The Republic of the Congo's history: a state built around its capital

Which kingdoms held the land before the French

People settled the Congo basin late. Britannica dates the first habitation to the Sangoan era, between 100,000 and 40,000 BCE, and suggests the dense forest as the reason; the users of Sangoan tools gathered food and dug roots. Agriculture appeared among the western Bantu on the savannas beside the lower Congo River in the first millennium BCE, which recent research places much earlier than was once thought.

Between 1000 and 1500 CE larger societies emerged: clans whose members lived in different villages, village clusters with chiefs, and small forest principalities. On the southern fringe the chiefdoms grew more complex, and three kingdoms eventually developed. Loango stood at the mouth of the Kouilou River on the Atlantic coast, Kongo in the far south-west, and Tio, also called Anziku, on the plains north of Malebo Pool. Their rulers drew power first from control of spirit cults and then from trade.

Loango is the one whose founding date is argued. Britannica has the Vili founding it probably before 1485. The documentary record is later: a priest in Kongo mentioned around 1561 that King Diogo I had sent missionaries there, and a Dutch account of 1625 described a ruler who had taken the throne around 1565 and reigned for sixty years, most likely the Njimbe whom later traditions name as the first king. The historian Phyllis Martin argued for a foundation in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.

What Loango sold is better documented than when it began. Vili merchants carried copper from the mines at Mindouli, and thousands of metres of Loango cloth reached the Portuguese at Luanda in the early seventeenth century. By 1600 the kingdom was importing ivory and slaves from the interior along routes reaching Malebo Pool, and from the late seventeenth century Vili traders were exporting slaves in considerable numbers. European ships anchored offshore and dealt through royal officials called mafouks, who kept direct European influence at arm's length; no permanent European trading post was built.

The trade unsettled the monarchy itself. Phyllis Martin's reading is that nobles enriched by commerce came to dominate the royal council, and after King Buatu died in 1787 no king was elected for over a hundred years. A succession of officials titled Nganga Mvumbi, priest of the corpse, held royal authority in the meantime, watching over the body of the dead king while it awaited burial.

How a treaty with Makoko became a capital

Henry Morton Stanley, a British journalist, explored the Congo River in 1877, and Leopold II of Belgium later hired him to establish his authority there. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, born in Rome in 1852 and serving as a French naval officer, refused to work for Leopold's association and travelled inland for France instead, from the coast of present-day Gabon by the Ogooué and Léfini rivers. He reached the Téké kingdom in 1880 and on 10 September 1880 signed a treaty with King Makoko placing the region under French control.

The mouth of the river was then shared out. Portugal took Cabinda on the Atlantic coast, France took the large area north of the river, and Leopold took a small foothold at the mouth and the immense hinterland that became his Congo Free State. The two Congos and their two capitals, Brazzaville and Kinshasa on opposite banks below Malebo Pool, are the result.

The sources name the original settlement differently. The Wikipedia history calls it the village of Mfoa; Britannica dates the city to 1883, "when the village of Ntamo was 'purchased' by the French", and puts the word purchased in quotation marks. The French built it as a European administrative and residential centre, and until the early 1960s the centre stayed European while African districts grew to the north-east at Poto-Poto and to the south-west at Bacongo and Makélékélé. Those two south-western districts reappear in 1998.

The colony was named three times before it was a country: Colony of Gabon and Congo on 1 August 1886, French Congo on 30 April 1891, and, from 15 January 1910, part of French Equatorial Africa. Middle Congo was the French name for the territory itself.

Brazza went back in 1905 to lead an inquiry into the abuses of the concession companies. Since 2006 his remains have lain in the Mémorial Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in the city named after him, and the Republic of the Congo's embassy in Washington describes him as known for his simplicity, his cultural sensitivity and a peaceful approach to the Congolese population.

What the concession companies did to Middle Congo

France leased the colony to private firms. Roughly forty concessionary companies, with a combined capital of about 59.5 million francs, received 650,000 square miles of land for thirty years, everything except a few strategic points around the river, under near-monopoly conditions. Many were undercapitalised and staffed by adventurers who lived off the land. Ivory and rubber virtually disappeared from the concessions, and the population was reduced by forced labour, disease and maladministration.

The scale of the losses is unknown. Refugees from Leopold's rubber regions had fled into French territory, and the violence in the French rubber areas was such that many fled back. André Gide's Travels in the Congo, published in 1927, recorded the mutilations and executions he was told of in Ubangi-Shari and had an important impact on the anti-colonial movement in France. Adam Hochschild estimates that the population of French Congo and Gabon fell by half. By 1930 most of the companies had gone bankrupt, and the French state had lost more in the system than it earned from rents and taxes.

