Democratic Republic of the Congo
A continent-sized country at the green heart of Africa
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the second-largest country in Africa and the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, a near-continental expanse threaded by the mighty Congo River and cloaked in the world's second-largest rainforest. It holds staggering mineral wealth - cobalt, copper, coltan, diamonds, gold - that powers the global supply chains for batteries and electronics, even as much of its population lives in deep poverty. Vast, biodiverse, and chronically unstable, the DRC is at once one of the planet's most important ecological treasuries and one of its most enduring humanitarian crises.
The country is built around the immense Congo River, which loops north across the equator and back south, draining a basin of dense rainforest before reaching the Atlantic through a short coastal corridor. Eastern Congo rises dramatically into the volcanic and glaciated mountains of the Albertine Rift, where Margherita Peak on Mount Stanley - shared with Uganda - reaches 5,109 meters, the third-highest point in Africa. The east also holds active volcanoes near Goma and the great lakes of the rift, while the south contains the copper-cobalt belt of Katanga.
The territory was the brutal personal possession of Belgium's King Leopold II before becoming a Belgian colony, and won independence in 1960 amid the turmoil of the Congo Crisis. Mobutu Sese Seko renamed it Zaire and ruled for three decades before the catastrophic wars of the late 1990s, sometimes called Africa's world war, drew in nine countries. French is the official language above hundreds of local tongues, with Lingala and Swahili widely spoken. Conflict persists in the mineral-rich east, where armed groups and regional rivalries continue to displace millions.