Kinshasa
Capital of the DR Congo and the world's largest French-speaking city
Kinshasa spreads along the southern bank of the Congo River, facing its smaller rival Brazzaville across the water in the only place on Earth where two national capitals sit within sight of one another. Capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and home to upward of seventeen million people, it is one of the planet's fastest-growing megacities and now the most populous French-speaking city anywhere, having outgrown Paris. Its music — rumba, soukous, the dance of the sapeurs — pulses through neighborhoods that range from riverside ministries to vast self-built popular quarters.
The city occupies a broad, low basin where the Congo River widens into the Pool Malebo before plunging downstream toward the Atlantic over the Livingstone Falls. This stretch is the last navigable reach of the great river, making Kinshasa the head of an immense inland transport network that penetrates the Congo Basin rainforest. The terrain rises gently from the riverbank to surrounding hills, and the city sprawls eastward across the plateau in a continuous tide of construction that has long since overrun its colonial-era plan.
Henry Morton Stanley established a station here in 1881 and named it Léopoldville for the Belgian king who claimed the Congo as his private domain. Renamed Kinshasa after independence, the city became the stage for some of the era's defining dramas, from Mobutu's long dictatorship to the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Today it is the political and cultural center of a vast, resource-rich and turbulent nation, its scale and youthful energy making it one of the central cities of Africa's urban future.