Resistance began early. The Bahangala revolt led by Mabiala Ma Nganga started in 1892 with the killing of the French administrator Laval and ended when the French killed its leader in 1896. Colonial subjects were governed under the Code de l'indigénat, which imposed forced labour, made it illegal to air grievances in public and kept Africans out of senior posts. Britannica adds head taxes, the compulsory growing of cash crops and draconian labour contracts.

The costliest single project was the Congo-Océan railway, built between 1921 and 1934 over 511 km from Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville. The death toll is given differently: Britannica puts it at between 15,000 and 20,000 Africans, and the Wikipedia history at around 23,000 local people and a few hundred Europeans.

Why Brazzaville governed four colonies at once

French Equatorial Africa, the AEF, was a federation of Gabon, Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Chad, and it existed from 1910 to 1958. The Governor-General sat in Brazzaville with a deputy in each territory, and in 1950 the whole federation counted 4,143,922 people, of whom only about 15,000 were not African.

Placing the governor in Brazzaville decided where everything else went. Education, health, the courts and public works were run by Brazzaville-based authorities who could overrule the territorial governors. Middle Congo received the federation's deep-water port at Pointe-Noire and its railway, while workers from Chad were forced to come and work there and federal funds flowed in. The civil service expanded, people left the countryside for the towns, and Middle Congo acquired a bureaucracy and a trade-union network built for a federation four colonies wide.

The territory's own capital, meanwhile, was elsewhere. For Middle Congo the administrative capital was Pointe-Noire, and Brazzaville became the capital of the Congo itself only on 28 November 1958. The state has carried several names since, and the table sets them in order.

How Brazzaville became the capital of Free France

Philippe Pétain surrendered to Germany on 22 June 1940, and troops loyal to Charles de Gaulle took Chad on 26 August, Cameroon on 27 August and Middle Congo on 28 August. Gabon stayed with Vichy until 12 November 1940. Brazzaville became the capital of Free France in Africa, nominally ruled by a Conseil de défense de l'Empire that de Gaulle set up on 27 October 1940, and the embassy's list of historic sites still includes the house that hosted him.

The war changed the colony's economy as well. Pointe-Noire became the transit base for supplies, soldiers and labour moving between the interior and the coast, and the heavy traffic on the railway produced a new urban working class.

Félix Éboué, the governor of Chad who had backed de Gaulle, became Governor-General of the AEF in 1940. Born in French Guiana in 1884, a descendant of enslaved Africans, he had set out a programme in his 1941 book La nouvelle politique coloniale de l'A.E.F., and with René Pleven he organised the Brazzaville Conference, held from 30 January to 8 February 1944. The conference led to the abolition of forced labour and of the Code de l'indigénat. The Fourth Republic's constitution was approved on 27 October 1946, and that year the Congo became an overseas territory of France with members in the French Parliament and an elected Territorial Assembly.

The same administration treated dissent harshly. Éboué combined new freedoms with the repression of anything judged a threat to French control, and the case that shows it is André Matsoua's.

Who led the Congo from colony to independence

André Matsoua, born at Mandzakala in 1899, joined the customs service in Brazzaville in 1919 and served in the French army in Morocco. In Paris in 1926 he founded the Association des Originaires de l'A.E.F. to help people from the federation living in France. When the association began working in the Congo and demanded an end to the Code de l'indigénat, the French dissolved it in 1929 and sent Matsoua into exile in Chad, which set off years of riots and civil disobedience. He escaped to France in 1935, joined the army against the German invasion in 1940, was wounded and rearrested, and on 8 February 1941, under Éboué, was sentenced in Brazzaville to labour camps for life. He died in prison on 13 January 1942 in unclear circumstances. His followers maintain he was murdered, and the movement that formed around him lasted beyond independence, chiefly among the Lari, many of whom boycotted elections between 1946 and 1956 in the belief that he would return.

Loango's line reached the new politics directly. Jean-Félix Tchicaya, born in Libreville on 9 November 1903 into the Loango royal family, was elected to the French parliament on 21 November 1945 and helped found the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in 1946. His rival Jacques Opangault was the more radical. The French establishment and the Catholic Church preferred a third man, Fulbert Youlou, a former priest, who became prime minister in 1958.

French geologists had established the presence of oil and gas in 1926, and in 1957 the French company SPAEF found offshore reserves near Pointe Indienne in quantities worth exploiting.

