DR Congo

DR Congo: capital Kinshasa, population 112.8M, area 2,344,858 km². The 15th most populous country, in Africa. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo sits astride the Congo, the deepest river ever measured and the third largest by discharge, inside the second largest rainforest on Earth. The Kingdom of Kongo held its western lands from about 1390, while farmers in the Upemba Depression had been draining swamps and drying fish since the 4th century. Kinshasa's guitar bands, the sapeurs of La Sape, Kuba raffia velvet and Bodys Isek Kingelez's paper cities all treat ordinary material as something to be worked hard.

• The Kingdom of Kongo was independent from about 1390 under a ruler titled Manikongo, and its lands ran from the Atlantic east to the Kwango River, taking in the west of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• The Upemba Depression in the south has been settled since at least the 4th century by iron-working farmers who cleared canals through the swamps and dried fish, and the Luba state later grew out of those villages.
• At independence from Belgium in 1960 the country was named the Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville, the city added to the title to tell it apart from its neighbour of the same name.
• In October 1971 the country took the name Zaire, an older name for the Congo River, and it went back to Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997.

• Franco Luambo led the band TPOK Jazz for more than twenty years until his death in 1989, and listeners called him the Sorcerer of the Guitar for his playing in Congolese rumba.
• Papa Wemba co-founded Zaïko Langa Langa in Kinshasa in December 1969 at the age of 20, then started Viva La Musica in 1977 around a semi-communal artists' quarter he called Village Molokai.
• Chéri Samba paints Kinshasa scenes carrying handwritten text in French and Lingala; the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art hold his work, and he showed at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
• Bodys Isek Kingelez built models of imaginary cities from cardboard, paper and tape, and they were shown at the Pompidou, at documenta XI in Kassel and at the Museum of Modern Art.

• The Congo is the deepest river on record, measured at around 220 metres, the second longest in Africa and the third in the world by discharge after the Amazon and the Ganges-Brahmaputra.
• Virunga was created in April 1925 as the first national park in Africa; it contains the active volcanoes Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira along with mountain gorilla habitat, and was listed in 1979.
• The Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Ituri Forest was listed in 1996, when it held an estimated 3,900 to 6,350 okapi out of a world population of 10,000 to 20,000.
• Salonga National Park covers about 36,000 square kilometres of rainforest between Kinshasa and Kisangani, the largest tropical forest reserve in Africa and a stronghold of the bonobo.

• Congolese rumba builds towards the sebene, an instrumental stretch where interlocking guitars run over the drummer's cavacha pattern while an atalaku drives the crowd; UNESCO listed it in December 2021.
• La Sape, short for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, is a subculture of dress and public performance carried by sapeurs in Kinshasa and Brazzaville, on facing banks of the river.
• Men weave Kuba raffia cloth from palm fibre and women then embroider and cut it into pile surfaces like velvet, used for ceremonial skirts, tribute cloths and headdresses.
• Lingala grew out of Bobangi, a trading language of the Congo River, and now has roughly 20 million native speakers plus about as many again who use it as a second language.

What is the capital of DR Congo?

The capital of DR Congo is Kinshasa.

What is the population of DR Congo?

DR Congo has about 112.8M people — the 15th most populous country in the world.

How big is DR Congo?

DR Congo covers 2,344,858 km², making it the 11th largest country by area.

Which region is DR Congo in?

DR Congo is in Middle Africa, Africa.