DR Congo

The territory of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, with early Pygmy populations succeeded by Bantu-speaking peoples who arrived during a long migration beginning roughly in the first millennium BCE. By the late medieval period the region hosted a number of organised polities, most notably the Kingdom of Kongo, founded in the fourteenth century along the lower Congo River, together with the Luba and Lunda kingdoms that flourished in the savannas of the south and southeast from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward. The Kuba kingdom in the central forest belt and a constellation of smaller chiefdoms completed a politically diverse precolonial landscape, much of which was disrupted from the eighteenth century by the Atlantic and Arab-Swahili slave trades reaching deep into the interior.

European contact began in 1482, when the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao reached the mouth of the Congo, but sustained outside intervention came only with the expeditions of Henry Morton Stanley in the 1870s. At the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 the powers recognised King Leopold II of Belgium as sovereign of the Congo Free State, a private domain notorious for forced labour in rubber and ivory extraction and for catastrophic population loss. International outcry compelled annexation by the Belgian state in 1908, and the territory was administered as the Belgian Congo until independence on 30 June 1960, with Joseph Kasavubu as president and Patrice Lumumba as prime minister.

The early independence years were marked by the Congo Crisis, including the secession of Katanga and South Kasai, the assassination of Lumumba in January 1961, and a United Nations military intervention. In 1965 the army chief Joseph Desire Mobutu seized power, later renaming himself Mobutu Sese Seko and the country Zaire in 1971. His one-party state, formally based on the doctrine of authenticite, endured until the end of the Cold War eroded Western backing and economic decline, popular protest, and the spillover of the 1994 Rwandan genocide undermined the regime. In 1996 and 1997 a rebellion led by Laurent-Desire Kabila, supported by Rwanda and Uganda, swept Mobutu from power and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A second war erupted in 1998 when Kabila fell out with his former backers, drawing in armies from at least seven African states in what is sometimes called Africa's World War. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and succeeded by his son Joseph Kabila, under whom a 2002 peace agreement, a transitional government, and a new constitution adopted by referendum in 2005 paved the way for multi-party elections in 2006. Persistent insurgencies in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, and Ituri, involving groups such as the M23 and the Allied Democratic Forces, have continued alongside successive electoral cycles. The 2018 vote produced the first peaceful transfer of power between elected presidents, bringing Felix Tshisekedi to office; he was returned for a second term following elections held in December 2023.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is today a unitary semi-presidential republic organised into twenty-six provinces, with an elected president, a prime minister drawn from the National Assembly majority, and a bicameral legislature seated in Kinshasa.