On 16 February 1959 clashes between southern supporters of Youlou and northern supporters of Opangault's party left about 200 people dead, and Opangault was arrested. France agreed to full independence on 12 July 1960, and on 15 August 1960 the Republic of the Congo became independent with Youlou as its first president.

Why the unions of Brazzaville unseated Youlou

The workforce the federation had gathered in Brazzaville outlasted the federation. On 6 August 1963 Youlou announced a one-party state with a single legal trade union. The unions rose on 13 August, workers besieged the presidential palace, France declined to intervene, and Youlou resigned. The rising is called Les Trois Glorieuses, the Three Glorious Days, after the French July Revolution of 1830.

The army installed a civilian provisional government under Alphonse Massamba-Débat, who was elected president under the 1963 constitution and openly proclaimed himself a Marxist. In 1964 he built a single party, the National Movement of the Revolution, backed by an armed popular militia, the Défense Civile. He imprisoned Captain Marien Ngouabi in 1968, released him in an amnesty that summer, and gave up power soon after; the accounts date the takeover to August and to September 1968. Ngouabi became head of state on 31 December 1968, and a year later, on 31 December 1969, proclaimed the People's Republic of the Congo, with the Congolese Party of Labour as its only party and the national assembly abolished. Government was centralised in Brazzaville.

The People's Republic kept close ties with the Soviet Union and an equally close relationship with France. Ngouabi was assassinated on 18 March 1977. Several people were tried and executed for the killing, among them Massamba-Débat, on little evidence, and the motive remains unclear. An eleven-member Military Committee of the Party installed Joachim Yhombi-Opango as president; the party's Central Committee removed him on 5 February 1979 and named Denis Sassou Nguesso interim president. The People's Republic counted 2,153,685 inhabitants in 1988. Between independence and its end, constitutions were adopted and set aside in 1961, 1963, 1968 and 1973, and once more in 1992.

How multiparty politics became a war for Brazzaville

What the national conference changed

The Sovereign National Conference of 1991 ended the single-party state. In mid-1991 it removed the word populaire from the country's name, replaced the flag and the anthem, and appointed André Milongo transitional prime minister with executive powers; the People's Republic had ceased to exist by March 1992. In the elections of August 1992 Pascal Lissouba won the presidency, Bernard Kolélas came second and Sassou Nguesso third, and Lissouba was inaugurated on 31 August 1992.

The result did not hold. Disputed parliamentary elections in May 1993 led to fighting that ended in December 1994 with about 2,000 dead, and the three camps came out of it armed: the Ninja of Kolélas, drawn mainly from the Lari, the Cocoye of Lissouba from the south-western regions known together as Nibolek, and the Cobra of Sassou Nguesso, drawn from the Mbochi. The peace accords left the weapons where they were. "The politics of Congo-Brazzaville are triangular," an analyst told the agency IRIN in February 1999: "Two sides of the triangle become aligned against the third, and those alliances are constantly shifting."

Why the next war divided Brazzaville by district

On 5 June 1997, ahead of the July presidential election, government forces surrounded Sassou Nguesso's house in the Mpila district of Brazzaville, and fighting spread until the three militias each held parts of the city. On 17 June French soldiers and United States Marines evacuated 6,000 foreigners through the airport. Shells landing in Kinshasa killed 21 people on 29 September, and for forty-eight hours the Kinshasa army fired more than a hundred shells into Brazzaville, according to residents. Angola entered on Sassou Nguesso's side; on 16 October the Cobra, with tanks and 1,000 Angolan troops, took the capital, and Sassou Nguesso declared himself president the next day. Four months of fighting had destroyed or damaged much of Brazzaville.

The war then moved into the south. In April 1998 the Cocoye seized the Moukoukoulou hydroelectric dam and cut the power to Pointe-Noire for weeks. On 16 December 1998 about 300 Ninja fighters entered Bacongo and Makélékélé, the south-western districts that had been the colonial city's African quarters, and the shelling that drove them out displaced 200,000 civilians and left at least 1,000 dead. On 29 December 1999 about 2,000 Ninja and Cocoye fighters surrendered under a peace agreement.

A constitution of January 2002 lengthened the presidential term to seven years and created a two-chamber parliament, and peace agreements were imposed on the Pool militia of Pasteur Ntoumi in 2003 and 2007. A referendum in 2015 abolished the presidential term and age limits and gave the president immunity from domestic prosecution for crimes committed in office. In April 2016 a military campaign in the Pool region around Brazzaville displaced 80,000 people by the Wikipedia count and 138,000 by the Bertelsmann count, and a ceasefire was signed in December 2017.