Kongo, Luba and Lunda
Long before Belgium, the lower Congo held one of Africa's notable states: the Kingdom of Kongo, founded around 1390. When the Portuguese arrived in 1483 its king converted to Christianity and took the name Afonso I; for a time Kongo dealt with Lisbon as an equal, exchanging ambassadors. That relationship was steadily poisoned by the Atlantic slave trade, which drew captives from the interior in enormous numbers.
In the centre and south the Luba and Lunda empires built their own sophisticated political systems, with sacred kingship and long-distance trade, from the sixteenth century onward. The rainforest was never the empty "heart of darkness" of European imagination.
Leopold's Congo
The single darkest chapter belongs to King Leopold II of the Belgians, who in 1885 acquired the entire Congo basin not as a colony of Belgium but as his personal property, the "Congo Free State". To extract rubber he imposed a regime of quotas enforced by mutilation and murder: hostages, burned villages, and the severed hands that became the emblem of the system.
The population is thought to have fallen by millions during his rule, though the exact toll is unknown and still debated by historians. The scandal grew so great that in 1908 Belgium took the territory off its own king and ran it as the Belgian Congo — an improvement only by the standard of what came before.
Lumumba, Mobutu and Zaire
Independence came on 30 June 1960 with Patrice Lumumba as prime minister. His independence-day speech, answering the Belgian king's condescension by naming the colony's cruelties to his face, made him a hero and a marked man. Within months the country fractured, the army mutinied, and Lumumba was seized and murdered in January 1961 with Belgian and American complicity — a killing that still shapes how Congolese see the West.
Out of the chaos rose Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who took full power in 1965, renamed the country Zaire, renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and ruled for thirty-two years. He was the model African kleptocrat, propped up by the West as a Cold War ally while he looted the state and let its roads and schools rot.
Africa's world war, and the cobalt
Mobutu was overthrown in 1997 by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, backed by Rwanda and Uganda in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. When Kabila fell out with his backers, the result was the Second Congo War of 1998–2003, which drew in around nine African countries and has been called Africa's world war. One widely cited survey estimated some 5.4 million excess deaths, mostly from disease and hunger; the figure is contested and the methodology disputed, but by any count it was catastrophic.
The war formally ended but the east never fully stopped fighting. Armed groups, including the Rwanda-backed M23, have continued to battle over territory and minerals; in early 2025 M23 seized the major eastern cities of Goma and Bukavu, displacing large numbers of people. All of this sits atop the world's largest reserves of cobalt and vast coltan deposits — the metals of phones, laptops and electric-car batteries — much of it dug by hand, sometimes by children, for a pittance. Félix Tshisekedi has been president since 2019.