolais in October 1958, the first party to organise across the whole colony.

The timetable broke on 4 January 1959. An ABAKO rally in Léopoldville, which the authorities would permit only as a private meeting, turned into three days of rioting. The Force Publique put it down, at least 49 people were killed, and total casualties may have reached 500. On 13 January King Baudouin announced that the Congo would be granted independence, and the Belgian government promised to proceed "without fatal procrastination, yet without fatal haste". A Round Table Conference opened in Brussels on 18 January 1960. At its close on 27 January it set elections for 22 May and independence for 30 June 1960.

The colony that became a state that day had almost no one trained to run it. The first Congolese graduated from university only in 1956. Lumumba became prime minister and Joseph Kasavubu president, and the country took the name Republic of the Congo, the same name the French colony of Middle Congo across the river chose at its own independence.

Who fought over Katanga and the new state

The army mutinied against its European officers on 5 July 1960, and Belgian paratroopers intervened. On 11 July Moïse Tshombe declared Katanga independent. Union Minière had supported his party before independence, worried that a nationalist government would seize its assets, and the Belgian government gave Katanga military support and told its civil servants there to stay at their posts. South Kasai, the diamond province, declared its own secession on 8 August. At the peak of the fragmentation the country had split into four parts.

The central government split in the same weeks. Lumumba asked the United Nations for help and then the Soviet Union; on 5 September Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba and Lumumba dismissed Kasavubu; on 14 September the army chief of staff, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, took power with American support. Lumumba was captured and on 17 January 1961 flown to Élisabethville in Katanga, where he was shot. A Belgian parliamentary inquiry found in 2001 that he had been killed by Katangan gendarmes in the presence of Belgian officers, and held Belgium "morally responsible".

The United Nations sent 20,000 peacekeepers, and with Congolese government forces they ended the secessions. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld died in an air crash near Ndola on 18 September 1961, on his way to negotiate with Katanga. South Kasai was retaken on 30 December 1961 and Katanga on 15 January 1963. A further rising, the Simba rebellion, proclaimed a People's Republic of the Congo at Stanleyville in September 1964 and was defeated by government forces and European mercenaries by November 1965. Around 100,000 people are believed to have died in the crisis as a whole. A constitution drafted at Luluabourg in August 1964 gave the state the name Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The country has carried six names since 1885, and each marks a change in who held it:

How Mobutu ran the state as a holding

Mobutu took power a second time on 24 November 1965, removing both Kasavubu and Tshombe, and assumed the presidency himself. His first economic target was the company that had backed Katanga. Union Minière's assets in the country were valued at nearly US$430 million in 1965, and in 1967 its operations passed to a new state company, Gécamines, with daily management contracted back to a firm created by the former owners.

That arrangement became the model for what the regime called the Zairianization of the economy, the steady acquisition of private businesses by the state. Britannica's account is that Mobutu appropriated the income of the new state enterprises to build a personal fortune and a patronage network, and that in the 1970s and 1980s he handed control of those enterprises to shifting circles of associates whose loyalty he needed. The single party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, was the only legal party from 1970 to 1990.

The renaming came with it. Léopoldville became Kinshasa in 1966, the country became the Republic of Zaire on 27 October 1971, and from 1972 citizens were required to drop Christian names for African ones; Mobutu himself became Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1973 the regime introduced salongo, one afternoon a week of compulsory work on agricultural and development projects, an obligation that drew direct comparison with the forced labour of the colonial state.

The end came when the regime's foreign backing did. Exiled Katangan rebels invaded Shaba, as Katanga was then called, in 1977 and 1978, and both times Moroccan or French troops drove them out. In April 1990 Mobutu lifted the ban on opposition parties; in May his forces killed between 50 and 150 students at the University of Lubumbashi, according to Amnesty International. In 1991 the World Bank cut its ties with the government after Mobutu appropriated US$400 million from Gécamines. A Sovereign National Conference of more than 2,000 delegates met in 1992, and the elections it was meant to lead to were scheduled repeatedly and never held.

Why foreign armies fought inside the Congo

The war that ended Mobutu began in Rwanda. After the genocide of 1994, in which more than 800,000 people were killed, as many as two million Rwandans fled into eastern Zaire, among them militias responsible for the killing, who used the refugee camps as bases. In October 1996 Rwandan forces and a coalition led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the AFDL, attacked from the east with backing from Uganda and Angola. They took Kisangani on 15 March 1997 and entered Kinshasa on 17 May, after Mobutu had fled. Kabila restored the name Democratic Republic of the Congo.

He then turned on the allies who had installed him. In August 1998 rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda rose in the east, and by the end of that year they held roughly a third of the country; Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe sent troops to defend Kinshasa. The war drew in nine African states and about 25 armed groups. A ceasefire signed at Lusaka in July 1999 did not hold. Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and succeeded by his son Joseph, and a settlement reached in Pretoria in December 2002 produced a transitional government in July 2003.

What the occupying armies extracted

The minerals were part of how the war was paid for. In April 2001 a United Nations panel of experts accused Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe of systematically exploiting Congolese diamonds, cobalt, coltan and gold in the areas their forces held, and recommended sanctions.

How the war's dead were counted

How many people the war killed is disputed. The International Rescue Committee's report of 2008 estimated 5.4 million excess deaths between 1998 and 2008. The Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University argued that the baseline death rate the estimate assumed was far too low for the Congo, and that the figure should be revised to 860,000. Britannica gives more than three million by the end of the war. This catalogue records all three and adjudicates none of them.

What the constitution claims for the state

A constitution approved by voters came into force in 2006, and on 30 July 2006 the country held its first multiparty elections since 1960. Article 9 of that text, revised in 2011, answers the decree on vacant land almost clause for clause: the state "exercises a permanent sovereignty notably over the soil, the subsoil, the waters and the forests". On 24 January 2019 Félix Tshisekedi was sworn in as president, and Britannica records it as the first peaceful transfer of power since independence, though leaked election data and the Catholic bishops' observers both showed his opponent Martin Fayulu ahead.

In the east, armed groups have contested that claim on the ground. The M23 rebellion, formed by former rebels who had been folded into the army, took Goma on 20 November 2012 and was defeated by a United Nations brigade given an offensive mandate. It returned in late 2021. In April 2024 it took the Rubaya mining area, a major source of coltan, and in 2024 the UN refugee agency counted 7.2 million people displaced by the conflict in the east. M23 seized Goma in January 2025 and Bukavu in February 2025, with what Britannica describes as considerable Rwandan support, which Rwanda denied.

The settlements negotiated since have been written in the old currency. A peace agreement between the Congo and Rwanda brokered by the United States was signed on 27 June 2025, and the accords signed in Washington on 4 December 2025 came with a separate agreement giving American companies preferential access to Congolese critical minerals. The Council on Foreign Relations describes that access as granted in exchange for security cooperation. The record puts the population whose land it concerns at 105,789,731 on 1 January 2023; the first census, in 1924, counted about 10 million.